"Artfulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Erh was, who would have thought it, a girl gifted with matchless artfulness, and perceiving that Pao-y had requisitioned her services, she speedily began to devise extreme ways and means to inveigle him. When evening came, and dinner was over, Pao-y's eyes were scorching hot and his ears burning from ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... his whole course and character that he should carry Bebelle off in state, or receive any compliments or congratulations on that feat, he devoted the next day to getting his two portmanteaus out of the house by artfulness and stealth, and to comporting himself in every particular as if he were going to run away,—except, indeed, that he paid his few debts in the town, and prepared a letter to leave for Madame Bouclet, enclosing a sufficient sum of money in lieu of notice. A railway train would come ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... reminiscences, which he read with affected scorn, that I was wise in setting down my successes, because the life of Methuselah himself would not be long enough to chronicle my failures, and the man to whom this was said replied that it was only my artfulness, a word of which these people are very fond; that I intended to use my successes as bait, issue a small pamphlet filled with them, and then record my failures in a thousand volumes, after the plan of a Chinese encyclopaedia, selling these ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... The artfulness of this man! None knows so well as he how to pique the curiosity of the reader—and how to disappoint it. He raises the hope, here, that he is going to tell all about how one enters a classic wall in the usual mode of Southern manners; but does he? No; he smiles in his sleeve, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and bravest of womankind! The time is come to show yourself in turn uncompromising and conciliatory, exacting and yielding, haughty and condescending. Call up all your skill and artfulness. Lo! the foremost men in Hellas, seduced by your fascinations, are agreed to entrust you with the task of ending ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... they had broken open a money-box. His parents, he acknowledged, had meant it for the very best, but they had kept him, nevertheless, so strictly that he had become shy and timid. Theirs, however, was not that unloving severity which blunts the spirit of a child, and leads to artfulness and deceit. Their strictness, well intended, and proceeding from a genuine moral earnestness of purpose, furthered in him a strictness and tenderness of conscience, which then and in after years made ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... judge gets 'old of him, it's sure to," said Horatio. "There ain't no judge on the Bench as will let artfulness win if he knows it. I've sin em watchin like a cat watches a mouse; and directly it comes out o' the 'ole, down he is on em—like that:" and he slapped his hand on the ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... slipped his feet from the cords, and paid dearly for his folly. Julius had him down on the ground, daring him to move a limb or even turn his head on pain of unheard-of laceration. The wretched fellow had cursed a thousand times his own artfulness. For three hours he had lain thus, not daring to stir a muscle; and if ever a night's experiences are enough to turn the hair grey, Corporal should not have a single black ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... of Leith Walk would have been more pleasant to me but for this encounter. The old rampart ran among fields, the like of them I had never seen for artfulness of agriculture; I was pleased, besides, to be so far in the still countryside; but the shackles of the gibbet clattered in my head; and the mops and mows of the old witch, and the thought of the dead ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he rested on the goodness of men, and not, as theologians rest, on their vileness. It is a most interesting thing, we may notice in passing, to consider what was the effect upon the Revolution of this artfulness or prudence with which its theoretic precursors sowed the seed. Was it as truly wise as Condorcet supposed? Or did it weaken, almost corrupt, the very roots? Was it the secret of the thoroughness with which the work of demolition ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... mother'll let her come," pursued the enterprising Brisket, with a look of great artfulness at Mr. Chalk, to call his attention to the bridge he was building for him; "but the old woman's been laid up lately and talks about not being ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... the work here because they want to write, and although this very tendency should keep open the passages between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of matter, the fashions and mannerisms of the hour, artfulness of speech and reading, the countless little reserves and covers for neglected thinking, the endless misunderstandings of life and the realities of existence—had already begun to clog the ways which, to every old artist, are the ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... both sides exhibited the most extraordinary artfulness, cunning and ingenuity in the discovery, adaptation and invention of "cover." The great desideratum, of course, was to hide where we could see without being seen, to shoot from where there was least danger ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... "Yes—that's like your artfulness: anything to make me hold my tongue. But we won't quarrel. I'm sure if it depended upon me, we might be as happy as doves. I mean it—and you needn't groan when I say it. Good-night, ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... a Cleopatra, and Varro a Saronia, whilst I, for my own part, see in her only a deep, designing woman, part tiger, part serpent. The tiger hath a lovely sleek body with a furious heart; the serpent for its creeping artfulness is a byword for deceit. Do not get within her fatal circle, or she will sting thee to the very core, and then devour thee. I hate her! She has robbed me of my peace, and now, with deep conceit and hellish pride, she deigns not to turn her head this way. Oh that I had ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... studying Henry Denvil, and her sky cleared. She knew every particular of his history and family before he even saw her. When he did observe her, Madame Robin made no impression on him beyond being genteel and modest in appearance. Wait! A foreigner soured by poverty, endowed by nature with artfulness, knowledge of humanity in its baser aspects, a certain feline patience, may achieve much in a hamlet ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... altogether very friendly, if rather grave and dry towards her, as soon as he was convinced that "it was only Joe," and that pity, not artfulness, was to blame for the undesirable match. He was too honourable a man not to see that it could not be given up, and he held that the best must now be made of it, and that it would be more proper, since it was to be, for him to assume the part of ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... did not, might tell both for and against her. Granting that she lacked true dignity, native refinement, might it not have been expected that artfulness would supply their place? Artful fencing would have stamped her of coarse nature. But coarseness she had never betrayed; he had never judged her worse than intellectually shallow. Her self-surrender might, then, indicate a trait worthy of admiration. Her subsequent behaviour undeniably pleaded for ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... perceiv'd by an ordinary Eye; but it requires the Penetration of a Lynceus to discern the Depth of a good Poem; the secret Artfulness and Contrivance of it being conceal'd from a ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb |
