"Belittling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from which it was clear that he did not intend to leave yet awhile. There was no way out except by going through the inn taproom, and I was not inclined to face Dick Cludde there, for he would of a certainty make some sneering or belittling remark, and my temper being not of the meekest I feared things might come to a brawl. Not that I cared a fig's end for Cludde, or feared any ill result from a personal encounter; but I knew the inn was a property of Sir Richard's, ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... dinner proved an unqualified success. With sole and chicken saute, with trifle and savoury, he mutely pleaded his cause; feeling vaguely guilty, the while, of belittling his childhood's idol, whom he increasingly admired and loved. But this India business was tremendously important, and the dear ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... ever been employed against slavery as degrading and brutalizing to its victims. He said it was "to pay the highest compliment to the institution of slavery," and "stultify ourselves." But this was belittling a great national question, by the side of which all considerations of party consistency were utterly trivial and contemptible. The ballot for the negro was a logical necessity, and it was a matter of the least possible ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... Italians, those lovers of fair pseudonymes, called "La Benedetta," is no other than Clara Benette. But these are trivial, compared with Rodomant and Porphyro. It was daring enough, when Beckendorf mimicked Prince Metternich; but to undertake and to contrast Louis Napoleon and Beethoven, without belittling either, pales every other performance. They tower before us grand and immutable as if cast in bronze, and so veritable that they throw shadows; the prison-gloom is sealed on Porphyro's face,—power and purpose indomitable; just as the "gruesome Emperor" is to-day, we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... first day of the final chase of Moby Dick; I question whether he is as good in sea narrative as Cooper in the famous passage of Paul Jones's ship through the shoals. Such comparisons are, of course, rather futile. They differentiate among excellences, where taste is a factor. Nevertheless, it is belittling to a man who, above almost all others in our language, has brooded upon the mysteries of the mind's action, to say that he is great because he describes so well ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... science, a practice, a religion, or—I might add—a profitable business venture, is considered an evil thing by the Church, and by her is condemned as superstition, that is, as a false and unworthy homage to God, belittling His majesty and opposed to the Dispensation of Christ, according to which alone God can be worthily honored. This evil has many names; it includes all dabbling in the supernatural against the sanction of Church authority, and runs ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... of his way of belittling his flying feats, Mr. Nighthawk was secretly very proud of his skill at sky-coasting. And when Kiddie Katydid asked him if he wouldn't kindly give an exhibition of the art of fancy flying, Mr. Nighthawk ...
— The Tale of Kiddie Katydid • Arthur Scott Bailey
... a national hero and finally deified. So, too, the theory, that Herakles sinking down upon his couch of fire is but a symbol of the declining sun can be entertained without marring the grandeur of the hero or belittling Nature's phenomenon; but it would obscure our understanding of the Hebrew intellect and profane the Hebrew religion to conceive Samson as anything but the man that the Bible says he was; while to make of him, as Ignaz Golziher suggests, a symbol of the setting sun whose curly locks ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... as well as of its frequent associate, anger, have been dwelt upon by writers philosophical, religious, and medical. "Worry," says one author, "is the root of all cowardly passions,—jealousy, fear, the belittling of self, and all the introspective forms of depression are the children of worry." The symptoms and the evil results seem to receive more elaborate and detailed attention than the treatment. "Eliminate ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... the notion to go "out there," its sharp striking-in.... Carington and he taking counsel with some of the other fellows in his rooms later on, all the deep voices roaring at once, all the boys insulting him at once, belittling his cigars, saying sharp things about his pictures, that being their way of showing him that they were badly broken up over his leaving them; all their eyes shining interest in him and hope for him and even envy of him, as the young man who was "going out West," while the great ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... nothing like it back there in America. They hadn't the time there; everybody was in the market, speculating in bubbles. He admired the snowy fountains, too, and the doves that darted in and out of the wind-blown spray. There was nothing like this in America, either. He was not belittling; he was only making comparisons. He knew that he would be far happier in his adopted country, which would accomplish all ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... 1862. Rosecrans was inspired by telegraph to change defeat into victory; the indomitable Grant received by telegraph the fertility of resources shown by him at Vicksburgh. Oh! Halleck! you cannot succeed in thus belittling the two heroes, and you may tell your little ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... was Hunferth over the reminder of his former wrongdoing and the implied accusation of cowardice, but he had brought it on himself by his unwise belittling of Beowulf's feat, and the applause of both Danes and Geats showed him that he dared no further attack the champion; he had to endure in silence Beowulf's boast that he and his Geats would that night await Grendel in the hall, and surprise him terribly, since the fiend had ceased ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... his friend's monopoly of the talk and promptly seized the opportunity of belittling ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... man was nothing in his own or anybody else's eyes, in the ages when he thought to magnify the Deity by belittling himself, an interfering agency of the Divine was necessarily invoked on almost every conceivable occasion; "the hand of God" was seen in every occurrence. From the comparatively minor matters of bodily ailments up to the colossal disasters which nature is capable of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... What might have happened had he gone back? And when he next saw Alice Yorke there would be a softer tone in his voice, and he would talk a deeper and higher philosophy to her than she had ever heard, belittling the gaudy rewards of life, and instilling in her mind ideas of something loftier and better and finer than they. He even told her once something of the story of his life, and of the suffering and sorrow that ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... Between 1850 and 1860 this question reached a crisis and free colored people from the South were to be seen taking up their homes in the Northern States and in Canada. (Many of the people, especially from Charleston, carried with them all their belittling prejudices, and after years of sojourn under the sway of enlightened and liberal ideas, proved themselves still incapable of learning the new way or forgetting ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... you?" There was a grin on Eyer's face. But his eyes were stern. He wasn't belittling their deadly danger. And there was also a chance that Jeter's vibration ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... had thrown the mud into his eye purposely. There had been bad feeling between them, and even worse, for some time, and the gap separating them seemed to be growing wider all the while. Each had said exasperating and belittling things of the other, and a wall of hate had been built up where once there had been a bond of strong friendship. The pain in Badger's eye was excruciating, and it rendered him for a little while absolutely reckless. Fortunately, it also rendered him incapable ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... could, poor woman, but in what belittling, coarsening conditions! She had to interpret a character in a play, and a character in a play—not to say the whole piece: I speak more particularly of modern pieces—is such a wretchedly small peg to hang anything on! The dramatist shows us so little, is so hampered by his audience, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... heard such a belittling character of the profession," she went on. "Your mother would have given it a very different one, Mr. Landholm. She would have told you, 'Open thy mouth, judge' — what is it? — 'and plead ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... them, after all, when they arrived at the theatre, the Sphinx and Lady Dolly. The older feminine presentment sent her belittling gaze over their heads and beyond them from the curtain; Lady Dolly turned a modish head to greet them from the front of the box. Lady Dolly raised her eyes but not her elbows, which were assisting her ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... always have, from the time we prayed to God through our fathers and mothers until now, when we find God in Christ. We want in God a personality that can answer ours, and we can have it without belittling in the least ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Bible concept is false, belittling, wholly disastrous and degrading, the death knell to any possible inspiration for human effort and attainment. It is a concept against which he revolts with all the nature in him, and hates with an exceeding ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... belittling the work of Sturm, thinks that the celebrated course has but little in it different from the courses of the Wittenberg reformers. He says, "If Melanchthon had had the planning of a school course for a large city, it would have been much the same (as Sturm's). ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... but he did not inform his valued client that he was well acquainted with the agent of the Cuban insurgents, who had come West to meet the Senor da Cordova, for he had no intention of belittling the difficulty ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... guided by the author's imagination, he has endeavored to bring nearer to the sympathizing reader the human side of the mighty destiny of the nation which it was incumbent on him to describe. If he has succeeded in doing so, without belittling the magnificent Biblical narrative, he has accomplished his desire; if he has failed, he must content himself with the remembrance of the pleasure and mental exaltation he experienced during the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... into a temper carelessly serene; and the leisurely tapping of his iron-shod stick accompanied his footfalls with a self-confident sound on the flagstones. It was impossible to connect such a fine presence and this unruffled aspect with the belittling troubles of poverty; the man's whole existence appeared to pass before you, facile and large, in the freedom of means as ample as the ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... treatise on the Sphaeriaceae of Vaucluse, that singular family of fungi which cover fallen leaves and dead twigs with their blackish fructifications; a remarkable piece of work, full of the most valuable documentation, as were the theses whose subjects I have just detailed; but without belittling the fame of their author, one may say that another, in his place, might have acquitted ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros |
