"Hackneyed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it all, this creed is false, quite false. I shall not advance to the attack with hackneyed tales of the rich man astray in a desert, who cannot get even a drop of water for his gold; or the decrepit millionaire who would give half he has to buy from a stalwart fellow without a cent, his ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... refused it. Mr Boyd also told us, Cumming the Quaker first began to distinguish himself, by writing against Dr Leechman on prayer, to prove it unnecessary, as God knows best what should be, and will order it without our asking—the old hackneyed objection. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... to use a new simile in illustrating that somewhat hackneyed theme of the supremacy of Love over Reason; and simply to carry out my idea I represented the violent uprising of the Communist emotions against ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... ignorance of the very first principles: simple ignorance of the mechanical part of his art chilled all inspiration and formed an impassable barrier to his imagination. His brush returned involuntarily to hackneyed forms: hands folded themselves in a set attitude; heads dared not make any unusual turn; the very garments turned out commonplace, and would not drape themselves to any unaccustomed posture of the body. And he felt and saw ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... legitimate protection of a more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological explanation there can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of the female in anger is noli me tangere. I take this as the most obvious and at the same time the least hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality in the female tradition, which has tended in our time to be almost immeasurably misunderstood, both by the cant of moralists and the cant of immoralists. The proper name for the thing is modesty; ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Take the hackneyed case of the Italian who tortured mice, ostensibly to find out about the effects of pain rather less than the nearest dentist could have told him, and who boasted of the ecstatic sensations (he actually used the word love) with which ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... I called to mind those truths That are the common-places of the schools— (A theme for boys, too hackneyed for their sires,) Yet, with a revelation's liveliness, In all their comprehensive bearings known 195 And visible to philosophers of old, Men who, to business of the world untrained, Lived in the shade; and to Harmodius known And his compeer Aristogiton, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Variations Serieuses for Pianoforte and some of the Songs without Words[205] contain a genuinely poetic message, flawlessly expressed. As for the pianoforte music, when the Songs without Words are called "hackneyed" we must remember that only compositions of truly popular appeal ever have sufficient vogue to warrant the application of this opprobrious term. In the pianoforte Scherzos and in the Rondo Capriccioso in E major there ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... points gave the quality of interest to his discourse; and the fact of his speaking direct from his own resources, and not borrowing or stealing from books—here a dry fact, and there a trite phrase, and elsewhere a hackneyed opinion —ensured a freshness, as welcome as it was rare. Before my eyes, too, his disposition seemed to unfold another phase; to pass to a fresh day: to rise in new ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... composure upon our knowledge that the fire would have to burn its way through four inside passengers before it could reach ourselves. I remarked to the coachman, with a quotation from Virgil's "neid" really too hackneyed— ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... a tide in the affairs of men, has very naturally become a figure of frequent and almost hackneyed use in the cockpits, gun-rooms, and even the captains' cabins of our ships and vessels of war. Like its numerous brethren of common-places, it will be found, perhaps, but of small application to the ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... man. Attracted by the dramatic aspects of human nature, she finds congenial subjects in the great efforts of humanity in the struggle for life. Her power of observation enables her to give freshness to hackneyed subjects, as in "La Forge." The attitudes of the workmen, so sure and decided, turning the half-fused metal are perfect in the precision of their combined efforts; the fatigue of the men who are resting, ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... himself, "feature for feature, down to the very 'cataract leaping in glory,' the scene might have been got up, apres coup, to illustrate it." And he began to repeat the beautiful hackneyed words, under ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... you, dear Charles. I know you may probably feel that this avowal ought to be expressed with more hesitation, veiled over by the hypocrisy of language, disguised by the hackneyed forms of mere sentiment, uttered like the assertions of a coquette, and degraded by that tampering with truth which makes the heart lie unto itself. Oh, yes!—perhaps, Charles, you may think that because I fail to express what I feel in that spirit ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... and Betsy Trotwood and Bill Sikes and Dick Swiveller and Bob Sawyer and Sam Weller and Mark Tapley and Old Scrooge. The mere mention of these names, which, to some, would suggest the music of the spheres, to others would suggest forced merriment, horrible Early Victorian sentiment, and that sort of hackneyed "unction" of sly moral elders, which is youth's especial Hell. Much wiser were it, as it seems to me, to indicate what in Dickens—in his style, his method, his vision, his art—actually appeals to one particular mind. I think it is to be found in his childlike Imagination. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... mediaeval conditions of life as we find them in the early sixteenth century left more abiding traces on the German mind and on German culture than was the case with some other nations. The time was out of joint in a very literal sense of that somewhat hackneyed phrase. At the opening of the sixteenth century every established institution—political, social, and religious—was shaken and showed the rents and fissures caused by time and by the growth of a new life underneath it. The empire—the Holy Roman—was ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... tell you of something rather extraordinary that my mother used to say happened to a friend of hers at Glamis. I have no doubt you are well acquainted with the hackneyed stories in connection with the hauntings at the castle; for example, Earl Beardie playing cards with the Devil, and The Weeping Woman without Hands or Tongue. You can read about them in scores of books and magazines. ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... low-bred man is filled up with proverbs and hackneyed sayings; instead of observing that tastes are different, and that most men have one peculiar to themselves, he will give you—"What is one man's meat is another man's poison;" or, "Every one to their liking, as the old woman said, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Vicar; and in the sententious pause that followed, I felt that I would offer any gifts of gold to avert or postpone the solemn, inevitable, hackneyed, and yet, as it seemed to me, perfectly appalling statement that "the Pen is mightier ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... warrant its being treated separately. Its chief distinction is that it is written in the broken English used by the uneducated classes of our own country, and by foreigners. Its plot is either very slight or hopelessly hackneyed, and it is redeemed from sheer commonplace only by its picturesque language. It is usually told in the first person by some English-murdering ignoramus. It is simple, and sometimes has a homely pathos. It may present character as either active or inactive, though ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... observation not been so hackneyed, I would have advised Mr. Bull to mend his way; but he seemed so thoroughly astonished that ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... on to say. "It seems to me very possible that the very singularity of such an address might captivate her, and give you a decided advantage over lovers who pressed their suit in hackneyed, stereotyped phrases." ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... to advantage; later readers have found him inferior in urbanity to Douglas, of whom he disapproved, while Douglas probably disapproved of no man; his speeches are, of course, not free either from unsound arguments or from the rough and tumble of popular debate; occasionally he uses hackneyed phrases; but it is remarkable that a hackneyed or a falsely sentimental phrase in Lincoln comes always as a lapse and a surprise. Passages abound in these speeches which to almost any literate taste are arresting for the simple beauty of their English, a beauty characteristic ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... gay, yet thoughtful sentiment. The song, "I never have been false to thee," is, of itself, sufficient to establish General Morris's fame as a great poet—as a "potens magister affectuum"—and as a literary creator of a high order. It is a thoroughly fresh and effective poem on a subject as hackneyed as the highway; it is as deep as truth itself, yet light as the movement of a dance. We had almost forgotten, what the world will never forget, the matchless softness and transparent delicacy of "Near the Lake." Those lines, of ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... poetical estates shut up and deserted where live the souls of beautiful women; old footmen, relics of serfdom, on the brink of the grave; young ladies longing for the most conventional love. In addition to all these things, not far from me there is even such a hackneyed cliche as a water-mill (with sixteen wheels), with a miller, and his daughter who always sits at the window, apparently waiting for someone. All that I see and hear now seems familiar to me from old novels and fairy-tales. The only thing that has something new about ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... blush with shame in their prose setting. Except for my acquaintance with this modern standard of life, I should know, quite naturally, that just as my being born a woman was not in my own hands, so the element of devotion in woman's love is not like a hackneyed passage quoted from a romantic poem to be piously written down in round hand ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... acting consul of the Republic of Mexico, who had the singular consular virtue of sympathizing warmly with the free North, the General's attentions were something more sincere than the hackneyed "assurances of distinguished consideration" so necessary to diplomatic correspondence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas Browne peacefully writing his Religio Medici amid all the commotions of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the crash of empires. It is not his business to fight. His business ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... is a very old story The original version is found in the "Arabian Nights," and it has been told over and over again. Shakespeare embodies it in "The Taming of the Shrew," and seven other versions occur in Elizabethan literature alone. This hackneyed farce, amplified by material from Biedermann's "Utopia," Holberg made the vehicle of profound delineation of character Dr. Georg Brandes says of Jeppe, "All that we should like to know of a man when we become ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... have rid the house of the last vestige of an uninvited and unwelcome guest. With which reflection Desmond sat down finally in the sanctuary of his study; lit a cheroot; and opened a battered original of Omar Khayyam, whose stately quatrains and exquisite imagery were less hackneyed then, than they have since become among modern devotees ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... stated, "of the only time that I ever, to my knowledge, talked face to face with the devil. It is rather odd how obstinately life clings to the most hackneyed trick of ballad-makers; and still naively pretends to enrich her productions by the stale device of introducing a refrain—so that the idlest remarks of as much as three years ago keep cropping up as the actual gist of the present!... However, were it within ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... morning. Yet they have the true vagabond abhorrence of all useful and industrious employment; and they have their pleasures too: one of which is to lounge in this way in the sunshine, at the stage-door, during rehearsals, and make hackneyed theatrical ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... that his friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men had turned different colours at the thought of being addressed like that before the staff; and St. George had recast the story and had received ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... account of a weak-minded youth whom she had driven to suicide—utterly false, of course, but difficult to deal with. A Sunday "special" appeared—one of those fantastic, colored- supplement nightmares—in which she was pictured as a vampire with an angel's face. It was the hackneyed "moth and flame" story. The page was luridly decorated with a swarm of entomological curiosities—winged bipeds supposedly representing her fatuous admirers. These fond victims of her enticements appeared to be ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind; and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... which are not integral and necessary elements of the one Catholic faith, but have been left behind, in pardonable human weakness, by our great Reformers? Great they were, and good: giants on the earth, while we are but as dwarfs beside them. But, as the hackneyed proverb says, the dwarf on the giant's shoulders may see further than the giant ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... his time to every trade, Save censure.—Critics all are ready made. Take hackneyed jokes from Miller, got by rote, With just enough of learning to misquote; A mind well skill'd to find or forge a fault, A turn for punning—call it Attic salt: Fear not to lie, 'twill seem a lucky ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... sensibility of the audience seemed equal to that of Mrs. Siddons. There was no eye within my view which did not 'silently a gentle tear let fall,' nor, though long hackneyed in music, did I find myself made of stronger ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... charming wife. We hear she is charming; and, from the good taste and good feeling of his writings, we can readily take it for granted that his choice must be charming, in the best sense of that hackneyed, but still comprehensive word. There is a peculiar delicacy in this book, which delights from being accompanied, as it is, with the strongest evidence ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... consideration. You are going to collect odes; I could not wish a better man to do so; but I tremble lest you should commit two sins of omission. You will not, I am sure, be so far left to yourself as to give us no more of Dryden than the hackneyed St. Cecilia; I know you will give us some others of those surprising masterpieces where there is more sustained eloquence and harmony of English numbers than in all that has been written since; there is a machine about a poetical ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is that most histories are mere registers of names and dates, dull or highly-colored hackneyed splurges of print giving no ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... warm appearance to the scene, although no sensible warmth proceeded from it, so cold was the air. Countless millions of icy particles covered every bush and tree, glittering tremulously in its rays like diamonds—psha! that hackneyed simile: diamonds of the purest water never shone like these evanescent little gems of nature. The air was biting cold, obliging us to walk briskly along to keep our blood in circulation; and the breath flew thick and ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... But then the whole would have been spoiled. Under the present systems, this would all have come out. Mr. Pickwick, when it came to his turn, would have explained what his proceedings meant. It is a most perfect and vivid satire on the hackneyed methods of the lawyers when dealing with the witnesses. Nothing can be more natural or more graphic. It is maintained to something between the level of comedy and farce: nor is there the least exaggeration. It applies now as it did then, though ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... furniture, is distinguished, not for its costliness and profusion, but for a pervading air of graceful originality. She is quite sensible of the regard due to the reigning fashion of the day, but her own tasteful discrimination is always perceptible. She instinctively avoids every thing that is hackneyed, vulgar, and common place, and uniformly succeeds in pleasing by the ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... once have been striking and effective, or witty and felicitous, but which have become worn out by oft-repeated use, should be avoided. The following hackneyed phrases will serve to illustrate: "The staff of life," "gave up the ship," "counterfeit presentment," "the hymeneal altar," "bold as a lion," "throw cold water upon," "the rose upon the cheek," "lords of creation," "the weaker sex," "the better half," "the rising generation," ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... it depends upon the point of view, to use a hackneyed phrase. You study people with a discerning eye for good qualities. Nature—and circumstances have ordered it otherwise with me. I ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... resting with benign composure upon our knowledge that the fire would have to burn its way through four inside passengers before it could reach ourselves. I remarked to the coachman, with a quotation from Virgil's "AEneid" really too hackneyed— ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... as, upon the whole, a countrified performance. De Puysange liked that air; he liked the reticence of every glance and speech and gesture,—liked, above all, the thinnish oval of her face and the staid splendor of her hair. Here was no vulgar yellow, no crass and hackneyed gold ... and yet there was a clarified and gauzier shade of gold ... the color of the moon by daylight, say.... Then, as the pleasures of digestion lapsed gently into the initial amenities of sleep, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... distinct and noteworthy feature of these sermons is, we certainly think, their freshness—freshness of thought, treatment, and style; nowhere do we meet pulpit commonplace or hackneyed phrase—everywhere, on the contrary, it is the heart of the preacher pouring out to his flock his own deep convictions, enforcing them from the 'Treasures, old and new,' of a cultivated ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... I thought he should be murdered by his younger brother; but I afterwards hit upon another plan, that seemed less hackneyed and provided more interesting issues. Murdock should arrive at the Maine village at the same time as Lord Vivian, and upon the same errand, to get hold of Lord Vivian's son, of whose existence he had heard, and whom ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... you say to Matchlock?" inquired I. "You might as well have Blunderbuss while you are about it," was the reply. "No, both words are dreadfully hackneyed; let us try and find out something ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... them I kept company only with one young gentleman, whose whole manner of thinking on religious subjects I found so congenial with my own that I could not live out of his society. My mother began to lay down some of her old hackneyed rules of faith, but I turned from hearing her with disgust; for, after the energy of my new friend's reasoning, hers appeared so tame I could not endure it. And I confess with shame that my reverend preceptor's religious dissertations began, about this time, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... sound of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery—the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole—which has so long become publica materies. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to the dead language, the dead manners, it will always be on. All is just near enough to us for it to be enjoyed, as we cannot enjoy ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... only accessory productions, artistic enough, but of a lighter character. Many of the tales unfortunately suffer from a hackneyed use of situations, materials, and ideas, suggestive of the hack writer. Gorki's cheap sentiment, and maudlin pity, often result in clap-trap and padding which are foreign to the artist proper. But this is the effect of his predilection ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... merchant flung his hoarded store, The prince his hall—and Moscow was no more! Sublimest of volcanoes! Etna's flame Pales before thine, and quenchless Hecla's tame; 180 Vesuvius shows his blaze,[287] an usual sight For gaping tourists, from his hackneyed height:[dz] Thou stand'st alone unrivalled, till the Fire To come, in which ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... patients, and looked back with longing to his tavern haunts and broad convivial meetings, from which the dignity and duties of his medical calling restrained him. At length, on prescribing to a lady of his acquaintance who, to use a hackneyed phrase, "rejoiced" in the aristocratical name of Sidebotham, a warm dispute arose between him and the apothecary as to the quantity of medicine to be administered. The doctor stood up for the rights and dignities of his profession, and resented the interference ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... people of all ages are agreed upon it. And it is not literature, nor is it any other art, nor is it history, nor is it any science. It is the study of one's self. Man, know thyself. These words are so hackneyed that verily I blush to write them. Yet they must be written, for they need to be written. (I take back my blush, being ashamed of it.) Man, know thyself. I say it out loud. The phrase is one of those phrases with which everyone is familiar, of which everyone acknowledges ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... the hackneyed, battered, old conventional newspaper gibberish had in it the breath of life. I believed it. At that moment, on the threshold of new experiences, I took the words on trust. Perhaps, for once, the things I had read in books had not eluded me! Perhaps the old gentleman in the flannel ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... anything is the first requisite for success,'" he repeated to himself, striving to recall whether or not it was, as she had intimated, a hackneyed proverb for the young; yet there was something bracing in it, coming from her calm, young, womanly lips. "That's it; she has it," he again said to himself. "'Faith.' That's what I need." And he resumed his tramp up the mountainside with a better courage and more hope for ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... no reason to suppose that the explanations given by the priests did more than account for mythological stories, agreeably to the spirit and form of the received mythology, or deduce moral maxims from the representation, as hackneyed, as simple, and as ancient, as the generality of moral aphorisms are. But, as the intellectual progress of the audience advanced, philosophers, skeptical of the popular religion, delighted to draw from such imposing representations a thousand theories and morals utterly ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Venice,[24] and Collin's Indledning to his edition of the same play. Both are frankly compilations, but both are admirably organized, admirably written, and full of a personal enthusiasm which gives the old, sometimes hackneyed facts a ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... for a perfect community of feeling is a mutual recognition of, and a common respect for, certain great moral rules, without which there can exist no esteem between the upright. The alliance of knaves depends on motives so hackneyed and obvious, that we abstain from any illustration of its principle as a work of supererogation. The Signor Grimaldi and Melchior de Willading were both very upright and justly-minded men, as men go, in intention ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... metaphors which have become hackneyed and worn out should be allowed to rest in the oblivion of past usage. Such expressions and phrases as "Sweet sixteen" "the Almighty dollar," "Uncle Sam," "On the fence," "The Glorious Fourth," "Young America," "The lords of creation," "The rising generation," "The weaker ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... the same aspects of life, which form her one freehold for all artists, and he had but the instrument of his guild—his pen; the series of his collected contributions to journals and magazines bear a no more distinctive title than the hackneyed one of 'Notes Contemporaines,' but the sub-titles betray at once the trend of originality: 'Great Souls and Little Lives,' 'The Obscure Ones,' 'Companions of the New Life'; and in the treatment of these subjects, and especially ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... hackneyed phrase Of shallow words and empty praise, And prate of "peace" till one might think My foolish pen was drunk with ink. Nor will I here the wish express Of "lasting love and happiness," And "cloudless skies"—for after all "Into each life some rain must fall." —No. Keep the empty page below, ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... stillness of old age, when youthful memories come back to us involuntarily; yet he barely lifts the veil from his own childhood, and has much more to say of external events and older people than of himself and his young companions. How valuable is the story of George Washington and his hatchet, hackneyed as it has become! What do we know of the boyhood of Franklin, Webster, Seward and Longfellow? ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... something more than coincidence when they work out like this. You know your Shakespeare, John, and he says most truly: 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.' I will not repeat the hackneyed phrase about 'more things in ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... exhibited some fine specimens of old plaster-work. We witnessed the dismantling of the premises previous to their being taken down. It was indeed a sorry breaking up. The long tables which had so often, to use a hackneyed phrase, "groaned" beneath the weight of civic fare—the cosy high-backed stuffed chairs which had held many a portly citizen—nay, the very soup-kettles and venison dishes—all were to be submitted to the noisy ordeal of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... also colour from the ground whence it springs. It has the tang of the soil as well as the savour of the blood. Fletcher of Saltoun's hackneyed epigram, 'Let me make a country's ballads, and let who will make its laws,' does not embody all the truth. A country and the race inhabiting it may not be responsible for the laws that govern it. But a country and a people may rightly be tried and judged by their ballads—their own handiwork; their ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... necessarily be unpicturesque; witness Launt Thompson's 'Trapper,' Rogers's bits of petrified history, or Eastman Johnson's vivid delineations of scenes familiar to us all. We have no reason to follow in any beaten, hackneyed track, but, within the needful restrictions of good sense, good taste, and the teachings of nature, may wander wherever the bent of our gifts may lead us. We may choose sensational subjects, striking ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the island was a veritable apocalypse. There was something unique about the desolate grandeur of the novel surroundings that would cause a man of the Sir Charles Coldstream type to say there "is something in it," and the most hackneyed man of the world would acknowledge a new sensation. It was midnight, and the sun shone with gleaming splendor over all this waste of ice and sea and granite; on one hand Wrangel Island appeared in well-defined outline, on the other an open sea extended northward as far as we were able ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... routine for other lovers of routine. New needs of the mind, of the heart, and of the sense of hearing, make necessary new endeavours and, in some cases, the breaking of ancient laws. Many forms have become too hackneyed to be still adopted. The same thing may be entirely good or entirely bad, according to the use one makes of it, or the reasons one has for making use of it. Sound and sonority are secondary to thought, and thought is secondary to feeling and passion." (These opinions were given with reference to ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... the humour even of Mr. Bret Harte and that of English writers. His fun is derived from the vagaries of huge, rough people, with the comic cruelty of the old Danes, and with the unexpected tenderness of a sentimental time. The characters of the great Texan and Californian drama are like our hackneyed friends, the Vikings, with a touch, if we may use the term, of spooniness. Their humour is often nothing more than a disdainful trifling with death; they seize the comic side of manslaughter very promptly, and enjoy all the mirth that can be got out of revolvers and grizzly bears. In Mr. Bret ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... presence of unexpected forces; he became aware that there was another way of looking at things, and this powerful sensation was deepened by the personality of Mr. Grayson, in whom he saw intuitively that there was something fresh, original, and strong; he seemed less hackneyed and more joyous than the types that he found in the old states of the Union or the Old World, and, because of this, the interest of Harley, whose mind had a singularly keen and inquiring quality, was aroused; the regions that apparently lay in the shadow might have enough light, ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... them. I wonder what can touch them? But to soothe your uneasiness I will point out again that an Irrelevant world would be very amusing, if the women take care to make it as charming as they alone can, by preserving for us certain well-known, well-established, I'll almost say hackneyed, illusions, without which the average male creature cannot get on! And that condition is very important. For there is nothing more provoking than the Irrelevant when it has ceased to amuse and charm; and then the danger would be of the ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... insipid soda- water, I take the deadly razor in my vacillating grasp; I proceed to skate upon the margin of eternity. Stimulating thought! I bleed, perhaps, but with medicable wounds. The stubble reaped, I pass out of my chamber, calm but triumphant. To employ a hackneyed phrase, I would not call Lord Wellington my uncle! I, too, have dared, perhaps bled, before the ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Precept and Hope. Who can resist such appeals to that kindness which increases the happiness of its possessor? With these reiterated words of counsel and of affection, let us take present leave of our readers, by wishing them in hackneyed phrase, but with ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... might have written fifty years ago, if the undergraduates of that day had been able to copy a Macaulay. The essayist has read the prose of that dangerous model until he has imitated the well-known and now hackneyed devices of the great rhetorician with a closeness which perilously brought to mind the show passages of the 'Essays' and the 'History.' Mr. Russell has caught the trick of cutting up his paragraphs into rolling periods, and short, sharp, and disjointed sentences; but he ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... this ancient Italian city offers little in comparison to detain the eager pilgrim; and yet to one cognizant of its history and alive to imaginative associations, this neglect might increase the charm of a brief sojourn. It is pleasant to explore the less hackneyed stories of history and tradition, to enjoy an isolated scene fraught with grand or tender sentiment, to turn aside from the trampled highway and the crowded resort, to listen to some plaintive whisper from the Past amid the deserted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... indebted to your goodness, I do not approach you, my Lords and Gentlemen, in the usual style of dedication, to thank you for past favours: that path is so hackneyed by prostituted learning that honest rusticity is ashamed of it. Nor do I present this address with the venal soul of a servile author, looking for a continuation of those favours: I was bred to the plough, and am independent. I come to claim the common Scottish name with you, my illustrious ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... had changed from its old vehemence. This change had been wrought in Zillah—the old, unreasoning passion had left her. A real affliction had brought out, by its gradual renovating and creative force, all the good that was in her. That the uses of adversity are sweet, is a hackneyed Shakspeareanism, but it is forever true, and nowhere was its truth more fully displayed than here. Formerly it happened that an ordinary check in the way of her desires was sufficient to send her almost into convulsions; but now, in the presence ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... The hackneyed lines sprang unbidden, as though to augment my punishment; then suddenly I reflected that it was not in my own interest I had begun to practise my deceit; and the thought of Catherine braced me up, perhaps partly because I felt that it should. I put myself back into ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... had thought," he continues later, "that unconscious memory was no more than a metaphor, and the detailed application of it to these various forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still have judged it not unprofitable to represent a somewhat hackneyed class of maladies in the light of a parable. None of our faculties is more familiar to us in its workings than the memory, and there is hardly any force or power in nature which every one knows so well as the force of habit. To ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... eh? Well, here's something that may interest you. The Sayers Automobile Company is going to reorganize its sales organization. It wants a man with imagination who will take hold of that department. It seeks a man with ideas—none of the old, worn out, hackneyed stuff, but—a man with original ideas that will prove good. The Martin Company handles its advertising. Do you think—really and honestly think—that you could reorganize its sales department and bring to it additional success if I recommend you ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... the attitude of the occasional playgoer! Seeing only a tithe of the plays of the day, he neither knows nor cares whether they repeat one another. The most hackneyed device may seem brilliantly original to him, the stalest stage trick as fresh as if just hot from the brain; and jokes that deterred the dove from returning to the ark arride him vastly. Per contra, for his unjaded imagination absolutely new scenes and ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... coroner's physician did not seem to be thoroughly satisfied with the theory of physical violence alone. Nor did I. Some one, I believe, exerted a peculiar force in order to get her into his power. What was that force? At first I thought it might have been the hackneyed knock-out drops, but tests by the coroner's physician eliminated that. Then I thought it might be one of the alkaloids, such as morphine, cocaine, and others. But it was not any of the usual things that was used to entice her away from her family and friends. >From tests that I have, ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... musical food for my pupils, I strive to keep away from the beaten track of the hackneyed. The mistake made by many teachers is to give far too difficult music. Why should I teach an old war-horse which the pupil has to struggle over for six months without being really able to master, and which he will thoroughly hate at the end of that time? The Scherzo ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... ship under our feet; but now we found ourselves face to face with one in a mere boat, little more than a toy craft. The sea, though nothing like as high as I had frequently seen it before, now wore a more formidable aspect than I could ever have believed possible. The hackneyed expression of "running mountains high" seemed strictly applicable; and I fairly own to having experienced, for, I believe, the first time in my life, a qualm or two of fear on ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... more hackneyed than an American's description of his feelings in the midst of the scenes and objects he has read of all his days, and is looking upon for the first time. To each of us it appears in some respects in the same way, but with a difference for ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... civilization. And herein appears a glimpse of the political mission of the American Union, destined itself to become still more comprehensive in the inevitable fluctuation and change of the political elements. It is a hackneyed theme that all the natural features of our country, its mountains, rivers, valleys, lakes, are on a grand scale; it is, therefore, meet that we should lead the civilized world in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... disputed, what shall we say to the so-called poets of the Flavian age? to Valerius Flaccus, Silius, Statius, and Martial? In one sense they are poets certainly; they have a thorough mastery over the form of their art, over the hackneyed themes of verse. But in the inspiration that makes the bard, in the grace that should adorn his mind, in the familiarity with noble thoughts which lends to the Pharsalia an undisputed greatness, they are one and all absolutely wanting. None of them raise in the reader one thrill of pleasure, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... anxious, intent young face with eyes fixed upon vacancy, or an idle, if somewhat begrimed and parti-coloured hand, fiercely clutching a dejected head; but nearly all were already busily at work, eagerly painting, or as eagerly obliterating strokes too hastily made. The subject, hackneyed as it certainly is, had pleased and stimulated the girls. There was a mingled vagueness and familiarity in its suggestion which puzzled them and spurred them on at the ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... you when I can get a little time. At present I am extremely hurried.' In October of that year, 1775, Franklin wrote to Priestley about the state of affairs in America. His letter contains one passage which can hardly be hackneyed from over-quotation. Franklin wants Priestley to tell 'our dear good friend,' Dr. Price, that America is 'determined and unanimous.' 'Britain at the expense of three millions has killed 150 yankees this campaign, which is 20,000 l. a head; and at Bunker's Hill, she gained a mile of ground, all ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... every age and of every nation, I would have you diligently study the criticisms of the masters of the art. It is true that the intimate knowledge of all that has been written on this hackneyed subject will never supply the want of natural poetic taste, of that union of mental and moral refinement which produces the only infallible touchstone of the beautiful; still such criticisms will tend to refine and sharpen a natural ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... The hackneyed joke about biographers adding a new terror to death holds still as good as ever. But biography can sometimes make a good case against her persecutors; and one of the instances which she would certainly adduce would be the instance of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Academic doubt about other things? (107) Your other strong point is that without assent action is impossible (108). But surely many actions of the dogmatist proceed upon mere probability. Nor do you gain by the use of the hackneyed argument of Antiochus (109). Where probability is, there the Academic has all the knowledge he wants (110). The argument of Antiochus that the Academics first admit that there are true and false visa and then contradict themselves by denying that there is any difference ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the story of the humble beginning of one substantial prop of the American Nation. And what a hackneyed story it is! How many other young men from the East have travelled across the mountains and floated down the rivers to enter those strange cities of the West, the growth of which ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... corner of the ground, inscribed with the name of Susan Meynell, who died July 14th, 1835, much lamented; and then the text about 'the one sinner that repenteth,' and so on," said Mr. Sheldon, as if he did not care to dwell on so hackneyed a truism. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... up one or two rousing speeches for the Parliament, which should take the shine out of every one else and carry the school by storm? It was not a bad idea. But the chance would not come. No one could get up a fine speech on such a hackneyed subject as "That Rowing is a finer Sport than Cricket," or that "The Study of Science in Public Schools should be Abolished!" And when he did attempt to prepare an oration on the subject of Compulsory Football, the first friend he showed it to pointed out so many faults in the composition ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... old town and the new—the detail is all lost in that soft mellowness of a sunny autumn day. We find an enthusiastic photographer expending plates on this familiar view, which is sold all over the town; but we do not dare to suggest that the prints, however successful, will be painfully hackneyed, and we go on rejoicing that the questions of stops and exposures need not trouble us, for the world is ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... better in a foreign language. If you must speak nothing but phrases, Ollendorff's are as good as any one's. Where there are a dozen people all speaking French equally badly, each one imagines there is a certain elegance in the hackneyed forms. I know of no other way of accounting for the fact that clever people seem stupid and stupid people clever when they speak French. This facile language thus becomes the missionary of mental equality,—the principles ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... barriers, built up by superstitious reverence and false respect. We are cased in peculiarity. We meet and mingle with trouble and sorrow,—enough of them, too much,—but our treatment of them gets hackneyed, worn, weary, and reluctant. They grapple with the world's strife and trial, but it is an armor. Our excision from the world's pleasure and intercourse, I doubt, is not good for us. We are ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... influence in the general tone and phraseology of the Dialogue (compare opos melesei tis...kaka: oti pas aphron mainetai): and the writer seems to have been acquainted with the 'Laws' of Plato (compare Laws). An incident from the Symposium is rather clumsily introduced, and two somewhat hackneyed quotations (Symp., Gorg.) recur. The reference to the death of Archelaus as having occurred 'quite lately' is only a fiction, probably suggested by the Gorgias, where the story of Archelaus is told, and a similar phrase ...
— Alcibiades II • An Imitator of Plato
... little lamb you are, to be sure! How lucky for you that I am always at hand to keep you from being led to the slaughter—not altar!" Eleanor laughed again at her clever play on the hackneyed phrase. ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... at last, I opened it,—listening for any promise of being interrupted—and—to adapt a hackneyed phrase—directed by the power which shaped my end, I went across the hall and up the stairs. I passed up the first landing, and, on the second, moved to a door upon the right. I turned the handle, it yielded, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... reports of Sir Walter Raleigh's deportment at this final moment of his life. In the place of these hackneyed narratives, we may perhaps quote the less-known words of another bystander, the republican Sir John Elyot, who was at that time a young man of twenty-eight. In his Monarchy of Man, which remained in manuscript ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... of the poetry ascribed to him, than to account for the fact, that there is nothing in the recorded or traditionary life of Shakspeare which in any way connects the poet with the man? It will not do to use the common hackneyed expression, that Shakspeare had a 'genius so essentially dramatic, that all other writers the world has seen have never approached him in his power of going out of himself.' Even the inspired writers of Scripture have their style and their expressions modified, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... (skillful) 698; omniscient; self-taught. known &c v.; ascertained, well-known, recognized, received, notorious, noted; proverbial; familiar, familiar as household words, familiar to every schoolboy; hackneyed, trite, trivial, commonplace. cognoscible^, cognizable. Adv. to one's knowledge, to the best of one's knowledge. Phr. one's eyes being opened &c (disclosure) 529; ompredre tout c'est tout pardonner [Fr.], to know all is to pardon all; empta ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... York to Jummoo is about as long in point of time as to California twenty-five years ago. As many years hence the survivors of us may be getting up Thanksgiving or Christmas reunions at the old homestead of the Aryan family. It will never be a hackneyed spot. It stands too much on end. Steep mountains are never hackneyed: Cook's Personally Conducted will never ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... said I, interrupting; "men will press taper fingers, look into bright eyes, and feel their witchery; and although the fair owners be only quizzing them half the time, and amusing themselves the other, and though they be the veriest hackneyed coquettes—" ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... was expected,—was customary in all cases,—there was a pause of dead silence, an interval of solemnity even in this hackneyed part of the proceeding; while the prisoner at the bar stood with compressed lips, looking at the judge with his outward eyes, but with far other and different scenes presented to his mental vision; a sort of ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... needs no historical explanation, no reference to hackneyed categories in the card-index of Time. Whether his plan was dedicated to this world or to the glory of some invisible God, you may debate as you will, but Bismarck will be neither greater nor less because of flights of ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... racy—full of strong idioms of language and character, and abounding in novelties in type which are no novelties to those familiar with popular life—would be doing them faint justice. They embody a new and perfectly truthful conception of one of the multitude, and have nothing that is hackneyed in them. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... annals. We have developed wholly new powers; and, coincidentally and correspondingly, a wholly new attitude to life. Of the powers I do not intend to speak; the wonders of steam and electricity are the hackneyed theme of every halfpenny paper. But the attitude to life, which is even more important, is something that has hardly yet been formulated. And I shall endeavour to give some first ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... wondrous loveliness in the face of the Lady Duty, and, putting a hand in hers, go onward, thinking nothing hard because of her beauty. But it is admitted by all that there is often a stage between these two, when all the romance of life is summed up in the hackneyed word "love." The pretty girls who were nicknamed Blue and Red had outgrown childhood, and they saw no particular charm in work; they were very dull, and scarce knew why, except that they half envied Eliza, who had gone to the hotel, and who, it was well known, ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... McEachern gruffly, giving a pleasing air of novelty to the hackneyed salutation by pronouncing it as one word. He took some little time getting into his stride when carrying ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... dear reader, that it must be a particularly pleasant thing to be dead? To say nothing hackneyed about the blessed freedom from the cares and vexations of life—which we cling to with such tenacity while we can, and which, when we have no longer the power to hold, we let go all at once, with probably ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... first encounter in the Virginia Legislature has become deathless. Hackneyed though it be, it can never grow old. Referring to the injustice of the Stamp Act, Patrick Henry reached the climax of his speech in these words: "Caesar had his Brutus; Charles the First, his Cromwell; and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... MAUREL as the Jester; acting good, voice too loud. ALBANI, as Gilda, overwhelmed with encores. M. MONTARIOL's Il Duca is Alfredo over again, only confirmed in a vicious career. To obtain an encore for the great but now hackneyed song, "La Donna e mobile," a wonderful rendering is absolutely essential, and somehow something seems wanting to the success of Rigoletto when this song goes for nothing and is passed without a rapturous "bis, bis!" which makes a Manager rub his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... causes, the raising of funds for which is a matter of popular interest. Does a church need a new roof, a hospital some more furnishings, or a college a new building? And have all the usual methods of raising money become hackneyed and uninspiring to those interested in furthering the project? To those confronted with such a money-raising problem the quilt exhibition offers a most welcome solution. For not only does such an exhibition offer a new form of entertainment, ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... and most entertaining description; lively, cheerful love stories in which the shadow cast is infinitesimally small compared with the stretch of sunlight; and the interest is always maintained at full head without apparent effort and without resorting to the conventional and hackneyed devices of most novelists, devices that the experienced reader sees through at once. No more sprightly novel than "Theo" could be desired, and a sweeter or more beautiful romance than "Kathleen" does not exist in print, while "Pretty Polly ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me, and I hope never will. It was all new, no detail of it hackneyed. And India did not wait for morning, it began at the hotel —straight away. The lobbies and halls were full of turbaned, and fez'd and embroidered, cap'd, and barefooted, and cotton-clad dark natives, some of them rushing about, others at rest squatting, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... subject or play upon any theme, whatsoever it may be, provided it is not a "cause," is not hackneyed, is not improper for its own sake and likely to bring a blush to the cheeks of those you love, is familiar to you in its every angle, and is a subject that forms a problem which can be proved conclusively within the ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... a note of interrogation of that sort. The only touch of the morbid in Paul was his resentment at owing anything to his mere personal appearance. He could not escape the easy chaff of his fellows on his "fatal beauty." He dreaded the horrible and hackneyed phrase which every fresh intimacy either with man or woman would inevitably evoke, and he hated it beyond reason. There was a tour during which he longed for small-pox or a broken nose or facial paralysis, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... here as a sample of what can be done with even the most hackneyed stage framework by filling it in with an observed touch of actual humanity instead of with doctrinaire romanticism. Nothing in the theatre is staler than the situation of husband, wife and lover, or the fun of knockabout farce. ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... the English painter, had gone back to London. Perhaps it was the spring, perhaps it was merely the law which decrees that the past can never be recaptured—whatever the cause, Stefan's flight had not wholly assuaged his restlessness. Of adventures in the hackneyed sense he had not thought. He was too fastidious for the vulgar sort, and had hitherto met no women who stirred his imagination. Moreover, he harbored the delusion that the failure of his great romance had killed ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... Take any—the most hackneyed passage of 'Comus,' the 'Allegro,' the 'Penseroso,' the 'Paradise Lost,' and see the freshness, the sweetness, the simplicity which is strangely combined with the pomp, the self-restraint, the earnestness of every word; ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... very happy here, father," Peter's voice declared,—and Zizi bit her lip to keep from smiling at the hackneyed phrase uttered ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... that on one occasion I avoided a certain thicket, one of my favourite daily haunts for three whole days, not to hear that one everlasting sound; then I returned and to my great relief the birds were all at their old game of composing, and not one uttered—perhaps he didn't dare—the too hackneyed phrase. I was sharply reminded one day by an incident in the village of this old Patagonian experience, and of the strange human-like weakness or passion for something new and arresting in music or ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... early morning the army and its general retired from the field, leaving the victory with their solitary adversary and his crowbar. This is the first time this has happened in romantic literature. The invention is original. Everything in this book is original; there is nothing hackneyed about it anywhere. Always, in other romances, when you find the author leading up to a climax, you know what is going to happen. But in this book it is different; the thing which seems inevitable and unavoidable never happens; it is circumvented ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... of Familiar Quotations, containing the hackneyed Quotations in daily use, with names of Authors, and places in their works where they are to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... were roving elsewhere: they were not unpleasant ones, apparently, for he smiled twice or thrice to himself, much less icily than usual. At last he spoke abruptly, after a long pause—Miss Tresilyan's name had not once been mentioned—"Hal, you know that old hackneyed phrase, about 'a woman to die for?' I think we have seen one to-day who is worth living for; which is saying a good ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... understand that the tripping little song, with its wild-wood life and movement—that the boy singing with the delight of a pure, fresh heart—told him, beyond the power of labored language, how hackneyed and blase he had become, how far and hopelessly he had drifted from the same ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... her he smiled, and quoted the hackneyed and beautiful lines from The Rape of the Lock about Belinda's diamonds, "which Jews might kiss and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and in controlling both material and psychic forces, and also about the necessity for developing originality and independence? Is it too much to expect now that greater ingenuity be displayed in education itself to the end of producing more originality? This is a hackneyed request to make of the school, but it seems certain that we do not succeed in obtaining through our educational processes the highest possible degree of productiveness of mind, as regards either quantity or quality. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... a conspirator, and the head of a secret society which extended all over Europe, with signs and passwords, and that whenever any tyrant became intolerable, the warrant for his death was sent from Mistress Jamieson's. Whenever one fable grew hackneyed Nestie produced another, and it was no longer necessary in Muirtown Seminary to buy Indian tales or detective stories, for the whole library of fiction was now bound up and walking about ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... still, I was, to a certain extent, indemnified for this by the pleasure of visiting a beautiful country, a remarkable people, and magnificent scenery, the entire appearance of which is utterly unlike what one is accustomed to see in the hackneyed ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... for years, having shaken the dust off their Bibles, turned to the verses to which he referred, and when in the taverns, so intoxicated as to be scarcely able to stand, they, with maudlin utterances, and serio-comic grimaces, would unctiously quote these hackneyed texts in the pauses which ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... the persons to whom I dedicate these Discourses; both because I seem to myself, in doing so, to have shown a little gratitude for kindness received, and at the same time to have departed from the hackneyed custom which leads many authors to inscribe their works to some Prince, and blinded by hopes of favour or reward, to praise him as possessed of every virtue; whereas with more reason they might reproach him as ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... another cause to be noticed, which seems to have induced a considerable alteration into the popular creed of England, respecting Fairies. Many poets of the sixteenth century, and, above all, our immortal Shakespeare, deserting the hackneyed fictions of Greece and Rome, sought for machinery in the superstitions of their native country. "The fays, which nightly dance upon the wold," were an interesting subject; and the creative imagination of the bard, improving upon the vulgar belief, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... because in a general view it is never too late to expose error on matters of fundamental importance, and because, in this case, there are some special reasons why it should be done, arising from your personal position. If you were a mere hackneyed party politician, I should not think it worth while to take any public notice ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... impossible subjects of the German Empire. Worst of all it has suggested to onlookers that the people who have so plenary a belief in frightfulness are not themselves strangers to fear. There is an old English proverb, hackneyed and stale three hundred years ago, but now freshened again by disuse, that the goodwife would never have looked for her daughter in the oven unless ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... reason of his wish to make the journey. He believes in the theory that there is a buried treasure in the hills beyond Tel-el-Amarna, where Akhnaton was buried, and I think he also wanted . . . what shall I say? . . . to find himself—I suppose I must use that hackneyed phrase for want of a better—to find himself in ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... but the hall, as they entered it from the brightness without, was black at first, like a room unlighted. Then, little by little, it turned from black to brown, and defined itself:—"that hackneyed type of Stage-property hall," I have heard Adrian lament, "which connotes immediately a lost will, a family secret, and the ghost of a man in armour"; "a noble apartment, square and spacious, characteristic of the period when halls were meant to serve at need as guard-rooms," ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen an edge upon but lately; to do, or to imagine this done in a feigned story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of honour as opposed to the laws of the land or a commonplace against duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer nowadays in far better stead than Captain Ager and his conscientious honour; and he would be considered a far ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... despite the efforts of modern novelists and playwrights to render it stale and hackneyed, attaching to the middle of the seventeenth century—that period of upheaval and turmoil which saw a stately debonnaire Court swept away by the flames of Civil War, and the reign of an usurper succeeded by the Restoration of a ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... utmost friendliness and flattering ir-restraint; he seemed to be leaving his heart bare to the Frenchman. Count Victor was by these last words transported to his native city, and his own far-off days of galliard. Why, in the name of Heaven! was he here listening to hackneyed tales of domestic tragedy and a stranger's reminiscences? Why did his mind continually linger round the rock of Doom, so noisy on its promontory, so sad, so stern, so like an ancient saga in its spirit? ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... office-seekers. Again the ardent supporters of State government ignored the latter charge and replied to the taxation argument by quoting the provisions of the Distribution Act. Altogether the discussion lacked freshness, force, and vigor—it was stale and hackneyed. Two years of growth and reflection had wrought a change in sentiment. The public mind had evidently settled down in favor of State organization. At the elections in April the people returned a large majority in favor of calling ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh |
