"Man of the world" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Foucquet was a man of the world, and of the court, knew how to please man's lighter side, and how to use social position for his own ends. France calls him a "dilapidateur," but when his power and incidentally the revenues of state, were laid out to produce a day of pleasure for king and court, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... situation. Here have I been thinking myself the only man in the place capable of appreciating its beauties properly—the only poetic and artistic temperament amongst you all—and I gradually awake to find myself but a humdrum, commonplace man of the world, who has dropped into a nest of sweet things: earth, sea, and sky combining to form pictures of beauty; picturesque rural life; an interesting and mysterious host; an idyllic cow; a friend who, though unable, ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... musical comedy ensembles. To all these outpourings Major Selby had listened with keen attention, and finally had made one of those luminous suggestions, so simple yet so shrewd, which emanate only from your man of the world. It was Jill's girlish ambition, it seemed from Major Selby's statement, to become a force in the motion-picture world. The movies were her objective. When she had told him of this, said Uncle Chris, he had urged her, speaking in her best ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... a man of the world," Mr. Henley resumed, "what does this mean? If you're too cautious to speak out—and I must say it looks like it—shall ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... they should vote the Prohibition ticket, one's conscience is not wounded if this poster, ink down, takes the place which a tablecloth would have taken under other circumstances. If there is not much crockery to use, there is but little to wash. And, in short, as well trained a man of the world as Dane had made himself thoroughly comfortable in his new quarters before ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... the rustle of a skirt, and the swift vanishing of a woman's figure from the doorway. Mr. Leyton turned red. Rushbrook lived en garcon, with feminine possibilities; Leyton was a married man and a deacon. The incident which, to a man of the world, would have brought only a smile, fired the inexperienced Leyton with those exaggerated ideas and intense credulity regarding vice common to some very good men. He walked on tip-toe to the door, and peered into the passage. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... too much a man of the world to assert anything so monstrous; but he took no pains to contradict the story. In all his conversations with persons of rank and education, he advanced his claims modestly, and as if by mere inadvertency; and seldom pretended to a longevity ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... is! She's thirty if she's a day. That's what I say, Mr. Mack. What do you say?" "Older or younger, she'll rule the roast at Thorpe Ambrose; and I say, for the sake of the place, and for the sake of trade, let's make the best of it; and Mr. Mack, as a man of the world, sees it in the same light as I do, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... does not live and make a fortune.' Now, Mr. Burns, what will you, who know the feelings of paternity, and the incalculable, and assuredly I may say, invaluable value of human souls, think when I add, that the father commended the hint, as showing the wisdom of a shrewd man of the world!" ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... very hard not to color, thus forfeiting all his pretensions to the character of a self-possessed man of the world and elegant coxcomb; but this is equally forlorn with his attempt not to observe the mischievous glance and satirical lip ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... so much self-satisfaction in the speaker's manner of uttering these last words, that it would not have required the wisdom of one older than Miss Cable to detect that he was thoroughly enjoying his pose of man of the world. He was indeed young! For, he had yet to learn that not to disillusion the girl, but to conform as much as possible to her ideals, was the surest way to win her favour; and his vanity surely would have ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... so charmingly naive in this self-depreciation— something so altogether novel in his experience, and, he could not help adding, just a little bit countrified. His spirits rose; he began to relish keenly his position as an experienced man of the world, and, in the agreeable glow of patronage and conscious superiority, chatted with hearty ABANDON with ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... The man might pretend to look at the weather, which was fine; or he might affect earnest conversation with a bystander: it was bootless. The pony saw through it. No feint hoodwinked him. This animal was thoroughly a man of the world. His undistracted eye stayed fixed upon the dissembling foe, and the gravity of his horse-expression made the matter one of high comedy. Then the rope would sail out at him, but he was already elsewhere; ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... mortify him in my progress. His sagacity as a man of the world stood rebuked—his conduct as a gentleman—his blood as a relation, who had not striven for the welfare and good report of his kin, and who had suffered unworthy prejudices, the result of equal avarice and ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... meeting, at which some of my friends of my own age became seriously inclined, and we drifted together into the profession of Christian faith. But here there was nothing of the ghastly terrors of the great revival agitations. My uncle was a man of the world, had been all his early life a sailor, and had taken late to what, in his experiences of men and the vicissitudes of life, he considered the only reality, the duty of making known to his fellows the importance of the spiritual life. To fit himself for the ministry, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... forty eight years of age, was born at Nuremberg, and was a pupil of Regiomontanus, the great German astronomer. A very interesting man, this, if we could decipher his features and character; no mere star-gazing visionary, but a man of the world, whose scientific lore was combined with a wide and liberal experience of life. He was not only learned in cosmography and astronomy, but he had a genius for mechanics and made beautiful instruments; ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... weight of his personal influence; all this in the very face of his own habits and susceptibilities. He has resolved that I shall not miss the offices of father, brother, friend, nor the tenderness and sympathy of them all. And this man is called a mere man of the world, and would be called so rightly if the world were a place for angels. I shall love him dearly and gratefully to my last ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... owing to the candid fashion in which they dealt with our customs and our countrymen. The book received the high honour of a complimentary review from the pen of the aged Goethe. 'The writer appears to be a perfect and experienced man of the world,' observes this distinguished critic; 'endowed with talents and a quick apprehension; formed by a varied social existence, by travel and extensive connections. His journey was undertaken very recently, and brings us the latest intelligence from ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... not," replied the Doctor. "But do not suppose me so unwary as to adopt him out of hand. I am, I flatter myself, a finished man of the world; I have had all possibilities in view; my plan is contrived to meet them all. I take the lad as stable-boy. If he pilfer, if he grumble, if he desire to change, I shall see I was mistaken; I shall recognise him for no son of mine, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... too concealed by tree and islet, to be called by the dull name of pond. Such as it was it arrested the eye before the gaze turned towards the house: it had an air of tranquillity so sequestered, so solemn. A lively man of the world would have been seized with spleen at the first glimpse of it; but he who had known some great grief, some anxious care, would have drunk the calm into his weary soul like an anodyne. The house,—small, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... know by what unnatural restraints the Romish clergy were made thus superior to private interest, but let us not give them cause to say, that celibacy is necessary to prevent the man of God from becoming a man of the world. The ties of nature which he owns in common with others, must not supersede those duties which bind him to his congregation. He does not profess, like the priest at mass, to be a mediator between God and man, but he pleads to the rich in behalf of poverty; to the powerful for those who require protection. ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... this is no time 'for bated breath and whispered humbleness.' I am but a simple girl of seventeen, but I understand your purpose and that of your son just as well as though I were an old man of the world. You are the fortune hunters and maneuverers! It is the fortune of the wealthy heiress and friendless orphan that you are in pursuit of! But that fortune, like my hand and heart, is already promised to one I love; and, ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... profoundy distrustful of my own judgment in delicate matters that I determined to find out if I could what Dodds thought of Lalage's opinions. Dodds is preeminently a man of the world, very sound, unemotional and full of common sense. I did not produce the Gazette or mention Lalage's name, for Dodds has had a prejudice against her since the evening on which he played bridge with Miss Battersby. Nor did I make a special business of asking his advice. ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... of many years, to soften a disposition naturally mild and contemplative. His feelings on the present occasion were therefore likely to differ from those of the severe disciplinarian, strict magistrate, and distrustful man of the world. ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... thought, even then he is in the midst of shadows, the illusory shadows cast by unseen realities. This world is full of forms that are illusory, and the values are all wrong, the proportions are out of focus. The things which a man of the world thinks valuable, a spiritual man must cast aside as worthless. The diamonds of the world, with their glare and glitter in the rays of the outside sun, are mere fragments of broken glass to the man of knowledge. The crown of the king, the sceptre of the emperor, the triumph of earthly ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... women's customs regulate etiquette, men are by no means exempt from the necessity of knowing and practising what we call good manners. A man can have no greater charm than that easy, unstudied, unconscious compliance with social forms which marks what we call "a man of the world"—the man who knows what a good manner requires of him in any situation, and does it quietly and ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Balzac has nothing to say against the necessary intimacy with the dangerous Spanish or Irish or whatever woman—for Lola Montes is a second Homer—the reading world may anticipate an interesting, chapter of life. No writer is better fitted for such a work than so profound a man of the world, and so keen a painter of ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... next place, was the nature of this regard? Was it merely avuncular, or something different? Drayton assured himself that it was the former. He was a man of the world, and had done with passions. The idea of his falling in love made him smile in a deprecatory manner. That the object of such love should be a girl eighteen years his junior rendered the suggestion yet more irrational. She was lustrous with lovable qualities, which he genially recognized and appreciated; ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... o'clock and stay till midnight. The first-comers found the newspapers on the table and read them while awaiting the rest; or they sometimes sallied forth to meet the doctor if he were out for a walk. This tranquil life was not a mere necessity of old age, it was the wise and careful scheme of a man of the world to keep his happiness untroubled by the curiosity of his heirs and the gossip of a little town. He yielded nothing to that capricious goddess, public opinion, whose tyranny (one of the present great evils of France) was just beginning to establish its power and to make ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... excuse my abruptness; but I judge you from your appearance to be pre-eminently a man of the world." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deal, and their beautiful rooms in the Palazzo Caffarelli, on the top of the Capitol Hill (the two great statues of Castor and Pollux standing by their horses looking as if they were guarding the entrance) were a brilliant centre for all the Roman and diplomatic world. He was a thorough man of the world, could make himself charming when he chose, but he never had a pleasant manner, was curt, arrogant, with a very strong sense of his own superiority. From the first moment he came to Paris as ambassador, he ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... neither soured nor a pessimist. Many of his late portraits are even more energetic than those of his early maturity. He shows himself a wise man of the world. "Do not be a grovelling sycophant," some of them seem to say, "but remember that courtly manners and tempered elegance can do you no harm." Titian, then, was ever ready to change with the times, and on the ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... apparition did not surprise her, and yet she was tremendously excited. "Burn it!" she echoed, "the valuable manuscript? At which he laboured for so many weary hours? Yet, doubtless, it would be wrong to preserve it. Sin is the only rolling stone that gathers moss; what a gentleman, a scholar, a man of the world may write, when living, he would see very differently as a poor soul standing naked before its God, with its good or evil deeds alone to answer for, and their consequences visible to it from the first moment, rolling on to the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not like theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world. His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... war, (which, by the way, excited more the attention of the Parisians than the national contest in which we were engaged,) the public had adopted the plan of never commencing operations until half-price, to the injury of the manager's purse. It was during the earlier acts of "The Man of the World," that Cooke, in performing to "a beggarly account of empty boxes," was addressed by one of the actors, in accordance with the scene, in a whisper; when the elevated comedian, casting a glance around, bitterly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... to any religious order, though he was supposed to live according to a definite set of religious rules and as a member of a religious community. Abelard, however, made rather light of his churchly associations. He was at once an accomplished man of the world and a profound scholar. There was nothing of the recluse about him. He mingled with his fellow men, whom he dominated by the charm of his personality. He was eloquent, ardent, and persuasive. He could turn a delicate ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... than those with which I left my house about six weeks ago. I was then in doubt whether I should fly my country or become avowedly bankrupt, and surrender my library and household furniture, with the liferent of my estate, to sale. A man of the world will say I had better done so. No doubt had I taken this course at once, I might have employed the L25,000 which I made since the insolvency of Constable and Robinson's houses in compounding my ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... though, I must confess, he was vastly my superior in education and ability. He had all the gallantry and impetuosity of an Irishman, with a warm heart full of generous feelings, and at the same time the polish of a man of the world, not always to be obtained in a cock-pit. Another friend of mine was Noel Kennedy, also a master's mate. He was a Scotchman of good family, of which he was not a little proud. His pride in this respect was an amiable failing, if failing ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... inmate of the family. The multiplicity of such performances, for brother, mother, sister, the reverend gentleman—mere pastime, as Mrs. Somebody would remark,—most probably would have caused a mystery or misgiving in the minds of many adventurous Lotharios; but Rhapsody, though, as we see, a man of the world, had something yet to learn of society and its complexities. Things progressed smoothly—the reverend gentleman facetiously cajoled Miss Alice and the mother upon the issue of coming events—the lively young lawyer, etc., etc.,—and it seemed to be a settled ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... me, I did not love quite so much as I honoured him; I was indeed so sensible of his infinite superiority, that though I did not envy, I stood in awe of it. He, Hobhouse, Davies, and myself, formed a coterie of our own at Cambridge and elsewhere. Davies is a wit and man of the world, and feels as much as such a character can do; but not as Hobhouse has been affected. Davies, who is not a scribbler, has always beaten us all in the war of words, and by his colloquial powers at once delighted and kept us in order. H. and myself always had the worst of it with the other two; ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... well.' First he thinks there is something innocent about her request, and then he wonders if 'innocent' is the right word. 'Well, your business, please?' he demands, like the man of the world he hopes some ...
— Alice Sit-By-The-Fire • J. M. Barrie
... man of the world and clergyman, with Rabelais as a model, and himself a master of prose, possessing command of humor and pathos, skilled in character sketch and essay-philosophy, is not a novelist at all. His aim Is not to ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the capture of Fort Duquesne held an important place. Brigadier John Forbes was charged with it. He was a Scotch veteran, forty-eight years of age, who had begun life as a student of medicine, and who ended it as an able and faithful soldier. Though a well-bred man of the world, his tastes were simple; he detested ceremony, and dealt frankly and plainly with the colonists, who both respected and liked him. In April he was in Philadelphia waiting for his army, which as yet had no existence; for the provincials were not enlisted, and an expected ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... a fellow must do, you know, mamma," he said. "You can't expect him to stick at home like a girl. He must see life, or he'll be a muff instead of a man of the world. How shall I get on at Fairholm, when I come in for the property, if I'm not ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... official secrets we learn from the correspondence of Cicero as Proconsul of Cilicia.[19] And it surprises us greatly to find a man, so eminently wise in his own case, suddenly turning romantic on behalf of a friend. How came it—that he or any man of the world should fancy any substance or reality in the public enthusiasm for one whose character belonged to a past generation? Nine out of ten amongst the Campanians must have been children when Pompey's ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... is not Spanish for nothing. He is a mystic; which, of course, does not prevent him being a remarkably gay and competent man of the world. Amateurs who knew him in old days are sometimes surprised to find Picasso now in a comfortable flat or staying at the Savoy. I should not be surprised to hear of him in a Kaffir kraal or at Buckingham Palace, and wherever he might be I should know that under that ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... twinkled as he spoke, and Ned suddenly felt a strong liking for him. He was not young and, despite his buckskin dress and careless grammar, there was something of the man of the world about him. But he seemed to have a certain boyishness of spirit that ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... A man of the world and a gentleman, Mr. Effingham had looked forward to this passage with a good deal of concern, on account of his daughter, while he shrank with the sensitiveness of his habits from the necessity of exposing one ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... portliness and six grown daughters, taller than their parents and not precisely in their first bloom. I speak," added the Collector, still eyeing his victim, "as to a man of the world." ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... 'And since then I have had a business, and a colony, and a mission of my own. I was a man of the world before I was a Christian; I'm a man of the world still, and I made my mission pay. No good ever came of coddling. A man has to stand up in God's sight and work up to his weight avoirdupois; then I'll talk to him, but not before. I gave these beggars what they wanted: a judge in Israel, the bearer ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... to in France or on the boat; he has a quiet dignity and ease, and that perfect calm of a man of the world on his own ground. I think there must be something Irish about him, too, for he has a strain of sentiment and melancholy which can come directly after his most brilliant burst of spirits. We stayed there talking for about an hour undisturbed, and then the Senator opened the ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... of existence. He has left us, in his Letters, some brilliant passages, indicative of the delights of his boyhood and youth. Like him, we linger over a period still fresh, still hopeful, still generous in impulse— still strong in faith in the world's worth—before we hasten on to portray the man of the world, heartless, not wholly, perhaps, but wont to check all feeling till it was well-nigh quenched; little minded; bitter, if not spiteful; with many acquaintances and scarce one friend—the Horace Walpole of Berkeley ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... prosperous tradesman, and busy politician and man of the world, devolves the delicate and responsible task of being the first to write the life of the greatest literary genius this century has produced, and of revealing the strange secret of that genius, which has lighted up the darkness ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... from a letter which I wrote shortly after: 'Charlie Gordon's character is a very fascinating one; he has so much of the natural man about him. To his friends—and he treats all as friends whom he knows and trusts—his charm of manner is irresistible. It is utterly unlike the charm of a polished man of the world; it is the charm of a perfectly open mind, giving and demanding confidence, sometimes playfully, sometimes earnestly, ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... her eyes dilated. Prince Boris Strogareff was coming down the steps; he passed the American couple they had been talking about and looked at them. A light of involuntary admiration shone from his gaze, but there was no recognition in it—only the instinctive tribute that a man of the world and a gallant Russian is ever prone to pay at the sight of an unusually charming member of the other sex. Then, once more impassive—a striking handsome figure—he moved leisurely down and out of the gardens. The couple, ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... short of the Jews in morality. How curious is the tolerant attitude of Socrates, like a modern man of the world talking to a young fellow who runs after the girls. The Jew, however he fell short in other respects, set himself a certain standard in cleanliness of life, and would not fall below it. The more creditable to him, because these vices were the offspring ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... miraculous to be seen; nothing—except the trifles previously noticed—to confirm the idea of a supernatural peril environing the pretty Polly. The stranger it is true was evidently a thorough and practised man of the world, systematic and self-possessed, and therefore the sort of a person to whom a parent ought not to confide a simple, young girl without due watchfulness for the result. The worthy magistrate who had been conversant with ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a moment, perhaps longer than to some may seem dignified, on this ideal or sentimental love. It may seem trivial and unimportant to the eye of youth, or a man of the world, or a woman of sensual nature, or to unthinking fools and butterflies; but it is invested with dignity to one who meditates on the mysteries of the soul, the wonders of our higher nature,—one of the things which arrest the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... first prizes among sixteen competitors. He therefore obtained the degree of doctor in divinity; but his success only made him the more proud and headstrong. He disdained his theological eminence, and sighed for distinction as a man of the world. He took his degree as a doctor of medicine, and aspired to celebrity as a practitioner of physic. About the same time he fell in with certain contemporaries, of tastes similar to his own, and associated with them in the study of Chaldean, Greek and Arabic science, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... the historians who find these unreconciled contrasts is that they try to treat Hadrian as an "ancient" rather than as a modern. The enormously rich men who are at present most in the public eye present the same contradictions. Hadrian was a thorough man of the world. There was nothing venerable about him, though much ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... he began, without further explanation, "I am a man of the world, and I know the utmost capabilities of human wickedness. I don't believe you are a real libertine. But I know Grey Town. Many a dog has been hanged here because of his bad ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... adviser. He discussed with her in a series of enormous letters the problems of religion and philosophy; he criticised her writings on those subjects with the tactful sympathy of a cleric who was also a man of the world; and he even ventured to attempt at times to instil into her rebellious nature some of his own peculiar suavity. 'I sometimes think,' he told her, 'that you ought seriously to consider how your work may be ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... a man of the world par excellence, not of the too formal and too numerous world, but of the intimate world, of the salons of twenty persons, of the hour when the crowd goes away and the habitues crowd round the artist to wrest from him by amiable importunity his purest inspiration. It was then only that he exhibited ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... than detracts from, the tranquillizing influence of a friendly presence. We sober down our feelings still more before casual acquaintance and strangers; and hence the greater equality of temper in the man of the world ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... humour, and is merely a literary form, resembling nothing so much as the hard geniality of some clever college tutor of stiff manners, entertaining undergraduates at an official breakfast-party. This is not because his tone is bookish; on the contrary, his tone and level are distinctly those of the man of the world. But one always seems to find that neither a wide range of cultivation, nor familiar access to the best Whig circles, had quite removed the stiffness and self-conscious precision of the Clapham Sect. We would give ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... Mr. McNally who had played for Katherine two nights before. That had been a well-groomed, self-possessed man of the world; this was a muddy, unshaven, angry man, who spoke in a loud voice and smothered an oath just too late to keep it from ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... French Mission to my Headquarters made salaams, viz., Captain Bertier de Sauvigny, Lieutenant Pelliot and Lieutenant de la Borde. The first is a man of the world, with manners suave and distinguished; the second is a savant and knows the habits of obscure and out of the way people. What de la Borde's points may be, I do not know: he is a frank, good looking young fellow ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... beside its chief, embraced Tom Nast and William A. Seaver, whom John Russell Young named "Papa Pendennis," and pictured as "a man of letters among men of the world and a man of the world among men of letters," a very apt phrase appropriated from Doctor Johnson, and Major Constable, a giant, who looked like a dragoon and not a bookman, yet had known Sir Walter Scott and was sprung from the family of Edinburgh publishers. Bret Harte had but newly arrived from California. Whitelaw ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... and enjoyment. But it is by no means impossible that you may have scruples about outbidding your kinsman, especially as, if you did, you would, by the very fact, become subject to perpetual "black-mailing" at our hands. I speak plainly, as one man of the world to another. It is also a drawback to our position that you could attain your ends without blame or scandal (your ends being, of course, if the law so determines, immediate succession to the property of the marquis), by merely pushing us, with the aid of the police, to ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... than just a little impetuous. I want that marriage to come off! Not on account of her wealth. She is to inherit a Welsh mine from her uncle, you know, besides being an only child. Recall what Nevil was during the war. Miss Halkett has not forgotten it, I am sure, and a good word for him from a man of the world would, I am certain, counteract Captain Baskelett's—are they designs? At any rate, you can if you like help Nevil with the colonel. I am convinced they are doing him a mischief. Colonel Halkett has bought an estate—and what a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the hard and gross materialism of his studies a system of transcendent spiritualism. From his aggregation of cold and apparently lifeless practical facts beautiful and wonderful abstractions start forth like blossoms on the rod of the Levite. A politician and a courtier, a man of the world, a mathematician engaged in the soberest details of the science, he has given to the world, in the simplest and most natural language, a series of speculations upon the great mystery of being: detailed, matter-of-fact narratives of revelations from the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... evidently a man of the world, knowing in his ripe experience that there existed a sufficient number of such cold natures to warrant the obtrusion of this heart-rending formula; and I doubt not that these negative specimens of the possible alone ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... though all the good resolves may not have been quite rigidly acted up to. And even in Evelyn's case, at any rate so far as his diary shews, he appears afterwards to have continued just as much a man of the world as he was before these solemn resolutions, although the glamour of being a courtier seems perhaps to have henceforth become less rose-coloured. A trivial incident happening while he was supping one night ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... at me, and an enigmatical smile spread over his face. I knew then that the ice was cracked between us. Yet he was too much a man of the world not to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... on the 28th of December 1777. The strange contradictions of his character make Alexander one of the most interesting as he is one of the most important figures in the history of the 19th century. Autocrat and "Jacobin,'' man of the world and mystic, he was to his contemporaries a riddle which each read according to his own temperament. Napoleon thought him a "shifty Byzantine,'' and called him the Talma of the North, as ready to play any conspicuous part. To Metternich he was a madman to be ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... however, or knowing what he was about, Edmund was beginning, at the end of a week of such intercourse, to be a good deal in love; and to the credit of the lady it may be added that, without his being a man of the world or an elder brother, without any of the arts of flattery or the gaieties of small talk, he began to be agreeable to her. She felt it to be so, though she had not foreseen, and could hardly understand it; ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... to eat since morning, but he did not feel hungry. He was faint from grief and despair. To encounter a man of the world like Mr. Wygant, cold and merciless and masterful—that was a terrible ordeal for him. The man seemed to him like some great fortress of evil; and what could he do, save to gaze at it ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... who had spoken with her at the door her mind created a brilliant, laughing image, who would treat her like a queen... "There's only one thing I could not stand—that he should be coarse or vulgar. Well, he wasn't—he was obviously a man of the world, and the way he apologised... I have enough faith in my own power and beauty to know I could make a man treat me just as I wanted to be treated."... It floated into her dreams—that sweet scent of cigarette smoke. ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... manner tempted the young ladies who were members of his class in drawing to cut various innocent capers in his presence, and indulge in sly jokes which never would have been perpetrated had the tutor been more of a man of the world. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... union is surely due to a belief that the union cannot last, and if so, farewell to illusion. The passion that does not believe that it will last for ever is a hideous thing. (Here is pure unadulterated Fenelon for you!) At the same time, those who know the world, the observer, the man of the world, the wearers of irreproachable gloves and ties, the men who do not blush to marry a woman for her money, proclaim the necessity of a complete separation of sentiment and interest. The other sort ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... operations of the Peloponnesian War. Yet, to the scholar, a raid in Thucydides is more than a campaign in Xenophon. For neither is his style so pure as that of either of his rivals, nor is his enthusiasm the same. We feel him always a polished man of the world—never the rugged patriot, never the rapt seer. He seems, too, to lack impartiality. He lavishes praise upon Agesilaus, a second-rate man, while he is curt and ill-tempered concerning Epaminondas, the real genius of the age. It is more than ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... late Clyde Fitch. It was called The Last of the Dandies,[3] and its hero was Count D'Orsay. At a given moment, D'Orsay learned that a young man known as Lord Raoul Ardale was in reality his son. Instantly the man of the world, the squire of dames, went off into a deliquium of tender emotion. For "my bo-o-oy" he would do anything and everything. He would go down to Crockford's and win a pot of money to pay "my boy's" debts—Fortune ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... dumb, not a speech-maker who cannot do; the knowledge that comes of books, widened and freshened by the knowledge that comes of experience; the literary sense fortified by common sense; the bashfulness and delicacy of the scholar hovering as a finer presence above the forceful audacity of the man of the world; at once bookman, penman, swordsman, diplomat, sailor, courtier, orator. Of this type of manhood, spacious, strong, refined and sane, were the best men of the Elizabethan time, George Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, in a modified sense, Hakluyt, Bacon, Sackville, ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... estates amid the plaudits of the Pit, while you were left to die in the streets! you remembered, but the house had forgotten those earlier scenes in always wicked Paris. The good friend of the family, the breezy man of the world, the Deus ex Machina of the play, who was so good to everybody, whom everybody loved! aye, YOU loved him once—but that was in the Prologue. In the Play proper, he was respectable. (How you loathed that word, that meant to you all ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... recommend Monsieur to present his letter immediately," said the former. "Monsieur le Docteur Cheron is a man of the world—a man of high reputation and sagacity. Monsieur could not do better than advise ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... but there the choice of teachers was not large and in the end narrowed itself to Preston King, Henry Winter Davis, Owen Lovejoy, and a few other men born with social faculty. Adams took most kindly to Henry J. Raymond, who came to view the field for the New York Times, and who was a man of the world. The average Congressman was civil enough, but had nothing to ask except offices, and nothing to offer but the views of his district. The average Senator was more reserved, but had not much more to say, being always excepting one or two genial ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... fervor. "I will begin then, madame, by telling you that an unknown man has been about in the town, who wears the uniform of a naval officer, and therefore has an entree to military society. He seems to be a man of the world, and is an entertaining companion. Who he may be I know not, for it is not my way to be inquisitive. This man has spent some weeks among us, and seems to have plenty of money. He gave as a reason for being here that he was waiting for Herr von Levetinczy, with whom he had important private ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... world a magnifying glass to study its wounds. You wrote your own story. You told the tale of your own suffering. Of course it was strong, of course it rang with all the truth of genius. So you loved that child, Arnold! You, a man of the world, not a callow schoolboy. You loved her ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... feel obliged to add, with his disquieting smile. "Two strange fellows, gentlemen, with whom, doubtless, you will care to have as little to do as possible. One is a churchman, narrow-minded, though a Protestant. The other is a man of the world gone ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... were more constantly kept in view, the effort of philosophers to bring the ultimate colligating principles of thought into clear consciousness would not, at the outset at least, be regarded with so much suspicion. For the philosopher differs from the practical man of the world, not so much in the nature of the task which he is trying to accomplish, as in the distinct and conscious purpose with which he enters ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... graciously, and smiled in the right places, and spoke in answer pleasantly and well, when she did speak, and evidently wished to appear and to be amused; her mind was at times absent and distracted, and it could not long escape the observation of so thorough a man of the world as Lord St. George, that he had not made that impression on the young country damsel which he was wont to make, with one half the effort, on what might be supposed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... certain faculties, is to insist on what no one who had given his mind to the matter would care to deny. For even the orthodox, who regard Man's nature in its totality as intrinsically evil, admit without hesitation that there are faculties in Man which can be and ought to be trained; while the "man of the world," whom we may regard as the most typical product of Western civilisation, is clamorous in his demand that education shall foster the growth of certain mental faculties which will enable the child to become an efficient clerk or workman, and so contribute to the enrichment of his employer ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... authors, in which anticipations, even indications, of a possible and necessary history of art appear. Velleius Paterculus observes with great interest, the coincidence in the rise and fall of all the arts. As a man of the world, he was especially concerned with the observation that they could be maintained only for a short time at the highest point which it was possible for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... wondering what special thing Captain Bertram had to communicate. She was not particularly troubled or roused in any way by his admiration of her. He was certainly pleasant to talk to; she had never met a refined man of the world before, and Captain Bertram was handsome to look at, and had a charming way of saying charming nothings. Beatrice did not object to his talking to her, but her heart had never yet in the smallest degree responded to any ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... kind as to say so. But I have an idea, which I think it best to set before you frankly. You are a bachelor: it is not good to be a bachelor," he went on, laying his hand affectionately on the doctor's arm, and flushing—old man of the world though he was—flushing to the eyes. "What—what do you think of my daughter? I mean, not as a doctor, ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... social history of the powers with which the embasssador's nation comes into most frequent intercommunication. To this varied knowledge, it is needless to state, the negotiator should join moderation, dexterity, temper, and tact. An embassador should be a man of learning and a man of the world; a man of books and a man of men, a man of the drawing-room and a man of the counting-house; a preux chevalieur, and a man of labor and of business. He should possess quick faculties, active powers of observation, and that which military men call the coup d'oeil. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... odd words, the unaccountable attitude, one evening, of a person whom he has a thousand reasons for loving. But for a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a vice which Nature herself has planted ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... with affairs of state. In similar circumstances so was Claud—Messalina's husband—so, too, was Antonin. But Claud was an imbecile, Antonin a man of the world, while Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher. When fate links a woman to any one of these varieties of the husband, she is blessed indeed. Faustine was ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... be quite a man of the world, talks a great deal about his "bachelor quarters" and the theatres; he drinks and smokes, and I've heard him swear; he considers all this the proper thing for young fellows of our age, and more than ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... here, like me, eh? because the children bore you, and you want a quiet gossip over the world in general? Sit down then, take a cigar, if you don't think it will make you very unwell. I shouldn't recommend it myself, you know, before supper—but you're a man of the world and know what's good for you. Come along, enjoy yourself till you find yourself getting ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... man of the world than was Armand St. Just would easily have guessed that de Batz' desire to be the only instrument in the rescue of the poor little Dauphin from the Temple was not actuated by patriotism, but solely by greed. Obviously there ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... wife, for she must have had a lot to teach you. But let's stop slanging, we have our own opinions of each other and there's an end. Now we have both the same object, you because you are a pious crank and no more human than a dried eel, and I because I am a man of the world who want to see my daughter where she ought to be, wearing a coronet in the House of Lords. The question is: How is the job to be done? You don't understand Isobel, but I do. If her back is put up, wild horses won't move her. She'd ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... he placed the fact that neither our national nor (here in New York) our state capital coincides with our metropolis. In this we differ from England and all the continental countries. The result is not difficult to perceive. In London, a man of the world, a business man, or a great lawyer, who represents a locality in Parliament, can fulfil his mandate and at the same time lead his usual life among his own set. The lawyer or the business man can follow during the day his profession, or those affairs on which he depends to support ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... and best manifestations, but as yet he has given no proofs of possessing the breadth of view, the oratorical talent, or the urbanity which distinguished his predecessor. Prince von Buelow's career as a German diplomatist in foreign capitals made him an acute and highly polished man of the world. The present Chancellor has spent all his life within the comparatively narrow confines of Prussian administrative service. It is, of course, too soon to pass final judgment on him as German ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... is coming, coming, To help, to guide, to save. Though I hear no martial drumming, And see no flags that wave. But the great soul travail of woman, And the bold free thought unfurled, Are heralds that say he is on the way— The coming man of the world. ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... coarse as the peasant. In Poland this is quite otherwise. The peasant may be called a rough creature, but the noble is almost always a man of refinement, lacking indeed almost always in scientific information, but never in the culture of a man of the world. The reason of this is, that his active, impetuous soul finds constant occasion for maintaining familiarity with the world around him, and really needs to keep up a good understanding with it. The Russians ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... you I was interested in both of them?" he said, laughing. And he rose now, and stood half leaning against the door of the little room, looking down at Mrs. Barclay; and she reviewed him. He looked exactly like what he was; a refined and cultivated man of the world, with a lively intelligence in full play, and every instinct and habit of a gentleman. Mrs. Barclay looked at him with ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... the other hand—much more a person in society than Tennyson, much more a man of the world, and obeying in society its social conventions more than Tennyson—never allowed this to touch his poems. As the artist, he was quite free from the opinions, maxims, and class conventions of the past or the present. His poetry belongs ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... deeds of prowess in the saddle and at the table when the bottle went round. There were many evil stories of his roysterings, but it was not his way to think of them as evil, but rather to his credit as a man of the world, for, when he heard that they were gossiped about, he greeted the information with a loud triumphant laugh. He had married, when she was fifteen, the blooming toast of the county, for whom his passion had long died out, having indeed departed with the honeymoon, which had been of the briefest, and ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Jemima, Kezia, and Keren-happuch. The professor had always been very kind to Ralph. He was not a Marrow man, and therefore, according to the faith of his father, an outcast from the commonwealth. But he was a man of the world of affairs, keen for the welfare of his class at the University College—a man crabbed and gnarled on the surface, but within him a strong vein of tenderness of the sort that always seems ashamed of catching its ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... my Lord Steyne and my Lord Colchicum were of the society. "Give the young men their pleasures," this worthy guardian said to Pen more than once. "I'm not one of your straight-laced moralists, but an old man of the world, begad; and I know that as long as it lasts, young men will be young men." And there were some young men to whom this estimable philosopher accorded about seventy years as the proper period for sowing their wild oats: but they were ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... present to the mind of Heraclitus as one element only in a system of abstract philosophy, became with Aristippus a very subtly practical worldly-wisdom. The difference between him and those obscure earlier thinkers is almost like that between an ancient thinker generally, and a modern man of the world: it was the difference between the mystic in his cell, or the prophet in the desert, and the expert, cosmopolitan, administrator of his dark sayings, translating the abstract thoughts of the master into terms, first of all, of sentiment. It has been sometimes seen, in the history of the human ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... and all it stood for, as well as books and everything else, was forgotten and Madeleine would become the sole topic. These two influences struggled for mastery in the young man's heart; influences unknown to Philip, but clear as print to the eye of the thoughtful man of the world who, day by day, read his ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... an epic because it celebrates not the strength of man but his weakness. In the character of Major Pendennis, Chesterton feels that Thackeray did a great work, because he showed that the life of the so-called man of the world is not the gay and careless one that fiction depicts. It is the religious people who can afford to be careless. 'If you want carelessness you must go to the martyrs.' The reason is fairly obvious. The worldling has to be careful, as he wants to remain in the world; the religious ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Mr. Sheldon, in the cheery, pleasant tone of an easy-going man of the world, who is not too worldly to perform a generous action once in a way. "All I ask is frankness. You and Charlotte have fallen in love with one another—why, I can't imagine, except on the hypothesis that a decent-looking young woman and a ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... intrigues during a memorable epoch in the history of the Netherlands and of France. He was beyond all doubt one of the ablest diplomatists in Europe. Versed in many languages, a classical student, familiar with history and international law, a man of the world and familiar with its usages, accustomed to associate with dignity and tact on friendliest terms with sovereigns, eminent statesmen, and men of letters; endowed with a facile tongue, a fluent pen, and an eye and ear of singular acuteness ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the morning mist. He had to go slowly, for he could not see far ahead, and travel by water was still treacherous by reason of belated floes of ice. Over to the eastward the sun winked down on him with a dissipated bloodshot eye, knowingly, with the cruel misanthropic humour of a tired man of the world who, regarding idealism as a jest, had guessed at the purpose of his errand and was eager to ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... the promised lines arrived and Effi read: "I am glad, dear gracious Lady, to be able to give you good news. Everything turned out as desired. Your husband is too much a man of the world to refuse a Lady a request that she makes of him. But I must not keep from you the fact that I saw plainly his consent was not in accord with what he considers wise and right. But let us not pick faults where we ought to be glad. We have arranged that Annie is to ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... and chancing to be a little merry, he let slip the opinion that a flask of Trebbiano and a berlingozzo[18] were worth all the Kings and Queens that had ever reigned in those regions. And if the matter had not happened to fall into the hands of a Bishop, who was a gentleman and a man of the world, and also, above all, a tactful person, both able and willing to turn the thing into a joke, Visino would have learnt not to play with savages; for those brutes of Hungarians, not understanding his words, and thinking that ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... man—not even of Jack—that perfect faithfulness in every word and thought which is read of in books. And it is one of the theories of the day that what one does not expect one is not called upon to give. Jack, she reflected, was too much a man of the world to expect her to sit and mope alone. She was apparently incapable of seeing the difference between that pastime and sitting on the sea-wall behind a large flowering currant-tree with a man who did not pretend to hide the ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... with manhood, drifted to the city, and had become one of the city's cream in all acuteness and earnestness and what makes the pulse of life, when thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands congregate to live together in one vast hive. He was a man of affairs, a man of the world, easily at home among traders and schemers for money, at a political meeting, at a banquet, or in society. Sometimes, in the midst of things, would float before his eyes a vision of woods, of dark soil, of a buckwheat field, of squirrels on brush fences, of a broad, blue river, ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... smoking around us, there was one who drew my attention, and that of every other person present, by his jolly laugh. He was a short man, with broad shoulders and full chest, but otherwise slight. He was very good-looking, and had the air of a perfect man of the world,—but not in any disagreeable sense of the word, for a more genial fellow I never saw. His ha! ha! was irresistible. Wherever he took his merry face, good-humor followed. He had a smart clap on the shoulder for one, a hearty hand-shake ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... King with full as little concern (tho with more respect) as you would to your equals. This is the distinguishing characteristic of a gentleman and a man of the world. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various |
