"Ostentatious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Forsite,' he had the pheasant proper placed upon his carriage and the buttons of his coachman, and both crest and motto on his writing-paper. The arms he hugged to himself, partly because, not having paid for them, he thought it would look ostentatious to put them on his carriage, and he hated ostentation, and partly because he, like any practical man all over the country, had a secret dislike and contempt for things he could not understand he found it hard, as anyone might, to swallow 'three dexter ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... son-in-law, Mr. John Larking [108], at their residence "The Sycamores," but he slept in an outhouse in order the better to delude the servants. He read the Koran sedulously, howled his prayers with a local shaykh who imparted to him the niceties of the faith, purified himself, made an ostentatious display of piety, and gave out that he was a hakim or doctor preparing to be a dervish. As he had some knowledge of medicine, this role was an easy one, and his keen sense of humour made the experience enjoyable enough. On the steamer that carried him to Cairo, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... had appropriated certain rather large trust sums and had presented them to her servant. At first every suspicion of the influence of sex was set aside. Only the discovery of the fact that in her ostentatious piety she had set up an altar in her house, and compelled her servant to pray at it in her company, called attention to the deep interest of this very ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... with five-story flat buildings, their dingy-red brick facades regularly broken by equally dingy brownstone stoops, as to the ground floor, by open windows as to those above. The south side was mostly taken up by a towering white apartment hotel with an ostentatious entrance; against one of whose polished stone pillars the short ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... pastime, the evening of a life whose meridian had been employed in disputing, inch by inch, the overwhelming march of corrupt influence; while, as though it were for effect of light and shade, the spacious plain of Wimbledon served to display the ostentatious manoeuvres of those servile agents of equivocal justice, whose permanent organization by an anti-human policy has been engrafted on modern society, but whose aid would seldom or never be necessary, if the purposes of ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... No. —— Gramercy Park, was one of those dignified, old-fashioned residences that still remain in New York to remind our vulgar, ostentatious nouveaux riches of the days when culture and refinement counted for something more than mere wealth. Overlooking the railed-in square with its green lawns, pretty winding paths and well-dressed children romping at play, it had a high stoop which opened ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... was in the white arcade with Hadj, who looked both wicked and deplorable, and had a shabby air, in marked contrast to Batouch's ostentatious triumph. Domini felt quite ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... criticism exercised by reason, then, on common sense may be as severe as it pleases, but it must be as patient as it is severe. Hasty, dogmatical, self-satisfied reason is worse than idle fancy or bigoted prejudice. It is systematic, ostentatious in error, closes up the avenues of knowledge, and 'shuts the gates of wisdom on mankind.' It is not enough to show that there is no reason for a thing that we do not see the reason of it: if the common feeling, if ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... thick ivy and wall flowers. The pedlar sat on a large gray stone, with his red cap on and his brown fingers adorned with splendid rings, and he spread them out and waved his hands to the people with ostentatious ceremony. ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... Petion, disgusted them all; including Barnave. He behaved with ostentatious rudeness and brutality. The king began to converse with him upon the condition of the nation, and to explain the reasons of his own conduct, saying that he wished to strengthen the government so far as to enable ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... strange and bizarre in these surroundings; to the sensitive fancy of Miss Keene, Mrs. Brimmer's Parisian toilet had an air of provincial assumption; her own pretty Zouave jacket and black silk skirt horrified her with its apparent ostentatious eccentricity; and Mrs. Markham and Miss Chubb seemed dowdy and overdressed beside the satin mantillas and black lace of the Senoritas. Nor were the gentlemen less outres: the stiff correctness of Mr. Banks, and the lighter foppishness ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... to be told, that they were ringing for Diana's marriage with the Colonel. That showed there wasn't much the matter with me, didn't it? Why, I can hear them everywhere now. I don't think she ought to have had them rung at Sandown though: it was just a little ostentatious, so long after the ceremony; don't ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... away the precious hours, depressed the sick, worried their nurses, and wasted more of money's worth in official time, paper, and expensive cross-purposes than could possibly have been saved by all the ostentatious vigilance of the method. The deck-loads of vegetables at Balaklava, thrown overboard because they were rotten before they were drawn, were not the only stores wasted for want of being asked for. When the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... low, flitting from stump to stump and from root to root, dodging in and out of his hiding-places, and watching all intruders with a suspicious eye. He has a very pert, almost comical look. His tail stands more that perpendicular: it points straight toward his head. He is the least ostentatious singer I know of. He does not strike an attitude, and lift up his head in preparation, and, as it were, clear his throat; but sits there on a log and pours out his music, looking straight before him, or even down at the ground. As a songster, he ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Liberty Restored, and to assert the state and majesty of Rome Revived—no doubt these spectacles, however otherwise judged in a more enlightened age and by closet sages, served greatly to augment the importance of the Tribune abroad, and to dazzle the pride of a fickle and ostentatious populace. And taste grew refined, luxury called labour into requisition, and foreigners from all states were attracted by the splendour of a court over which presided, under republican names, two sovereigns, (Rienzi, speaking in one of his letters of his great enterprise, refers it to the ardour ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... his own character. Elaborate. Think what to say—say what one thinks. Letter on sickness to Steele. On Solitude. Ostentatious benevolence. Professions of sincerity. Neglect of fame. Indifference about everything. Sometimes gay and airy, sometimes sober and grave. Too proud of living among the great. Probably forward to make acquaintance. No literary man ever talked so much of his fortune. Grotto. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the broad edge of the furnace or fireplace, as the case may be, stands an ostentatious range of copper coffee-pots, varying in size and form. Here in the Djowf their make resembles that in vogue at Damascus; but in Nejed and the eastern districts they are of a different and much more ornamental fashioning, very tall and slender, with several ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... before the birth of Christ, in one of the apogees of the town which, in the course of its interminable duration, experienced so many fluctuations, some ostentatious kings thought fit to build on this ground, already covered with temples, that which still remains the most arresting marvel of the ruins: the hypostyle hall, dedicated to the God Amen, with its forest of columns, as monstrous as the trunk ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... and then restrain the grace you shew; As ostentatious priests, when souls they woo, Promise their heaven to all, but grant to few. But do for me, what I have dared for you: I did no argument from duty bring; Duty's a name, and love's a ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... imperceptibly from the world; and no one marvelled if he met the Pope arm in arm with the Devil. How miserable, in comparison, is the present sapless age, with its prudery and its pedantry, and its periwigs and its painted coaches, and its urban Arcadias and the florid impotence and ostentatious inanity of what it calls its art! Pope Alexander! I see in the spirit the sepulchre destined for you, and I swear to you that my soul shivers in my ratskins! Come, now! I do not expect you to emulate the Popes of my time, but show that your virtues are your own, and your faults ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... In most descriptions, whether short or long, the most important detail, the detail that emphasizes most the general feeling of the whole, stands at the end. If the description be short, the necessity of a comprehensive opening statement is not imperative,—indeed, it may be made so formal and ostentatious when compared with the rest of the description as to be ridiculous; yet even in the short description some important detail should close it. In a long description the repetition of the opening statement in a new form sometimes stands at the end. If the description be of movement or change, the ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... be replied, is not noisy and ostentatious; it is modest and private in its nature; it resides in a man's own bosom, and shuns the observation of the ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... Gisli; he was the son of that Thorsteinn whom Snorri the Godi had caused to be slain. He was a big strong man, very ostentatious in his dress and in his armour, a man with a high opinion of himself and very boastful. He was a mariner, and landed at the Hvita river in the summer after Grettir had spent a winter in the mountains. Thord the son of Kolbeinn rode to his ship and was welcomed ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... provisions of the Constitution. They cannot be obeyed by moieties and violated in the same ratio. They must be followed out to their full extent, or treated with that decent neglect which has at least the merit of forbearing to render contumacy obtrusive by an ostentatious display of the very duty which we in part abandon. If the decalogue could be observed in this casuistical manner, we might be grievous sinners, and yet be liable to no reproach. We might persist in all our habitual irregularities, and still be spotless. We might, for example, continue to ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... her aid when it is most called for. "The chill, damp air under the walnut tree made me feel quite faint just now, and that must have alarmed this doctor of mine. Does he not look on me as a very nearly finished work of art? He was startled, I suppose, by the idea of seeing it destroyed." With ostentatious coolness she took Lord Grenville's arm, smiled at her husband, took a last look at the landscape, and went down the pathway, drawing ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... politely, and while she stared, in suspicious surprise, he passed her a plate of toast with ostentatious courtesy; but before she could take one of the slices, "Wait," he said; "it's very nice toast, but I'm afraid it isn't hot. I'll take it to the kitchen and have it warmed for you." And he took the plate ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... outrages by the Mohammedans. Their number was from fifteen to twenty thousand, and they were more wealthy and refined than their brethren in most eastern cities. They looked upon themselves as the aristocracy of Syria. Instead of prudently concealing their wealth, they made an ostentatious display of it in furniture, dress, and costly decorations of their churches. Added to this was an arrogant bearing, often even towards the Moslems, rekindling their hereditary hate; while the recent efforts of the Sultan to establish liberty throughout ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... ignorance could never have absorbed the precious thing. Women of her training and vile experience, nerve-ridden, and clothed in hysteria as in a garment, often think to gain what they want by the mere shrillness of outcry, the mere grabbing of ostentatious, eager hands and frenzy of body. Their lives lead them through a wonder of knowledge and of danger to the demeanour of babyhood, and they cry for every rattle, much more for every moon. So Cuckoo had thrown ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... (ibid., p. 326), "lived a long time in habits of intimacy with him, and was so obliging as to delineate it at our solicitation." "In his person were collected the most opposite defects and advantages of every kind. He was avaricious and ostentatious, ... haughty and obliging, politic and confiding, licentious and superstitious, bold and timid, ambitious and indiscreet; lavish of his bounties to his relations, his mistresses, and his favourites, yet frequently paying neither his household ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... holiday? Was there perhaps a youthful female of his species somewhere for whom he was waiting and upon whose tryst she was now breaking? Was he—terrible thought!—the outlying picket of some family picnic? His dress, neat, simple, free from ostentatious ornament, betrayed nothing. ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... intense, proud, and inflexible as ever existed—not limited either by customs or institutions, not recognised and adjusted in the regular order of society, playing a reciprocal part in its machinery, but secret, disowning its own existence, baptized with ostentatious names of democracy, obsequious to the people for the sake of governing them; this nameless, lurking aristocracy, that ran in the blood of society like a rash not yet come to the skin; this political tapeworm, that produced nothing, but lay coiled in the body, feeding ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... the convent in which she had taken refuge, perpetually outraged by the violence of her husband and the insolence of his mistress; it was an ill-omened sort of place for a bride. Around extended the sombre and squalid Rome of the second half of the eighteenth century, with its huge ostentatious rococo palaces and churches, its straggled, black and filthy streets, its ruins still embedded in nettles and filth, its population seemingly composed only of monks and priests (for all men of the middle-classes wore the black ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... endeavoured to avoid an ostentatious display of learning. By the idle and the frivolous indeed, any appearance of learning is called pedantry. But as I do not write for such readers, I pay no regard to their censures. Those by whom I wish to be judged, will I hope, approve of my adding dignity to Corsica, by shewing ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... of an American student of sociology, Henry George. Nowhere in the world has what a shrewd English traveller calls "the illegitimate development of private wealth" attained such proportions in modern times as in America, and especially in California. Nowhere, too, in the world is the ostentatious waste of the results of labour upon the antics of a frivolous plutocracy a more crying peril of our times than in America. Henry George, an American of the Eastern States, who went to the Pacific coast as a lad, had grown up with and watched the progress of this social ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... avarice was indeed no part of the character of Themistocles, although he has been accused of those vices, because guilty, at times, of extortion. He was profuse, ostentatious, and magnificent above his contemporaries and beyond his means. His very vices were on a large and splendid scale; and if he had something of the pirate in his nature, he had nothing of the miser. When he had to choose between two suiters for his daughter, he preferred the worthy ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Leslie's instincts were hospitable, and they were by no means strained by exercise; but she did not like this guest; she felt an involuntary repugnance to him, although he was very courteous to her—with an elaborate, ostentatious homage that astonished and confused her. He was a man of Hector Garret's age, but, even in his rough coat, with marked remains of youthful foppishness and pretension. He was a tall man, with beard and moustache slightly silvered; his aquiline features were sharpened and drawn; ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... "Isn't it perhaps ostentatious to call the family saw-mill a 'mighty machine'?" inquired Marsh mildly. He sat at the end of the bench, his arm along the back behind Mr. Welles, his head turned to the side, his soft hat pulled low over his forehead, looking ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... was at his desk copying from his Primer on to his slate. The easy, ostentatious way in which he glanced from slate to book was not lost upon Emmy Lou, who lost her place whenever her eyes left the rows of ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... boards, open to the wind from the street, standing in a double row which gives the boulevard the aspect of a foreign market place. There are to be found the real interest, the poetry of New Year's gifts. Luxurious in the Madeleine quarter, less ostentatious toward Boulevard Saint-Denis, cheaper and more tawdry as you approach the Bastille, these little booths change their character to suit their customers, estimate their chances of success according to the condition of the purses of the passers-by. Between them stand tables covered ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... camp-followers, as well as its soldiers. In its progress it collects round it a vast retinue, composed of people who thrive by its custom or are amused by its display, who may be sometimes reckoned, in an ostentatious enumeration, as forming a part of it, but who give no aid to its operations, and take but a languid interest in its success, who relax its discipline and dishonour its flag by their irregularities, and who, after a disaster, are perfectly ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... upon which she has ever laid particular stress, and I thank her here publicly for her pertinacity. It has saved me from the slough of utter carelessness.) Barring the single blue necktie and the pajamas, I drifted into and have stuck to blacks and browns and the least ostentatious cuts until my own wife and children have felt called upon ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... Christmases, and she had a purple veil wrapped around her head, to hide Heaven knows what deficiency. She examined the empty egg-nog glass, inquired what the evening paper had said about the weather, and then stalked into the dressing-room, and prepared, with much ostentatious creaking, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... speak so of any one whose hospitality I have accepted, but unless it is your wish I hope never to accept it again. They all smell of their beer. Everything is so coarse, lavish, and ostentatious. They tell you as through a brazen trumpet on every side, 'We are rich.'" "They give magnificent suppers," said ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... thin line extended from the side of the Hall gateway backwards to the railings in St. Margaret's Street, with another line drawn up across the far edge of the broad carriage-way before the entrance. There was no ostentatious show of police, but they had a way of silently filing out from under the sheds or out of the Commons' gateway in proportion as the crowd thickened, which conveyed the impression that there was a force somewhere about that would prove sufficient to meet any emergency. As a matter of fact, ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... Reynal was an adept at this work; he and Delorier have joined forces and are hard at work together over the fire, while Raymond spreads, by way of tablecloth, a buffalo hide, carefully whitened with pipeclay, on the grass before the tent. Here, with ostentatious display, he arranges the teacups and plates; and then, creeping on all fours like a dog, he thrusts his head in at the opening of the tent. For a moment we see his round owlish eyes rolling wildly, as if the idea he ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... as this pen cannot pretend to recall; advocating his scheme of ambition, showing the great good he would do for his country when he was the undisputed chief of it; backing his opinion with a score of pat sentences from Greek and Roman authorities (of which kind of learning he made rather an ostentatious display), and scornfully vaunting the very arts and meannesses by which fools were to be made to follow him, opponents to be bribed or silenced, doubters converted, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with the air of one who expects the congratulations of his audience. The humility which thinks only of the acquisition itself, as the very perfection of human conquest, was wanting equally to his language and deportment. The very details which he gave, were ostentatious; and the gracious smiles which covered his lips as he concluded, were those of the self-complacent person, who feels that he has just been saying those good things, which, of necessity, must command the applause ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... and cedars threw their shadows over the clear waves. On the other side a light fence separated the grounds from a large paddock, in which three or four hunters grazed in indolent enjoyment. It was one of those cottages which bespeak the ease and luxury not often found in more ostentatious mansions—an abode which, at sixteen, the visitor contemplates with vague notions of poetry and love— which, at forty, he might think dull and d—-d expensive-which, at sixty, he would pronounce to be damp in winter, and full of earwigs in the summer. Master Philip was ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... quidem, non tamen homo errans, abominandus': or, to pun a little, 'abhominandus'. Be bold in denouncing the heresy, but slow and timorous in denouncing the erring brother as a heretic. The unmistakable passions of a factionary and a schismatic, the ostentatious display, the ambition and dishonest arts of a sect-founder, must be superinduced on the false doctrine, before the heresy makes the man ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... necessity that was laid upon him to quit Southampton for a few days, though he hoped very speedily to be able to return. His inamorata, as usual, was very inquisitive to learn the business that was to deprive her for a time of the presence of a lover, of whom she was not a little ostentatious. Sir William answered that he was under an engagement to be present at the marriage of one of his college friends, and that he should set out in company with ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... sensitiveness of man to the opinion in which he is held by others. Social life in every stage of society is characterized by an eagerness to make a striking effect. A bare reference to the ethnological facts in this connection will suffice: The Kite Indians have a society of young men so brave and so ostentatious of their bravery that they will not fight from cover nor turn aside to avoid running into an ambuscade or a hole in the ice. The African has the privilege of cutting a gash six inches long in his thigh for every man he has ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... of tissues, odd yards of brocade, vast bales of faded silk, and innumerable boxes of antiquated ribbons. His shop was soon celebrated through all quarters of the town, and frequented by every form of ostentatious poverty. Every maid, whose misfortune it was to be taller than her lady, matched her gown at Mr. Drugget's; and many a maiden, who had passed a winter with her aunt in London, dazzled the rusticks, at her return, with cheap finery which Drugget had supplied. His shop was often ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... account she gave us of her benevolent round, as Lady Davers calls it, she says, that as she was going to London, she should instruct Mrs. Jervis about some of her clients, as I find she calls her poor, to avoid a word which her delicacy accounts harsh with regard to them, and ostentatious with respect to herself. I asked her, how (since, contrary to her then expectation, Mrs. Jervis was permitted to be in town with her) she had provided to answer her intention as to those her clients, whom she had referred to the care ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... lamps. She says lamps are just what we need to complete the entrance. She thinks Mr. Berkeley's scheme of putting them on the stone posts is the best. There's more dignity about it. Putting them on the piazza steps, she says, looks ostentatious, and suggests a ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... times are improved in respect, at least, to appearances, may be fairly concluded from the fact that no example of a similar ostentatious display of luxury is ever now exhibited by persons in the same position as Mademoiselle Duthe; and that if the same folly that enabled her to indulge in such extravagance still prevails, a sense of decency prevents all public display of wealth ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... was an ostentatious rustle of retiring dresses; whereat Mr. Pericles chose to proclaim himself awake. The astute fairy-fury immediately stepped ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... were being watched with the most absorbing interest from the top of the Thetis's deck-house, it must not be supposed that the watching was conducted in an obtrusive or ostentatious manner; very far from it. The occupants of that "coign of vantage", to whom Milsom was now added, were, so far as the ordinary observer was concerned, lounging indolently in their several basket chairs, reading, smoking, and chatting ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self- complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... back in Paris she had less time for introspection, and Raymond less for books. They resumed their dispersed and busy life, and in spite of Hubert's ostentatious vicinity, of the perpetual lack of money, and of Paul's innocent encroachments on her freedom, Undine, once more in her element, ceased to brood upon her grievances. She enjoyed going about with her husband, whose presence at her side was distinctly ornamental. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Retz's experience, though with none of his genius, I see the folly of taking a violent part without any view, (I don't mean to commend a violent part with a view, that is still worse;) I leave the state to be scrambled for by Mazarine, at once cowardly and enterprising, ostentatious, jealous, and false; by Louvois, rash and dark; by Colbert, the affecter of national interest, with designs not much better; and I leave the Abb'e de la Rigbi'ere to sell the weak Duke of Orleans to whoever has money to buy him, or would buy him to get money; at least these are ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... inward monitor. "How about money, where is that to come from?" And all at once the wealth displayed in the Countess de Restaud's drawing-room rose before his eyes. That was the luxury which Goriot's daughter had loved too well, the gilding, the ostentatious splendor, the unintelligent luxury of the parvenu, the riotous extravagance of a courtesan. Then the attractive vision suddenly went under an eclipse as he remembered the stately grandeur of the Hotel de Beauseant. As his fancy wandered among these lofty regions in the great world ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... said in print of him—that it is not the correct way of speaking, to say that Wordsworth is as proud as Lucifer; but, inversely, to say of Lucifer that some people have conceived him to be as proud as Wordsworth. But, if proud, Wordsworth is not haughty, is not ostentatious, is not anxious for display, is not arrogant, and, least of all, is he capable of descending to envy. Who or what is it that he should be envious of? Does anybody suppose that Wordsworth would be jealous of Archimedes if he now walked upon earth, or ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... be heard in the stillness the old clock, that now lifted up its voice with unwonted emphasis, as if, unnoticed through the bustling week, Sunday was its vantage ground, to proclaim to mortals the swift flight of time. And if the old pedant performed the task with something of an ostentatious precision, it was because in that house nothing else put on official airs, and the clock felt the responsibility of doing it ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... clouds was very mild, and so was the color of the sea. A comely fog involved the day, and a decent mist restrained the night from ostentatious waste of stars. It was not such very bad weather; but a captious man might find fault with it, and only a thoroughly cheerful one could enlarge upon its merits. Plainly enough these might be found by anybody having any core of rest inside him, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... ostentatious about the girls' dressing, dear," said his mother's voice in his ear. "And I noticed they all put on their simplest clothes for ...
— On Christmas Day In The Evening • Grace Louise Smith Richmond
... title to military distinction himself, he could afford, as the unwarlike emperors could not, to be generous to his officers. The common soldiers, on the other hand, were fascinated by his personal prowess and his somewhat ostentatious camaraderie. His features were firm and clearly cut; his figure was tall and soldierly, and exhibited the sinewy hard health of a veteran campaigner. His hair was already gray before he came to the throne, though he was not more than forty-four years old. The stoutness of the emperor's arm had ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... after the battle at Lexington the following year he joined the regular army at Roxbury. The next year he volunteered to join the expedition to Ticonderoga to expel the enemy. Referring to this service in an address some years later Haynes said: "Perhaps it is not ostentatious in the speaker to observe that in early life he devoted all for the sake of freedom and independence, and endured frequent campaigns in their defense, and has never viewed the sacrifice too great. And should an attack be ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... more advantageous alliance. Mattie Smith had resented this triumphant placing of the higher standard and took pains, as Imogen, with the calm displeasure of the successful, observed, to make difficulties for her and to treat her with ostentatious disregard. Imogen guessed very accurately at the seething of anger and jealousy that bubbled in Mattie Smith's breast; it was typical of so much of the lamentable spirit displayed by rudimentary natures when feeling the pressure of ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... nor hide our talent in the napkin of ignorance or false humility. There is quite as much harm done to Christian character and Christian service by our failure to recognise what is in our power, as by ambitious or ostentatious attempts at what is above our power. We have to be ourselves as God has made us in our natural faculties, and as the new life of Christ operating on these has made us new creatures in Him not by changing but by enlarging ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... who had dressed them for their first real party—not a play-party, as the saying went down our way, but a regular dancing party, corresponding to a debut in some more ostentatious and less favoured communities. It was Aunt Sharley who had skimped and scrimped to make the available funds cover the necessary expenses of the little household in those two or three lean years succeeding their mother's death, when dubious investments, which afterward turned out to be good ones, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... there were men, whose red and bloated faces gave faithful witness of their habitual intemperance; and men, whose threadbare and ragged garments betokened sloth and poverty; and men, whose vulgar and ostentatious display of showy clothing, and gaudy chains, and rings and breast-pins, which they did not know how to wear, indicated dishonest pursuits; and men, whose blue jackets and bluff, brown faces showed them to be sailors; and men, whose scowling brows and fiendlike ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... at his sudden change of manner, he studied her face anxiously as he set her feet to the ground. But there was no cause for uneasiness. So far from resenting the liberty he had taken after so many days of almost ostentatious respect, Victoria was not even thinking of him, and her indifference would have been a blow, if he had not been too greatly relieved to be hurt by it. She was looking at his father, the Agha, who seemed to her the embodiment of some biblical ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... things without parade or dogmatism. Doubtful of all versatility as Kate was, she could not help admitting to herself that his truths were none the less true for their quantity or that he got at them without ostentatious processes. His talk certainly was more picturesque than her brother's, and less subduing to her faculties. John ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... if I were to live on bread and water, if I were to wash the feet of the poor day by day, it would not be too great an humiliation; and the only reason I do not, is, that I have no call that way, it would look ostentatious. Gladly then will I hail an inconvenience which will try me without any one's knowing it. Far from repining, I will, through God's grace, go cheerfully about what I do not like. I will deny myself. I know that with His help what is in itself painful, will thus be pleasant as done ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... such ostentatious nonchalance, Kane drove another bullet into the snow within a few inches of the wolf's forefeet. This proved more effective. The great beast looked down at the place where the ball had struck, sniffed ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... withdrew from a trouble that would interfere with their comforts or their business—while a few felt an impulse to aid the man, but hesitated in being foremost in doing that which would be honourable to their feelings, but might not accord with their condition, or might seem as the ostentatious display of unusual benevolence. Where men are congregated, conduct must be regulated by the touchstone of public opinion; and, although it is the fashion of New-York to applaud acts of charity, and to do them too in a particular manner—it is by no means usual ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... devoted to proselytism. They were austere in life, and despised all who were not. They were learned and decorous, and pragmatical. Their dogmatism knew no respite or palliation. They were predestinarians, and believed in the servitude of the will. They were seen in public with ostentatious piety. They made long prayers, fasted with rigor, scrupulously observed the Sabbath, and paid tithes to the cheapest herbs. They assumed superiority in social circles, and always took the uppermost seats in the synagogue. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... promised reward, fifty dollars. The morning light showed fine copper. Here free metal was distinctly traceable in the scori, and it was the first time that we had seen slag so carelessly worked. Not a little merriment was caused by the ostentatious display of "gold-stones," marked by M. Philipin's copper-nailed boots. Sulaymn, the Bedawi, had killed a Wabar, whose sadly mutilated form appeared to be that of the Syrian hill coney: these men split the bullet ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... by scores of millions; he has palaces in this country and abroad. His domination over the lives of the thousands who slave in his foundries is kept unshaken by reason of the fact that he coats the bitter acts of oppression of which he is constantly guilty, with ostentatious gifts in the name of benevolence. He presents the cities of the country ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... handsomest thing she could do was to love and be silent. This put her affection out of suspicion of mercenary ends, and showed that she loved, but not for gain; and that her professions, the less ostentatious they were, had so much the more of truth ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... companion of his wife, I, as your best friend, would say, begone, and speed you on your way; then as much pride, as much spirit as you will; but those who are conscious of possessing real spirit, should never be—seldom are—in a hurry to show it; that kind of ostentatious haste is undignified in man, and ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... head. She had but slight confidence in her husband's insight into character, and sighed in an ostentatious way. ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid, and works its effect itself unseen. It is the proper study and labour of an artist to uncover and find out the latent cause of conspicuous beauties, and from thence form principles for his own conduct; such an examination is a ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... proximity of the household to Champion's had given that flighty celebrity opportunities for behaving in a way that could not but cause painful and rather base excitement. Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity to perfection; and he seemed to take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an intrigue that could do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon were perpetually leaving bouquets for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and motor-cars were perpetually calling at the cottage for Mrs Boulnois; balls and masquerades perpetually filled the grounds in which the baronet paraded ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... honorably. But when he shall read these pages, on which nought shall be set down save with a regard for truth, and shall perceive by them, that while he steadily, quietly, and effectively worked for many years, with no attempts at ostentatious display, scarcely looking up the while to observe the outer results of his work, and to catch for inspiration the praises of men; when he shall see in his now mature years that all he so noiselessly invented, and fashioned into practical, useful form, is regarded by a well-meaning chronicler ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... most simple of edifices. Such, take him for all in all, was Michael Angelo, the salt of art; sometimes, no doubt, he had his moments of dereliction, deviated into manner, or perplexed the grandeur of his forms with futile and ostentatious anatomy; both met with armies of copyists, and it has been his fate to have been censured for their folly." This studied panegyric is nevertheless vigorous—emulous as that of Longinus, of showing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... wonderful difference between the servile manner in which he had offered his hand in my new prosperity, saying, "May I?" and the ostentatious clemency with which he had just now exhibited the ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... dancing as soon as he found that there were many of the natives who could out-dance him, and that the late hours were bad for his complexion, attached himself to any or every married lady who was at all distinguished for beauty or fortune; and then went about asking, with an ostentatious air of mystery,—"Est-ce qu' on parle beaucoup de moi et Madame Chose?" Sometimes he deigned to turn aside for an heiress; and as he was a very amusing and rather ornamental man, the girls were always glad to have his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... swift glance at the disturbing cause of her wonted self-approval. But Van Berg took pains to manifest his indifference by standing with his back towards her when she knew that he must be aware of her departure, from her slightly ostentatious leave-taking of her cousin, in which, of course, the spoiled beauty had no other object than ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... higher than a man, hand-cars and rickshaws hauled by dripping coolies, and other coolies staggering along beneath the weight of burdens swinging from the carrying-poles called pikolans, and every make and model of motor-cars from ostentatious, self-important Rolls-Royces to busybody Fords. Standing in the middle of the roadway, controlling and directing this roaring river of traffic with surprising efficiency are diminutive Javanese policemen wearing blue helmets many sizes too large ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... fond notion, that they are imposing upon the world; strive to fancy, for instance, that their bankers consider them men of property because they keep a tolerable balance, pay little tradesmen's bills with ostentatious punctuality, and so forth—but the world, let us be pretty sure, is as wise as need be, and guesses our real condition with a marvellous instinct, or learns it with curious skill. The London tradesman is one of the keenest judges of human nature extant; and if a tradesman, how much more ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hand that they had, but now I was in the hall among them. A red-faced barrel of a boy did all the holding, one hand round the wrist, the other palm to palm, and his knees braced up against the panel. Another was rendering ostentatious but ineffectual aid, and three or four others danced about in their pyjamas. After all, they were not more than four to one. I had raised my voice, so that Raffles might hear me and take heart, and now I raised it again. Yet to this day I cannot ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... relax their hold than dead fingers do—these were men whose last chance had been the Klondyke, and who here, as elsewhere, had failed. Many who came in young were going out old; but the odd thing was that those worst off went out game—no whining, none of the ostentatious pathos of those broken on the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... then made of Mesopotamia and Armenia, however sure to be interpreted into the language of fear by the enemy, did not imply any such principle in this emperor. He was of a civic and paternal spirit, and anxious for the substantial welfare of the empire rather than its ostentatious glory. The internal administration of affairs had very much gone into neglect since the times of Augustus; and Hadrian was perhaps right in supposing that he could effect more public good by an extensive progress through the empire, and by a personal correction ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... is to abolish with a firm hand the inveterate vices of Spanish administration, substituting a more simple and expeditious system of public administration for that superfluity of civil service and ponderous, tardy and ostentatious official routine, I ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... I recognized was Faltonius Bambilio, unmistakably pompous and self-satisfied. Although a senator he came early. Later I saw Vedius Vedianus and, far from him, Satronius Satro. Didius Julianus, always the most ostentatious of the senators, was unmistakable even in section B, further from me than any part of the Circus except the left hand starting ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... livelier; but Italy was passing now through the valley of the shadow, and, save for the horrors of the Neapolitan prisons, was not much before the public for the moment. The intrigues of Louis Napoleon and the ostentatious aggression of the Pope in England were the matters of most interest in foreign politics, and both were overshadowed by the absorbing topic of the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... His great pain arose from the coolness of the Bradshaws. With all the faults which had at times grated on his sensitive nature (but which he now forgot, and remembered only their kindness), they were his old familiar friends—his kind, if ostentatious, patrons—his great personal interest, out of his own family; and he could not get over the suffering he experienced from seeing their large square pew empty on Sundays—from perceiving how Mr Bradshaw, though he bowed in a distant manner ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... only gave some master-touches to one or two of the principal parts or characters.' Ravenscroft's assertion deserves acceptance. The tragedy, a sanguinary picture of the decadence of Imperial Rome, contains powerful lines and situations, but is far too repulsive in plot and treatment, and too ostentatious in classical allusions, to take rank with Shakespeare's acknowledged work. Ben Jonson credits 'Titus Andronicus' with a popularity equalling Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy,' and internal evidence shows that Kyd was capable of writing much of 'Titus.' ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... river off the market, beside which float all manner of craft, from the humble wherry to the ostentatious puffy little steamers who collect the cargoes of the North Sea fleet and rush them to market against all competitors. The market opens at five A. M., summer and winter. Moored to a buoy, a short distance from the shore, are always to be found one or more Dutch fishing-boats, ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... love him. She could never have learnt to love him. There was a gleeful zest in his enjoyment of his money, an ostentatious parade of his riches which repelled her. And there was a look in his face, those narrow eyes, that hard mouth, which revealed to her womanly intuition a ruthlessness which she guessed he kept for his business. But she liked him, especially ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... left, by persons unknown, in the houses of poor women, who received with them very considerable sums of money. At first, no suspicion whatever fell on the friars, who continued their offices of preaching, saying mass, confessing penitents, and giving ostentatious indications of their leading humble and ascetic lives. A diligent watch was instituted by the authorities, but as far as exterior observances went, there was no reason to believe that any suspicious persons from without ever entered the convent of the nuns; it was ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... the best History of England for her son to read. My friend recommended Hume's. But, upon recollecting that its usher was a superlative panegyrick on one, who endeavoured to sap the credit of our holy religion, he revoked his recommendation. I am really sorry for this ostentatious alliance; because I admire The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and value the greatest part of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Why should such a writer be so forgetful of human comfort, as to give any countenance ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... somewhat showy, but which showed from its outside, that it was not inhabited by high-bred people. There were pink linings to lace curtains at the windows, and quantities of green vines drooped from the balconies, as if to attract attention from the passers- by. Madame Strahlberg, with her ostentatious and undulating walk, which caused men to turn and notice her as she went by, went swiftly up the stairs to the second story. She put one finger on the electric bell, which caused two or three little dogs ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... paleness. Her figure, petite and surpassingly graceful, had scarce yet attained the matured fullness of womanhood; yet it was of exquisite symmetry.—Her dress was elegant without being gaudy, and tasteful without being ostentatious. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... you have more occasion for rest, not having (I suppose) slept these four-and-twenty hours." "Bring me some water!" said I, in a peremptory tone; upon which he sneaked away shrugging his shoulders. Before he returned, I had spread my whole stock on the table in the most ostentatious manner; so that, when it first saluted his view, he stood like one entranced; and, having rubbed his eyes more than once, to assure himself of his being awake, broke out into, "Lord have mercy upon us, what a vast treasure is here!" "'Tis all our own, Strap," said I; "take what is necessary, and ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... government employe, and must be armed to repel robbers. One of these conductors was a boy of fourteen who appeared under heavy responsibility. I watched him loading a pistol at a station and was amused at his ostentatious manner. When the operation was completed he fixed the weapon in his belt and swaggered out with the air of the heavy tragedian at the Old Bowery. Another postillion stuck around with pistols and knives looked like a military museum on ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... During all those times it was usual for the princes and great nobility to make settlements of their velvet beds and silken robes, in the same manner as of their estates and manors.[***] In the list of jewels and plate which had belonged to the ostentatious Gavaston, and which the king recovered from the earl of Lancaster after the murder of that favorite, we find some embroidered girdles, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... in the nurse's mind now but that the girl would live and regain her health. But what then? The people would see that she was cared for as long as she was sick. Who among them would give her a place when she was no longer an object of ostentatious charity? Her very attempted suicide would mark her in the community more strongly than ever, and she would be met on every hand by suspicion, distrust and cruel curiosity. Then, indeed, she would need a friend—someone to believe in her and to love her. Of what use to ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... Border hung unfinished on his hands, and when these scores were cleared he intended to settle down as a more or less virtuous citizen. He had never passed the serai gate since his arrival two days ago, but had been ostentatious in sending telegrams to Bombay, where he banked some of his money; to Delhi, where a sub-partner of his own clan was selling horses to the agent of a Rajputana state; and to Umballa, where an Englishman was excitedly demanding the pedigree of a ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... that has doubtless given him a competence; but it is folly to charge him with being a millionaire. We have, in common with our neighbors, enjoyed his hospitality, and his style of living is neither extravagant nor ostentatious. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... nettled, took out his case and lighted a cigarette with rather ostentatious coolness, waiting ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... announcement that he wished to marry her daughter, she had expressed herself well pleased, and during the engagement, which had lasted some six months, she had received him as Juliet's intended husband, with almost ostentatious delight. Now, for some inexplicable reason, she suddenly changed her mind and declined to explain. But rack his brains as he might, Cuthbert could not see how the death of a sister she had quarrelled with, and to whom she had been ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... the decay of trade, our expenses have never been contracted; we have squandered millions in idle preparations, and ostentatious folly; we have equipped fleets which never left the harbour, and raised armies which were never to behold any other enemy than the honest traders and husbandmen that support them. We have, indeed, heard many reasons alleged for oppressing the empire with standing ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... Wealth, and Power, and Fame, and Name, Which generally leave some flowers to bloom Even o'er the grave, I have nothing left, not even A little love, or friendship, or esteem, No, not enough to extract an epitaph From ostentatious kinsmen; in one hour I have uprooted all my former life, And outlived everything, except thy heart, The pure, the good, the gentle, which will oft 110 With unimpaired but not a clamorous grief[fs] Still keep——Thou turn'st so pale!—Alas! she faints, She has no breath, no pulse!—Guards! ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Indian Director. Binnie had his retiring pension, and, besides, had saved half his allowances ever since he had been in India. He was a man of great reading, no small ability, considerable accomplishment, excellent good sense and good humour. The ostentatious said he was a screw; but he gave away more money than far more extravagant people: he was a disciple of David Hume (whom he admired more than any other mortal), and the serious denounced him as a man of dangerous principles, though there were, among the serious, men much ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pay tribute to the attractions of a beautiful woman. The Iron Duke indeed showed a decided preference for her ladyship. He was charmed with the sweet, unassuming, and childlike manner of the young matron, and took delight in contrasting these with the glaring and ostentatious demeanor of these high-minded and profound women ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... labour among "modern nations" depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers; and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... near the back of the car that he had to turn out, a step or so, to avoid collision with it. He accompanied this turning-out maneuver by another which was less ostentatious, but more purposeful. Timing his steps, so as to pass by the rear of the car just as the Master was busy helping his wife to descend, the youth thrust an arm over the side of the tonneau, with the speed of a striking snake. His hand closed on the handle of a ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... "Spectator" coming into his hands, he read the essays over and over and took them deliberately as a model in language. This was before the date of Johnson's well-known dictum: "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." His method of work was "to make short hints of the sentiments in each sentence," lay these by for a few days, and then having reconstructed the essay from his notes to compare his version with ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... laces and silks have been known to wind them around their bodies, as being less ostentatious than carrying them in a trunk. Edison thought his resistance-boxes an equally superfluous display, and therefore ingeniously wound some copper resistance wire around one of the legs of the motor field magnet, where it was out of the way, served as a useful ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Hepsy Ann's self; and finally, but most important of all, the parlor, a mysterious and hermetically sealed apartment, which almost seemed to me an unconsecrated spot in this little temple of the homely virtues and affections,—a room furnished in a style somewhat ostentatious and decidedly uncomfortable, swept and dusted on Saturday afternoons by Hepsy Ann's own careful hands, sat in by the Captain and her for an hour or two on Sundays in awkward state, then darkened and locked for the rest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... boast &c. 884. render vain &c. adj.; inspire with vanity &c. n.; inflate, puff up, turn up, turn one's head. Adj. vain, vain as a peacock, proud as a peacock; conceited, overweening, pert, forward;, vainglorious, high-flown; ostentatious &c. 882; puffed up, inflated, flushed. self-satisfied, self-confident, self-sufficient, self-flattering, self-admiring, self-applauding, self-glorious, self-opinionated; entente &c. (wrongheaded) 481; wise in one's own conceit, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the Good; was still enjoying her first happy years of wedded life, and society, under her gentle sway, was less ostentatious and much more sincere in its code of ethics than it is nowadays, the village of St. Rest, together with the adjacent post-town of Riversford, enjoyed considerable importance in county chronicles. Very great 'county personages' ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... oratorio; but she lacked the devotional pathos and tenderness which had given Mara and Mrs. Billington their power in sacred music. Yet she possessed strong religious sentiments, and always prayed before entering a theatre. Her somewhat ostentatious piety provoked the following scandalous anecdote: She was observed reading a prayer from her missal prior to going before the audience one night, and some one, taking the book from the attendant, found it to ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... have now become almost absurdly gorgeous. The old fashion, which was started among the frugal Dutch, of giving the young couple their household gear and a sum of money with which to begin, has now degenerated into a very bold display of wealth and ostentatious generosity, so that friends of moderate means are afraid to send anything. Even the cushion on which a wealthy bride in New York was lately expected to kneel was so elaborately embroidered with pearls that she visibly hesitated to press it with her knee at the altar. Silver ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... his companion, and they descended to the roomy saloon, where two long tables were already laid with an ostentatious display of silver, glassware, and cutlery, which made many, who looked on this wilderness of white linen with something like dismay, hope that the voyage would be smooth, although, as it was a winter passage, there was every chance it would not be. The purser ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... piece or two of sculpture, and a few little curiosities of art in the way of mosaics and antiquities from different ruins of Italy, which, for a man who was by no means a Stewart or an Astor, showed great liberality. Uncle could not afford, like ostentatious millionnaires, to dazzle the public with paintings bought by the yard; but for a man of his means he displayed, I think, a true love for art and a strong desire to encourage it. His purchases, too, were very different from the second-rate pictures so often purchased abroad ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... Heavy, ostentatious, and expensive habiliments are often worn in mourning, but they are not in the best taste. The ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... might easily bear that construction; and she was now an experienced matron, and knew how to be as charming as ever, yet check or parry all approaches to gallantry on the part of her admirers. Then Griffith observed how delicate and prudent his lovely wife was, without ostentatious prudery; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... possessed by them; equal capability for what is honorable, if they so wish." The Emperor Marcus Aurelius gratefully recalls that from his mother he learned piety and generosity, and to refrain not only from doing ill, but even from thinking it, and simplicity of life, far removed from the ostentatious display of wealth.[21] The passionate attachment of men like Quintilian and Pliny to their wives exhibits an equality based on love that would do honour to the most Christian households.[22] All Roman historians ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... of Blunt; and then came the second crisis. Blunt did not come one day—afterwards he admitted his deliberate intention—and through the tedious morning Whitey awaited the interval between the spells with an ostentatious impatience. He knew nothing of the scrapping lessons, and he spent the time in telling Denton and the vault generally of certain disagreeable proceedings ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... bridegroom, Giovanni Galeazzo gave away 150 beautiful horses, and his kinsman, Bernabo, jewels and golden coins to a large amount, the whole sum disbursed on this occasion would appear so enormous as to make one doubt whether a petty sovereign could really afford such ostentatious prodigality. But when we consider that the flourishing state of the commerce of Italy attracted thither all the wealth of Europe, we are no longer surprised at an expenditure which, however great, might at that time have been borne not by a reigning duke of Milan or Florence alone, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... to have any wit; Casaubon interprets this in the mildest sense, and confesses his author was not good at turning things into a pleasant ridicule, or, in other words, that he was not a laughable writer. That he was ineptus, indeed, but that was non aptissimus ad jocandum; but that he was ostentatious of his learning, that by Scaliger's good favour he denies. Persius showed his learning, but was no boaster of it; he did ostendere, but not ostentare; and so, he says, did Scaliger (where, methinks, Casaubon turns it handsomely upon that supercilious critic, and silently ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... that should be shown without ostentation." Beatrice laughed. "And you are decidedly ostentatious at the present moment. It would interest mamma and me very much to know the object ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... you drive along the chasm between long ranks of photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime Niagara; and a great many people have the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... enthusiasm upon his friend; and Antonio could not refrain from acknowledging to himself that here in the garb of lowly simplicity he found more than had ever delighted him from Apone's mouth, even at the time of his greatest admiration for that ostentatious philosopher. Indeed he was already become fully convinced that the knowledge which people call supernatural may be easily united with piety and a thorough resignation ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck |
