"Pedantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contracting parties had parental approval. Maybe I had better explain that infare meant the bride's going home—to her new house, or at least her new family. This etymologically—the root is the Saxon faran, to go, whence come wayfaring, faring forth and so on. All this I am setting forth not in pedantry, but because so many folk had stared blankly upon hearing the word—which was to me as familiar as word could be. In application it had a wide latitude. Commonly the groom or his family gave the infare, ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... was. His brothers were his equals in most respects. His eldest brother was a very fine young man, and had taken high honours at Cambridge. He was an excellent specimen of an English gentleman of the nineteenth century. Free from all affectation and pedantry, still his whole nature seemed to revolt from anything slangish or low. No oaths, nor anything which would be considered one, nor any cant expressions, ever escaped his lips. Yet he was full of life and spirits, the soul of every society in ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... the other hand, an inspiration and waft of feeling in the metre which lends him wings and helps him on. If Mr. Stern does not encumber his style with a betrayal of the difficulties he has got over—if he does not give us pedantry and double-epithets, so common in vulgar renderings from the German—he certainly shows no timidity in turning the polished familiarity of Heine's prose into our commonest vernacular. "What lots of pleasure I found on my arrival;" "for the men, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... clear, without the faintest disposition to descend to the level of his audience; eloquent, but with no trace of the empty rhetoric which so often does duty for that quality; full of a high seriousness, but with no suspicion of pedantry; lightened by an occasional epigram or flashes of caustic humour, but with none of the small jocularity in which it is such a temptation to a lecturer to indulge. As one listened to him one felt that comparative anatomy was worthy of the devotion of a life, and that to ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... of the orthography of both being still retained: what—wh[ich—t]hat; (which-that.) Anciently it appeared in the varying forms, tha qua, qua tha, qu'tha, quthat, quhat, hwat, and finally what."—Kirkham's Gram., p. 111. This bald pedantry of "tha qua, qua tha," was secretly borrowed from the grammatical speculations of William S. Cardell:[217] the "which-that" notion contradicts it, and is partly of the borrower's own invention. If what is a compound, it was compounded more than a thousand ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Farquhar was permitted to hear were so interrupted by these cabalistic expressions that she finally begged to be excused. She said she did not doubt that to be in love was a liberal education, but pedantry was uninteresting. Latin might be convenient at this stage; but later on, for little tiffs and reconciliations, French ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... keeps up business appearances by driving several horses, or joins influential societies. He may make a great display in style, manner, dress, pretensions, writing for the newspapers, exhibiting literary pedantry, referring to the superior facilities afforded by some particular school or society to which he belongs; or by editing and publishing a medical journal, ostensibly for the advancement of medical science, but practically to display titles or professorships, to publish reports ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... is current for ordinary purposes, even amongst the most scientific of astronomers. For the man of science, equally with the populace, talks of the sun as rising and setting, as having finished half his day's journey, &c., and, without pedantry, could not in many cases talk otherwise. But the results, which are all that concern Scripture, are equally true, whether accounted for by one hypothesis which is philosophically just, or by another which ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... who so spoke of Christianity could have intended seriously to discredit it, and yet certainly could not possibly believe the absurd theory of it concocted out of German philosophy; ergo, that we must regard the whole book as a piece of prolonged irony,—a little too characteristic of German pedantry, it is true, but sincerely designed to expose that extravagance of historic criticism and Biblical exegesis which had so distinguished the author's countrymen, by which Homer had been annihilated, a great part of ancient history rendered doubtful, and ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... advantage that it is quite moral, nay, in a pure sense, Christian—represents the reward of a goodwill and perseverance in the right, strengthens an unconditional confidence in God, and attests the final triumph of good over evil; and all this without a trace of cant or pedantry. The author was preserved from both of these by an elocution of mind that shows itself throughout in the form of irony, by which this little work must appear to us as wise as it is amiable. The author, Dr. Goldsmith, has, without question, a ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... calculated for a sick bed. Gives a short journal of what had passed relating to the lady since his last. Mr. Brand inquires after her character and behaviour of Mrs. Smith. His starchedness, conceit, and pedantry. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... critique of An Account of the Empire of Marocco.... To which is added an ... account of Tombuctoo, the great Emporium of Central Africa, by James Grey Jackson, London, 1809, the reviewer comments on the author's pedantry in correcting "the common orthography of African names." "We do not," he writes, "greatly object to ... Fas for Fez, or even Timbuctoo for Tombuctoo, but Marocco for Morocco is a little too much."—Edinburgh Review, July, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... that they belonged to God, while this age belongs only to man, blind chance, and the evil one, let us cast them from us as the suggestions of an evil lying spirit, as the natural parents of laziness, pedantry, fanaticism, and unbelief. And therefore let us not fear to ask the meaning of this present day, and of all its different voices—the pressing, noisy, complex present, where our workfield lies, the most intricate of all states of society, and ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... it took no great sensibility to feel that poor Ralph's tenure of life was less elastic than it should be. He was a bright, free, generous spirit, he had all the illumination of wisdom and none of its pedantry, and yet he was ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... increased the local refinement and virtue, so they have ennobled and given body to the local dignitary. What would the Bishop of Caen (he calls himself Bishop of Lisieux and Bayeux, but that is archaeological pedantry); what, I say, would the Bishop of Caen be without his railway? A Phantom or a Paris magnate. What the Mayor of High Wycombe? Ah! what indeed! But I cannot waste any more of this time of mine in discussing ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... the disgrace with which it has forever covered the nation which tolerated such an abomination, it was relieved by some incidents which did honor to the country and to human nature. The murderers of Louis, in their ignoble pedantry, wearied the ear with appeals to the examples of the ancient Romans, of Decius[5] and of Brutus. But no Roman ever gave a nobler proof of contempt of danger, and devotion to duty, than was afforded by the intrepid lawyers, Malesherbes, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... in a sterile restoration of the letter. It may be said of this school of architects that they were of more service to posterity than to their contemporaries; for while they opened the way to modern antiquarian research, their pedantry checked the natural development of a style which, if left to itself, might in time have found new and ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... probity. But he had great confidence in his own savoir faire. His talents were naturally acute, and by no means confined to the line of his profession. He had at different times resided a good deal in England, and his address was free both from country rusticity and professional pedantry; so that he had considerable powers both of address and persuasion, joined to an unshaken effrontery, which he affected to disguise under plainness of manner. Confident, therefore, in himself, he appeared at Woodbourne ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... commits trespasses on language that are really past excusing. In one place she says that a man 'had a contemptible opinion' of some other man's understanding. Such a blunder is not of that class which usage sanctions, and an accuracy not much short of pedantry would be argued in noticing: it is at once illiterate and vulgar in the very last degree. I mean that it is common amongst vulgar people, and them only. It ranks, for instance, with the common formula of 'I am ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... disposition, but to an exquisite sense of propriety, an honest indignation of depravity, and a generous desire to reform the degenerated manners of his fellow-creatures. This has been the cause of Aristophanes censuring the pedantry and superstition of Socrates; Horace, Persius, Martial, and Juvenal, the luxury and profligacy of the Romans; Boileau and Moliere the levity and refinement of the French; Cervantes the romantic pride and madness of the Spanish; ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... you stiffen on a bench And stoop your curls to dusty laws; Your petal fingers curve and clench In slavery to parchment saws; You suit your hearts to sallow faces In sullen places: But no pen Nor pedantry can make you men. Yours are the morning and the day: You should be taught of wind and light; Your learning ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... Brother, in three lines, what the determination of my friends was; only, that then you would not have had room to display your pedantry by so detestable an allusion or reference to the Georgic. Give me leave to tell you, Sir, that if humanity were a branch of your studies at the university, it has not found a genius in you for mastering it. Nor is either my sex or myself, though a sister, I see entitled ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... is pleasant to see,' said Goethe, 'how the earlier pedantry of the Scotch has changed into earnestness and profundity. When I recollect how the 'Edinburgh Reviewers' treated my works not many years since, and when I now consider Carlyle's merits with respect to German literature, I am astonished at the important step ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... manner with which he indulged in these coruscations of argument. He obtained a victory without being vain, or even, from his perfect command of countenance, appearing sensible of it; and, unless he happened to be disputing with pedantry and conceit, with a dignified consciousness of strength, he never pursued an enemy who was contented to fly, by which means a defeat was often perceived rather than felt, and the vanquished forgot his own humiliation in applauding the generosity ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... can equal the avidity of these people for news. We sat down after dinner under some trees in the village, and Mr. de began reading the Gazette to the farmers who were about us. In a few minutes every thing that could hear (for I leave understanding the pedantry of a French newspaper out of the question) were his auditors. A party at quoits in one field, and a dancing party in another, quitted their amusements, and listened with undivided attention. I believe in general the farmers are the people most contented with the revolution, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... they may apparently agree to act together permanently for any purposes of common interest on the same conditions. That is, they may form associations. Yet at bottom the powers of an association are something very different from the powers of the individuals composing it; and it is only by legal pedantry that the attempt can be made to regulate the behaviour of an association on principles derived from and suitable to the relations of individuals. An association might become so powerful as to form a state within the state, and to contend ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... had not yet appeared on the stage; and Akenside's metaphysical subject and diffuse style were not calculated to engross the general taste. Johnson had taken possession of the field of satire, but there are too many readers of enthusiastic mind to be satisfied with satire. The pedantry and uncouthness of Walter Harte had precluded him from ever being a favourite with the public; Shenstone had not yet risen into fame; and Lyttelton was engrossed by politics. When, therefore, Collins's Odes appeared, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... System of an English Education; they had not incurr'd those Self-contradictions of which they are guilty; they had not mention'd your self, and your incomparable Treasury of Northern Literature in so cold and negligent a manner, as betrays too much of an invidious Pedantry: But in those Terms of Veneration and Applause which are your just Tribute, not only from the Learned of your own Countrey, but of most of the other Northern Nations, whether more or less Polite: Who would any ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... also regarded me a bit mad—but to a degree sympathetic. For a Galician nobleman and land-owner, and considering his age—he was hardly over thirty—he displayed surprising sobriety, a certain seriousness, even pedantry. He lived according to a minutely elaborated, half-philosophical, half- practical system, like clock-work; not this alone, but also by the thermometer, barometer, aerometer, hydrometer, Hippocrates, Hufeland, Plato, Kant, Knigge, and Lord Chesterfield. But at times he had violent ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... it could do nothing to diminish. But oftentimes to know the persons concerned in a great disaster, is a step to knowing something of its causes. And this we will venture to say—that, in defiance of all professional pedantry incident to military men and engineers, the reader is likely to be of opinion that we, at a distance of 7000 miles, have pointed out capital blunders, ensuring ruin and forming temptations to conspiracy, which Lieutenant Eyre, a principal artillery ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... "The Christmas of Delsato's Maria", tells how an Italian thief utilized his questionable art to replace a loss in his family. "To General Villa" is a peculiar piece of verse written last summer for the purpose of defying those who had charged its author with pedantry and pomposity. It has suffered somewhat at the hands of the printer; "Intrepido" being spelled "Intrepedo", and the word "own" being dropped from the clause "your own name can't write" in the third line of the second ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... James in its psychological and historical details; unfortunately he developed it chiefly in controversy against its opposite, which he called intellectualism, and which he hated with all the hatred of which his kind heart was capable. Intellectualism, as he conceived it, was pure pedantry; it impoverished and verbalised everything, and tied up nature in red tape. Ideas and rules that may have been occasionally useful it put in the place of the full-blooded irrational movement of life which had called them into ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... times that year, I retired after the coffee, leaving him to the hands of a captain of ours, far better able than I was to lock arms with such a valiant antagonist. My comrades, like myself, saw nothing in this but absurd pedantry. We even believed that this magisterial tone which he assumed was meaningless until one day when he reasoned so forcibly on the rights of nations in general, his own in particular, Stupete gentes! that we could ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... loving fondness for their old language. Not only the energy and power, but the intelligence and music of Europe have come mainly from Teutonic sources, and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it were not pedantry, would be sheer ignorance. The sooner all Welsh specialities disappear from the face of the ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... a certain want of nature in them. The fault of Propertius was too pedantic an imitation of the Greeks. His whole ambition was to become the Roman Callimachus, whom he made his model. He abounds with obscure Greek myths, as well as Greek forms of expression, and the same pedantry infects even ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... from Holbein's circle a story which modern pedantry is inclined to flout. This is, that when an irate nobleman wanted the painter punished for an affront, the King hotly exclaimed:—"Understand, my lord, that I can make seven earls out of as many hinds, any day; but out of seven earls I could not make one such painter as this Holbein." An eminently ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... of names and other words of Oriental languages the Editor has 'endeavoured to strike a mean between popular usage and academic precision, preferring to incur the charge of looseness to that of pedantry'. Diacritical marks intended to distinguish between the various sibilants, dentals, nasals, and so forth, of the Arabic and Sanskrit alphabets, have been purposely omitted. Long vowels are marked by the sign ^. Except in a few familiar ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... strength no pedantry can stir, Whether in thine iron enemies, Or in thine own strayed follower Bemused with subtleties and sophistries, Now dost thou rule the garden, now The gatherers' hands ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... they stand, but even better by help of excerpts and selections. But the excellence of his best comedies can only be appreciated by a student who reads them fairly and fearlessly through, and, having made some small deductions on the score of occasional pedantry and occasional crudity, finds in "All Fools," "Monsieur d'Olive," "The Gentleman Usher," and "The Widow's Tears" a wealth and vigor of humorous invention, a tender and earnest grace of romantic poetry, which ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... different from what one usually reads on similar subjects! In your arguments, and in the intrinsic and extrinsic proofs you adduce, what weight—without heaviness, what solidity—without stiffness, of strong and wholesome criticism—without pedantry! Ideas are plentiful in this by turns incisive, brilliant, reflected, and spontaneous style, in which learning comes in to enhance and steady the flow of a lively and luxuriant imagination. To all ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... staggered Frank. Some men it would have only hardened in their pedantry, and have emboldened them to say: "Ah! then these men see that a High Churchman can work like any one else, when there is a practical sacrifice to be made. Now I have a standing ground which no one can dispute from which to go on, and enforce ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... man objects to that), but for the manner, which is full of knavery, and a wicked precedent. For by this assignment he is protected from all his creditors, which (I dare say) was neither his Majesty's nor your Lordship's meaning." It was an ill-natured and cowardly piece of official pedantry to plunge deeper a drowning man; but in the end the pardon was passed. It does not appear whether Buckingham interfered to overrule the Lord Keeper's scruples. Buckingham was certainly about this time ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... Smug content (erbrmliches Behagen) was threatening to thwart his one purpose—the elevation of man; smug content personified in the German scholar was giving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and all the while it was a mere cover for hidden rottenness and jejune pedantry. ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... not so very stupid as all you gentlemen make it out to be; that it has good sense enough to appreciate everything; that some good taste can be acquired there; and that the common sense found there is, without flattery, well worth all the learning of pedantry. ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... is so nice and guileless that she doesn't resent my pedantry. I love giving information, you know," Augustine smiled. He looked about him as he spoke, at birds and trees and clouds, happy, humorous, clasping his riding crop behind his back so that his mother heard it make a pleasant little click against ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Erasmus and other moderate men been the only reformers. He will long be honored for his elegant, Latinity. In the republic of letters, his efforts to infuse a pure taste, a sound criticism, a love for the beautiful and the classic, in place of the owlish pedantry which had so long flapped and hooted through mediveval cloisters, will always be held in grateful reverence. In the history of the religious Reformation, his name seems hardly to deserve the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... begets coarseness; art preponderating over nature begets pedantry; art and nature ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... had had reason to suspect—at least we had had hopes—that the pedantry in Mr. M—— was somewhat superimposed, that he had possibilities, human and otherwise, but none of us, it must be confessed, had been able to surmise quite accurately just where they would break out. We were filled with ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... has its faults of style, to be sure,—principal among which is a tendency to make too much of the scientific investigation and the acquirement of the writer, extending sometimes almost to pedantry in the use of long words and large phrases; but it contains much information that is important and can be found nowhere else except by troublesome comparison of extended treatises, and a deal of plain common-sense that should commend it to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... danger which the most exquisite military combinations cannot remove, which the most perfectly served artillery cannot sweep away, before which all the bayonets, and gunpowder, and lines of fortification in the world are useless—and compared with which the science of the commander is pedantry, and strategy but a word. They will discover that something more than mechanical power, however great—something more than the skill of the practised officer, or the instinct of well-trained soldiers, are requisite for success—where every ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Jehane of the Forest (MELROSE) is not calculated to whet the appetite of the adult public, and the eulogy of a well-known author, appended on a printed slip, lacks the essential glow of the effective advertisement. It misses the point; it is pedantic, and pedantry is the one thing for which wary readers are on the look out in stories of antiquity. It is first important, then, to acquit Mr. L. A. TALBOT of every offence of which, in the blackness of the outward circumstances, he might be suspected—affectations, anachronisms, excess of local and contemporary ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... the uprising Apollo. However inferior in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I own I am proud that I was the first in time who publicly demonstrated to the full extent of the position, that the supposed irregularity and extravagances of Shakespeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan. In all the successive courses of lectures delivered by me, since my first attempt at the Royal Institution, it has been, and it still remains, my object, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... misadventures; but she continued instead to pour forth the most extraordinary mixture of the correct school miss and the poor untutored little piece of womanhood in a false position—of engrafted pedantry and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but a riotous, hopeless, and stupid prison. It is true that it was on the side of Art alone that this enlightenment began, and that even on that side it progressed slowly enough at first—e.g. Sir Walter Scott feels himself obliged, as in the Antiquary, to apologize to pedantry for his instinctive love of Gothic architecture. And no less true is it that follies enough were mingled with the really useful and healthful birth of romanticism in Art and Literature. But at last the study of facts by men who were neither artistic nor sentimental came to the help of that ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... and most admired institutors of youth, whose fine taste has been allowed clear from the least tincture of pedantry, Quintilian recommends especially the talent of dancing, as conducive to the formation of orators; not, as he very justly observes, that an orator should retain any thing of the air of a dancing-master, in his motion or gesture; but that the impression ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... strained interpretations. Guenzburg was the first, with the exception of Erter perhaps, to try to remedy the evil. "Every writer," he maintained, "should guard himself against the fastidiousness or stiffness which results from pedantry, and take great pains not only with the content of his thoughts, but with the language in which these thoughts are couched." Simplicity, perspicuity, and conciseness, these he taught by precept and example, and though he ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... the ultimate tendency of future progress it would be pedantry to dogmatize; our task has been the humbler one of pointing out the means by which progress is to be attained. We have assumed, however, that there is a separate sphere of collective action in which government is an instrument ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... her last interview with him, when she descanted at length on that superfluity of naughtiness and Biblical pedantry which, she asserted, made Scottish ministers preach ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... "Inexplicable pedantry of science!" thought Elsley to himself, while Tom worked on steadfastly, and at last rose, and, taking out a phial from his basket, was about to ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... commentary, rarely extend beyond a score of lines, and are most often far below that, yet they are always wonderfully pertinent; there is "no philology, no antiquarianism, no discussion of difficult or corrupt passages," no pedantry in fact, or dry-as-dustism. It must not be forgotten when we look over the volume with scenes from the plays of Kyd, Peele, Marlowe, Dekker, Marston, Chapman, Heywood, Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Shirley and others—it must not be forgotten ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... satisfied when we meet. Never yet, my dear girl, did I long to administer a productive pecuniary Squeeze to any human creature, as I long to administer it to Mr. Noel Vanstone. I say no more. Verbum sap. Pardon the pedantry of a Latin quotation, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... contemporaries in the opening years of the sixteenth century continued the manner of the so-called rhetoriqueurs, who endeavoured to maintain allegory, now decrepit or effete, with the aid of ingenuities of versification and pedantry of diction; or else they carried on something of the more living tradition of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former, Jean le Maire de Belges deserves to be remembered less for his verse than for his prose work, Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... shall blame us if, the flowers being pretty well plucked, we add an artificial rose or two to the composition of the bouquet?" They take care, in a word, that there be plenty of relics, and their establishments are huge and active. They administer the antidote to pedantry, and you can complain of them only if you never cross their thresholds. If you take this step you are lost, for you have parted with the correctness of your attitude. Venice becomes frankly from such a moment the big depressing dazzling joke in which after all our sense of her contradictions sinks ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the way, I judge it not impertinent to mention the many authors both of the Latin and Greek which, through his excellent judgment and way of teaching, far above the pedantry of common Public Schools (where such authors are scarce ever heard of), were run over within no greater compass of time than from ten to fifteen or sixteen years of age:—Of the Latin, the four grand authors De Re Rustica, CATO, VARRO, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... like the miraculous draught of fishes. I hardly know his rivals except Burton and Cotton Mather. But no one would accuse him of pedantry. Burton quotes to amuse himself and his reader; Mather quotes to show his learning, of which he had a vast conceit; Emerson quotes to illustrate some original thought of his own, or because another writer's way of thinking falls ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... mainly those of Greece and Rome: but there was little of literary or humane interest about the study of it; its meaning and spirit were concealed from all but the few who could surmount the fences of linguistic pedantry and artificial technique ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... and enthroned Cibber in his stead. Unhappily the two heroes were of opposite characters, and Pope was unwilling to lose what he had already written; he has, therefore, depraved his poem by giving to Cibber the old books, the cold pedantry, and the sluggish pertinacity ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... nakedness. Till now you have studied man merely in books and philosophical treatises; or, in other words, you have been thrashing empty straw. But the film will soon fall from your eyes. We will shortly quit this dirty country of yours, where priestcraft, pedantry, and oppression reign unmolested and undisturbed. I will usher you upon a stage where the passions have a freer scope, and where great energies ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... totems infected 'even those who ought to have been proof against this infantile complaint' (which is not even a 'disease of language' of a respectable type), then 'the objection that a totem meant originally a clan-mark was treated as scholastic pedantry.' Alas, I fear with justice! For if I call Mr. Arthur Balfour a Tory will Mr. Max Muller refute my opinion by urging that 'a Tory meant originally an Irish rapparee,' or whatever ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... socialist leaders, stump speakers, pamphleteers, think Marx meant, than to know what he said. For then you are dealing with living ideas: to search his text has its uses, but compared with the actual tradition of Marx it is the work of pedantry. I say this here for two reasons—because I hope to avoid the critical attack of the genuine Marxian specialist, and because the observation is, I believe, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... fifty years, no pedantry, no loose manners, no questionable characters, no social or political intrigues, no discourtesies of any kind, were recorded; hers was a reign of dignity and grace, of purity of language, manners, and morals. She died in 1665, at the advanced ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... reunions, which of course you will do, you will find we disdain no pursuit worthy of thinking beings. We pass from music to literature—to science—even to philosophy; but we do this—I pray you to believe—without pedantry and without leaving the tone of familiar converse. Sometimes we read verses, but we never make them; we love the ancients and do not fear the moderns: we only fear those who would lower the mind and debase the heart. We love ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Richard Scott, was an accurate classical scholar, which perhaps accounts for his being, unlike some others of his profession, free from pedantry. He was kind-hearted and somewhat disposed to indolence, loving more to converse with one of my years than to instruct him in languages. He had seen a good deal of the world and its ways, and I learned much from him besides Greek and Latin. We were great friends and companions, and rarely ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... his clear intelligence stands forth in marked contrast to the narrow pedantry of the Roman Cardinals. At a time of reconciliation between orthodox and "constitutionals," they required from the latter a complete and public retractation of their recent errors. At once Bonaparte intervened with telling effect. So condign a ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Gargantuan compass; vast cyclopaedia copied by hand and running into thousands of volumes; essays dating from the time of dynasties now almost forgotten; woodblocks black with age crowded the endless unvarnished shelves. In an empire where scholarship has attained an untrammelled pedantry never dreamed of in the remote West, in a country where a perfect knowledge of the classics is respected by beggar and prince to such an extent that to attempt to convey an idea would cause laughter in Europe, all of us thought—even the pessimists—that it could never happen that ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... his cap, flourishes his bauble, tosses that fine head, and with tongue in cheek, asks questions and propounds conundrums that pedantry can never answer. Hence the ink-bottle, with its mark on the walls at Eisenach, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the city was doomed and that her rulers who persisted in defending her were senseless, if gallant, fanatics, but also that they had forfeited their technical legitimacy. To talk to-day of duty, civil or military, to such a perjured Government does not even deserve to be called constitutional pedantry, for it has not a splinter of constitutionalism to support it. Sedekiah held his vassal throne only by his oath to his suzerain of Babylon and when he broke that oath his legitimacy crumbled.(591) Of right Divine or human there was none ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... peremptorily rejected. I am convinced that you are still what the world calls an upright man of business, but I do not know whether you have preserved that proudly pure integrity, which, alas! many in the mercantile world treat as mere pedantry, and to have to tell you this makes your return painful ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... franchise. Four years after his death a Constitutional Amendment was passed by which any distinction as to franchise on the ground of race or colour is forbidden in America. The policy of giving the vote to negroes indiscriminately had commended itself to the cold pedantry of some persons, including Chase, on the ground of some natural right of all men to the suffrage; but it was adopted as the most effective protection for the negroes against laws, as to vagrancy and the like, by which it was feared they might practically be enslaved again. Whatever the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... or to neither. No stranger could tell. Julius Laspara no doubt knew which of his girls it was who, after casually vanishing for a few years, had as casually returned to him possessed of that child; but, with admirable pedantry, he had refrained from asking her for details—no, not so much as the name of the father, because maternity should be an anarchist function. Razumov had been admitted twice to that suite of several small dark rooms on the top ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... style must be simple, the sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage. Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of phrase. The deeper themes of the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... a man of grave and quiet manner, one who seemed to think much and deeply. He habitually led the conversation, without pedantry, to religious or instructive subjects, and when lighter matter was introduced, was given rather to withdraw his mind from it to ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on the spot and under her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry; when people were at her pass everything was allowed. And her pass was now, as by the sharp click of a spring, just completely his own—to the extent, as he felt, of her deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn't would have close ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... that rustics and savages call wedge-shaped objects that fall from the sky, "axes": that scientific men, when it suits their purposes, can resist temptations to prolixity and pedantry, and adopt the simple: that they can be ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... touched. They had not, indeed, the almost miraculous sense and mastery of the great artists of Greece, that did not come again till the time of the great Italian artists of the fifteenth century. But they were free from pedantry, from formalism, they left the dying art of the ancient world and made their own way. Their sense of colour was almost infallible, as those who have seen the mosaics of the older Roman basilicas ...
— Progress and History • Various
... as he sat over Examination papers, his sensitive imagination framed the accusations of selfishness, pedantry, scrupulosity, which his wife might be bringing against him in the "sessions of silent thought;" although it was clearly to her advantage as much as to his own that he should keep out of money difficulties and do work which counted. She had no fixed habits, and he flung down pipe and pen, hoping ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... the account of their opinions in religion; and, being strict in his own, he took it not upon him to censure those of another persuasion. His conversation was pleasant, witty, and learned, without the least tincture of affectation or pedantry; and his inimitable manner of diverting and enlivening the company made it impossible for any one to be out of humour when he was in it. Envy and detraction seemed to be entirely foreign to his constitution; and whatever provocations he met ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... which I had entertained no conception previously to my knowledge of him. Notwithstanding the uncouthness of his garb, his manners were not unpolished. All topics were handled by him with skill, and without pedantry or affectation. He uttered no sentiment calculated to produce a disadvantageous impression: on the contrary, his observations denoted a mind alive to every generous and heroic feeling. They were introduced without parade, and accompanied ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... welcomes him in the hall of Bowling Green House, after his last journey to his home on Putney Heath.[761] The words probably fell from him on some occasion. But at the risk of incurring the charge of pedantry, I must point out that the news of Austerlitz did not come on him as one overwhelming shock: it filtered through by degrees. As we have seen, he wrote to Harrowby on 21st December, stating that ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... words and accents to classical metres, he shows clearness and good sense in apprehending the conditions of the problem, while Sidney and Spenser still appear confused and uncertain. But in spite of his pedantry, and though he had not, as we shall see, the eye to discern at first the genius of the Faery Queen, he has to us the interest of having been Spenser's first, and as far as we can see, to the last, dearest friend. By both of his younger fellow-students at Cambridge, he was looked up to with ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... his ideas naturally became a craze. Many of the reforms for which he passionately pleaded are so much a part of our modern thought that we do not realize the fact that in those days of routine, pedantry and slavish worship of authority, they were the daring dreams of an enthusiast, the seeming impossible prophecy of a new era. Aristocratic mothers were converts to his theories, and began nursing their children as he commanded them. Great lords began to learn handicrafts; physical exercise came ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... worked for bread. Who now talks of Mr. Morritt of Rokeby? Yet Morritt carried on a voluminous correspondence with Scott and the rest of that brilliant school. Who ever thinks of George Ellis? But Ellis was the most learned of antiquaries, and devoid of the pedantry which so often makes antiquarian discourses repellent. His polished expositions have the charm that comes from a gentle soul and an exquisite intellect, while his criticism is so luminous and just that even Mr. Ruskin could hardly improve upon it. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... may be added that he was genial to all whom he did not consider his inferiors, a good though not a demonstrative husband; that as a lawyer he was learned without the least pedantry; and that he was a Bencher of his Inn, where he frequently dined, and a Member of Parliament, where he never spoke, even on ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... scholastic jargon was much in vogue in the time of Lucian, and it is no wonder he should take every opportunity of laughing at it, as nothing can be more opposite to true genius, wit, and humour, than such pedantry. ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... with a wife and a son; he stood alone in jealous isolation, wifeless and childless. It is true that some learned scribe, steeped in Babylonian learning, now and then tried to find a Babylonian goddess with whom to mate him; but the attempt was merely a piece of theological pedantry which made no impression on the rulers and people of Nineveh. Assur was supreme over all other gods, as his representative, the Assyrian King, was supreme over the other kings of the earth, and he would brook ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... of Boeotian dulness were at least as often well invented as true, it is perhaps the case that there is generally some ground for the popular caricatures of any given community. I duly discounted the humorous and would-be humorous stories of Boston's pedantry that I heard in New York, and found that as a rule I had done right so to do. Blue spectacles are not more prominent in Boston than elsewhere; its theatres do not make a specialty of Greek plays; the little boys do not petition the Legislature for an increase in the hours of school. There ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Literature I really could benefit Posterity with, I do believe, is an edition of that wonderful and aggravating Clarissa Harlowe; and this I would effect with a pair of Scissors only. It would not be a bit too long as it is, if it were all equally good; but pedantry comes in, and might, I think, be cleared away, leaving the remainder one of the great, original, Works of the World! in this Line. Lovelace is the wonderful character, for Wit: and there is some grand Tragedy too. And nobody ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... in intrigues and overwhelmed with debts should release himself by involving a trusting girl in his difficulties, and whether the girl should be Miss Milbanke or another, were not likely to distinguish between the cultivated ability of a sensible girl and the pedantry of a blue-stocking; and hence, because Miss Milbanke was neither ignorant nor silly, she was called a learned lady by Lord Byron's associates. He bore testimony, in due time, to her agreeable qualities ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... particular about a gradual increase and decrease of loudness." Karasowski writes: "Exaggeration in accentuation was hateful to him, for, in his opinion, it took away the poesy from playing, and gave it a certain didactic pedantry."] ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... that our too arbitrary institutions have too often made us forget nature; that we have been the dupes of our own handiwork, and that the savage who does not know how to consult nature knows how to follow her. Let her criticise our pedantry, for it is this that constitutes our education of the present day. Look at the Rudiments; they begin by insisting on stuffing into the heads of children a crowd of the most abstract ideas. Those whom nature in her variety ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... reassertion of nature, and it was well for him. So was he saved, so was his genius unfettered from the cloying weight of too much abstract thought, which at one time, save for his artistic instincts, would have plunged him into the morass of pedantry and turned his genius into a pillar of salt. A woman had saved him, and through the long years of their life together he ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... could scarcely control the skin of his head, so often did he have to twitch his eyebrows in order to express the above opinion, which he held about his master's pedantry. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... known that he would enjoy teaching, and took up his duties with keen interest. Fortunately for him he had little conceit or pedantry, which would have been a fatal handicap for him as teacher among his own people, simple-hearted though they were. He organized his work with straightforward earnestness and quiet ability and things usually ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... not part of the pedantry of letters to limit the word art, a little narrowly, to certain manifestations of the artistic spirit, or, at all events, to set up a comparative estimate of the values of the several arts, a little unnecessarily? Literature, painting, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... love. It was in that quarter, quia multum amavit,—because he loved much—that he was regarded as vulnerable by "serious men," "grave persons" and "reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess of love? It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived without disdain. He was indulgent towards God's creation. Every man, even ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... in the circle he most frequented, this disappointment of the imagination was far more than compensated by the frank, social, and engaging qualities, both of disposition and manner, which, on a nearer intercourse, he disclosed, as well as by that entire absence of any literary assumption or pedantry, which entitled him fully to the praise bestowed by Sprat upon Cowley, that few could "ever discover he was a great poet by his discourse." While thus, by his intimates, and those who had got, as ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the idle pretensions and stilted pedantry of the men of the schools, can we wonder if good and earnest men still refuse to acknowledge the high worth and dignity of art, which, in accordance with such definitions, would be nothing but a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... be found texts of Livy and Lucretius and the letters of Cicero. Philip was already a master of Latin, writing it with an elegance worthy of Niccolo the Florentine. At fourteen he entered the college of Robert of Sorbonne, but found little charm in its scholastic pedantry. But in the capital he learned the Greek tongue from a Byzantine, the elder Lascaris, and copied with his own hand a great part of Plato and Aristotle. His thirst grew with every draught of the new vintage. To Pavia he went and sat at the feet of Lorenzo Vallo. The company ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... father, familiarly, "you son would know that though a scholar is often a fool, he is never a fool so supreme, so superlative, as when he is defacing the first unsullied page of the human history by entering into it the commonplaces of his own pedantry. A scholar, sir,—at least one like me,—is of all persons the most unfit to teach young children. A mother, sir,—a simple, natural, loving mother,—is the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... circulates in turn through every system. The central identity enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities and shades of the real being. In the transmission of the heavenly waters, every hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Everything must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition to understand ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... which few parallels could be found since the days of the Renaissance. "Mr. Froude's appearance on the field of mediaeval history will hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history belonged to particular historians. Before writing about Becket Froude should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of Freeman, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... is not fair to dwell upon the eminent beauties of the History of the World without at the same time acknowledging that the book almost wilfully deprives itself of legitimate value and true human interest by the remoteness of the period which it describes, and by the tiresome pedantry of its method. It is leisurely to the last excess. The first chapter, of seven long sections, takes us but to the close of the Creation. We cannot proceed without knowing what it is that Tostatus affirms of the empyrean heavens, and whether, with Strabo, we may ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... for it is assumed that the vulgar can judge for themselves; intellectually, it means rationalism, that is, an appeal to the reason common to all men; and, in literature it means the hatred of pedantry and the acceptance of such literary forms as are thoroughly congenial and intelligible to the common sense of the new audience. The hatred of the pedantic is the characteristic sentiment of the time. When Berkeley looked ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... on the side of human enjoyment. He conspired and contrived to make things pleasant. Pedantry he abhorred. He was a man of this life and this world. A severe critic of this world he indeed was; but, finding himself in it, and not precisely knowing what is beyond it, like a brave and true-hearted man, he set himself to make the best of it. Its sights ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... the vicar, noted for his greenness and pedantry. Being sent to sell a good horse at a fair, he bartered it for a gross of green spectacles, with copper rims and shagreen cases, of no more value ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... chapter headed, with a delightful little wood engraving of 'Fair Russell,' looking pre-eminently sensible, at her desk, to prepare the reader for the imminent welter of rules for 'decorous composition.' Not that pedantry is approved. 'Ease and simplicity, an even flow of unlaboured diction, and an artless arrangement of obvious sentiments' is the ideal to be striven for. 'A metaphor may be used with advantage' by any young lady, but only 'if it occur naturally.' And 'allusions are elegant,' ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... edification of the unlearned, have I thought it best to give a list of the interjections and phrases in question, with the definition or free translation of each, ignoring etymologies as smacking, just here, of pedantry: ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... I have several times heard her declare with enthusiasm that ours is a beautiful language, a noble language even to the ear, when properly spoken; and imitate with disgust the short, snappy, inarticulate way in which many people utter it. There was no touch of pedantry or affectation in her own measured, careful speech, although I can well imagine that she might have been accused of both by those persons—unfortunately more numerous than could be desired—who seem to take it for granted that all difference from one's neighbour, and especially ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... been twelve hours upon the journey, and his grandfather (Lillie) two days"! The profession was still but in its second generation, and had already broken down the barriers of time and space. Who should set a limit to its future encroachments? And hence, with a kind of sanguine pedantry, he pursued his design of "keeping up with the day" and posting himself and his family on every mortal subject. Of this unpractical idealism we shall meet with many instances; there was not a trade, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... given up. For on what principle does it stand? This famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a description of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but too comprehensive!) vocabulary of finance,—a preambulary tax. It is, indeed, a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a tax of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but benefit to the imposers or satisfaction ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... France which inaugurated the new age after the Revolution had only been an English conquest, how much more enlightened the world would have been now! We, alas, can only fight. France is unconquerable. We impose our narrow ideas, our prejudices, our obsolete institutions, our insufferable pedantry on the world by brute force—by that stupid quality of military heroism which shews how little we have evolved from the savage: nay, from the beast. We can charge like bulls; we can spring on our foes like gamecocks; when we are overpowered by reason, we can ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... and peculiar theories have been devised for them, &c. In the lacrymose drama of Diderot, which was afterwards so much decried, the failure consisted altogether in that which was new; the affectation of nature, the pedantry of the domestic relations, and the lavish use of pathos. Did we still possess the whole of the comic literature of the Greeks, we should, without doubt, find in it the models of all these species, with this difference, however, that the clear head of the Greeks assuredly never ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... me in my uncle most strongly was his blunt contempt of the modern pedantry in State, Church, and School, to which he gave vent with some humour. Despite the great moderation of his usual views on life, he yet produced on me the effect of a thorough free-thinker. I was highly delighted by ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... which some philologists regard this tendency of the language. It seems to me that each case ought to be judged on its own merits, and by a strictly utilitarian standard. When a 'spelling-pronunciation' is a mere useless pedantry, it is well that we should resist it as long as we can; if it gets itself accepted, we must acquiesce; and unless the change is not only useless but harmful, we should do so without regret, because the influence of the written on the spoken form of language is in itself no more condemnable ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... Hungary to which Jokai belonged. The brutal ignorance of the common people, the criminal neglect of the gentry which made such ignorance possible, the imbecility of mere mob-rule, and the mischievousness of demagogic pedantry—these are the objects of the ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai |
