"Sentimentality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fiction. Above all other kinds of writing, fiction must win the heart of the reader. And this requires that the heart of the writer should be tender and sympathetic. Harsh critics call this quality sentiment, and even sentimentality. Dickens had it above all other writers, and it is probable that this popularity has never been surpassed. Scott succeeded by his splendid descriptions, but no one can deny that he was also one of the biggest hearted men in the world. And Thackeray, with all his reserve, ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... of men. Then, indeed, woman may be freed—able to give expression to those creative ideas which are wrapped up with the elements of her nature. But women must beware of sham emotion and lachrymose sentimentality. It is her own feelings she must voice, not the feelings that have been supposed to belong to her. Then, indeed, the work of women will begin to count. The two things most peculiar to woman—her pursuing-love of ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... this exalted sentimentality with the stern logic of fact, and never misdirect or misapply it in any of our charitable work. Imperfect knowledge perverts the noblest sentiments; widened and perfected knowledge strengthens their ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... she'll have to know sometime! I must say I cannot understand the way you've kept this dreadful thing from her. It's pure sentimentality. ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... barbarous state. The bitter truth is that motherhood, among the larger part of our population, does not rise to the level of the barbarous or the primitive. Conditions of life among the primitive tribes were rude enough and severe enough to prevent the unhealthy growth of sentimentality, and to discourage the irresponsible production of defective children. Moreover, there is ample evidence to indicate that even among the most primitive peoples the function of maternity was recognized as of primary and central importance ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... from him before he would issue the necessary safe-conducts placed the whole of his future, perhaps his very life, in jeopardy. And he had consented to do this not for the sake of a reality, but out of regard for an idea—he who all his life had avoided the false lure of worthless and hollow sentimentality. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... had been so suddenly extinguished in misfortune and crime? Those who had known her so well in Washington might find it impossible to believe that the fascinating woman could have had murder in her heart, and would readily give ear to the current sentimentality about the temporary aberration of mind under ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... poets, while Matthew Arnold did not like him at all. Emerson, in his last years, preferred him to Longfellow, but it is doubtful if he always did so. The strong point of his poetry is its intelligent manliness,—the absence of affectation and all sentimentality; but it lacks the musical element. He composed neither songs nor ballads,—nothing to match Hiawatha, or Gray's famous Elegy. America still awaits a poet who shall combine the savoir faire of Lowell with the force of Emerson and the grace ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... her box, where he found her alone, the General having descended to the parterre for a few moments. He was astonished, on entering, to find traces of tears on the young woman's cheeks. Her eyes were even moist. She seemed displeased at being surprised in the very act of sentimentality. ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... feet; and as they stood thus, side by side, one of them struck its beak several times against the beak of the other, as if in play. I wished them joy of their expected progeny, and was the more ready to believe they would have it for this little display of sportive sentimentality. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... tightly. She had almost answered, for no Madigan may be accused of sentimentality and live unavenged. Only a moment, though, was she at a loss. Then calmly, prettily, she glided into Split's own particular "piece." She knew this would ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... thinks that David was carried away by sentimentality, or that he was overscrupulous, one has only to recall how, when actually in want, he took the consecrated bread from the Tabernacle at Nob, and ate it and gave it to his followers. His strong common-sense told him that even ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... touch of pure poetic fancy in each of the tales, and the sunbeams here invested with life and tiny human forms, are lovable and mirth-provoking imps.... The children, too, are real children, and there is no mawkish sentimentality, but an unforced, tender pathos in the story of little Tom Riley, who was 'mos twelve,' but who had a heart big enough for a man, and so skilfully is it told that a child may read and miss much of the sadness of it. In and out and everywhere ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... is unique as a piece of pure sentimentality carried right rough without one divagation into irony or pungency. It is the story of a much-injured and revengeful Norse pilot, who, having the chance to drown his old enemies, Milord and Milady, saves them at the mute appeal of their blue-eyed English baby. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... women. He seemed to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: See The Catalogue. Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is The Squinting Poetess.] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See To a Poetess. More seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend with poetical tastes. [Footnote: ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... courage to face truth, you should have a surer ideal than we have found. When this comes, there will be less sentimentality but much deeper feeling about marriage. I have tried to show you a different ideal, and picture for you the Jewish home, where the exalted esteem in which women are held is the outcome of their attitude to marriage and the ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... benches, and once his hand was upon the lock of the door; but attracted as much by the daughter as repelled by the mother, he could move no farther. The mother's masculine boldness heightened, by contrast, the charms of the daughter's soft sentimentality. The Lady Isabel seemed to shrink from the indelicacy of her mother's manners, and seemed peculiarly distressed by the strange efforts Lady Dashfort made, from time to time, to drag her forward, and to fix upon her the attention of gentlemen. ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... pretentious quarterly to the arrogant and flippant daily newspaper, and the weekly and monthly publications are mostly heathen or maudlin. They express and inculcate, on the one hand, stoical, cold, and polished pride of mere intellect, or on the other, empty and wretched sentimentality. Some employ the skill of the engraver to caricature the institutions and offices of the Christian religion, and others to exhibit the grossest forms of vice, and the most distressing scenes of crime and suffering. The illustrated press has become to us what the amphitheatre ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... boarded the car and pursued his homeward way conscious, let us hope, of a very pretty and graceful deed of kindness to a most insignificant claimant for protection and succor. Sentimental, was it? Well, God help the world when all sentimentality of this kind is gone ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... such impersonal items, but included meals, scandals, relationships, finances, love affairs, quarrels, peccadillos. Here Nick often played his harmonica, his lips sweeping the metal length of it in throbbing rendition of such sure-fire sentimentality as The Long, Long Trail, or Mammy, while the others talked, joked, kept time with tapping ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... extinguished. They may flag, or vanish for a time, but their restoration in increased vigor and radiance is certain; for, they bear within themselves the guarantee of a future. Henriette Herz, the apostate daughter of Judaism chewing the cud of Schleiermacher's sentimentality and Schlegel's romanticism, had not yet passed away when England produced Jewish women whose deeds were quickened by the spirit of olden heroism, who walked in the paths of wisdom and faith, and, recoiling from the cowardice that counsels apostasy, would have fought, if need be, suffered, and bled, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... been attributed to religious sentimentality or religiosity. The latter word has been defined as "an excessive susceptibility to the religious sentiments, especially wonder, awe, and reverence, unaccompanied by any correspondent loyalty to divine law in ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... cetera. This, however, is mere sentimentality; and as regards George and Theo, is neither here nor there. What I mean to say is, that the young lady's family were perfectly satisfied with the state of affairs between her and Mr. Warrington; and though he had not as yet asked ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Cairo and the Nile. The actual terminus at the Suez end is called Port Tewfik, after Ismail's son and successor in the khedivate. This convenient mode of perpetuating the names of mighty actors in the Suez drama suggests a certain sentimentality, but the present generation cares as little for the subject as for a moldy play-bill hanging in a dark ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... of human civilization. First: the let-alone policy; every man to look out for number one. This is the age of selfishness. Second: the opposite pole of thinking; every man to do somebody's else work for him. This is the dry rot of sentimentality that feeds tramps and enacts poor laws such as excite the indignation of Herbert Spencer. But the third stage is represented by our formula: every man must render and receive the best possible service, except in the case of inequality, and ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... might have felt a little hurt, a little neglected by the absence of any show of feeling on his wife's part, but Stott passed it by. He was singularly free from all sentimentality; certain primitive, human emotions seem to have played no part in his character. At this moment he certainly had no thought that he was being carelessly treated; he wanted to be free from the oppression of that horror upstairs—so ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... feeling; but she would not; it did not suit her. Mr. Rhys let her be still for a few minutes. When he did speak, his voice was gravely tender indeed, as it had been to her all day, but there was no sentimentality about it. He spoke clear and abrupt, as ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... eighteen years which Paula passed in Bethlehem, or the previous sixteen years at Rome, did ever a scandal rise or a base suspicion exist in reference to the friendship which has made her immortal. There was nothing in it of that Platonic sentimentality which marked the mediaeval courts of love; nor was it like the chivalrous idolatry of flesh and blood bestowed on queens of beauty at a tournament or tilt; nor was it poetic adoration kindled by the contemplation of ideal excellence, such as Dante ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... with you," said Miss Littlejohn, with her eyes on the clock. "I broke my engagement to Metcalfe Hussey because he insisted on going over to join the English regiment his grandfather used to belong to. I've no patience with sentimentality." She took the check and screwed it into a small gold case. "I'm dining with my bandage-rolling aunt and going on to the opera. Thank goodness, the music will drown her war talk. Good-by." She nodded here and there and left, to be driven ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... insomuch as it substituted sentiment for common sense, and made enthusiasm, not reason, the guide of conduct. A character was given to political conflict which obtained for years to come. There was, it is true, a certain manliness about it in remarkable contrast with that maudlin sentimentality of our time which is rather inclined to ask pardon of the rebels of the late civil war for having put them to the trouble of getting up a rebellion. It was a conflict, nevertheless, more of party passion than of principle, wherein it is impossible to see that either ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... objects which neither need nor appreciate it. We often see it exercised in behalf of the brute animals, whose proper natures are totally unconscious of it; while their gentleness and quietness seem to rebuke this shallow, human sentimentality, as something wandering from its sphere, or as seed wasted upon the sand. Your sympathy has its legitimate uses, and it is against the economy of nature to misuse it, or bestow it upon natures foreign to its own. If we pity the slave because he is not like ourselves, we ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... fact clears the ground for God very ably, and then makes a well-meaning gesture in the vacant space. There is no help nor strength in his gesture unless God is there. Without God, the "Service of Man" is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an hypocrisy in the undisciplined prison ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... scorching sun. Not a sound was heard but the gentle ripple of a limpid stream, breaking over the boulders on its course towards the ravine below. But it was hardly the moment to ponder on the poetic scene, for fatigue and hunger had almost overcome sentimentality, and I got as quickly as I could to the first resting-place. This I found to be a native cane-grower's plantation bungalow, where quite a number of persons was assembled, the occasion of the meeting being the baptism and benediction of the sugar-cane mill. Before I was ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... since he felt it to the last fibre of his being, and could not more dispute its mastery than he could dispute the force of gravitation of which he knew nothing but the formula. He was only too glad to yield himself entirely, not to her charm or to any sentimentality of religion, but to her mental and physical energy of creation which had built up these World's Fairs of thirteenth-century force that turned Chicago and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... heroines exercised their benevolence. Very likely he would discover that, when at last the poor began to take an important part in the action of the story, we were permitted to see them at first only through a haze of sentimentality, so that, allowing for great advances in the art of novel writing between the time of Richardson and the time of Dickens, we still should find the astonishing characterizations of "Pamela" reflected in the impossible virtues and melodramatic ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... treasures of Rushbrook's villa, far from provoking any sentimentality, seemed only to give truth to the current rumor that it was merely waiting to be transformed into a gorgeous watering-place hotel under Rushbrook's direction; that, with its new ball-room changed into an elaborate ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... oneself, "Where shall I be in an hour's time?" One gazes with a subtle feeling of affection on one's limbs, and wonders, "Where shall I get it?" Subconsciously one is amused and a little ashamed of such concessions to sentimentality. The best thing to do under the circumstances is to go and check the range-finders' figures, or prepare the headlines of ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... that she knew so well? This side of him was the same, and it was a side that pleased her; but this was all she ever saw of him now. Where was his sentimentality—those old, varying moods of impetuous love-making, of fanciful, quixotic devotion, of heart-breaking gloom, of alternating, absurd tenderness and haughty dignity? His nature had been a sensitive one, his temperament bordering closely on the artistic. She knew that, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... a song she had always hated because of its sickly sentimentality. She had no sweetheart, and having none, she certainly did not want him back. But she admitted that there was a certain melodious swing to the tune, and that her fingers had probably strayed into the rhythm of it while she was ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... than the sight of a nation in search of its great man, nothing more beautiful than its readiness to accept a hero on trust. Nor is this a feeble sentimentality. It is much rather a noble yearning of what is best in us, for it is only in these splendid figures which now and then sum up all the higher attributes of character that the multitude of men can ever hope ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... an inability to form permanent purposes and to inhibit the distracting desires; (4) a desire to win others' good opinion and sympathy,—therefore he always lavished his money on those whom that kind of "good fellowship" wins and told pathetic stories to those whose sentimentality made them easy victims; (5) a weak kind of egoism, seeking easy ways to pleasure and position, restless under discipline, always repentant after wrong-doing, fluent in speech but lacking the courage to face ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... punishment, both in being sent beyond the rebel lines and afterwards in being defeated for governor of his State by more than one hundred thousand majority, that many of the delegates were not content to sit with him,—a sentiment which Mr. Vallandingham is said to have considered one of mawkish sentimentality, but one to which he deferred by quietly withdrawing from all participation in the proceedings. It was believed, and indeed openly asserted, at the time, that if he had chosen to remain the attempt to eject him by resolution, as ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... should be put hors de combat before the fight became a hand-to-hand melee. It certainly seemed, at the first blush, to be rather cowardly to pelt the poor beggars with grape while they were unable to strike a blow in return; but the feeling was, after all, one of very weak, false sentimentality. Every man of them was an outlaw and, even if not yet an actual murderer at least a potential one, and a consorter with cruel, cowardly brutes in human shape who would destroy without mercy if they were not themselves destroyed—who ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... to us all; one of the Division doctors, Alexei Ivanovitch, a man from Little Russia, beloved of us all, whether in the Otriad or the army, a character possessing it seemed none of the Russian moods and sensibilities, of the kindest heart but no sentimentality, utterly free from self-praise, self-interest, self-assertion, humorous, loving passionately his country and, with all his Russian romance and even mysticism, packed with practical common sense; another Division doctor, a young man, carving for himself a practice out of ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... no touch of cant, or of that other-worldliness which Coleridge complains of as interfering with the pressing affairs and obligations of the present. No pen ever drew a firmer boundary between sentiment and sentimentality. But never was shrewd knowledge of this world so humane, keen observation so kind, wit so tender, and humor so sanctified, united with resolution by all means to teach and save mankind so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... literary and scientific activity of the period, Italian society was never quite so fantastically immoral as in this long peace, which was broken only by the invasions of the French republic. A wide-spread sentimentality, curiously mixed of love and letters, enveloped the peninsula. Commerce, politics, all the business of life, went on as usual under the roseate veil which gives its hue to the social history of the time; but the idea which remains in the mind is one of a tranquillity ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... Yet all was not sentimentality with him. He was an honest and high-spirited man in the main. He questioned me—and no question could then be a bolder one at the time—in what manner he could best serve me. My answer was immediate—"Find out the commercial house of Elnathan, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... far too sensual in my opinion. They think a great deal too much about their sexual appetites;—only they don't think about them in those terms unfortunately; they think about them veiled and wreathed; that's why we are sunk in such a bog of sentimentality ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... lived, and that such common things as bread and wine and love and hatred were shot through with the pure gold of mystery. Once, if he had been moved to magnanimity it would have been through an impulse of weak and bloodless sentimentality ... now he had risen to generosity on the wings of a supreme indifference, a magnificent contempt for unessentials, a full-blooded understanding. Not that he had achieved a cold and pallid philosophy ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... of the religious contemplation of a future state is pure sentimentality, and like all pure sentimentality is either immoral or non-moral. But here the two things are brought into clear juxtaposition, the bright hope of Heaven and the hard work done here below. Now is that what the gleam and expectation of a future life ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... charm of it was a generalized one—I think an impersonal one; for with the thought of individual persons who might illustrate it there comes too often into my memory a touch of sordidness, if not in one connection then in another; so that I suspect myself, not for the first time, of sentimentality. Was the social atmosphere after all anything but a creation of my own dreams? Was the village ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... unreservedly bind up their destinies with those of the Cotton dynasty,—the Issachars of the North, whose strong backs are bowed to receive any burden,—the men who in the present conflict will see nought but the result of the maudlin sentimentality of fanatics and the empty cries of ambitious demagogues,—are not mistaken in their calculations. While Cotton is King, as it now is, nothing but time or its own insanity can permanently shake its hold on the national policy. In ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... tenderness. He wept sweet tears over Maillard, that nice little man introduced la paperasserie into the September massacres. But as emotional tenderness leads to fury, he becomes all at once furious against the victims. There was no help for it. It is the sentimentality of the age. The assassin is pitied, but the victim is considered quite unpardonable. In his later manner Michelet is more Michelet than ever before. There is no common sense in it; it is simply wonderful! Neither art nor science, neither criticism nor narrative; only furies and fainting-spells ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... hour magnified, and she wondered who this being was who had brought so much trouble into her life even before she had seen him. As the word 'trouble' went through her mind she paused, arrested by a passing feeling of sentimentality; but it explained nothing, defined nothing, only touched her as a breeze does a flower, and floated away. The dreamy warmth of the fire absorbed her more direct feelings, and for some moments she dozed in a haze of dim sensuousness ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... one point on which you touch in your letter that encourages and pleases me greatly. You condemn, as is right, the exaggerated sentimentality, and the tendency to be easily moved and to weep from childish motives, from which I told you that I suffered at times; but, since this disposition of soul, so necessary to combat, exists in me, you rejoice that it does not affect my prayers and ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... nip all silly sentimentality in the bud. The real thing is never silly," said Joyce ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... you—I am a penniless clerk, with no one to look to but you, and no heart in the world but yours can form a clear idea of my probable future. Let us leave hearts out of the question. Business is business, and business is not carried on with sentimentality like romances. Now to the facts. My principal's practice is worth in his hands about twenty thousand francs per annum; in my hands, I think it would bring in forty thousand. He is willing to sell it for a hundred and fifty thousand francs. And here,' I said, striking my forehead, 'I feel ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... others, we found all the opinions to which we attached most importance, constantly attacked on the ground of feeling. Utility was denounced as cold calculation; political economy as hard-hearted; anti-population doctrines as repulsive to the natural feelings of mankind. We retorted by the word "sentimentality," which, along with "declamation" and "vague generalities," served us as common terms of opprobrium. Although we were generally in the right, as against those who were opposed to us, the effect was that the cultivation of feeling ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... hair in a plait; she looked about fourteen. Lord! how his nose used to peel! And the amount they ate, and the amount they slept in that immense feather bed with their feet locked together... William couldn't help a grim smile as he thought of Isabel's horror if she knew the full extent of his sentimentality. ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... story developed with a flavour of strangely twisted sentimentality. Suddenly he did not like it. He liked it less as ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... forever filling the world with a battle din which only observant souls hear: Love contending with Impurity; Passion springing mines under the calm entrenchment of Reason; scowling Ignorance thrusting in the dark at holy-eyed Reverence; Romance deathfully encountering Sentimentality on the one side and Commonplace on the other; young Sensibility clanging swords with gigantic maudlin Conventionalities. . . . I have seen no man who did not suffer from the shock of these wars, unless he got help from that One Man whom it is not unmanly ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... "Rotten sentimentality!" exclaimed Lawrence. "The curse of the age. Oh, there's no doubt she was clever. She played her cards so well that she succeeded in deceiving the principal looker-on as well ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... to make a home. The first home was made when a woman, cradling in her loving arms a baby, crooned a lullaby. All the tender sentimentality we throw around a place is the result of the sacred thought that we live there with some one else. It is "our" home. The home is a tryst—the place where we retire and shut the world out. Lovers make a home, just as birds make a nest, and unless ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... trembling like an old man, which he was, but which he never looked like save at moments of emotion like this, and told me to take the light; then stopped when he had got half-way across the room. "This is a piece of theatrical sentimentality," he said. "No, Phil, I will not go. I will not bring her into any such—Put down the lamp, and, if you will take my advice, ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... few weeks later, through the elaborate investigations of the Metropolitan police, the perambulator was discovered at midnight, standing by itself in a remote corner of Bayswater. It contained the manuscript of a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality. [Miss Prism starts in involuntary indignation.] But the baby was not there! [Every one looks at Miss Prism.] Prism! Where is that ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... Mrs. Delilah Jones, you overcome me with your sentimentality. I don't believe in love. That's what I believe in," said he, as he opened his pocket-book and showed her ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... it can allow itself to act as though Jesus were slain and in His tomb! Has not the Lord Himself spoken? Let us listen to Him who speaks in rebuke to those who would darken our homes and places of worship, and cheat themselves into a sentimentality which again sees the corpse of Jesus laid ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... of this chapter to demonstratte that such experiments upon human beings have been performed. Naturally, it will be impossible to quote the cases in full. Enough, however, will be given to prove that the charge of human experimentation is not the exaggeration of ignorance or sentimentality; that such methods of research have been practised upon the sick, the friendless, the poor in public institutions, without their knowledge or intelligent consent; that they are in vogue even in our own time; and that hospitals ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... our sentiments and to the impulses of our hearts than they do credit to our heads or to any serious desires we may cherish for her welfare. She has become, and is becoming more and more, the object of such an amount of sentimentality on the part of philanthropists, sociological investigators, labor agitators, and yellow journals—and a goodly share of journalism that prides itself upon not being yellow—that the real work-girl has been quite lost sight of. Her name ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... abominable Abiram don't find her out before then, you may depend upon it they will abandon the search. In the interim, the lady will have cooled. Walks upon the sea-shore are uncommonly dull without something like reciprocal sentimentality. The odds are, that the old aunt is addicted to snuff, tracts, and the distribution of flannel, and before August, the fair Dorothea will be yearning for a sight of her adorer. You can easily gammon Anthony Whaup into a loan of that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... and dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had once entered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbled strange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted. But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... sight of the Eps [?], often intreated the Duchess to intercede with her father. He once called with "Vathek" in his pocket, which he styled "his gospel." Moore's "Lallah Rookh" has too much western sentimentality for an Oriental romance, the common fault of most writers of such stories. Beckford prefers Moore's Melodies, and likes the "Loves of Angels" least of all. "Fudge ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... He felt the shadow of death upon him; and he worked as if his days were numbered. "Don't be surprised," he wrote to a friend, "if any morning at breakfast you hear that I am gone." But while he said so, he did not in the least degree indulge in the feeling of sickly sentimentality. He worked on as cheerfully and hopefully as if in the very fulness of his strength. "To none," said he, "is life so sweet as to those who have lost all ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... his own power of impassioned autobiography, and because he had the same sort of power of exhibiting both his charm and his weakness as Boswell had in dealing with Johnson. But Ruskin was not at all a typical Englishman; he had a very feminine side to his character, and though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme trenchancy, and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and picturesque. He had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ideal, and an exuberant fancy; but though his spell over ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... women, the old, deep, human notes which "make us men." Youth, beauty, charm, death—they are the great themes with which all art, plastic or literary, tries to conjure. It is given to very few to handle them simply, yet sufficiently; with power, yet without sentimentality. Breathed into Laura's short life, they affected whose who knew her like the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... roses Amy gave him were the sort that the Italians lay in dead hands, never in bridal wreaths, and for a moment he wondered if the omen was for Jo or for himself, but the next instant his American common sense got the better of sentimentality, and he laughed a heartier laugh than Amy had ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... the truth by the exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said—though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality—leaving the world better for the art that they ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... understand a thing. But, my pretty dear, you must remember that you will not have a father always. Who will look after you, when I am gone, except the Almighty?—and He does not do it, except for the few who look after themselves. It is my duty to consider these points, and they override sentimentality. To me it is nothing that Dashville will be an Earl, and a man of great influence, if he keeps up his present high character; but it is something to me that I find him modest, truthful, not led away by phantoms, a gentleman—which is more than a nobleman—and with his whole heart given ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... me to take out the gold purse and look at it. It was an imbecile thing to do—call it impulse, sentimentality, what you wish. I brought it out, one eye on the door, for Mrs. Klopton has a ready eye and a noiseless shoe. But the house was quiet. Down-stairs McKnight was flirting with the telephone central and there was an odor of boneset tea in the air. I ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... abstraction; of no possible use except as a convenient cell for referring (as in a nest of boxes), which may perhaps as much degrade the idea as a relative of my own degraded the image of the crescent moon by saying, in his abhorrence of sentimentality, that it reminded him of the segment from his own thumb-nail when clean cut by an instrument called a nail-cutter. This was the Aristotelian notion. But Kant could not content himself with this idea. His own theory (1) as to time and space, (2) the refutation of Hume's notion of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... produced before the Author's twenty-fourth year [1796], devoted as he was to the 'soft strains' of Bowles, have more in common with the passionate lyrics of Collins and the picturesque wildness of the pretended Ossian, than with the well-tuned sentimentality of that Muse which the overgrateful poet has represented as his earliest inspirer. For the young they will ever retain a peculiar charm, because so fraught with the joyous spirit of youth; and in the minds of all readers that feeling ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... be altered. Birth costs nothing, except in pain and valour and such old-fashioned things; and the merchant need pay no more for mating a strong miner to a healthy fishwife than he pays when the miner mates himself with a less robust female whom he has the sentimentality to prefer. Thus it might be possible, by keeping on certain broad lines of heredity, to have some physical improvement without any moral, political, or social improvement. It might be possible to keep a supply of strong and ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... inconsistencies Real happiness is a state of dulness Reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim Rewards, together with the expectations, of the virtuous Salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution Service of watering the dry and drying the damp (Whiskey) Sham spiritualism She had sunk her intelligence in her sensations She marries, and it's the end of her sparkling She herself did not like to be seen eating ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... take the right tone," flashed through my mind. "I may not get far with sentimentality." But it was only a momentary thought. I swear she really did interest me. Besides, I was exhausted and moody. And cunning so easily goes ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... first visit to her, not with any maudlin sentimentality, but with a quiet earnestness: the empty room looking to the river, the open piano and the music upon it, the few roses, and the books. He recalled "The Scarlet Letter" bound in white, and her partial ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... illogical heat which he tried to suppress; "I don't know what you mean by 'it' and 'something.' Ringstone's offer was perfectly unselfish; he certainly did not suppose that I would be affected, any more than he would he, by the childish sentimentality of these people over a legitimate, every-day business affair. The old Don made a good bargain, and simply sold the land he could no longer make profitable with his obsolete method of farming, his gang of idle retainers, and his Noah's Ark machinery, to a man who knew how to use steam reapers, ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... are one"—the ultimate destiny of each human soul, each of the Father's children, for all, no matter what differences man may see, are equal in His sight; and He created not one in vain. So love to God in its true expression is not a mere sentimentality, a mere abstraction: it is life, it is growth, it is spiritual awakening and unfoldment, it is realization. Again, it is life: it ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... story to him, to be sure, told to the end, the pages shut. And she must needs seem to seek to turn the leaf anew! What else indeed could he think? Surely she had been beguiled by Gladys' vicarious sentimentality as to the lure of his coming, even while she ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... that the word would to many readers seem to imply a degree of blame, it might be said that George Sand created Sandism, so true is it that, morally speaking, all good has a reverse of evil. This leprosy of sentimentality would have been charming. Still, Sandism has its good side, in that the woman attacked by it bases her assumption of superiority on feelings scorned; she is a blue-stocking of sentiment; and she is rather less of a bore, love to some extent neutralizing literature. The most conspicuous ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... he, who had seen the world, especially in its social aspects, should be perplexed by a young girl scarcely twenty, and that this girl of all others should be little Madge. He had intimated that she had become imbued with sentimentality and aspirations after ideals, and was hoping to meet a male embodiment of these traits, which he regarded as prominently lackadaisical. Her merry and half ironical laugh was not the natural response of a woman of the ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... him!" The only pleasant thing in the meaningless room was Nannie's drawing-board, which displayed the little girl's painstaking and surprisingly exact copy in lead-pencil, of some chromo—"Evangeline" perhaps, or some popular sentimentality of the sixties. In the ten years which had elapsed since Mrs. Maitland had plunged into her debauch of furnishing—her one extravagance!—of course the parlors had softened; the enormous roses of the carpets ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... violinist, writes: "The beauty, purity and equality of his tone, and the tastefulness of his cantabile playing, cannot be surpassed; but he does not execute great difficulties." His compositions are marked by vivacity, grace, and sweet sentimentality, but he has neither the depth of feeling, the grand pathos, nor the concentrated energy of ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... than that of Goethe ever became, yet Goethe has also his measure of significance for our theme. If he steadied Herder in his religious experience, he steadied others in their poetical emotionalism and artistic sentimentality, which were fast becoming vices of the time. The classic repose of his spirit, his apparently unconscious illustration of the ancient maxim, 'nothing too much,' was the more remarkable, because there were few influences in the whole ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... of the gradual abandonment of natural form the "angle" school is paralleled by the "curve" school, which also descends wholly from Gauguin. The best known representative is Maurice Denis. But he has become a slave to sentimentality, and has been left behind. Matisse is the most prominent French artist who has followed Gauguin with curves. In Germany a group of young men, who form the Neue Kunstlevereinigung in Munich, work almost entirely in sweeping curves, and have reduced natural objects ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... entire absence of mawkish sentimentality, of effort to conceal the secret motives and desires of the heart beneath specious language and words of double meaning. On the contrary, they tear away from the heart the curtain of deceit, artifice and treachery, ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... deep sympathy without sentimentality, and an all-saving sense of humor amid dreadful and depressing conditions are the salient features of this little book. The author, who preserves her anonymity, has been "over the top" in the fullest sense. She has faced bombardments and aerial ...
— Attack - An Infantry Subaltern's Impression of July 1st, 1916 • Edward G. D. Liveing
... the low stool which she had always occupied, and which Marcus, in his strange sentimentality, had always considered sacred to her. She was veiled; but, through the thick gauze, he could see that her beautiful face was deathly pale. Her slender frame shook with little convulsions, that made the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... whom some readers know for the idle Books, long-winded Novels chiefly, which he wrote, was the Grandfather of this favored Princess; a good-natured old gentleman, of the idle ornamental species, in whose head most things, it is likely, were reduced to vocables, scribble and sentimentality; and only a steady internal gravitation towards praise and pudding was traceable as very real in him. Anton Ulrich, affronted more or less by the immense advancement of Gentleman Ernst and the Hanoverian or YOUNGER Brunswick ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... he was neither cruel by nature nor cross-grained; and he was even moved by the pathetic and frank avowal which Barbara made to him on the state of her heart. But, though touched by her tears, he understood them not, treated them but as the natural mawkishness of girlish sentimentality; nor had her assurance that she could never love any one but her cousin John, power to dissuade him from the prosecution of his suit. He was void of all delicacy of feeling, was neither hurt nor displeased with ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... chair and looked at her through a cloud of smoke. She saw that his eyes were not gray, as she had thought, but brown, a hazel brown with points of light sparkling in the irises and taking away all the suggestion of weakness and sentimentality that makes pure brown eyes unsatisfactory in ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... unnecessary interference with the comfort of customers, and loss of time and money. The necessity of providing for his little living family had quite disenthralled Monsieur C—— from any weakly sentimentality in regard to his little ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... first unfurling of her standard on the rocky pinnacle of Europe, is here celebrated in the style which it deserved. There is no false timsel-decoration about Tell, no sickly refinement, no declamatory sentimentality. All is downright, simple, and agreeable to Nature; yet all is adorned and purified and rendered beautiful, without losing its resemblance. An air of freshness and wholesomeness breathes over it; we are among honest, inoffensive, yet fearless peasants, untainted by the vices, undazzled by the theories, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... to save you from the sentimentality in which you are lost at this moment. The regent of France—already too much occupied by whims and pleasures—must make things worse by adding passion to the list. And what a passion! Paternal love, dangerous love—an ordinary love may be satisfied, and ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... not feel a bit sorry for my father. He seemed to me to be the victim of his own foolish sentimentality. The current cant required my attendance at his funeral, but it was ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... familiar to be spoken with the least emphasis: they are strong, tender, and sweet, yet never without a sufficient infusion of brisk natural acid and piquancy to keep their sweetness from palling on the taste: they are full of fresh, healthy sentiment, but never at all touched with sentimentality: the soul of romance works mightily within them, yet never betrays them into any lapses from good sense, or any substitutions of feeling ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... with my head on another person's knapsack full of used clothes; I am doing this solely because it is just the right size. But sleep will not come; there are only thoughts and dreams and lines of poetry and sentimentality. The sack smells human, and I fling it away, laying my head on my arm. My arm smells of ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least. The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things, to the scholar is rarely well remembered; steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one's style, both of speaking and writing. If he has worked hard from morning till night, though he may have grieved that he could not be watching the train of his thoughts during that time, yet the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... Thirdly, was the desire of knowledge as a luxury to brighten life and kindle thought. I am very much afraid that, in the ordinary temper of our people, and the ordinary mode of looking at life, the last of these motives savours a little of self-indulgence, and sentimentality, and other objectionable qualities. There is a great stir in the region of physical science at this moment, and it is likely, as any one may see, to take a chief and foremost place in the field of intellectual activity. After the severity with which ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... favourite after another when she first returned, but her attention wandered from her best beloved, and all that were solid came somehow to be set aside and replaced, the nourishing fact by inflated fiction, reason and logic by rhyme and rhythm, and sense by sentimentality, so far had her strong, simple, earnest mind deteriorated in the unwholesome atmosphere of London drawing rooms. It was only a phase, of course, and she could have been set right at once had there been ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... ascribed to King Liholiho—Kamehameha II—who died in London July 13, 1824, on his visit to England. It attained great vogue and still holds its popularity with the Hawaiians. The reader will note the comparative effeminacy and sentimentality of the style and the frequent use of euphemisms and double-entendre. The double meaning in a Hawaiian mele will not always be evident to one whose acquaintance with the language is not intimate. To one who comes to it from excursions in Anglo-Saxon poetry, wandering through ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... usually leads to humor or satire; sentiment without observation to rhetoric and long-drawn lachrymosity. The extreme fault of the one is flippant superficiality, that of the other is what is called sickly sentimentality. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... sensible that the clergy on the whole have not used it much; rather they prefer to sing of heaven with a golden floor and a gate of pearl, ignoring a really fine hymn that pictures God as a sensible Being and not a Lord Chief Justice either of sickly sentimentality or of the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... fondness for such wisps of sentimentality and greediness as that?" Imogen asked, as the tiny griffon darted into the room and ran ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick |
