"Superciliousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Characteristics, was so enamoured of it, that he terms "gravity (its counterpart,) the essence of imposture;" and so it is, for to what purpose does a man store his brain with knowledge, and the profitable burden of the sciences, if he gathers only superciliousness and pride from the hedge of learning? instead of the milder traits of general affection, and the open qualities of social feelings. I remember, when a youth, I was extremely fond of attending the House of Commons, to hear the debates; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... prickly arguments, intricate conceptions; humbug and gammon and wishy-washy hair-splittings without end; and hullo! why here's avarice, and self-indulgence, and impudence! luxury, effeminacy and peevishness!—Yes, I see them all; you need not try to hide them. Away with falsehood and swagger and superciliousness; why, the three-decker is not built that would hold you with ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... felt from the heights or the depths, is sharply repugnant to a new gentility, that embraces all that have had the joy of promiscuous social intercourse. From this aristocracy no one is excluded that does not exclude himself through servility or superciliousness. Its distinction is liberality, that is, the habit of disputing questions and judging persons on their merits, with due allowance for that never wholly negligible possibility that the other man is right. Among those who are united by this spirit, ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... than in the case of his elder sons, and the home atmosphere was not such as to give the boy a sense of superiority, especially when diligently kept down by his brother. Even the half year at Eton had not produced superciliousness, though it had given Eton polish to the home-bred manners; it had made sisters valuable, and awakened a desire for masculine companionship. He did not rebel against his sister's rule; she was nearly a mother to him, and had always been the most active president of his studies and pursuits; and he ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lip, you could but suppose the heart young, confiding, and impressible. But the eyes were in wonderful contrast to these beautiful lips; they shone like great, mysterious, unfathomable stars—one moment sparkling with youthful superciliousness, the next with the firm, steady, piercing glance of an observing sage. The lofty, somewhat retreating forehead, and the straight, finely-pointed nose, formed a profile indicating commanding elevation of character. And the soul imprisoned behind these temples was powerfully agitated, seeking ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... four days with malevolence perpetually increasing, and without any endeavour but to outvie each other in superciliousness and neglect; and when any two of us could separate ourselves for a moment, we vented our indignation at the sauciness ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... iron rail of the seat as if to leap from it, but checked herself suddenly and leaned back, with a set smile on her mouth that seemed stamped there. It was remarkable that with that smile she flung away her old affectation of superciliousness for an older and ruder audacity, and that not only the expression, but the type of her face appeared ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... communicativeness, miss all touch with these friendly lives, and knock their confiding "feelers" back into the shell. But the advance-guard at least of our countrymen will find here a human nature poor and narrowed but right-minded, true, unwarped either by feudal lordliness or modern superciliousness. Reciprocity of treatment, let us hope, will endeavor to keep it so for years ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... quite simple objection to the causes advocated by certain wealthy idealists; causes of which the cause called teetotalism is the strongest case. I have used many abusive terms about the thing, calling it Puritanism, or superciliousness, or aristocracy; but I have not seen and stated the quite simple objection to philanthropy; which is that it is religious persecution. Religious persecution does not consist in thumbscrews or fires of Smithfield; the essence ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... only by her charities and kindness at Christmas-time, that the Rev. Dr. Potter, the rector at Rosebury, knew her. The old clergy, you see, live with the county families. Good little Madame de Florac was pitied and patronised by the Doctor, treated with no little superciliousness by Mrs. Potter, and the young ladies, who only kept the first society. Even when her rich brother died, and she got her share of all that money Mrs. Potter said poor Madame de Florac did well in not trying to move out of her natural sphere (Mrs. P. was ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rather overdid his superciliousness and that he treated you a little as if he were your ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... others who are specially predisposed to experience a certain series of sensations? Moreover, even an ordinary observer will constantly discover faces which bear the unmistakable imprint of a ruling passion—such as superciliousness, self-satisfaction, misanthropy, sensuality, and many others. Sometimes, no doubt, we meet with a face that expresses nothing; but when the physiognomy has a marked stamp it is almost always a true index. The passions act upon the muscles, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... less disinclined to go into the feast if there were in it reserved seats for superior people and a private entrance to them. If the wise and prudent were more of both, they would be liker the babes to whom these things are revealed, and they would be revealed to them too. Not knowledge but the superciliousness which is the result of the conceit of knowledge hinders from God, and is one of the strongest fortresses against which the weapons of our ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... took it into her head to give herself airs, and treat me with some coldness and superciliousness, I did not hesitate to set down at breakfast my dish of tea not half drank, go for my hat and stick that lay in the corner of the room, turn my back to the house insalutato hospite, and walk away to London without ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... stones break through sandy earth, camels come and go, passing from south to north, from north to south, marching slowly with rhythmic gait, as if to the sound of music which only they can hear, glancing from side to side with unutterable superciliousness, looking wistfully here and there at some miniature oasis thrown like a dark prayer-carpet on the yellow sand. Two or three in a band they go, led by desert men in blowing white, or again in a long train of twelve or twenty, their legs a moving lattice, their ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... feeling of the sharp contrast between them which had made the man stare at him so; in the moment that he was perhaps contending with the bitterest poverty, he (the Baron) was piling up heaps and heaps of gold with all the superciliousness of the gambler. He resolved to find out the stranger that very morning and atone to him ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... in his resigning his pension. His feelings appear to have been deeply hurt by Hamilton's superciliousness, and his demand for the right to employ the whole time of his private secretary. In a long explanatory letter to Hutchinson, a leading member of the Irish parliament, and father of the late Lord Donoughmore, he says, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Politian and Hermolaus, or even Virgil and Cicero.' Erasmus in 1518 writes to thank a canon of Mainz who had entertained him at supper. After compliments on his host's charming manners, his erudition free from superciliousness—if he could have known Gibbon, he surely must have used those immortal words of praise, 'a modest and learned ignorance'—and his wit and elegance of speech, he goes on: 'One might have been listening to a Roman. Now let the Italians go and taunt Germans with barbarism, if they dare!' ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... disrespect, disesteem, disestimation[obs3]; disparagement &c. (dispraise) 932, (detraction) 934. irreverence; slight, neglect, spretae injuria formae [Lat][Vergil], superciliousness &c. (contempt) 930. vilipendency|, vilification, contumely, affront, dishonor, insult, indignity, outrage, discourtesy &c. 895; practical joking; scurrility, scoffing, sibilance, hissing, sibilation; irrision[obs3]; derision; mockery; irony &c. (ridicule) 856; sarcasm. hiss, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... coldly frustrated soon takes unto itself a sting and branding-irons, and thus, what was originally merely idle curiosity, becomes bitter malice; and henceforth the worthy minister's gossiping wife lost no opportunity of inveighing against the superciliousness of the stranger, and of insinuating that some very extraordinary circumstances led her "to fear that something was radically wrong about that poor Mrs. Gerome, for troubles that could not be poured into the sympathetic ears of pastors and of pastors' wives must ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... lady, wild and merry as she was, and enchanted to be in the rare fairyland of child companionship. And that indeed she had, Mysie and Valetta, between whose ages she stood, hung to her inseparably, and Jasper was quite transformed from his grim superciliousness into her devoted knight. At tea-time there was a competition for the seats next to her, determined by Valetta's taking one side, in right of the birthday, and Jasper the other, because he secured it, and Mysie gave way to him because he was Japs, ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Notwithstanding the superciliousness of my friendly assistant, I still wrote verse, which was handed about the village as something wonderful. As Riprapton doubted, or rather denied my rhyming prowess, at length I was determined to try it upon himself, and he shortly gave me ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Grobbendonck, invited Sir Thomas to a banquet. A large party of Flemish nobles were collected, among whom I felt myself a very humble person. The conversation turned upon the thoroughly hated Cardinal Granvelle, his luxurious style of living, and the air of haughty superciliousness with which he treated all who approached him. As the wine circulated, the abuse of the Cardinal became more vehement. His magnificent equipages, liveries, and the arrangements of his household, excited their derision; the way he lived, and the tinsel and glitter in which the prelate pranked himself, ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... had come across to see my stepfather with some message from Semyon Matveitch, and he found me in our little sitting-room. I was getting up to go; he detained me. He was very lively and unconstrained in all his movements and words, but of superciliousness or arrogance, of the tone of Petersburg superiority, there was not a trace in him, and nothing of the officer, of the guardsman.... On the contrary, in the very freedom of his manner there was something ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... setting of fine clothes, cleanliness, and the absence of petty worries, made his characteristics respectable. That which is ill breeding in homespun, is apt to become mere eccentricity in purple and fine linen; Grant felt that Harcourt jarred on him less than he did before, and was grateful without superciliousness. Harcourt, relieved to find that Grant was neither critical nor aggressively reminiscent, and above all not inclined to claim the credit of creating him and Tasajara, became more confident, more at his ease, and, I fear, in proportion more unpleasant. ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... humbled; he drops into a seat beside her shrinkingly; and the dog, with more self-possession and sense of his own consequence, brushes with his paw some imaginary dust from a third chair, as in the superciliousness of the well dressed, and then seats himself, and looks ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which ignorance revenges the superciliousness of learning, is that of pedantry; a censure which every man incurs, who has at any time the misfortune to talk to those who cannot understand him, and by which the modest and timorous are sometimes frighted from the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... though the mother was found to be intolerable, and the younger sisters not worth speaking to, a wish of being better acquainted with them was expressed towards the two eldest. By Jane, this attention was received with the greatest pleasure, but Elizabeth still saw superciliousness in their treatment of everybody, hardly excepting even her sister, and could not like them; though their kindness to Jane, such as it was, had a value as arising in all probability from the influence of their brother's admiration. ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... primitive openness and good nature, than mere time and experience of the world should have wrought in it. Perhaps this was nothing more than a slight perversion which he had contracted in the school of Warburton. What was a coarse arrogance in the master himself, assumed the form of nicety and superciliousness in the less confident and better regulated tempers of Mason and Hurd. His harmless vanity cleaved to him longer. As a proof of this, it is related that, several years after the publication of Isis, ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... person of markedly inferior position. Our sentence would run in this case, Will Er mit mir kommen? (Will HE—meaning, will YOU, John or Thomas—come with me?), and carries with it a sort of contemptuous superciliousness, as if the person spoken to were beneath the dignity of a direct address. It is evident, therefore, that to a sensitive, self-torturing child like Froebel, being addressed in this manner would cause the keenest pain; since, as he justly says, it has the effect, by the mere form of speech, of isolating ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... idea was that his stick had attracted the man's attention by the poor figure it made in the castle hall, and that Bashville was requesting him, with covert superciliousness, to remove his property. On second thoughts, his self-esteem rejected this suspicion as too humiliating; but he resolved to show Bashville that he had a gentleman to deal with. So he took the stick, and instead of thanking Bashville, ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... elusive South Pole and across a third clear and unimpeded water way straight to the magical, mystical, mysterious Orient. This sense of amplitude gives the Native Son an air of superiority... Yes, you're quite right, it has a touch of superciliousness—very difficult to understand and much more difficult to endure when you haven't seen California; but completely understandable and endurable when ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... he was also a mounted policeman. He might even be grandiloquently styled, by those who were particular about the names of things, the soldier of peace. Still Dora had an irresistible conception of the pained disdain, the latent superciliousness, which would have sprung into full force in Fanny's dark eyes, if she had ever seen the once magnificent Cyril in the most careful modification of a bobby's ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... hurl it at the dapper head of the consequential little gentleman, but with such a girl standing by it would have been impossible to treat him with any disrespect, and as I looked at him I felt sure that his apparent superciliousness was probably the result of too much money and too ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... illustrations, their wonderful pertinence, his exhaustless humor, his confidence in his own resources, engendered by his firm belief in the justice of the cause he so ably advocated, never once rising, however, to the point of arrogance or superciliousness, fastened upon him the eyes of the people everywhere, friends and opponents alike. It was not strange that more than once, during the course of the unparalleled excitement which marked this canvass, Douglas should have been thrown off his guard by the singular self-possession displayed by his ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... intercourse of particular friends, but avoided general society; in company, he seldom talked, and only with a neighbour; he shunned the acquaintance of persons of rank, because he disliked patronage, and dreaded the superciliousness of pride. His conversation was simple; he possessed, but seldom used, considerable powers of satire; but he applied his keenest shafts of declamation against the votaries of cruelty. In performing acts ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... clerk, with a kind look at the boy. He had lost one of his own years ago, and Eddy, in spite of his innocent superciliousness, appealed ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of arms. He walked like a man accustomed to command; he turned a cold eye upon too-familiar wayfarers and startled them into silence by the level blackness of his low brows. Wealth, beauty, age nor rank won servility or superciliousness from him. The Egyptian soldier was not obliged to cringe, and this one abode by ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the tutor left the office, telling Nicholas that he might go home with the little girls if he liked. "I shall try to have the books you need by to-morrow," he said, and, his natural amiability overcoming his assumed superciliousness, he ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... no right to deprive the girl of this money, and it was more than probable that these young fellows were not as wild as they seemed. Fernando's calm superciliousness reassured him in ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... later, the servant came to me with a card on which was engraved the name of 'Mr. Joseph Smythe.' I requested her to show him up. He entered with his usual air of languid superciliousness, and seated himself in a ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... quitting his presence, as is done at court! This was said of a man, whom I found to be of more simple, off-hand, unpretending, gentleman-like deportment, whose demeanour had more of the nice tact which neither offends by superciliousness, nor wounds by condescension, than that of any other man of rank in England. To return to our subject;—the Austrian face is, certainly, getting to be prevalent among the southern catholic families, for all ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... ardent when there was no occasion for it, a man who blended the faults of Grub Street with the faults of St. James's Street, and who united to the vanity, the jealousy and the irritability of a man of letters, the affected superciliousness and apathy of a man of ton. The Whartons over-praise Walpole where Lord Macaulay under-rates him; the truth lies between the two. He was not in the least an estimable or an admirable figure, but he wrote admirable, indeed incomparable letters to which the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... impressed with their keen interest in outside matters. All were of a type new to me, quiet, dignified, interested, with the fine manners of the Chinese gentleman, but without the rather lackadaisical superciliousness of some officials, nor was there anything Western about them; they were not copying Europe, but learning how to be a new, fine sort of Chinese. Among those whom I met were Mr. Yang, president of the Institute, and a prominent business ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... philosopher's young companion was just pleading openly and confidentially with his distinguished tutor, and apologising for having so far renounced his calling as a teacher in order to spend his days in comfortless solitude. No suspicion of superciliousness or arrogance had induced ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the vacant hours which were lost to love, she looked at her cousin to see if it were possible that he meant to make use of it. The manners of the young man, his gestures, the way in which he took up his eye-glass, his affected superciliousness, his contemptuous glance at the coffer which had just given so much pleasure to the rich heiress, and which he evidently regarded as without value, or even as ridiculous,—all these things, which shocked the Cruchots and the des Grassins, pleased Eugenie so deeply that before ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... pumping me. He alluded constantly to Europe, to the people I was supposed to know there—putting leading questions as to my acquaintances in the sepulchral city, and so on. His little eyes glittered like mica discs—with curiosity,—though he tried to keep up a bit of superciliousness. At first I was astonished, but very soon I became awfully curious to see what he would find out from me. I couldn't possibly imagine what I had in me to make it worth his while. It was very pretty to see how he baffled ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... care about the ordinary city folk. They have an air of elaborate superciliousness which testifies to ages of systematic half-culture. They seem to utter that hopeless word, connu! And what, as a matter of fact, do they know? They are only dreaming in their little backwater, like the oysters of the lagoon, distrustful of extraneous matter and oblivious of the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... matters of business and etiquette, can have no object but to demean himself in his public character in such a manner as to maintain the dignity of his office, without subjecting himself to the imputation of superciliousness or unnecessary reserve." ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... to time a man whom you suspected of having washed himself thoroughly, and his whole make-up seemed to match. As for the women, they were always the same, those frightful women you all know, ugly, tired looking, drooping, and walking along in their lackadaisical manner, with that air of foolish superciliousness which they assume, I ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the scantiest, in proportion to their intellectual capacity, were Archbishop Whately and Dr Brown. Accordingly they are the only two of whom Sir W. Hamilton, though acknowledging their abilities, speaks with some tinge of superciliousness. It cannot be denied that both Dr Brown and Whately would have thought and written better than they did, if they had been better read in the writings of previous thinkers; but I am not afraid that posterity will contradict me when ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... Waiyau, and very impudent, demanding gun or game medicine to enable them to shoot well: they came into the hut uninvited, and would take no denial. It is probable that the Arabs drive a trade in gun medicine: it is inserted in cuts made above the thumb, and on the forearm. Their superciliousness shows that they feel themselves to be the dominant race. The Manganja trust to their old bows and arrows; they are much more ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... themselves as indispensable, but also by serious and disinterested persons; and as evidence of greater or less weight may be adduced in opposition to that which Dr. Sancianco cites, it seems expedient, to us to study this question thoroughly, without superciliousness or sensitiveness, without prejudice, without pessimism. And as we can only serve our country by telling the truth, however bit, tee it be, just as a flat and skilful negation cannot refute a real and positive fact, in spite of the brilliance ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... "Tribune" was equally cogent and inspiriting—and the "Times," "Evening Post," and other principal papers, were not a whit behind. They came in good time, for they were needed. For in the humiliation of Bull Run, the popular feeling north, from its extreme of superciliousness, recoil'd to the depth ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... or of Spanish or Italian. Very few people know the Arthurian legends well, or even Malory (if they did they might realize that the Idylls of the King are hardly more important than a parody, or a "Chaucer retold for Children"); but no one accuses Tennyson of needing footnotes, or of superciliousness toward the uninstructed. The difference is merely in what people are prepared for; most readers could no more relate the myth of Atys correctly than they could give a biography of Bertrand de Born. It is ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... must be confessed, are as a rule imported ones. In fact, there was that evening, among all those in the pulp-mill, only one man who seemed to disassociate himself from the general good-will. That man was Waynefleet. He wore his old velvet jacket as a cloak of superciliousness—or, at least, that was how it seemed to the Bush-ranchers, who recognized and resented an effete pride in the squeak of his very ancient lacquered shoes. It is possible that he did not mean to make himself in any way offensive, and merely desired ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... the folds of my drab merino pelisse, and now lingering on the plain trimming of my cottage bonnet. Young ladies have a remarkable way of letting you know that they think you a "quiz" without actually saying the words. A certain superciliousness of look, coolness of manner, nonchalance of tone, express fully their sentiments on the point, without committing them by any positive ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Usually, superciliousness has not disturbed me. It is a cheap and harmless pleasure of cheap and harmless people. But just at that time my nerves were out of order, and Miss Ramsay's airs of patronage "got" on me. I proceeded politely to convey to her the impression that ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... dignity—though only in a mechanical way. On the other hand, Mlle. Blanche did not trouble to conceal the wrath that was sparkling in her countenance, but bent her gaze upon me with an air of impatient expectancy. I may remark that hitherto she had treated me with absolute superciliousness, and, so far from answering my salutations, had always ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... middle stood the choir, the brass band, and Mr. Dryland. The village yokels were collected round in open-mouthed admiration. The little party from the house took their places under the triumphal arch, the Clibborns assuming an expression of genteel superciliousness; and as they all wore their Sunday clothes, they made ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... commission with alacrity and self-confidence. I went to Bobbin's, and asked one of his young men, with easy indifference, to give me some of that. The young man, who is as handsome a young man as ever I looked at, and who appears to own the shop, and whose suave superciliousness would be worth everything to a cabinet minister who wanted to repel applicants for place, says, "I have n't an ounce: I have sent to Paris, and I expect it every day. I have a good deal of difficulty in getting that shade in my assortment." To think that ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... for Philip, he never dined at home. When he had no engagements he dined at his club, leaving Elinor with her mother. He gave Mrs. Dennistoun very little of his company, and when they did meet there was in his manner too a sort of reflection of the superciliousness of the "smart" visitors and the "smart" servant. She was to him, too, in some degree the landlady, the old lady down-stairs. Elinor, as was natural, redoubled her demonstrations of affection, her excuses and sweet words to make up for this neglect: but all the time there was in her ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... less be on terms of intimacy with one another, and the degree of their acquaintance or intimacy will always be largely dependent on community of tastes, interests, occupations, and early associations. But these facts afford no reason why one set of men should look down with superciliousness and disdain on another set of men who have not enjoyed the same early advantages or are not at present endowed with the same gifts or accomplishments as themselves, or why they should hold aloof from them when there is any opportunity of common action or social intercourse. The ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... England were apt to fancy that the rebels were officered by a set of planters or merchants, and to treat them accordingly with superciliousness and contempt, instead of which, besides General Washington, there were many who had been engaged from their youth upward in border warfare, not only with Indians, but with the disciplined troops of France. ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... sense of need and a humble trust and a daily experience have to appropriate and suck out the blessing that lies in the love of Jesus Christ. Blessed be His name! The end of all aristocracies of culture and superciliousness of intellect lies in that great truth that we possess the deepest knowledge and highest wisdom when we love and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... The superciliousness that lurked in her manner told Venn that thus far he had utterly failed. He inwardly sighed and felt it necessary to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... glad himself to be a savage a great part of every year, but yet, as savages, entitled to name their own rivers, their own lakes, their own mountains. After all, these terms—"savage," "heathen," "pagan"—mean, alike, simply "country people," and point to some old-time superciliousness of the city-bred, now confined, one hopes, to such localities as Whitechapel ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... positiveness, have, without the smallest foundation, loaded with calumny." For myself, I felt my own innocence; and I soon found, upon enquiry, that three fourths of those who are regularly subjected to a similar treatment, are persons whom, even with all the superciliousness and precipitation of our courts of justice, no evidence can be found sufficient to convict. How slender then must be that man's portion of information and discernment, who is willing to commit his character and welfare to ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... Frau Dellwig could not face her infinite superciliousness more than once, and kept out of the way in spite of their burning curiosity. When Dellwig's shouts became intolerable, she did not hesitate to wince conspicuously and to put up her hand to her head. When Manske forgot that it was not Sunday, and began to preach, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... existence. And, again he says in the Manual. "If you wish to be a philosopher, prepare yourself to be thoroughly laughed at since many will certainly sneer and jeer at you, and will say, 'He has come back to us as a philosopher all of a sudden,' and 'Where in the world did he get this superciliousness?' Now do not you be supercilious, but cling to the things which appear best to you in such a manner as though you were conscious of having been appointed by God to this position." Again in the little ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... called Tamba, where we found the people, who had not been visited so frequently by the slave-traders as the rest, rather timid and very civil. It was agreeable to get again among the uncontaminated, and to see the natives look at us without that air of superciliousness which is so unpleasant and common in the beaten track. The same olive color prevailed. They file their teeth to a point, which makes the smile of the women frightful, as it reminds one of the grin ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... had not been roughly bred like most of the others. When his fellow officers learned that he was a violinist by profession, that he could have had a soft job as interpreter or as an organizer of camp entertainments, they no longer resented his reserve or his occasional superciliousness. They respected a man who could have wriggled out ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... had from his many famous expeditions. And it was a curious thing in their rivalry, that Pompey's name and interest in the city was greatest when he was absent, for his renown in war, but when present he was often less successful than Crassus, by reason of his superciliousness and haughty way of living, shunning crowds of people, and appearing rarely in the forum, and assisting only some few, and that not readily, that his interest might be the stronger when he came to use it for himself. Whereas Crassus, being a friend always at hand, ready to be had and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the splendid schemes of Ralph Dewey and Company went on prospering, while he grew daily in self-importance, and in offensive superciliousness toward men from whom he had nothing to expect. In my own case I had little to complain of, as my contact with him was generally professional, and under circumstances that caused a natural deference to my ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... a setting, a chorus, howling the praise of the heroes, and also furnishing their blood money for the whims and extravagances of their masters. Such history only tends to produce conceit, national impudence, superciliousness and patriotic stupidity, all of which is in full bloom in our ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... was pleased and happy and flattered. She was evidently frightfully gone on him. As he limped along the high street of Blackstable he looked with a tinge of superciliousness at the people he passed. He knew a good many to nod to, and as he gave them a smile of recognition he thought to himself, if they only knew! He did want someone to know very badly. He thought he ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... feverish addresses, dictated by the fear, and often by the pen of the bloody buoy, and was seduced by them into some open indications of his new principles of government, and in fact, was so elated as to mix with his kindness a little superciliousness towards me. Even Mrs. Adams, with all her good sense and prudence, was sensibly flushed. And you recollect the short suspension of our intercourse, and the circumstance which gave rise to it, which you were so good ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... They seemed to look at her, intent as was his gaze, as from a vast distance, from heights which neither she nor all that respectable world that despised his poor shell could ever attain. With it all there was no hint of superciliousness: the eyes were too sad, too terribly wise in their own way for that; and his whole manner went far beyond modesty; it had all the pitiable self-consciousness of one that has fallen from the higher social plane. No common man, no matter what his fame and ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... subjects, English, Dutch, and Natives. There have been in her management of this great Colony alternations of apathy and inaction, with interference which was sometimes unwise and hasty. Some of her acts have been the result of ignorance, indifference, or superciliousness on ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... we are very unobservant or very self-deluded, we are all familiar with the sudden checking (often almost physically painful) of our aesthetic emotion by the hostile criticism of a neighbour or the superciliousness of an expert: "Dreadfully old-fashioned," "Archi-connu,""second-rate school work," "completely painted over," "utterly hashed in the performance" (of a piece of music), "mere prettiness"—etc. etc. How often has not a sentence like these ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... Both were young men, and the one whose attitude most suggested menace I recognised as a young lieutenant of a line regiment (the 102nd) whom I had shaved that morning. The other wore the uniform of a staff officer, and at the first glance I read a touch of superciliousness in his indignant face. His left hand held his horse's bridle, his other he still kept tightly clenched while he ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Mr Holmes observes, "might have been endured, so far as mere superciliousness and hauteur to the professional musician were involved, if these people had possessed any real feeling or love for music; but it was their total want of all taste, their utter viciousness, that rendered them hateful to Mozart. He was ready to make any sacrifice for his family, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... intelligence. To see Josh Craig was to have instant sense of the presence of a personality. The contrast between him standing half- dressed in the doorway and the man seated in fashionable and cynically-critical superciliousness was more than a matter of exteriors. Arkwright, with features carved, not hewn as were Craig's, handsome in civilization's over-trained, overbred extreme, had an intelligent, superior look also. But it was the look of expertness in things hardly worth the trouble of learning; ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... and beneath that look of good-humor you will find a little something of superciliousness. You will see a line running down the cheek from behind each nostril, drawing the whole face, good-humor and all, into a sneer of habitual contempt,—contempt, no doubt, of the vain endeavors and devices of men to provide against the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... at the introduction, with a "How-d'ye-do-who-the-deuce-are-you?" expression on his face. He struck Graeme as not bad-looking, in a somewhat over-fed and self-indulgent fashion, and inclined to superciliousness and self-complacency, if not to actual superiority and condescension. It occurred to him afterwards that this might arise from his absorption in his companion, for he turned again at once to Miss Brandt and began chattering like a lively and ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... told you of this before: and I believe I hinted to you once, that the superciliousness you put on only to him, was capable of a construction, which at the time would have very little gratified your pride to have had made; since it would have been as much in his ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... feats, were of a very high order. And I will say here that the characteristic flavor of the humor and fun-making of the average English people, as it impressed my sense, is what one gets in Sterne,—very human and stomachic, and entirely free from the contempt and superciliousness of most current writers. I did not get one whiff of Dickens anywhere. No doubt it is there in some form or other, but it is not patent, or even appreciable, to the sense of such ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... haughtiness and pride! She had long suspected the family to be very high, and this made it certain. Such insolence of behaviour as Miss Tilney's she had never heard of in her life! Not to do the honours of her house with common good breeding! To behave to her guest with such superciliousness! Hardly even to ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... and insulting them when any occasion offered. They did not understand us, nor did we them, and they generally mistook the reserve which is common with the British towards strangers for pride and superciliousness. ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... this performance with a carriage of the head which, for superciliousness, I never have seen equaled in man, woman, or beast. His war-cry was a tinny bleat: the cry of a soul bursting with sardonic merriment. It was like the Falstaffian laughter of the duck, without its ring ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... house with John, talking farm work and prices of produce as if they were matters of pleasant as well as necessary importance, and he set John to talking in his best vein and without superciliousness; he had the faculty of bringing out the best in the people he met. He brought some of his books—he had stopped at the Chamberlain homestead for his trunk on their return that evening—and added them to those already on the Hunter shelves. While arranging them, he sat on the floor before ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... went on, glancing affably at Zossimov. "You must admit," he went on, addressing Razumihin with a shade of triumph and superciliousness—he almost added "young man"—"that there is an advance, or, as they say now, progress in the name of ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... men's work by preference, including well-sinking, hedging, ditching, and excavating, without any sense of fatigue. Noted reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the other three with some superciliousness. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... cultivation. They have travelled, many of them,—spending a year or two in Paris, and a month or two in the rest of Europe. Consequently they endure society at home, with a smile, and a shrug, and a graceful superciliousness, which is very engaging. They are perfectly at home, and they rather despise Young America, which, in the next room, is diligently earning its invitation. They prefer to hover about the ladies who did not come out this season, but are a little used to the world, ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... especially those of New England, being no less narrow and prejudiced, filled with a sensitive pride and a jealous local patriotism, and bred up in a lofty appreciation of the merits and importance of their country, regarded British superciliousness with a resentment which their strong love for England could not overcome. This feeling was far from being confined to the officers. A provincial regiment stationed at Half-Moon, on the Hudson, thought ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Indeed there was a dull, heavy ache at her heart whenever she looked at him, for however he might endeavour to conform, like Marcus Aurelius sacrificing to the gods, there was always a certain half- patronising, half-criticising superciliousness about his countenance. Yet, if he came for love of her, still something might yet strike him ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... accounts not only wicked, but foolish, to conduct yourselves with provoking superciliousness towards inferiors. Courtesy is easily practised, and the reverse dangerous to your own peace and comfort. Besides, it is scarcely possible to think of a human being so utterly contemptible, that his esteem is not worth possessing, or so morose that he may not be conciliated by kindness: ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... But his face was not strong, as the face of Madam Des Anges had been. Some strain of a weaker ancestry reappeared in it, and, so to speak, changed the key of the expression. What had been pride in the old lady bordered on superciliousness in the young man. What had been sternness became a mere haughtiness. Yet it was a handsome face, and pleasant, too, when the young smile came across it, and you saw the white small teeth and the bright, intelligent light in the ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... Hope has been so lucky as to please the public in two styles. In the one genre he has displayed an undoubted capacity, marred here and there to some tastes by a not very defined seeming of superciliousness, and in the other he has taken us into the most agreeable regions of unrestrained romance in which English readers have had leave to wander this many a day. He has caught the very tone of simple-hearted sincerity in which his later stories demand to be told. As an example ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... a moment. Even if he had accomplished nothing else he had struck a note which had caused the Athertons to forget their former superciliousness. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... educated, and the equal, socially and in all respects, of those he served. But it was perfectly evident that to neither side was the situation in the slightest degree embarrassing. Dr. Leete addressed the young man in a tone devoid, of course, as any gentleman's would be, of superciliousness, but at the same time not in any way deprecatory, while the manner of the young man was simply that of a person intent on discharging correctly the task he was engaged in, equally without familiarity or obsequiousness. It was, in fact, the manner of a soldier on duty, but without the military ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy |
