"Vulgar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like it; she had an idea that all military ladies were dashing and vulgar, but she could not say there was any objection, so she went on to the head of poor Fanny's offending. "This young man, my dear, he seems to make himself ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... appearance either. I should say she isn't refined. Why just now out there she pulled the forester from Anna's side and asked him to dance with her. We wouldn't do things that way. But when the highborn wish to unbend they become vulgar. Splendid she is though! ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... 1870 The Last Tournament was begun; it was finished in May 1871. Conceivably the vulgar scandals of the last days of the French Imperial regime may have influenced Tennyson's picture of the corruption of Arthur's Court; but the Empire did not begin, like the Round Table, with aspirations after the Ideal. ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... characters; "Our Mutual Friend" begun in May, 1864; a complicated narrative; Dickens' extraordinary sympathy for Eugene Wrayburn; generally his sympathies are so entirely right; which explains why his books are not vulgar; he himself a man ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... and impossible monsters and subjects of profane history, the Griffin, the Mermaid, the Phoenix, Arion and Hermes has each had its Mark or Marks. In the case of the first named, which, according to Sir Thomas Browne, in his "Vulgar Errors," is emblematical of watchfulness, courage, perseverance, and rapidity of execution, it is not surprising that the Gryphius family, from the evident pun on their surname, should have considered it as in their particular preserves. As may be imagined, it does ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... grade, by Ghazee-od Deen Hyder, and about the year 1825 he had become as great a favourite with him as he afterwards became with his son, Nuseer-od Deen Hyder, and he abused his master's favour in the same manner. The minister, Aga Meer, finding his interference and vulgar insolence intolerable, took advantage one day of the King's anger against him, had him degraded, seized, and sent off forthwith to one of his creatures, Taj-od Deen Hoseyn, then in charge of the Sultanpoor district, where he ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... Bridmore and Anne Sellwood, both of Chiltern all Saints, were married October 17, 1714. The aforesaid Anne Sellwood was married in her Smock, without any clothes or headgier on." "This is not uncommon," remarks Mr. Ashton, "the object being, according to a vulgar error, to exempt the husband from the payment of any debts his wife may have contracted in her ante-nuptial condition. This error seems to have been founded on a misconception of the law, as it is laid down 'the husband is liable for the wife's debts, because he acquires an absolute ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... an hour or so of daylight. I remembered that there used to be a humble restaurant and kitchen on wheels—to the vulgar, a dog-wagon—up toward York Street. This wagon, once upon a time, had appeased our appetites when we had been late for chapel and Commons. As an institution it was so trite that once we made of it a fraternity play. I faintly remember ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... exhibited his "Women Bathing," and again created a stir on the exhibition of his "Funeral at Ornans" and his "Drunken Peasants at Flagny." This early exponent of realism in its most radical form, despite his taste for vulgar types, showed such strength of technique that his landscapes were accepted ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... companions, then, were daughters of shopkeepers, and persons of that class who, having been taught to read, and occasionally going to Leghorn, besides being admitted by the deputy to the presence of his housekeeper, had got to regard themselves as a little elevated above the more vulgar curiosity of the less cultivated girls of the port. Ghita herself, however, owed her ascendency to her qualities, rather than to the adventitious advantage of being a grocer's or an innkeeper's daughter, her origin being unknown to most of those around ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... merely for the sake of the Gothic image. Farther: it has been said that if I had substituted the word "gable," it would have spoiled the line just as much as the word "pediment," though "gable" is a Gothic word. Of course it would; but why? Because "gable" is a term of vulgar domestic architecture, and therefore destructive of the tone of the heroic description; whereas "pediment" and "spire" are precisely correlative terms, being each the crowning feature in ecclesiastical edifices, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... have died—I, the child of many prayers, the hope of a house, and stumping home on a foggy morning after sitting among the scum of earth all night. I mean to be a philosopher, but what a beastly, silly school to cultivate political philosophy in! What do I know more than I knew before?—that one vulgar girl maintains three vulgar criminals, and that all the four will come whining to the workhouse when the game is played out and they can rob no one else. They are creatures whose vices and idleness and general villany are engendered amid drink. They are the foul fungi that ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... Harriet Ray was neither vulgar nor ambitious. She regarded Washington Square as the birthplace of Society, knew by heart all the cousinships of early New York, hated motor-cars, could not make herself understood on the telephone, and was determined, if she married, never to receive a divorced ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Catharine and Charles, feigning the deepest interest in the fate of their wounded guest, hastened to his sick-chamber with every possible assurance of their distress and sympathy. Charles expressed the utmost indignation at the murderous attempt, and declared, with those oaths which are common to vulgar minds, that he would take the most terrible vengeance upon the perpetrators as soon ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... by one single light, and is enlightened by one divine light: because there is one single light that shines among men, who have the happiness of going from the darkness of ignorance and of the vulgar prejudices, to follow the only light that leads to the celestial truth. The light that is in our Lodge, is composed of a glass globe filled with water, and a light placed behind it, which renders the light more clear. The glass of reflection, ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... others at their heels to confute them, we are then to overthrow them with such others as elsewhere are to be found in the same author. Nor must we be offended with the poet or grieved at him, but only at the speeches themselves, which he utters either according to the vulgar manner of speaking or, it may be, but in drollery. So, when thou readest in Homer of gods thrown out of heaven headlong one by another, or gods wounded by men and quarrelling and brawling with each other, thou mayest readily, if thou ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Joseph Raikes, occupied a commanding position, and attracted a great deal of attention amongst the gentlemen sportsmen. Those bucks upon the ground who were not acquainted with the fair occupant of that carriage—as indeed, how should many thousands of them be?—some being shabby bucks; some being vulgar bucks; some being hot and unpleasant bucks, smoking bad cigars, and only staring into Lady Raikes's carriage by that right which allows one Briton to look at another Briton, and a cat to look at a king;—of those bucks, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... notice in that strange mental photograph. The man was well-dressed, and had the bearing of a gentleman. Looking back upon the scene long after, when I had learned once more what words and things meant, I could feel instinctively this was no common burglar, no vulgar murderer. Whatever might have been the man's object in shooting my father, I was certain from the very first it was not mere robbery. But at the time, I'm confident, I never reasoned about his motives or his actions in any way. I merely ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... is vulgar, he stirs the puddle of life," object the fluttering, chirping gentlemen, the Tomlinsonian men. Well, and isn't life vulgar? Can you divorce the facts of life? Much of good is there, and much of ill; but who may draw aside his garment and say, "I am none of them"? Can you ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... San Francisco and work there, where he at least had friends who respected his station. Yet, he ought to have refused the girl's offer before she had repulsed him; his retreat now meant nothing, and might even tempt her, in her vulgar pique, to reveal her rebuff of him. He raised his eyes mechanically, and looked gloomily across the dark waste and distant bay to the opposite shore. But the fog had already hidden the glow of the city's lights, and, thickening around the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... it is that all sort of justice passes in the world for a low-spirited and vulgar virtue, far below the dignity of royal greatness—or at least there are set up two sorts of justice; the one is mean and creeps on the ground, and, therefore, becomes none but the lower part of mankind, and so must be kept in severely ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... his Federal Government, the citizen "looked down upon the vulgar herd of slaves, the freedmen and unqualified residents, as his own plebeian fathers had been looked down upon by the old Eupatrides in the days of Cleisthenes and Solon." Whatever phase of this Greek society we discuss, we must not forget ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... dear Harry," he said to his friend, "there is no use in striving to conceal the honest vulgarity of Jemmy the gentleman from you who know it already. I may say ditto to madam, who is unquestionably the most vulgar of the two—for, and I am sorry to say it, in addition to a superabundant stock of vulgarity, she has still a larger assortment of the prides; for instance, pride of wealth, of the purse, pride of—I was going to add, birth—ha! ha! ha!—of person, ay, of ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... was no distinction as to literary privilege or philosophical sectarianism. There was no profane vulgar in the chosen people. The stores of Divine knowledge were open to all alike. The descendant of Jacob beheld in every member of his tribe a brother, and not a master; one who in all the respects which give to man dignity and self-esteem ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... what Dido giues in charge, Commaund my guard to slay for their offence: Shall vulgar pesants storme at what I doe? The ground is mine that giues them sustenance, The ayre wherein they breathe, the water, fire, All that they haue, their lands, their goods, their liues, And I the Goddesse of all these, commaund ...
— The Tragedy of Dido Queene of Carthage • Christopher Marlowe
... now leave the rough usage of the field, where vulgar coarseness and brutal cruelty spread themselves and flourish, rank as weeds in the tropics; where a vile wretch, in the shape of a man, rides, walks, or struts about, dealing blows, and leaving gashes on broken-spirited men ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... Clarke, looking at the now buttered toast. "If my mother-in-law and my husband had any psychological faculty they would never have mistaken my unconventionality, which I shall never give up, for common, and indeed very vulgar, sinfulness." ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... beautiful woman. Mingled also with her jealousy was another feeling, that of partial recognition. For the moment—she could not remember where—but at some time in the past, she fancied she had seen that dark, highly-coloured face, and heard the harsh vulgar voice. ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... exceptional interest of being in a position to mould the growing minds of lads who will some day take their place among the country's hereditary legislators, that little knot of devoted men who, despite the vulgar attacks of loudmouthed demagogues, still do their share, and more, in the guidance of England's ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... girl of county family, you are inexcusably vulgar, Jane. I don't know what I said; but she will never forgive me for profaning her pet book. I shall be expelled as certainly ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... from whence nevertheless she emergeth sooner or later, and strikes the eyes of all who do not keep them shut." I cannot resist the temptation of illustrating the bishop's belief in the wonderful powers of his remedy, by a few sentences from different parts of his essay. "The hardness of stubbed vulgar constitutions renders them insensible of a thousand things that fret and gall those delicate people, who, as if their skin was peeled off, feel to the quick everything that touches them. The tender nerves and low spirits of such poor creatures ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... herself as soon as she spoke, the effect of her appearance was spoiled. Her voice was hoarse, a low-pitched rasp, husky, throaty, and full of brutal, vulgar modulations. ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... passion. He saw too that her nerves came, as it were, nearer the surface than those of other people, and that thence she was exposed to those sudden changes of feeling which had so often bewildered him. And now that delicate creature was in the hands of Beauchamp—a selfish and vulgar-minded fellow! That he whom he had heard insult a dead woman, and whom he had chastised for it, should dare to touch Kate! His very touch was defilement. But what could he do? Alas! he could only hate. And what was that, if Kate should love! But she ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... the particular events I have mentioned, the readers may judge by the fulfilling of them, whether I am on the level with common astrologers, who, with an old paltry cant, and a few pothooks for planets, to amuse the vulgar, have, in my opinion, too long been suffered to abuse the world. But an honest physician ought not to be despised because there are such things as mountebanks. I hope I have some share of reputation, which I would not willingly ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... vices which Lucilius attacks are those which reappear in the pages of the later satirists. They are the two extremes to which the Roman temperament was most prone: rapacity and meanness in gaining money, vulgar ostentation and coarse sensuality in using ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... was left alone with Paul, she began to upbraid him with his falseness,—"You vulgar, stuck-up, ugly, awkward deceiver! you have neither honesty enough to live by, nor wings enough to fly with." Whereupon she jumped at him and gave him such a plucking as spoilt his ...
— The Faithless Parrot • Charles H. Bennett
... the less disturbance to Miss Tallowax because it was arranged that she was to be taken over to lunch at Manor Cross on the following day. Lord George had said a word, and Lady Sarah had consented, though, as a rule, Lady Sarah did not like the company of vulgar people. The peasants of the parish, down to the very poorest of the poor, were her daily companions. With them she would spend hours, feeling no inconvenience from their language or habits. But she did not like gentlefolk who were not gentle. In days now long gone by, she had only assented to ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... forests; I see the grimy millions who slave for industrial production; I see some who are extravagant and yet contemptible creatures of luxury, and some leading lives of shame and indignity; tens of thousands of wealthy people wasting lives in vulgar and unsatisfying trivialities, hundreds of thousands meanly chaffering themselves, rich or poor, in the wasteful byways of trade; I see gamblers, fools, brutes, toilers, martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility, fills me with a passionate desire to end ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... away there in the blue obscurity amidst his apparatus intently signalling us to the last, all unaware of the curtain of confusion that drops between us; all unaware, too, of the final dangers that even then must have been creeping upon him. His disastrous want of vulgar common sense had utterly betrayed him. He had talked of war, he had talked of all the strength and irrational violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless futility of conflict. He had filled the whole moon ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... sixteenth century, that they were sports of nature. He also pretended that vegetable impressions were not those of real plants." ... "He would sometimes, in defiance of all consistency, shift his ground when addressing the vulgar; and, admitting the true nature of the shells collected in the Alps and other places, pretend that they were Eastern species, which had fallen from the hats of pilgrims coming from Syria. The numerous essays written by him on geological subjects were all calculated to strengthen ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... is nothing like your true jest; a thing once well done, is twice done, and I am the happiest Man in the World in your Alliance; for, Sir, a Nobleman if he have any tolerable parts,—is a thing much above the Vulgar;—oh,—here comes the Dancers. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... great troubles are included in this petty one! You men are a vulgar set. There is not a woman who does not carry her delicacy so far as to embroider her past life with the most delightful fibs, while you—but ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... discarding collars; but they are unashamedly shirt-sleeved. Any sculptor, seeking to figure this Republic in stone, must carve, in future, a young man in shirt-sleeves, open-faced, pleasant, and rather vulgar, straw hat on the back of his head, his trousers full and sloppy, his coat over his arm. The motto written beneath will be, of course, 'This is some country.' The philosophic gazer on such a monument might get some way towards understanding ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... virtue. It shall not be necessary to allege all that might be said, and therefore I will thus conclude; that whatsoever kingdom shall be enforced to defend itself may be compared to a body dangerously diseased, which for a season may be preserved with vulgar medicines, but in a short time, and by little and little, the same must needs fall to the ground and be dissolved. I have therefore laboured all my life, both according to my small power and persuasion, to advance all those attempts that might either promise return of profit to ourselves, or at ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh
... it, in the mere physical part of the strife; but in the more moral, if such a word can be used, the quiet ascendency of better manners and ancient recollections is very apt to overshadow the fussy pretensions of the vulgar aspirant, who places his claims altogether on the all-mighty dollar. It is vain to deny it; men ever have done it, and probably ever will defer to the past, in matters of this sort—it being much with us, in this particular, as it ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... oddity, is one of the ways;—they have a particular kind of stare for the purpose;—till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some excrescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a general vein of observation (not quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect whether you are not altogether a humorist,—a fellow well enough to have consorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be introduced to ladies. This may be called the staring way; and is that which ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... fair-sized portmanteau descends on their toes, and the sharp edge of a trunk takes them in the small of the back. Footmen with gloves and superior airs make gentlemanly efforts to collect the family luggage, and are rewarded by having some hopelessly vulgar tin boxes, heavily roped, deposited among its initialled glory. One elderly female who had been wise to choose some other day to revisit her native town, discovers her basket flung up against a pillar, like wreckage from a storm, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... Billingtons, worshipful Master Howland, lackey of the governor, and page-boy to his wife," demanded the voice that had interrupted Mistress Hopkins, and turning toward it, Howland confronted a short, square woman, not without a certain vulgar comeliness of her own, although now her buxom complexion was florid with anger and her black eyes snapping angrily, while the arms akimbo, the swaying figure, and raised voice betrayed Helena Billington for precisely what she was, a common scold and shrew. Howland was a brave man; he had already ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... thoughts just at breakfast time, that for the sake of posterity, as he was wont to say, he could by no means endanger the loss of them by suffering such a common place interruption as that of breakfast, such an every day and vulgar concern. On these occasions Tamar always took in his coffee and toast, and set it before him, and she generally had the pleasure of finding that he took what she brought him, though he seldom appeared to be ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... consequences. The ferocity with which the Earl came to regard every prominent German, Hollander, and Englishman, engaged in the service of the States, sprang very much from the complications of this vulgar brawl. Norris, Hohenlo, Wilkes, Buckhurst, were all denounced to the Queen as calumniators, traitors, and villains; and it may easily be understood how grave and extensive must have been the effects of such vituperation ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... they taken from it—let them now Take this prediction, with the red man's curse! The time will come when that dread power—the Poor— Whom, in their greed and pride of wealth, they spurn— Will rise on them, and tear them from their seats; Drag all their vulgar splendours down, and pluck Their shallow women from their lawless beds, Yea, seize their puling and unhealthy babes, And fling them as foul pavement to the streets. In all the dreaming of the Universe There is no ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... That was his proposition. Everything would be up to specifications, and there was nothing vulgar in his assertion that it would be cheap at the price. He implied that Providence could take ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... day, "you have instilled into my sensitive nature an indelible aversion to men, compared with which all such deleble passions as affection and love are as inconsequential as summer zephyrs. I believe men to be by nature and practice gross, vulgar, sensual, and unworthy; and from this opinion I feel that I shall never recede. Yet such a clinging and fragile thing is woman's heart that it must needs have some object about which it may twine, even as the gentle ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... tone to another), although a valuable and entirely legitimate expressional effect when used occasionally in a passage where its employment is appropriate, may be over-used to such an extent as to result in a slovenly, vulgar, and altogether objectionable style of singing; and that whereas the vibrato may imbue with virility and warmth an otherwise cold, dead tone and if skilfully and judiciously used may add greatly to the color and vitality ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... Of future weal, or future woe, By word, or sign, or star; Yet might a knight his fortune hear, If, knightlike, he despises fear, Not far from hence; if fathers old Aright our hamlet legend told." These broken words the menials move, For marvels still the vulgar love, And, Marmion giving license cold, His tale the ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... THREE HA'PENCE! If the vulgar fractions followed, Big fleas have little fleas! It flashed upon me there,— Like the snakes of Pharaoh which the snakes of Moses swallowed All the world was playing at the tortoise and the hare: Half the smallest atom is—my soul ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admitted foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in good measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in the stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while they forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the sense. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ideally as inept as it is actually impossible. It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can be, or ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... with native impudence. "But with your fine tact, Monsieur, you must be aware that we can't win tricks from people unless it is their interest to play at cards. I beg you not to confound me with the vulgar herd of travellers who succeed by humbug or importunity. I am no longer a commercial traveller. I was one, and I glory in it; but to-day my mission is of higher importance, and should place me, in the minds of superior people, among those who devote themselves to the enlightenment of their country. ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... the graves, bear the name, and boast the blood, of men in whom the loftiest sense of duty blended itself with the fiercest spirit of liberty, should add to their freedom, justice: justice to all men, to all nations; justice, that venerable virtue, without which freedom, valor, and power, are but vulgar things. ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... pleased, without considering inheritance, or succession. From that time forward they were called Curacas, which is the proper name of the chiefs of this land, and not Caciques, which is the term used by the vulgar among the Spaniards. That name of Cacique belongs to the islands of Santo Domingo and Cuba. From this place we will drop the name of Sinchi and only use ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... the past does not direct attention, and to which, therefore, the student of Greek civilisation may easily become blind. In what is new and growing there is apt to be something crude, insolent, even a little vulgar, which is shocking to the man of sensitive taste; quivering from the rough contact, he retires to the trim gardens of a polished past, forgetting that they were reclaimed from the wilderness by men as rough and earth-soiled as those from whom he shrinks in his own ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... cloth for tea. His eye was not trained to the admiration or appreciation of beauty, but he was struck by a singular grace in her every movement, by a certain still and winning loveliness of feature and expression. It was not the beauty sought for or beloved by the vulgar eye, to which it would seem but a colourless and lifeless thing; but a pure soul, to which all things seemed lovely and of good report, looked out from her grave eyes, and gave an expression of gentle sweetness to her ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... it: if I had made a name for myself, those who had no right to it would have borne it; and I entered life at twenty, God help me—hopeless and ruined beyond remission. I was the boyish victim of vulgar cheats, and, perhaps, it is only of late I have found out how hard—ah, how hard—it is to forgive them. I told you the moral before, Pen; and now I have told you the fable. Beware how you marry out of your degree. I was made for a better ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... advantages of a government influence; that the business of a minister, or of those who acted as such, had been still further to contract the narrowness of men's ideas, to confirm inveterate prejudices, to inflame vulgar passions, and to abet all sorts of popular absurdities, in order the better to destroy popular rights and privileges; that, so far from methodizing the business of the House, they had let all things run into an inextricable confusion, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... mighty low by Fate opprest!— 25 Perhaps, O Kettle! thou by scornful toe Rude urg'd t' ignoble place with plaintive din. May'st rust obscure midst heaps of vulgar tin;— As if no joy had ever seiz'd my breast When from thy spout the streams did arching fly,— 30 As if, infus'd, thou ne'er hadst known t' inspire All the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... real death-watch of the vulgar, must not be confounded with another minuter insect, which makes a ticking noise like a watch; but instead of beating at intervals, it continues its noise for a considerable time without intermission. This latter belongs to a very different tribe. It ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... day of November, 1898, can never be forgotten. I will not close this narrative without mentioning an act of bravery performed by a lone woman which stopped the vulgar and inhuman searching of women in our section of the city. The most atrocious and unpardonable act of the mob was the wanton disregard for womanhood. Lizzie Smith was the first woman to make a firm and stubborn stand against the proceeding ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... I meet them they go in at once for reminiscences. That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar." ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... consider me as a coward and an unworthy son if I did not follow this impulse. I certainly feel the greatness of the sacrifice; it costs me something, believe me, to leave my beautiful studies and go to put myself under the orders of vulgar, uneducated people, but this only increases my courage in going to secure the liberty of my brothers; moreover, when once that liberty is secured, if God deigns to allow, I will return ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of naturall causes as from their beginning. And these graunt withall, that we have free choise and election what life to follow; which being once chosen, we are guided after, by a certain order of causes unto our end. Neither do they esteeme those things to be good or bad which the vulgar ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... healthy laugh; and, indeed, the vulgar expression coming from her does not sound so bad as it might. There are some people who, when they say a queer thing, set one's teeth on edge; and there are others who, when they use the same words, raise only a smile. As yet, there is much ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... thought better of them than of any other class in England. I suppose that like Cicero he wished to excel, or perhaps more like Augustus to play his part well in the tragic comedy of life. I do not suppose that he had any vulgar ambition ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... us here is that in the conception of the beatific vision, we still find ourselves in a different religious world from ours—religion exoteric for the vulgar, and religion esoteric for the enlightened; religion not for living by, but for a period of retirement; a religion of spiritual self-culture, not of active sonship and brotherhood. Far be it from me to say that at this point the West may not learn as well as teach, for how much thought does the ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... afford useful hints not lightly to be disregarded. During some portion of Johnson's married life he had lodgings, first at Greenwich, afterwards at Hampstead. But he did not always go home o' nights; sometimes preferring to roam the streets with that vulgar ruffian Savage, who was certainly no fit company for him. He once actually quarrelled with 'Tetty,' who, despite her ridiculous name, was a very sensible woman with a very sharp tongue, and for a season, like stars, they dwelt apart. Of ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... observe, this court of the past differs from all living aristocracy in this:—it is open to labor and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, the guardian of those Elysian gates. In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar person ever enters there. At the portieres of that silent Faubourg St. Germain, there is but brief question, Do you deserve to enter? Pass. Do you ask to be the companion of nobles? Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you long for the conversation of the wise? Learn to understand it, and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... tongue, which arose from a union of ancient Egyptian with the vulgar vernacular, later became mingled with Greek and Arabic words, and was written in the Greek alphabet. It was used in Egypt until the tenth century A.D., when it gave way to the Arabic; but the Christians still preserve it in their ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Plants newly appear'd I recognized some Acquaintances I had not seen for many a Year: among these, two varieties of the Thistle; a coarse species of the Daisy, like the Horse-gowan; red and white clover; the Dock; the blue Cornflower; and that vulgar Herb the Dandelion rearing its yellow crest on the Banks of the Water-courses." The Nightingale was not yet heard, for the Rose was not yet blown: but an almost identical Blackbird and Woodpecker helped to make up ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... popular audience. The stage, therefore, resumed more than its original licence under his auspices. Most of our early plays, being written in a coarse age, and designed for the amusement of a promiscuous and vulgar audience, were dishonoured by scenes of coarse and naked indelicacy. The positive enactments of James, and the grave manners of his son, in some degree repressed this disgraceful scurrility; and, in the common course of events, the English stage would have ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Hee's now whisp'ring in Some doctrine of stabilitie and freedome, Contempt of outward greatnesse, and the guises 155 That vulgar great ones make their pride and zeale, Being onely servile traines, and ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... a clearing, he encountered a hare. The hare, which was suffering from extreme panic, owing to a terrifying noise behind it,—the blast of the newest and most vulgar motor horn, to be precise,—was bolting right across the clearing. After the manner of hares where objects directly in front of them are concerned, the fugitive entirely failed to perceive Excalibur and, indeed, ran right underneath him on its way ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... end of the winter. And news came soon which was harder still to bear; news, that he, whom she had been taught to regard as made in the image of our Saviour,[493] was unfaithful to his marriage vows,[494] Bradford had spoken generally of the king's vulgar amours; other accounts convinced her too surely that he was consoling himself for his long purgatory in England, by miscellaneous licentiousness. Philip was gross alike in all his appetites; bacon fat was the favourite food with which he gorged himself to illness;[495] ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... nursing, she was always industrious at her needle; one would love to know if perhaps in the Tresor at Rheims there was some stole or maniple with flowers on it, wrought by her hands. But the Tresor at Rheims is nowadays rather vulgar if truth must be told, and the bottles and vases for the consecration of Charles X., that pauvre sire, are more thought of than ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... replied. "I am trying to supply the real note. It is badly wanted. There are all kinds of stuff being written, but all indifferent and valueless. If it has a swing, it's merely vulgar, and what isn't vulgar is academic, commonplace. There's a crying need for the high level poetry that shall interpret with dignity and nobility the meaning ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... of course, had not seen this, but, though not yet nineteen, she was notorious. Had she not said to Mrs. Soames—who was always so beautifully dressed—that feathers were vulgar? Mrs. Soames had actually given up wearing feathers, so ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... human souls to one another he loves to display upon a background of political life. Then we follow him from the cloudy North into sunny Italy. Shakspeare is one of the intellectual powers of nature; he takes away the veil by which the inward springs of action are hidden from the vulgar eye. The extension of the range of human vision over the mysterious being of things which his works offer constitutes ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... thy memory See thou character: Give thy thoughts no tongue. Nor any unproportion'd thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel; But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, Bear 't that the opposed may beware ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... with being animated by a hatred of their kind when their central tenet was a universal charity. The masses, he says, called them "Christians"; and while he almost apologizes for staining his page with so vulgar an appellation,[30] he merely mentions in passing that, though innocent of the charge of being turbulent incendiaries, on which they were tortured to death, they were yet a set of guilty and infamous sectaries, to be classed with the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... true and the false, what should be published and what suppressed, should not be in the hands of a few men, and these mostly unlearned and of common capacity, erected into a censorship over books—an agency through which no one almost either can or will send into the light anything that is above the vulgar taste—on this subject, in the form of an express oration, I wrote my Areopagitica." [Footnote: The Latin of the passage will be found in the Defensio Secunda pro Popalo Anglicano.] In this passage, written in 1654, there ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... Sancerre are more easily imagined than described—she who had dreamed of handling a fortune and managing the dwarf whom she, the giant, had at first humored in order to command. In the hope of some day making her appearance on the greater stage of Paris, she accepted the vulgar incense of her attendant knights with a view to seeing Monsieur de la Baudraye's name drawn from the electoral urn; for she supposed him to be ambitious, after seeing him return thrice from Paris, each time a step higher on the social ladder. But when she struck on the man's heart, it was as ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... Not half as vulgar as it is. You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby, and a baby vamp. You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you danced ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... "So vulgar a notion!" reiterated Lady Verner, resuming her seat, and taking her essence bottle in her delicately gloved hand. "I wonder you don't ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... historians, Rapin and Carte, the only two who seem not to have swallowed implicitly all the vulgar tales propagated by the Lancastrians to blacken the house of York, warn us to read with allowance the exaggerated relations of those times. The latter suspects, that at the dissolution of the monasteries all evidences were suppressed that tended to weaken the right of the ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... declaring he had given up everything. The King afterwards heard of this affair, and questioning the Princess, she told him everything. He sent for Miss Mercer, and desired to see the letters, and then to keep them. This she refused. This Captain Hess was a short, plump, vulgar-looking man, afterwards lover to the Queen of Naples, mother of the present King, an amour that was carried on under the auspices of the Margravine at her villa in the Strada Nova at Naples. It was, however, detected, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... them?" Martin demanded, in the soul of him quite shocked that a Church of England missionary could possess so vulgar an affliction. ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... answered, with his fine eyes full upon me. How strangely I had misjudged him! I saw no vulgar curiosity in his flattering gaze, but rather that very sympathy of which I stood in need. I offered ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... bounds and dances along, and this motion, in her diminutive person, does not give the idea of violence. It is like a bird, hopping from twig to twig, and chirping merrily all the time. Sometimes she is rather vulgar, but even that works well enough into her character, and accords with it. On continued observation, one discovers that she is not a little girl, but really a little woman, with all the prerogatives and liabilities of a woman. This gives a new aspect to her, while the girlish impression still ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Holy Church. It is whispered by one and another that yon good woman, as I would fain believe her to be, is somewhat tainted with the damnable heresy they call Lollardism, and that she has in her possession one of those Bibles which that arch-heretic Wycliffe translated into the vulgar tongue for the undoing of the unlearned, who think that they can thus judge for themselves on matters too high for them. You, my son, as a true son of the Church, may do us great service by keeping open both ears and ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... liner has a great attraction on both sides of the "Herring Pond," but there is a difference. Passengers leaving England are surrounded with cheap and vulgar literature, newspapers, guide-books, sticks, and umbrellas. Leaving America, the liner is turned into a floating flower show. Most beautiful bouquets labelled with the names of the lady passengers are on view in the saloon. Just as the last gangway is drawn on to the shore, amid cries ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... supported him when disgusted with fraud, or in resistance to violence, and therefore it was a champion and a fortress. It was a pride of a peculiar sort: it attached itself to no one point in especial,—not to talent, knowledge, mental gifts, still less to the vulgar commonplaces of birth and fortune; it rather resulted from a supreme and wholesale contempt of all other men, and all their objects,—of ambition, of glory, of the hard business of life. His favourite virtue was ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... with quotations from the Holy Scripture, in other letters, where I have treated of the situation of the terrestrial paradise, as approved by the Holy Church;[398-2] and I say that the world is not so large as vulgar opinion makes it, and that one degree of the equinoctial line measures fifty-six miles and two-thirds; and this may ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... Mabel," said her mother. "You have been guilty of repeating common and vulgar gossip. You ought never to have listened to it. I had hoped that a daughter of mine, a Bertram, too, would have inspired too much respect to have any such rubbish spoken of in ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... revenue-producing thing. The editor was supreme in matters of culture and opinion. True, the editor, being revocable and poor, could not pretend to full political power. But it was a sort of dual arrangement which yet modified the power of the vulgar owner. ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... very beginning of his presidency, Mr. Lincoln had been constantly subject to the threats of his enemies. His mail was infested with brutal and vulgar menace, and warnings of all sorts came to him from zealous or nervous friends. Most of these communications received no notice. In cases where there seemed a ground for inquiry, it was made, as carefully as possible, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... church. All the way from the carriage to the stone porch the charity children strewed her path with flowers, and sang (out of tune) a bridal anthem. She smiled down upon their vulgar, admiring little faces as she went by on the Earl of Wroatmore's arm. The church was filled. Was seeing her married worth all this trouble to these good people, she wondered, as she walked up the aisle, still on the arm of the Right ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... inanimate nature, expanding and fructifying beneath its fostering influence, breathes the most delicious languor and voluptuous repose. It was one of those still, calm, warm, and genial days, which in those regions come under the vulgar designation of the Indian summer; a season that is ever hailed by the Canadian with a satisfaction proportioned to the extreme sultriness of the summer, and the equally oppressive rigour of the winter, by which it ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... your plan, if it is a fair question? Excuse me, old chap, I'm not asking out of mere vulgar, impertinent curiosity, but at the dinner table to-night somebody mentioned that you are working your passage out to South Africa. What do you propose to ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... at rare moments from the stage where some great drama is being played: What is higher, what is more real: this, or the life we live? In that sudden flash, the matters of today's and tomorrow's reality in our minds appear as vulgar trifles, things of which we are ashamed. The feeling lasts but a moment; for a moment we have been something higher than ourselves, in the mere desire so to be. Then we fall back to ourselves once more, to the ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... of the unhappiness resulting from unequal matches. In this way Carrie had early learned that her father owed his present position to her mother's condescension in marrying him—that he was once a poor boy living among the northern hills—that his parents were poor, ignorant and vulgar—and that there was with them a little girl, their daughter's child, who never had a father, and whom she must never on ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... pretty white spoons from that wood to sell to the colonists. Horn was an appropriate and available material for spoons. Many Indian tribes excelled as they do to-day in the making of horn spoons. The vulgar affirmation, "By the great horn spoon," has perpetuated ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... perfectly conceal it under an uncouth garb and manner, and under a pronunciation which, to say the least, was archaic and provincial. Jefferson told Daniel Webster that Patrick Henry's "pronunciation was vulgar and vicious," although, as Jefferson adds, this "was forgotten while he was speaking."[5] Governor John Page "used to relate, on the testimony of his own ears," that Patrick Henry would speak of "the yearth," and of "men's naiteral parts being improved by larnin';"[6] ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... else can save you from infamy. Even Madame Bernard will not dare to give you shelter, for she will lose every pupil she has if it is found out that she is harbouring a nun who has broken her vows, a vulgar bad character who has been caught in an officer's lodgings! That is what they ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... knowledge to enable him to play upon this weakness, this universal human susceptibility to the poison of pretense. All doubt of success fled his mind, and he was free to indulge his vanity and his contempt for these simple, unpretending people. "So vulgar!" he said to himself, as he left their house that night—he who knew how to do nothing of use or value. "It is a great condescension ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... well have been less microscopic. The spectacle of a great mind losing itself at length in the feebleness of age, almost the imbecility of second childhood, might well, they consider, have been withdrawn from the vulgar gaze. "Yet," as the late Prof. Wallace most truly remarks, "for those who remember, amid the decline of the flesh, the noble spirit which inhabited it, it is a sacred privilege to watch the failing life and visit the sick chamber ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... the world upon the strangest suppositions—"Carlyle got deep into whisky," said some,—ruined my reputation according to the friendliest voices, and in effect divided me altogether from the mob of "Progress-of-the-species" and other vulgar; but were a great relief to my own conscience as a faithful citizen, and have been ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol |
