"Vulgarity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of this strange contrast, and why are the most able citizens to be found in one assembly rather than in the other? Why is the former body remarkable for its vulgarity and its poverty of talent, while the latter seems to enjoy a monopoly of intelligence and of sound judgment? Both of these assemblies emanate from the people; both of them are chosen by universal suffrage; and no voice has hitherto been heard to assert, ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... apt from sheer loneliness to try and dispose of it as rapidly as possible. Drill yourself into eating leisurely. Persons of refinement take only small morsels at a time. One can not be too dainty at table. To attempt to talk while your mouth is full is another vulgarity upon which it is needless to dwell. The French have made us the reproach that we frequently drink while our mouths are in this condition. I fear there is some foundation for this accusation. Wipe your ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... "Emile," the "Contrat Social," and the rest of the series succeeded each other in her studies; but she does not speak of the "Confessions," a book most cruel to those who love the merits of the author, and to whom the nauseating vulgarity of his personal character is a disgust scarcely to be recovered from. Taken at his best, however, Rousseau was the Saint John of the Revolutionary Gospel, though the bloody complement of its Apocalypse was left ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... and helped to control the commercial policy. Another member was the bishop of the Anglican Church, for the seemly ceremonies and graded orders of clergy of this body were deemed to be a counterpoise to popular vagaries and vulgarity. Prior to the American Revolutionary War there had been no colonial bishopric; {35} three years after its close the first bishop of Nova Scotia ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... added, grinding his teeth, "is that I am perhaps viler and more loathsome than the louse I killed, and I felt beforehand that I should tell myself so after killing her. Can anything be compared with the horror of that? The vulgarity! The abjectness! I understand the 'prophet' with his sabre, on his steed: Allah commands and 'trembling' creation must obey! The 'prophet' is right, he is right when he sets a battery across the street and blows up the innocent and the guilty without ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... it would make any difference if I did," I said, with unconscious asperity, for indeed this excess of free manners was jarring upon me. The line dividing it from vulgarity was becoming so thin I was losing sight of the divisor. Yet no one, even the most fastidious, could associate vulgarity with Natalie Brande. There remained an air of unassumed sincerity about herself and all her actions, including even her dress, which absolutely excluded her from hostile ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... to tell, I fear, before I succeed in conveying my exact meaning to the understanding of—the person. I will pick a quarrel, if possible, and he persists in talking! Oh, dear! I could have endured the red hair, even those dreadful teeth, had it not been for the bear's-grease and general vulgarity of the creature. Well, it's all over now!" and she sighed, from which it may be inferred that Jo's admonitions had not been of much consolation ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... present herself, with a classic grace, as a priestess of this mild faith. It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed. For himself, he was fond of the good things of life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a dread of vulgarity, and even a theory that it was increasing in the society that surrounded him. Moreover, the standard of luxury in the United States thirty years ago was carried by no means so high as at present, and Catherine's clever father took the old-fashioned view of the education ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... protested, greatly tended to make them incredulous. It was not till the statements of scholars and gentlemen, like Henry Martyn and Bishop Heber, became generally known, that the work was looked on without sarcasm, provoked by vulgarity, even ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and intellectual zest, but the possessors of industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers, with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped theology with the air of connoisseurs; they ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a neighbor; as we mopped our brows at each other, he told me that he had just cleared 100o, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own); but it was a poor consolation. The fact ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... licentiousness, swearing, gambling, duelling, and drunkenness of the men. He attacked with both argument and ridicule the idea so prevalent since the Restoration, that vice was necessarily associated with pleasure and elegance, virtue with Puritanism and vulgarity. To teach people to be witty without being indecent, gay without being vicious, such was the object of Addison. As M. Taine says, he made morality fashionable. To do this he exposed the folly and ugliness of vice. But he did more. He held up to the public view ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... ideas are flung into it in passing; but it remains as shapeless as an English pantomime, and not much more interesting. Both appeal to the same undeveloped instincts, the English to a merely childish vulgarity, the French to a vulgarity which is more frankly vicious. Really I hardly know which is to be preferred. In England we pretend that fancy dress is all in the interests of morality; in France they make no such ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... book-stalls. There was great curiosity among Jews to know the name of the writer. Owing to my anonymity, I was enabled to see those enjoying its perusal, who were afterwards to explain to me their horror and disgust at its illiteracy and vulgarity. By vulgarity vulgar Jews mean the reproduction of the Hebrew words with which the poor and the old-fashioned interlard their conversation. It is as if English-speaking Scotchmen and Irishmen should object to "dialect" novels reproducing the idiom of their "uncultured" ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... necessarily fine copies. When a cheap trumpery piece of book-making is printed on hand-made paper or Japanese vellum paper the result is vulgarity, just as when a common person attempts to swagger about in fine clothes. No, a book must show good binding and be appropriately apparelled, or it cannot be referred to as a fine copy. In the matter of large paper copies it is necessary to form ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... a vulgarity in the East India House writing, the literature of clerks which is quite disgusting. Our clerks write better than theirs, but they do not ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... not look for vulgarity from you! But with the bourgeoisie, I suppose, it all comes down to dollars and cents. I have not considered ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... he were destined to live in a wilderness, would be conclusive. An anchorite may attain a very high degree of sanctity and yet retain all his defects of character—his crudity, selfishness, vulgarity. While grace disposes towards gentleness it does not destroy nature. There is no essential connection between holiness and ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... window. It appeared to be a region of washerwomen, and lines were stretched about the square on which clothes were dangling to dry. Poor Goldsmith! What a time he must have had of it, with his quiet disposition and nervous habits, penned up in this den of noise and vulgarity." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... domestic life. After the labors of the day are over, the men gather around the fire, and the social hour of the day is spent in yarning. The stories told may run from the sublime to the ridiculous, from a true incident to a base fabrication, or from a touching bit of pathos to the most vulgar vulgarity. ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... read; that the "yellow journals" grovelled, "appealed to the mob," drew their vast crowds by the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the News-Record's smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the popular newspapers and posed as the aristocracy ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... of dress hides from us much of the beauty and dignity of Humanity, I have seen men who appeared heroic in the freedom of nakedness, shrink almost into absolute vulgarity, when clothed. The soul not only sits at the windows of the eyes, and hangs upon the gateway of the lips; she speaks as well in the intricate, yet harmonious lines of the body, and the ever-varying play of the limbs. Look at the torso of Ilioneus, the son of Niobe, and see what an agony of terror ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... my part, I should have been afraid of him for your sister. That is really the reason why I behaved as I did this evening. That man has a sort of common distinction about him—a distinction made up of the vulgarity of all kinds of elegancies. He's a fashion poster, a tailor's model, morally and physically. There's nothing, absolutely nothing, in a little fellow like that. A husband for your sister—that man? Why, how in the world ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... the bar-room, to certify the damns and god damns of Mr. Wilkins, suddenly becomes extremely modest and refined, and falls to moralizing like Michael Cassio, after his own drunken fit is over. Mr. Bunce might really be esteemed far gone, had he reached the climax of vulgarity which distinguishes the citizen ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector
... hordes of mistresses, gave scandal even in that time of prodigal license. But he had a cool head, a daring spirit, and an intellect capable of accepting new and original ideas. He must be called a statesman; and, despite the vulgarity of some of his vices, he has to be called a gentleman as well. He could be trusted; he would keep his word once given. Other statesmen could treat with him, and not fear that he would break a promise or betray a confidence. How rare such qualities were at that day among the politicians ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... and we always appear to best advantage in that which most accords with our style of person and complexion. To my eyes, in this more simple yet really elegant apparel, you look charming. Before, you impressed me with a sense of vulgarity; now, the impression, is ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... ceased, in the cause of thy beloved Shakspeare, to delve into the fruitful ore of black-letter literature. Peace to thy honest spirit; for thou wert wise without vanity, learned without pedantry, and joyous without vulgarity! ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... About its base the meek-faced dead are laid To share the benediction of its shade. With crossed white hands, shut eyes and formal feet, Their nights are innocent, their days discreet. Sharon, some years, perchance, remain of life— Of vice and greed, vulgarity and strife; And then—God speed the day if such His will— You'll lie among the dead you helped to kill, And be in good society at last, Your purse ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... vulgarity of ushering this company into the presence of the punctilious reader without even the ceremony of a Bedouin introduction—(This is my friend, N or M; if he steals anything, I will be responsible for it): a form of introduction, by the way, too sweeping in its suretyship ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... said, "I haven't had anybody speak to me like that for four years." Her voice betrayed excitement, and differed in tone, and she had cast off unconsciously the vulgarity of speech. At that moment she seemed reminiscent of what she must once have been; and he found himself going through ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the same pulverous fashion, the words came very differently from the two mouths. In the speech of the mother was more than a tone of the vulgarity of a conscious right to lay down the law, of the rudeness born of feeling above obedience and incapable of error—a rudeness identical with that of the typical vulgar duchess; the daughter's tone was playful, but dainty in its playfulness, and not without ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... loaded with jewelry in a public place in the East, you may take it for granted that she belongs to the British nobility. Germans, French, Italians and other women of continental Europe are never guilty of similar vulgarity, and among Americans it is ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Besides, she was one of the few relations still left to the Saracinesca. The daughter of a cousin of the Prince, she would make a good wife for Giovanni, and would bring sunshine into the house. There was a tinge of vulgarity in her manner; but, like many elderly men of his type, Saracinesca pardoned her this fault in consideration of her noisy good spirits and general good-nature. He was very much annoyed at hearing ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... be said on his behalf when he stands at the bar of history, that the cause of his failure to serve the world as he might have done, as Gladstone surely would have done, was due rather to a vulgarity of mind for which he was not wholly responsible than to any deliberate choice of a cynical partnership with ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... word Mr. Tutt rolled Bibby up and threw him away, while his master shuddered at the open disclosure of his trusted major-domo's vulgarity, mendacity and general lack of sportsmanship. Somehow all at once the case began to break up and go all to pot. The jury got laughing at Bibby, the footmen and the cops as Mr. Tutt painted for their edification the scene following the ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... give up your religion in order to marry a French prince; you might just as well have left behind your gross Palatine vulgarity also. I have the honour to inform you that, in the exalted society to which you have been admitted, one can no more say 'the Montespan woman,' than one can say 'the Orleans woman.' I have never offended you in the slightest degree, and I fail to see why I should have been chosen as the favoured ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... rest, Byron has more passion and intensity, Shelley more fancy and music, Coleridge could see further into the unseen, and not one of those poets has insulted his own genius by the production of whole poems, such as I could name of Wordsworth's, the vulgarity of which is childish, and the childishness vulgar. Still, the wings of his genius are wide enough to cast a shadow over its feet, and our gratitude should be stronger than our critical acumen. Yes, I will be a blind admirer of Wordsworth's. I will ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... that, there were probably a dozen Bradys. The name was common enough, and the only decent thing to do was to get rid of the suspicion and to apologise to Connie in his thoughts. To impute a low motive to a simple action had always seemed to him the vulgarity of littleness, and littleness in a man he had come to look upon as a kind of passive vice. So until the event proved the necessity of action, he was determined that there should be no "black bats" among his thoughts. Had he loved Connie there might have been ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... "I daresay you did. Vulgarity will appeal to the Saints of Heaven next season if things go on as they're going ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... how, not very long ago, I had seen that same head lying side by side with Jack's head on the pillow at Mrs Nash's. And as I stood for a moment to look, I could almost have believed that the sleeping figure there, with all his vulgarity and dishonesty, had as good a title to call himself Jack ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... was literally not set before them; at others, a sort of fashion in the school to consider a good appetite as a proof of coarseness, greediness, and vulgarity, worked but too effectually upon these sensitive creatures. A girl at that age would rather be starved than ridiculed or ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... struggle to escape the uniformity of the older streets. The front door opened into a square hall, from the left side of which opened the dining-room, from the right the study, both of these rooms having bow windows, built with that broad sweep of curve which makes for beauty instead of vulgarity. The house, Rendel had told his wife with a smile when they came to it, he had furnished for her, with the exception of one room in it; the study he had arranged for himself. And it certainly was a room in which, to judge by appearances, a worker need never be stopped in his work by the ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... an artist. He might be a bad man, a very bad man—his face had an expression of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. But however bad he might be, Susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind of badness, without vulgarity. He might have reached the stage at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes—and he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and manner. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Rotherwood, was more in accordance with the purse of the daughter of the Esquire of Beechcroft. It was no part of Emily's character to care for dress. She was at once too indolent and too sensible; she saw the vulgarity of finery, and only aimed at simplicity and elegance. During their girlhood Emily and Lilias had had no more concern with their clothes than with their food; Eleanor had carefully taught them plain needlework, and they had assisted in making more than one set of shirts; but they had nothing ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... decisive blow approached she manifested the calmest serenity of bearing, whereas her rival, in spite of all her efforts to attain the same air of distinction, always lapsed into some piece of gross vulgarity, which she afterwards regretted. La Normande's ambition was to look "like a lady." Nothing irritated her more than to hear people extolling the good manners of her rival. This weak point of hers had not escaped old Madame Mehudin's observation, and she now directed ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... this fellow countryman had taken, I came to the conclusion that it was no exaggeration, but a true bill in all particulars. On the night of our second day in Paris we went to a theater to see one of the topical revues, in which Paris is supposed to excel; and for sheer dreariness and blatant vulgarity Paris revues do, indeed, excel anything of a similar nature as done in either England or in America, which is ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the French gloves actually belong to the dairy-maids, though I have known even this prodigy; but, rely on it, you see here the proper female counterparts of the men, and singularly delicate and pretty females are they, for persons of their class. This is what you call democratic coarseness and vulgarity, Miss ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... drawing-room to continue his reading, but the Latin bored him even more than it had done yesterday. He took up the novel, but its enchantment was gone, and it appeared to him in its tawdry, original vulgarity. He got on a horse and rode towards the downs, and went up the steep ascents at a gallop. He stood amid the gorse at the top and viewed the great girdle of blue encircling sea, and the long string ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... hair-brushes given to her one Christmas by Bruce Evelin. Beside them was placed a hideous receptacle for—well, for anything—pins, perhaps, buttons, small tiresomenesses of that kind. It was made of some glistening black material, and at its center there bloomed a fearful red cabbage rose, a rose all vulgarity, ostentation and importance. This monstrosity had been given to Rosamund as a thank-offering by a poor charwoman to whom she had been kind. It had been in constant use now for over three years. The charwoman ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of the shed roof, and set his feet comfortably upon the dashboard while he waited. He was not aware of any very lively curiosity concerning the young woman for whom he was waiting. That he had formed some nebulous hypothesis of vulgarity was evidenced by his whimsical hope that her prevailing atmosphere would not be musk; aggressive perfumery of some sort seemed inevitable. He found himself wondering what trait in her father had led him to this deduction, and drifted ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... nerves had steadied, I was forced by a villainous captain to the work of a common sailor. From that experience as a laborer I never recovered. My mind learned the comfort of association with other minds which conceived only the most elementary thoughts. The savage vulgarity of stevedores, strike-breakers, ships' waiters, circus crews, and soldiers had a charm to me of which I had never before dreamed. I entered the brotherhood of those at life's bottom and found that again I was looked upon as a man superior to ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... a surprised and distant gaze upon him; but Baldassare was not to be discouraged. He had that tough skin of true vulgarity which is impervious to any thing ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... Louisiana.[2] Denouncing the policy of getting all one could out of the slaves and of giving back as little as possible, Jones undertook to show how their spiritual improvement would exterminate their ignorance, vulgarity, idleness, improvidence, and irreligion; Jones thought that if the circumstances of the Negroes were changed, they would equal, if not excel, the rest of the human family "in majesty of intellect, elegance ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... thirty-five. In the first book of the Satires, produced about five years earlier, he had shown much of his admirable later qualities,—humour, sense, urbanity, perception,—but all strangely mingled with a vein of artistic vulgarity (the worst perhaps of all vulgarities) which is totally absent from his matured writing. It is not merely that in this earlier work he is often deliberately coarse—that was a literary tradition, from which it would require more than ordinary originality to break free,—but that he again and ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... a most informal table, spread according to no rules that for many generations at least have been known in the refined world; an anomaly in the eyes of certainly one of the company. Yet the board had a character of its own, very far removed from vulgarity, and suiting remarkably well with the condition and demeanour of those who presided over it—a comfortable, well-to-do, substantial look, that could afford to dispense with minor graces; a self-respect that was not afraid of criticism. ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... well-laid plan came to naught. The specimens of local and ephemeral poetry that were printed in the colonial press in succeeding years make it easy to comprehend the failure of the project: the villanously rhymed effusions fairly imposthumate all the ribald vulgarity of the times; coarseness and dulness of subject and thought being rivalled only by the super-coarseness of the verbiage. I do not say that the newspapers provoked these stupid rhymes, which are about as much poetry as is a game ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... greeted as he went along—none the less that some of them, hearing from their children that he had not been to school the day before, had remarked that his birthday hardly brought him enough to keep it with. The vulgarity belonging to the worship of Mammon, is by no means confined to the rich; many of these, having next to nothing, yet thought profession the one thing, money, houses, lands the only inheritances. It is a marvel that even world-loving people should never see with ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the host of immigrants washed in daily across the harbour—these are poor, but you don't see them unless you go Bowery ways and even then you can't help feeling that in their sufferings there is always hope. Vulgarity? I saw little of it. I thought that the people who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully. When a man is rich enough to build himself a big, new house, he remembers some old house which he once admired, and he ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... wise, this old lady who had made one huge mistake long ago; and she knew that the danger, the harm, the low vulgarity lay in the little fact that Millicent Chyne loved Jack Meredith, according to ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... desperate lover by the armed domestics of the house, and when plebeian fists have even entertained no shyness of the very finest cloth" (here the canon sighed somewhat), "then this fermented prose of miserable vulgarity must evaporate in order that the pure poetic unhappiness of love may settle as sediment You have been fearfully scolded, my dear young friend, this was the bitter prose that had to be surmounted; you have surmounted it, and so now give yourself up entirely to poetry. Here—here are Petrarch's ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... phraseology than his friend, and knew that outrageous as it was to good taste under the circumstances, it yet might spring from a sincere and honourable motive, or at best must be regarded as the natural result of innate vulgarity and mistaken training. ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... alone. But it is a very dangerous and a very melancholy thing for common women to be "lying on their oars" long at a time. Some of these were, I suppose, what Winthrop calls "business-women, fighting their way out of vulgarity into style." The process is rather uninteresting, but the result may be glorious. Yet a good many of them were good, honest, kind, common girls, only demoralized by long lying around in a waiting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... disinterested, and wholly noble. I worship the beautiful, the ideal, without being romantic; though I HAVE been, in my heart of hearts, in my dreams. But I recognize the truth of the various things, just even to vulgarity, which you have written me about Society ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... Hendrie Craig, and Rorie. These names, odd and uncouth enough, are better imagined at least than those which Hopkins contrived for the imps which he discovered—such as Pyewacket, Peck-in-the-Crown, Sack-and-Sugar, News, Vinegar-Tom, and Grizell Greedigut, the broad vulgarity of which epithets shows what a flat imagination he brought to ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... rather too far, even to the borders of vulgarity; but Mills remained untroubled and only reached for ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... great charm. These notes are not sermons; they are not even confessions. There is always an air of self-consciousness in confessions; in such revelations there is always a danger of unctuousness or of vulgarity for the best of men. St. Augus-tine is not always clear of offence, and John Bunyan himself exaggerates venial peccadilloes into heinous sins. But Marcus Aurelius is neither vulgar nor unctuous; he extenuates nothing, but nothing ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... the Chorus to assist them against Cleon, encouraging the sausage-seller to show the brazen effrontery which is the mob-orator's sole protection, and to prove that a decent upbringing is meaningless. Nothing loth, he redoubles Cleon's vulgarity on his head. Cleon rushes out intending to inform the Upper House of their treasons; the sausage-seller hurries after him, his neck being well oiled with his own lard to make Cleon's slanders slip off. ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... beasts of burden is, but too often, as exactly opposed to that of the Coolie as are his manners. No wonder that the two races do not, and it is to be feared never will, amalgamate; that the Coolie, shocked by the unfortunate awkwardness of gesture and vulgarity of manners of the average Negro, and still more of the Negress, looks on them as savages; while the Negro, in his turn hates the Coolie as a hard-working interloper, and despises him as a heathen; or that heavy fights between ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... his rank and position should condescend to marry a girl of low degree, however virtuous or excellent she might be. These mesalliances can never answer. Too soon the one of more refined habits and ideas discovers a degree of coarseness and vulgarity in the other, which must ultimately cause separation. No; my only notion of a happy union is, that where people are of the same rank and education, and all their sympathies ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... a matter of doubt whether any vulgar man suspects the full extent of his vulgarity; but there are few who are not conscious, now and then, of a very uncomfortable difference between themselves and the refined natures with whom they come in contact. Alfred Barton had never been so troubled by this consciousness ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... close of nearly a century, when Fuller collected and republished them. Probably the prose writing of this, the richest period of genuine English literature, contains nothing finer than some of his sermons. They are free, to an astonishing degree, from the besetting vices of his age—vulgarity, and quaintness, and affected learning; and he was one of the first English preachers who, without submitting to the trammels of a pedantic logic, conveyed in language nervous, pure, and beautiful, the most convincing arguments in the most ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... Tall and slender was she in stature, with a face like the egg of a goose. Her eyes so beautiful, with their well-curved eyebrows, possessed in their gaze a bewitching flash. At the very sight of her refined and elegant manners all idea of vulgarity was forgotten. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Class distinction can hardly be said to exist; there are employers and employed, masters and servants, of course, but the line of demarcation is lightly drawn, and we find an easy familiarity wholly free from impoliteness, much less vulgarity, existing ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... smothered under noisome horse-chestnuts and Virginia creepers. How came they to hit upon the ugliest tree, and the ugliest creeper, on earth? Infallible instinct! Zurich: who shall sum up thy merciless vulgarity? ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... as plain 'Shawn Duffy, of the Devil's Half-acre.' It was undoubtedly a most diabolic address; but Shawn was a man of considerable strength of mind, as well as of muscle, and he resolved to become a juntleman, despite this damning reminiscence. Vulgarity, it is said, sticks to a man like a limpet to a rock. Shawn knew the best way to rub it off would be by mixing with good society. Dress, he always understood, was the best passport he could bring for admission within the pale of gentility; accordingly, he boldly attempted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... original effect, even if the mere showing of movement has today lost its impressiveness. Moreover we are captivated by the undeniable beauty of many settings. The melodrama may be cheap; yet it does not disturb the cultured mind as grossly as a similar tragic vulgarity would on the real stage, because it may have the snowfields of Alaska or the palm trees of Florida as radiant background. An intellectual interest, too, finds its satisfaction. We get an insight into spheres which were ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... them has long since faded. True, they occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a sheer brute force, which those other composers never got into their insipid tunes; while, on the other hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also showing a degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and Donizetti were for the most ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... Varney entered the withdrawing-room with the graceful ease and unclouded front of an accomplished courtier, skilled, under the veil of external politeness, to disguise his own feelings and to penetrate those of others. Anthony Foster plodded into the apartment after him, his natural gloomy vulgarity of aspect seeming to become yet more remarkable, from his clumsy attempt to conceal the mixture of anxiety and dislike with which he looked on her, over whom he had hitherto exercised so severe a control, now so splendidly attired, and decked with so many pledges of ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the Catholic churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our next." Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... such vulgarity! such indelicacy!" cried Mrs. Ramshorn, while the parson was still occupied with the sherry. "Not content with talking about himself in the pulpit, he must even talk about his wife! What's he or his wife in the house of God? When his gown is on, a clergyman is neither Mr. This ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... (in the character of Aeschylus) ridicules Euripides for the vulgarity of deriving pathos from the rags, etc., of his heroes, he ought not to have omitted all censure of the rags and sores of the favourite hero of Sophocles. And if the Telephus of the first is represented as a beggar, so also is the Oedipus at ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... retail liquor houses in this nation. Allowing 20 feet to each, it gives us an unbroken liquor front of about 781 miles. Just think of it! Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of profanity and vulgarity. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of Sabbath-breaking. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of drunkard-making. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of filth, debauchery, anarchy, dynamite and bombs. [Applause]. Seven hundred ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... and girls persistently feel toward the school, and of their leaving it, at the last, with rejoicing! Are we astonished that when they have fairly escaped, frivolity is, with the young woman, too apt to replace mental culture, and with the young man, vulgarity or exclusive living for 'the main chance?' That the men and women so educated are too receptive, credulous, pliant and unstable; that in too large a degree they lack discrimination, judgment, and the good sense and executive talent which plan understandingly, and work without sacrifice of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... born at Norwich. In her somewhat ill-natured autobiography she writes: 'Norwich, which has now no social claims to superiority at all, was in my childhood a rival of Lichfield itself, in the time of the Sewards, for literary pretensions and the vulgarity of pedantry. William Taylor was then at his best, when there was something like fulfilment of his early promise, when his exemplary filial duty was a fine spectacle to the whole city, and before the vice which destroyed him had coarsened his morale and destroyed ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... introduce her into society? My dear Mrs. Pendennis, I will name no names, but in the very best circles of London society I have seen men suffering the most excruciating agony, I have known them to be cut, to be lost utterly, from the vulgarity of their wives' connections. What did Lady Snapperton do last year at her dejeune dansant after the Bohemian Ball? She told Lord Brouncker that he might bring his daughters or send them with a proper chaperon, but that she would not receive Lady Brouncker who was a druggist's daughter, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that is not an insult to your husband, and to those who are caring for you. I am speaking in this matter not merely for myself, but for your physicians, who know this woman, heard her menaces and her vulgarity. It is their judgment that you should be protected at all hazards from ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... impetuously, frowning at a huge full-length opposite of Lord Grosville as M.F.H., a masterpiece indeed of early Victorian vulgarity. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... according to my note, gave the interpretation thus; 'It is difficult to speak with propriety of common things; as, if a poet had to speak of Queen Caroline drinking tea, he must endeavour to avoid the vulgarity of cups and saucers.' But upon reading my note, he tells me that he meant to say, that 'the word communia, being a Roman law term, signifies here things communis juris, that is to say, what have never yet been treated by any body; and this ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... vulgar, but she was so wild with jealousy that I suppose vulgarity ought to be forgiven her. I hardly know myself how I managed it, but, somehow, I got the poor thing out of the room and the house and into the cool night air, and then I talked to her, and fairly made her be quiet and listen. I told her that Ned Temple had made love to me when ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... that is! It has such a decent sound, almost respectable. We are a refined people, even in our sins, and I know no word in the English language we strive harder to avoid using in any of its forms than that word of brutal vulgarity, but ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... refusal of offered good): while the literally derived word 'Charite' has become, in the modern mind, a gift, whether from God or man, only to the wretched, never to the happy: and lastly, 'Grace' in its physical sense has been perverted, by their social vulgarity, into an idea, whether with respect to form or motion, commending itself rather to the ballet-master than either to the painter ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... brilliant and overcrowded metropolis which formed the nucleus and centre of everything notable or progressive in the King's dominions, there stood a large and aggressively-handsome house, over-decorated both outside and in, and implying in its general appearance vulgarity, no less than wealth. These two things go together very much nowadays; in fact one scarcely ever sees them apart. The fair, southern city of the sea was not behind other modern cities in luxury and self-aggrandisement, and there were certain members of the population who ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... there arise a series of problems, in deciding which the wholesome desire for emphasis by means of shadow is too often exaggerated by the ambition of the sculptor to show his skill in undercutting. The extreme of vulgarity is usually reached when the entire bas-relief is cut hollow underneath, as in much Indian and Chinese work, so as to relieve its forms against an absolute darkness; but no formal law can ever be given; for exactly the same thing may be beautifully done ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... such a thing, that it was but a meaningless dream that had come into her head, but the dream was sweet. She did not, however, want to talk to John May. At the moment she was in a girlish period of being disgusted at what she thought of as the vulgarity of the men who worked on the place. At the table they ate noisily and greedily like hungry animals. She wanted youth that was like her own youth, crude and uncertain perhaps, but reaching eagerly out into the unknown. She wanted to draw very near to something young, strong, gentle, insistent, ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... Milton describes in "Comus," it dissipates with a glance the wild rout of low desires and insane follies which so much blur and blot up the otherwise fair face of human society. It permits of no meanness in its train; it expels vulgarity, and, with a high stretch toward perfected humanity, it unearths the grovelling nature, and gives it aspirations of ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... were unquestionably popular; and, we have no hesitation in saying, deservedly popular; for in spite of their occasional vulgarity, affectation, and silliness, they were undoubtedly characterised by a strong spirit of originality, of pathos, and natural feeling; and recommended to all good minds by the clear impression which they bore of the amiable dispositions ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... matter," said Mr. Abrahams, in a solemn voice. "You shall sit by me and partake of the essence of Lucoptolycus, which removes the scales from our earthly eyes. Whatever you may chance to see, speak not and make no movement, lest you break the spell." His manner was subdued, and his usual cockney vulgarity had entirely disappeared. I took the chair which he ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... was, at least, this advantage in duelling, that it set a certain limit on the tongue. When Society laid by the rapier, it buckled on the more subtle blade of etiquette wherewith to keep obtrusive vulgarity at bay.' In this connection, I may be permitted to recall a playful remark of his upon another occasion. The painful divisions in the First Parish, A.D. 1844, occasioned by the wild notions in respect to the rights of (what Mr. Wilbur, so far as concerned the reasoning faculty, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... calves in broadcloth, who are ever ready to fall down and worship the golden emblem of themselves. And yet she is pug-nosed, freckle-faced, and red-headed; insolent to her equals, coarsely familiar with her inferiors; her vulgarity is without wit, her affectation is devoid of elegance or grace; ignorant and stupid, the meanest kitchen wench would suffer by a comparison with her. In striking contrast with this ludicrous specimen of degraded aristocracy, there were several young ladies present who were really lovely ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... most liable to be deluded in this way; they commit wrong, devastation, and murder, on so grand a scale, that it impresses them as speculative rather than actual; but in our procession we find them linked in detestable conjunction with the meanest criminals whose deeds have the vulgarity of petty details. Here the effect of circumstance and accident is done away, and a man finds his rank according to the spirit of his crime, in whatever shape ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in him, and had the boy not been so intimate with Cardillac and Carfax, Olva might have made advances, Craven took a man of the Carfax type with extreme simplicity; he thought his geniality and physical strength excused much coarseness and vulgarity. He was still young enough to have the Public School code—the most amazing thing in the history of the British nation—and because Carfax bruised his way as a forward through many football matches, and fought a policeman on Parker's Piece one summer evening, Rupert Craven thought him a ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... according to fine people, that they were not even sensible of their own vulgarity. And so good-natured were they, that they were not offended because cousin Sandys did not invite them with any of the genteel parents of her pupils. They took this reserved hospitality as a complimentary admission of their ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... entertain any such evil designs, avowing freely that she likes him, and treating him very nearly as she does papa. It is my business to keep 'our aunt,' who, between ourselves, has, below the surface, the vulgarity of nature that high-breeding cannot eradicate, from startling the little humming-bird, before the net has been properly twined round her bright little heart. As far as I can see, he is much smitten, but very cautious in his approaches, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... of Harold Bell Wright are quite pronounced. He is unpretending, cares not for the lime-light and avoids interviews for the public press. Loud, boisterous conversation is but little less offensive to him than vulgarity in speech or action. His friends are strong, clean-minded men who are doing things in the world and are as necessary to his being as the air to his existence, and his generosity to them is no less marked than his caring and providing for his family, ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... abuse." It is really a relief to know that Overton, who is still credited with these lines by Godwin, Guizot, and others, was not the author of them, and this not because of their peculiar political import, but because of their utter vulgarity. How else could we have retained our faith in Milton's character of Overton—"you, Overton, bound to me these many years past in a friendship of more than brotherly closeness and affection, both by the similarity of our tastes, and the sweetness of your manners"? ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson |
