"Overweening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prolonged study of them produces a feeling of respect for all true believers. But a season of travel in India, entered upon with the desire to dispassionately study the Hindu religion in the land of its overweening strength, produces only bewilderment and mental nausea. The more determined one may be to lay bare the gems of this faith and its administration by the Brahmins, the keener will be his disappointment, for not a redeeming feature will he find, and he may quit ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... made his tavern their rendezvous. He was dark-skinned as the rest of the crew, red-faced as old Pedro (from the same faithful indulgence in vintages), not younger than forty, yet aggressive, vibrating with physical power, elasticity, and an overweening insolence. His manner of approach—and he entered this tavern with the same studied grace with which he swaggered into half a hundred others—seemed to indicate that he delighted in disorganizing and terrorizing whatever he might find established ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... for a moment in silence, and her face softened. After all, she loved Eberhard Ludwig, and in spite of her overweening prosperity, coupled with the world-hardness which marred her, there lingered something of tenderness in her love. Then, too, she was a consummate actress, and a being gifted with the womanly genius ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... miscalculation; they defy even the owner of the animal, and they cheerfully give him the opportunity of putting down thousands if he wishes to do so. There must be some reason for this assurance which at first sight looks so very overweening. Better have a care!" ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... day—and the last "chukker" of the final match for the Cup was in full progress. It lay between the Punjab Cavalry from Kohat and a crack Hussar team, fresh from Home and Hurlingham, mounted on priceless ponies, six to each man, and upheld by an overweening confidence that they were bound to "sweep the board." They had swept it accordingly; and although anticipating "a tough tussle with those game 'Piffer'[25] chaps," were disposed to look upon the Punjab Cup as their own property for at least ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... naturally swelled the overweening insolence of the Deys. A consul had a Maltese cook: the Dey objected to the Maltese, and took the man by force from the consul's house and sent him away in irons. If the consul objected, he might go too. When Captain Hope, of H.M.S. Romulus, arrived at Algiers, ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... judgment, both here and in the Seven before Thebes, the poet describes the issue of the war, not as accidental, which is almost always the case in Homer, but (for in tragedy there is no place for accident,) as the result of overweening infatuation on the one hand, and wise moderation ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... great Queen possess, but at times she had too overweening a contempt for her enemies. Her disdain for my master, the young Cardinal, was once too bitter, and begot in this presumptuous prelate's heart undying hatred. Educated under the same roof as M. le Cardinal, with the same teachers and the same doctrines, I saw, as it ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... past," she continued abruptly, "spread it out before you, with all its just defeats, all its broken faith, and overweening hopes, its beauty, and fear, and love, and its loss—its loss; then turn and say: this, this only, this duller heart, these duller eyes, this contumacious spirit is all that is left—myself. Oh! who could wish to one so dear a destiny so dark?" She rose hastily ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... African Company. Each could rely upon powerful political support, and their ambitions were supported by the solid mass of England's commercial class. Early in the session, which began in March, 1664, the grievances from which English commerce suffered under the overweening insolence and repeated aggressions of the Dutch, were laid before Parliament. Heavy losses were alleged to have been suffered, and the dangers of the total decay of the trade were forcibly foretold. Parliament ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... the President's overweening desire to accommodate all persons who came to him soliciting favors, but the opportunity was never offered until an untimely and unthinking disease, which possessed many of the characteristics of one of the most dreaded maladies, confined him to his ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... the very respectable salary, which, as a confidential clerk, he received from his employers, on whom his prospects of success depended. The chasm, therefore, betwixt the only daughter of the wealthy Mr. Bernard and himself, was wide—wide enough to check even an overweening confidence. But such it was not in the nature of Pownal to feel. He was sensible of the full force of the difficulties he had to encounter; to his modesty they seemed insuperable, and he determined to drive from his heart a sentiment that, in his despondency, he blamed ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... shut us in from the weary world," said Ebbo. "And alack! when they go, what a turmoil it will be! Councils in the Rathhaus, appeals to the League, wranglings with the Markgraf, wise saws, overweening speeches, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of French origin, hailing from Bourbonnais, members of which occupied for generations the thrones of France, Naples, and Spain, and who severally ruled their territories under a more or less overweening sense of their rights as born to reign. Two branches, both of which trace back to Henry IV., held sway in France, one beginning with Louis XIV., eldest son of Louis XIII., and the other, called the Orleans, with Philip of Orleans, second son of Louis XIII., the former ending ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... was disabled by two wounds, {138} one in the knee and one in the leg, which hindered him from walking. Still he urged the Hurons to renew the attack. But in vain. From overweening confidence the fickle savages had passed to the other extreme. Nothing could inspire them to another assault. Moreover, Champlain had lost much of his peculiar influence over them. They had fancied that, with him in front, success was sure. Now they saw that he could be wounded, ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... world: this cheating and screening Of cheats! this conscience for candle-wicks, Not beacon-fires! this overweening Of underhand diplomatical tricks, Dared for the country while ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Many have done worse—they have maintained after sharp warnings the pride of their blind years; they have maintained that pride on into the great disasters, and when these came they have sullenly died. France neither consented to sink nor died by being overweening. Some men must have been at work to force their sons into the conscription, to consent to heavy taxation, to be vigilant, accumulative, tenacious, and, as it were, constantly eager. There must have been classes ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... the hawking pedlars and balladmongers, entitled The Blason of Colours. Who made it? Whoever it was, he was wise in that he did not set his name to it. But, besides, I know not what I should rather admire in him, his presumption or his sottishness. His presumption and overweening, for that he should without reason, without cause, or without any appearance of truth, have dared to prescribe, by his private authority, what things should be denotated and signified by the colour: which is the custom of tyrants, who will have their will to bear sway in stead of equity, and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the blame of the conflict on the rich; and accordingly at the beginning of the poem he says that he fears 'the love of wealth and an overweening mind', evidently meaning that it was through these that ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... impression on most persons, including those who became afterwards her best friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them. I believe I fancied ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... virtues, but he had one vice. In the pride of his heart he forgot the Giver of all good things, and considered the blessings so abundantly showered upon him as the proper and just reward of his distinguished merit. Instances of this overweening presumption might perhaps be found in all ages among the possessors of wealth and power; but few sinners have the good fortune to be recalled, like Sir Isumbras, by a severe but salutary punishment, to the pious sentiments of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... was that of pure reaction against "the impudence," as Montaigne says, "of those who profess knowledge and their overweening presumption!" The self-styled skeptics of the Esope review were at heart men of the firmest faith. But their mask of irony and haughty ignorance, naturally enough, had small attraction for the public: rather ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... merchants; he has flouted Hastings,—who would gainsay us. For the rest, Elizabeth, be it yours to speak of affronts paid by the earl to your highness; be it yours, Jacquetta, to rouse Edward's pride by dwelling on Warwick's overweening power; be it mine to enlist his interest on behalf of his merchandise; be it Margaret's to move his heart by soft tears for the bold Charolois; and ere a month be told, Warwick shall find his embassy a thriftless laughing-stock, and no shade pass between the House ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... therefore treat that theology as either morally or intellectually respectable. It has happened to me once or twice to listen to expositions from orators of the Salvation Army. Some of them struck me as sincere though limited, and others as the victims of an overweening vanity. The oratory, so far as I could hear, consisted in stringing together an endless set of phrases about the blood of Christ, which, if they really meant anything, meant a doctrine as low in the intellectual scale as that of any of the objects of missionary enterprise. ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... habit arises from the overweening estimate which is formed of two things, well enough in their place,—rank and wealth. Everybody struggles to rise into some superior class. The spirit of caste is found as keenly at work among the ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... petrified system, defended from outward influence on all sides by an invulnerable bigotry, a haughty exclusiveness; while Christianity was in a young and vigorous, an assimilating and formative, state. Fourthly, the overweening sectarian vanity and scorn of the Jews, despising, hating, and fearing the Christians, would not permit them to adopt peculiarities of belief from the latter; but the Christians were undeniably Jews in almost every thing except in asserting the Messiahship of Jesus: they claimed ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... man of prepossessing appearance, had been one of the most promising officers, and had early been promoted to commandant. Whether through overweening ambition on his part or not I cannot say, but Vilonel, accused of insubordination, was thenceforth given the distasteful and inglorious task of commandeering. He wearied of this, and applied for ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... watched her departure from Durham House, in the Strand, were silent and sullen. Her youthful beauty and grace might win an involuntary cry of admiration, but the heart of the people was not hers. They recognised that she was but the tool of her father-in-law, whom, because of his overweening ambition, they hated. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... rashness or overweening presumption that led the admiral to leave the new home he had made within the strong defences of La Rochelle; or was he moved solely by a conscientious persuasion that he had no right to consider personal danger when the great interests ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... those lonely hills. Few men in literature have felt the burden of the world, the weight of the inexorable conscience, as has Carlyle, or drawn such fresh inspiration from that source. However we may differ from him (and almost in self-defense one must differ from a man of such intense and overweening personality), it must yet be admitted that he habitually speaks out of that primitive silence and solitude in which only the heroic soul dwells. Certainly not in contemporary British literature is there another writer whose ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... were jealously kept apart, and when one monarch, in a fit of overweening self-importance, tried to unite in his own person the kingly and the priestly functions, 'the leprosy rose up in his forehead,' even as he stood with the censer in his hand, and 'Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day of his death.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the enemy who has driven you out. But with such an army you might succeed in recovering your State as readily without a fortress as with one; nay, perhaps, even more readily, since your subjects, had you not used them ill, from the overweening confidence your fortress gave you, might then have felt better disposed towards you. And the event shows that in times of adversity this very fortress of Milan has been of no advantage whatever, either to the Sforzas or to the French; but, on the contrary, ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... from continents and islands. You will say that some one else will arise to do it for us on easier terms. Perhaps—and perhaps not for a century, and another Crown may thrust in to-morrow! France, probably. It is not impossible that England might do it. As for what is named overweening pride and presumption, at least it shows at once and for altogether. We are not left painfully to find it out. It goes with his character. Take it or leave it together with his patience, courage and long head. ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... master, who ardently wished reforms, were repelled when they found the main object of the leaders of the agitation was the separation of Canada from Britain and would have nothing to do with them. The first time the master met Mackenzie he took a dislike to him, perceiving his overweening vanity, his habit of contradiction, and his lack of judgment. He said he was a specimen of the unpleasant type of Scot who meddled and denounced to attract attention and make himself of consequence. When he saw him shaping a rebellion he declared it would be ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... Sim and his inclinations. His feeling against Bas Rowlett was becoming an obsession of venom fed by the overweening arrogance of the man, but Bas still held him in the hollow of his hand, and besides these reefs of menace were yet other ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... farthing if clerks who have never entered upon or trod the paths of chivalry should think me foolish. Knight I am, and knight I will die, if such be the pleasure of the Most High. Some take the broad road of overweening ambition; others that of mean and servile flattery; others that of deceitful hypocrisy, and some that of true religion; but I, led by my star, follow the narrow path of knight-errantry, and in pursuit of that calling I despise wealth, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... city should always be prepared for the advent of danger in their own quarters. The course of war cannot be foreseen, and its attacks are generally dictated by the impulse of the moment; and where overweening self-confidence has despised preparation, a wise apprehension often been able to make head against superior numbers. Not that confidence is out of place in an army of invasion, but in an enemy's country it should also be accompanied by the precautions ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... fully understood these politico-ecclesiastical questions. He was by no means a good husband, rather the contrary, but, in other things, he could control himself; he was moderate in eating and drinking. Success did not make him overweening, but all the more prudent:[26] ill-success found him resolute; yet it was remarked that he was more severe in success, milder in adversity. If contradicted, he showed all the excitability of the Southern French nature; he passed from promises to threats, from flatteries to outbursts of wrath, until ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... literature of our time, the intellectual manifestations of our age, whether scientific or literary. I urge that we do not sit on the counter in order to cry 'stinking fish,' and observe that this is merely an age of commerce. An overweening modesty in us seems to persuade us that it is quite impossible we should be fortunate enough to be the contemporaries of great men. The fact that we know them personally sometimes undermines our faith; contemporary contempt for a great man is too often turned on the contemporaries. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... Forrest, like myself, was somewhat leary of entering the town, and my brother and the boys passed on shortly, leaving Quince behind. We discussed every possible phase of what might happen in case we were recognized, which was almost certain if Tolleston or the Dodge buyers were encountered. But an overweening hunger to get into Ogalalla was dominant in us, and under the excuse of settling for our supplies, after the herd passed, we remounted our horses, Flood joining us, and rode ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... ruined temple. And there, in the ultimate chamber crouched all that was left of the inmate, terrified, helpless, and ignorant. As I looked upon him I understood why man is never permitted really to know himself unless, in an access of mad folly and overweening pride, he succeeds in crossing the boundary which to pass is sheer wickedness. And I tried to turn away, but I could not—I could not. I made a supreme ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... which he did not seem to know. He could not find there very quickly on his large-sized maps, or pretended not to, though I concluded that this was "camouflage," in case I might tell "old Fritz" that such places existed. Like most of our generals, he had amazing, overweening optimism. He had always got the enemy "nearly beat," and he arranged attacks during the Somme fighting with the jovial sense of striking another blow which would lead this time to stupendous results. In the early days, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... that he wants to do it is one-half of success. Before turning him down, there must be a substantially clear showing that he lacks the main qualifications. It must be a compelling reason, rather than the overweening excuse that it is more convenient to keep him where he is. In any case, he should be thanked for coming forward, and earmarked as a good prospect for the next ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... had refused to lend his name to a scheme under which Lars Larssen would hold the reins of control. He knew the ruthlessness of the man and his overweening lust of power, which had passed the bounds of ordinary ambition and had ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... that he had again fallen into a profound slumber, which she at first regarded as a favorable omen; and, in the conscious security of the spot, in the belief that he had received none of the injuries she had apprehended from the motion of the boat, and, above all, in the indulgence of that overweening pride of affection which covets all pains and sacrifices for the loved one, she felt a satisfaction which was almost happiness, in her situation. But it was not destined to be of very long duration. She at length began to perceive a gradual reddening of his cheeks, and then, soon after, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... never to use the knife unless his judgment was satisfied that an operation was necessary. "That he decided in favor of operating when some of his associates hesitated, was due rather to his large experience than to an overweening fondness for the use of the knife." In his operations he was firm and decided. Gifted with an unusual steadiness of nerve and strength of muscle, he never allowed his sympathy for the patient to cause him to hesitate or inflict one pang less than the case required. He was prompt and ready in ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... afterwards learned that Dougal had originally come to Glasgow as a prisoner, from being concerned in some depredation, but had somehow found such favour in the eyes of the jailor, that, with rather overweening confidence, he had retained him in his service as one of the turnkeys; a task which Dougal had discharged with sufficient fidelity, so far as was known, until overcome by his clannish prejudices on the unexpected ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Kepler tried the experiment of setting a planet, invisible by reason of its smallness, to revolve in the vast region of seemingly desert space separating Mars from Jupiter.[195] The disproportionate magnitude of the same interval was explained by Kant as due to the overweening size of Jupiter. The zone in which each planet moved was, according to the philosopher of Koenigsberg, to be regarded as the empty storehouse from which its materials had been derived. A definite relation should thus exist between the planetary ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... far-fetched. She argued against it, and became petulant. Nancy lost patience, but remembered in time that she was at Jessica's mercy, and, to her mortification, had to adopt a coaxing, almost a suppliant, tone, with the result that Miss. Morgan's overweening conceit was flattered into arrogance. Her sentimental protestations became strangely mixed with a self-assertiveness very galling to Nancy's pride. Without the slightest apparent cause for ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... him square in the eyes. He was maybe an inch taller than me, a handsome fellow, with a flushed, petulant face and an overweening pride ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... Sydney's great and overweening fault was that form of "moral stupidity" which we term selfishness. Something of it may have come with the faculties which he had inherited—in tendencies and inclinations mysteriously associated with his physical conformation; ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Australia are Sir Henry Parkes and Mr. Berry. Of these, Sir Henry Parkes is unquestionably the abler. He is a fair administrator, a good debater and leader of the House, has statesmanlike ideas, and but for his overweening conceit might have risen to the rank of a statesman. Mr. Berry's talent lies in a fluency of specious but forcible speech appealing to the mob, rather than in debating power. His vision is limited, and ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... with an education 'whose object was pretension, and whose principle was arrogance, made him at once a thing fearful and pitiable, at war with its species and itself, ready to crush in manhood as to sting in the cradle, and leading his overweening ambition to pursue its object by ways dark and hidden—safe from the penalty of crime, and exposed only to the obloquy which he laughed to scorn. If ever there was a man formed alike by nature and ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... things to be tolerated? Is it for the interest, is it for the honour, of the country, that they should not as speedily as possible be redressed? I should be as unwilling as any man, to give an overweening preference to the interests of my own profession; but I cannot help thinking that, under all the circumstances of the business, your lordships will be strongly disposed to advance this bill into a law, as speedily as may be consistent ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... supremacy that such things were done as have been related. It was to show the conqueror that the bonds in which the sleeping Samson had been bound were green withes which he scornfully snapped asunder in his first waking moment. Pride the most overweening, and a prejudice of caste the most intense and ineradicable, stimulated by the chagrin of defeat and inflamed by the sense of injustice and oppression—both these lay at the bottom of the acts by which the rule of the majorities ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... to state that, in the early period of his history, a thoughtless disregard of his own life, and an overweening confidence in his ability to swim almost any length, and amid circumstances of great peril, often led him to deeds of 'reckless daring,' which in riper years he would have trembled to attempt. Respecting most of the following circumstances ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... recall her words,—when, a moment later, she met the gaze of profound pity and disappointment with which Dr. Grey's eyes dwelt upon her countenance, hardened now by its expression of insolent haughtiness; but he allowed her no opportunity for retraction, even had she mastered her overweening pride, and stooping to whisper a brief sentence in his sister's ear, he took a medical book from the ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... means end with them. And it is even possible to have these virtues so unhappily proportioned and inauspiciously mixed with other turns and casts of mind, as to end in work with little grace or harmony or fine tracery about it, but only overweening purpose and vehement will. And it is overweeningness and self-confident will that are the chief notes of Macaulay's style. It has no benignity. Energy is doubtless a delightful quality, but then Macaulay's ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... them. But for thee I had persisted happie, had not thy pride And wandring vanitie, when lest was safe, Rejected my forewarning, and disdain'd Not to be trusted, longing to be seen Though by the Devil himself, him overweening To over-reach, but with the Serpent meeting Fool'd and beguil'd, by him thou, I by thee, 880 To trust thee from my side, imagin'd wise, Constant, mature, proof against all assaults, And understood not all was but a shew Rather then solid vertu, all but a Rib Crooked by nature, bent, as ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... party in right of his wife, declaring that it could not be inherited by a female. In this he appears to have acted unjustly, from the strong desire to avail himself by any pretext of an opportunity of breaking the overweening power of the great turbulent nobles; and, to make up for the loss, he created the new earldom of Menteith, for the young Malise Graham, the son of the dispossessed earl. But the proud and vindictive ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... subsequently to be ruler, lost his life by falling into a river called the Albula. This river was renamed Tiber from him. It flows through Rome and is of great value to the city and in the highest degree useful to the Romans. Amulius, a descendant of Tiberinus, displayed an overweening pride and had the audacity to deify himself, pretending an ability to answer thunder with thunder by mechanical contrivances and to lighten in response to the lightnings and to hurl thunderbolts. He met his end by the overflow of the lake beside which his palace was set, and both he and the palace ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... but thy wife sickens now, and she will give birth to a woman-child fair and lovely; and dearly thou wilt love her; but high-born men shall woo thy daughter, coming from such quarters as the eagles seemed to fly from, and shall love her with overweening love, and shall fight about her, and both lose their lives thereby. And thereafter a third man, from the quarter whence came the falcon, shall woo her, and to that man shall she be wedded. Now, I have unravelled thy dream, and I think things will befall ...
— The Story Of Gunnlaug The Worm-Tongue And Raven The Skald - 1875 • Anonymous
... appearance. Elizabeth was not to be thus cajoled. She ordered him into custody, deprived him of his offices, and, what was of more importance to him, refused to renew his patent of a monopoly of sweet wines. Although the earl soon regained his liberty he could not forget his disgrace, and his overweening vanity drove him to concert measures against the government. In 1601 he rode at the head of a few followers into the city, expecting the citizens to rise in his favour. The mayor had, however, been forewarned, and 1,000 men were held in readiness in each ward fully armed ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... with one of the Bowen boys, his old Hannibal schoolmates. He was reveling in the river life, the ease and distinction and romance of it. No other life would ever suit him as well. He was at the age to enjoy just what it brought him —at the airy, golden, overweening age ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... actions were leading him, Smith did not stop to consider. He had no fear of results. With an overweening confidence arising from past successes, he believed that matters would adjust themselves as they always had. Smith wanted a home, and the MacDonald cattle, horses, and hay; but more than any of them he wanted Dora Marshall. How he was going to obtain them all ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... of those refusals to advise with those who knew as well as he what should be done had been the one of not heeding the cries of the men who had warned him not to approach the vicious brute. To dominate had been the keynote of her father's character; his death had been a fitting symbol of his overweening desire to ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... success of the chief they choose in the enterprise, and the army more upon plunder than regular pay; both may desert the cause of the more wary for that of the more daring; each is flattered into an overweening confidence in his own ability and good fortune; and all rush on to seize upon the throne yet filled by their wretched parent, who, in the history of his own crimes, now reads those of his children. Gibbon has justly observed (chap. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... abomination, are not only wild to have a lord for their leader, but must have that lord who is the especial incarnation of all those odious qualities which they ascribe most unjustly to the order of which he is a member: and he who is brimful of pride and arrogance, and of an overweening sense of his greatness and his rank, is content to associate with men whose chief recommendation is the profuseness with which they pander to his vanity, and to seek personal distinction and power by lending himself to the promotion of schemes the success of which no man would more earnestly deprecate ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the form of a blind and overweening self-conceit. He has the 'great-man-mania' hardly less than Karl Moor. Accustomed to follow his own light, to command and to be obeyed, and to look with contempt upon the interference of priests and ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... not blindly idolized. In Spain the very beggar does not feel himself a degraded being, for he kisses no one's feet, and knows not what it is to be cuffed or spitten upon; and in Spain the duke or the marquis can scarcely entertain a very overweening opinion of his own consequence, as he finds no one, with perhaps the exception of his French valet, to fawn upon or ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... ran with Congress, yet Johnson had the promise of very respectable support until he threw it away. His extempore expressions suggested an overweening view of his own position. To the committee reporting to him the Philadelphia convention, he said, "We have seen hanging upon the verge of the government, as it were, a body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... against the truth and her own conscience. A fearful dread fell upon her, and deprived her of the power to lift her soul in prayer. She could not, she dared not, do what was required of her, and yet the overweening love of life which exists in every mortal led her feet to the base of the idol and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... answered, "You make a swift work of looking into this matter; Bolli himself once bespoke it before me, and I rather warded it off, and the same is still uppermost in my mind." Osvif said, "Many a man will tell you that this is spoken more in overweening pride than in wise forethought if you refuse such a man as is Bolli. But as long as I am alive, I shall look out for you, my children, in all affairs which I know better how to see through things than you do." And as Osvif took such a strong view of the matter, Gudrun, ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous
... setting the example. Their violent abuse of the Church, their unfounded assertions that the clergy did not really believe what they preached, that the Christian religion as taught by them was a mere invention of priestcraft to serve its own ends, their overweening pretensions contrasted with the scanty contributions which they actually made either to theology or to philosophy or to philology,—all ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... to greet Simonides. The little poet was delighted, despite overweening hopes, at the manly beauty yet modesty of the athlete, and being a man who kept his thoughts always near his tongue, made Glaucon blush more ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... fiercely issues his last command, and embraces death to escape insult. The haughty spirit was unchanged, crushed but the same, unsoftened, and therefore roused to madder defiance of God and man. What an awful last saying for 'the anointed of Jehovah,' and how the overweening self-will and vehemence and passionate pride of his whole life are ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... peculiar advantages for enforcing a policy which until that time had thriven conspicuously, if somewhat illusively, in its commercial results, and had substantially attained its especial object of maritime preponderance. Other peoples had to submit to the compulsion exerted by her overweening superiority. The obligation upon foreign shipping to be three-fourths manned by their own citizens, for instance, rested only upon a British law, and applied only in a British port; but the accumulations of British capital, with the consequent ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... been multiplied to such an extent—what advantage, we ask, has she derived from her faculty of scribbling, except that she has made herself pretty widely known, and ridiculed wherever she is known? Presumptuous ignorance, and overweening conceit, have, in her case, completely nullified, nay worse, have converted into a curse, in some respects, what was intended every way for a blessing. If Lady Morgan would forego her mongrel idiom, and use the English language; if she would confine herself ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... words, looks, sighs, or tears, revealed; 165 There saw into the depth of human souls, Souls that appear to have no depth at all To careless eyes. And-now convinced at heart How little those formalities, to which With overweening trust alone we give 170 The name of Education, have to do With real feeling and just sense; how vain A correspondence with the talking world Proves to the most; and called to make good search If man's estate, by doom of Nature yoked 175 With toil, be ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... doggish names of the Blacks, their ribald talk, and the fleering of the Women they had about them, find it sore travail to remember what I had for dinner yesterday, what friends I conversed with, what Tavern I supped at, what news I read in the Gazette? But 'tis the knowledge of that overweening Craving to count up the trivial Things of my Youth that warns me to use despatch, even if the chronicle of my after doings be but a short summary or sketch of so many Perils by Land and Sea. And for ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... rhetorical Smithers availed nothing. There was a joined battle over the insufficient tea-cups, and the elderly young assistant demonstrator hovered on the verge of the discussion, rejoicing, it is supposed, over the entanglements of Smithers. For at the outset Smithers displayed an overweening confidence and civility, and at the end his ears were red and his finer manners ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... perfectly incapable, so that any comparison of the intellectual powers of the two men" would indeed be as "exquisitely ridiculous" as the critic declares it. But lord Orford, speaking of d'Alembert, complains of the overweening importance which he, and all the men of letters of those days in France, attributed to their squabbles and disputes. The idleness to which an absolute government necessarily condemns nine-tenths of its subjects, sufficiently accounts for the exaggerated importance given to and assumed by the French ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... I noted a deprecatory gesture, and following his gaze saw the Chevalier himself coming our way at a good round pace. My knees did quake, and the veriest poltroon might have well been ashamed of the overweening fear which possessed me. In defense of which I may say, I believe it was due in large part to my great respect and fondness for de la Mora, as well as a deep consciousness of the justice of his cause. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... let us be practical. I own there is much to be done. I have often stated my 'platform.' We must clip the enormous expenditure on soldiers and ships; reduce our overweening army of diplomatic spies and busybodies; abstain from meddling in everybody's quarrels; redeem from taxation the workman's necessaries—a free breakfast-table; peremptorily legislate against the custom of primogeniture; encourage the distribution ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... was not merely a conceit of their vanity, or an overweening estimate of their local importance, but a calm, deliberate conviction entertained by others as well as themselves, can be shown by abundant evidence from the literature of that period. I will quote a single illustration of the form in which this thought occupied their minds. The subject is ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... and biped animal already alluded to, actuated by an overweening desire of notoriety, and in order to catch the applause of some one, grovelling in the morasses of insignificance and vice, like himself, leaves his native obscurity, and indulges in falsehood, calumny, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... winter nights the heavenly bodies seem to take on an additional splendour, something next to blazing, overweening boastfulness. "Now sleeps the world," they seem to say, "but we are awake and weaving destiny" And on they swing on ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... withstood even the most friendly advances, for there lay at times a vague yearning for love in the depths of his eyes. To grow hard because unfulfilled claims afflict and darken the soul, to retire into solitude because overweening pride shuns to lay bare the glowing heart, to be unjust from a feeling of shame and misunderstood defiance—that was perhaps his ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... children were like the headstones on a battlefield, you can scarcely see them for the flowers that have sprung up about them since. Of course, if the world had chosen, it might have said some hard truths about the Marquise, might have taken her to task for shallowness and an overweening preference for one child at the expense of the rest; but the world of Paris is swept along by the full flood of new events, new ideas, and new fashions, and it was inevitable the Mme. d'Aiglemont should be in some sort allowed to drop out of sight. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... could only retard the production of Dryden and Lee's excellent tragedy The Duke of Guise, first performed 4 December. The play created a furore, and its political purport as a picture of the baffled intrigues of Shaftesbury in favour of Lucy Walter's overweening son is obvious, nor is it rendered less so by Dryden's clever and caustic Vindication of the Duke of Guise (1683). It is interesting to note that Lady Slingsby, who played the Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici, in this play, has some very sardonic speeches put in her mouth; ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... Drayne was still in Gridley High School, and had an overweening idea of himself as a football player, it is extremely likely that we shall hear of him again, for which reason, if for no other, we may as well dismiss ...
— The High School Boys' Training Hike • H. Irving Hancock
... he despised himself! It was such a keen, bitter humiliation! Not only that he had aspired to her, but that he should have misrepresented and traduced Jack, not from an overwhelming passion of jealousy,—that might be pardoned,—but a shallow, overweening vanity ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... forth from hell by some fury. He speeds across the earth in hasty flight, and they whom he visits soon discover that he brings no deity with him, but frenzy rather; yet none will he visit except those abounding overmuch in earthly felicity; for they, he knows, in their overweening conceit, are ready to afford him lodgment and shelter. This has been proven to us by many facts. Do we not see that Venus, the true, the heavenly Venus, often dwells in the humblest cot, her sole concern being the perpetuation of our race? But this god, ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... made an ungallant attack upon the artistic character of Mme. Materna, and this the public found to be "most tolerable and not to be endured." The occasion soon presented itself for Schott to show that he had an overweening sense of his own importance and popularity. At the end of the fourth of the five supplementary performances there was a demonstration of applause. Herr Schott interpreted it as a curtain call for himself, and promptly showed himself, and bowed his thanks. The applause was renewed, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and wouldst thou take away my son's dudaim also?' And Rachel said, 'See, Jacob shall be thine to-night for thy son's dudaim.' But Leah insisted, 'Jacob is mine, and I am the wife of his youth,' whereupon Rachel, 'Be not boastful and overweening. To me he was betrothed first, and for my sake he served our father fourteen years. Thou art not his wife, thou wast taken to him by cunning instead of me, for our father deceived me, and put me out of the way ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... tempted her with such a delightful little man-servant—a perfect English groom. But she had resisted the temptation; and answered: "No, Warden, it would not be right; I will not have a footman on the box. I dare say we can afford it; but let us beware of overweening luxury. I assure you I don't require help to get into the carriage and out of it; I won't even let the coachman get down ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... neglect. Franklin quotes with approval the advice of a wise man to choose a wife 'out of a bunch,' as girls brought up together improve each other by emulation, learn mutual self-sacrifice and forbearance, rub off their angularities, and are not suffered to develop overweening self-conceit. A family where the ruling taste is vulgar, where the standard of honour is low, where extravagance and self-indulgence and want of order habitually prevail, creates an atmosphere which it needs a strong character ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... said Siegfried the good knight, 'To leave off idle talking and rule their tongues aright. Keep thy fair wife in order. I'll do by mine the same. Such overweening folly puts me indeed to shame.'" Nibelungenlied ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... visit of Mr. Pickwick to the firm was, as I said, a mistake and damaged his case. It showed that he was nervous and anxious, and insecure. He took nothing by it. There was in truth much short-sighted cunning in his ways, which came of his overweening vanity. But this was only one of several attempts he made to worm out something to his ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... looks of emulation, inquisitive curiosity, or hostile malevolence; but the most astounding part of the assembly, at least to a Lowland ear, was the rival performance of the bagpipers. These warlike minstrels, who had the highest opinion, each, of the superiority of his own tribe, joined to the most overweening idea of the importance connected with his profession, at first, performed their various pibrochs in front each of his own clan. At length, however, as the black-cocks towards the end of the season, when, in sportsman's language, they are said to flock or crowd, attracted together by the ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... laugh, but he refrained, not wishing to offend Jim, who was evidently suffering from an overweening sense of his own importance, since he had graduated into a temporary occupancy of the editorial chair. Jim was considerably short of twenty at that, so it could not have been more than a year or two since he used to play ball, and train with the other boys ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... believe that he, the wise Cheiron's pupil, the son of a goddess and of Peleus who was the gentlest of men and third in descent from Zeus, was so disordered in his wits as to be at one time the slave of two seemingly inconsistent passions, meanness, not untainted by avarice, combined with overweening contempt of gods ...
— The Republic • Plato
... night air speedily restored him to the possession of his faculties. He was surprised to find that his head ached violently, and that he remembered not one word of the two acts which he had witnessed. As the excitement wore away, it was succeeded by an overweening appetite for sleep, and he hailed a cab and drove to his lodging in a state of extreme exhaustion ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... smiled at this excess of tenderness, but Julien, whose habitual routine had been interfered with and his overweening importance diminished by the arrival of this noisy and all-powerful tyrant, unconsciously jealous of this mite of a man who had usurped his place in the house, kept on saying angrily and impatiently: "How wearisome she is with ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... his critical desk. Those who got a little whipping, got what in the main was good for them; not that the judge was any better or wiser than the persons whom he sentenced, or indeed ever fancied himself so. Pen had a strong sense of humour and justice, and had not therefore an overweening respect for his own works; besides, he had his friend Warrington at his elbow—a terrible critic if the young man was disposed to be conceited, and more savage over Pen than ever he was to those whom he tried at ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... constantly speak with the greatest contempt, and even with animosity, of these unhappy and oppressed beings. The strongest language of high nobility in the monarchies of the old world, cannot be more haughty, overweening or contemptuous towards their fellow creatures, than the expressions of the creole females with regard to the quadroons, in one of the much vaunted states of the free Union. In fact, such comparison strikes the mind of a thinking being very singularly! Many wealthy fathers, on account ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... would surely die; he announced that Italy was not worth dying for and it was said that he had sailed away on an aeroplane. He had accomplished none of his desires; the town had not become Italian, though he had bathed it in Italian blood. His overweening personal ambitions had been shipwrecked on the rock of ridicule, for as he made his inglorious exit he shouted at the world that he was "still alive and inexorable." But yet he may have unconsciously achieved something, for his seizure of what he loved ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... exaggerated tenderness for her boy,—the bete-noire of his step-father. Oscar was, unfortunately, endowed by nature with a foolishness his mother did not perceive, in spite of the step-father's sarcasms. This foolishness—or, to speak more specifically, this overweening conceit—so troubled Monsieur Moreau that he begged Madame Clapart to send the boy down to him for a month that he might study his character, and find out what career he was fit for. Moreau was really thinking of some day proposing Oscar to ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... dramatist had penned these words, the management of Blackfriars met with disaster. The cause, however, went back to December 13, 1600, when Giles and Evans were gathering their players. In their overweening confidence they made a stupid blunder in "taking up" for their troupe the only son and heir of Henry Clifton, a well-to-do gentleman of Norfolk, who had come to London for the purpose of educating the boy. Clifton says in his complaint that ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... glad to accept an appointment to Berlin as court composer for Frederick William III. There he brought out "Lalla Rookh," "Alcidor," and "Agnes Hohenstauffen," none of which found currency in other cities. His overweening conduct gradually made his position at Berlin untenable. He was finally driven out by the hostile demonstrations of his audiences, and retired, in 1841, a broken man. After a few years spent in Paris he returned to Italy, where the Pope created him a count. Spontini returned to his birthplace ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... ill-executed, attempt of Dumouriez to make himself a French Duke of Albemarle. It was quite as unprincipled as his political operations were at Paris in 1792, and in both cases he came to grief through his overweening self-confidence and consequent lack of the most ordinary prudence ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... courage or feats of arms, looked pale on each other, and had obviously received an unpleasant impression from the scene which had been just acted. Louis gazed on them with contempt, and then said aloud, "Although the Count of Crevecoeur be presumptuous and overweening, it must be confessed that in him the Duke of Burgundy hath as bold a servant as ever bore message for a prince. I would I knew where to find as faithful an Envoy to ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... The negroes of the village were our nearest neighbours, and we visited them occasionally, in the hope of ameliorating their condition by communicating to them such instruction as they were capable of receiving; but their grotesque ideas of liberty, overweening egotism, and marvellous superstition, together with the shortness of our stay in their vicinity, combined ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... The overweening love of money is a seed, a soil, and a sun that generates a certain crop: the aim of my poor husbandry is only to reap this; but my sickle does not wish to wound the growers: let them stand aside; or, better far, let them ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... did not expand unduly under Mrs. Hilary's graciousness, and she did not resent it. In fact, the graciousness had been very skilfully managed, and Mrs. Maxwell had not been allowed to feel that there was any condescension to her. She got on with Louise very well; if Mrs. Maxwell had any overweening pride in her son, she kept it as wholly to herself as any overweening pride she might have ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... describe the tremulous state of Lady Constantine during the interval. The warm interest she took in Swithin St. Cleeve—many would have said dangerously warm interest—made his hopes her hopes; and though she sometimes admitted to herself that great allowance was requisite for the overweening confidence of youth in the future, she permitted herself to be blinded to probabilities for the pleasure of sharing his dreams. It seemed not unreasonable to suppose the present hour to be the beginning of realization ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... that, it might happen to any of them. And a compass was not a sure safeguard. A man could wander round and round without finding a fairly nearby camp. Shelby was a few years older than the other two, and of a far more prudent nature. He had no dare-devil instincts, and not an overweening love of adventure. He was enjoying his trip because of the outdoor life and wildwood sports, but as for real adventure, he was content to omit it. Not from fear—Kit Shelby was as brave as any,—but he saw no ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... standards. This constitutes a change of mind, which is, in effect, when the inoculation succeeds, a change of vision. His eye sees differently. One kindly gentlewoman has confessed that the stereotypes are of such overweening importance, that when hers are not indulged, she at least is unable to accept the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God: "we are strangely affected by the clothes we wear. Garments create a mental ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life without some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is to love and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other men. An overweening sense of the passion and importance of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women, they feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if they were so many Joan-of-Arc's; but this does not come out in their behaviour; and they treat them to Grandisonian airs marked ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... remained as rugged as before. Beset on all sides by enemies, each struggling for his own aggrandizement, Sten had all he could do to keep the kingdom from going to pieces. In every measure to increase the income of the crown he was hampered by the overweening power of the Cabinet, who were reluctant to give up a jot or tittle of their ill-acquired wealth. Chief among his opponents was the archbishop, Jacob Ulfsson,—a man of rare ability, but of high birth and far too fond of self-advancement. Another ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... let him see in an affectionate way that she can let others enjoy his company betimes, secure in the knowledge that she is supreme in his affections—cajolery that flatters his overweening vanity, ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... entire sum. He accordingly did so, and the letter, as we have seen, reached the captain while Harry and Charley were at Surbiton Cottage. The old gentleman was anything but pleased. In the first place he liked his money, though not with any overweening affection; in the next place, he had done a great deal for Alaric, and did not like being asked to do more; and lastly, he feared that there must be some evil cause for the necessity of such a loan so soon after ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... useless and oppressive as undigested food; and as in the dyspeptic patient the appetite for food often grows with the inability to digest it, so in the unthinking patient an overweening desire to know often accompanies the inability to know to any purpose. Thought is to the brain what gastric juice is to the stomach,—a solvent to reduce whatever is received to a condition in which all that is wholesome and nutritive may ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... came soon enough. It was the work of a wretched political adventurer, who, inflated by an overweening estimate of his own abilities and importance, had made a preposterous claim to two high political offices—the post of Minister to Austria, and Consul to Paris—and receiving no encouragement in either direction, had deliberately ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... press on with the foremost, but would hold him a little aback, and while the battle was young he forbore to smite, and would do nothing but help a kinsman who was hard pressed, or succour the wounded. So that if men were dealing with no very hard matter, and their hearts were high and overweening, he would come home at whiles with unbloodied blade. But no man blamed him save those who knew him not: for his intent was that the younger men should win themselves fame, and so raise their courage, and become high- ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... when they are caught once, like burned children ever after dread the fire. Others there are who have such overweening confidence in their own smartness that their lives are nothing but a series of losses. Canada Bill and myself were nearing Magnolia, about a hundred miles above New Orleans, when Bill opened up his three cards. It was not long before a crowd gathered about to witness the ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... but knew!' he sighed. 'Young man, I am nearly twice your age, and I have, at a modest estimate, about ten times as much sense. Yet, in your overweening self-confidence, with your ungovernable gall, you fancy you can hand me a lemon. Me! I ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... folk despised," began he upon the horrible threshold, "wherefore is this overweening harbored in you? Why do ye kick against that will from which its end can never be cut short, and which many a time hath increased your grief? What avails it to butt against the fates? Your Cerberus, if ye remember well, still bears his chin and his throat ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... than by means of the balloon; and though, as before remarked, the experiments of M. Petin and others may probably not be without useful results, we dismiss these brilliant phantasmagoria with the charitable reflection, that the extravagance of overweening hopefulness is, at least in an age which has witnessed the advent of steam and electricity, more natural and more pardonable than the scepticism of confirmed despondency; and that "he who shoots at the stars," though missing his aim, will at all events shoot higher than ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... "He is of an overweening arrogance, but when contrition takes possession of him, he falls on his knees in front of the people of low estate, and has the tears, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... A vague trouble came over her. Could it be that he, Robert Lyon, had been seized with the auri sacra fames, which he had so often inveighed against and despised? that his long battle with poverty had caused in him such an overweening desire for riches that, to obtain them, he would sacrifice every thing else, exile himself to a far country for years, selling his very life ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... with acute feelings of sorrow and despair. He was at last convinced that Kurugsar had spoken the truth; for there seemed to be no chance whatever of taking the place by any stratagem he could invent. Revolving the enterprise seriously in his mind, he now began to repent of his folly, and the overweening confidence which had led him to undertake the journey. Returning thus to his tent in a melancholy mood, he saw a Fakir sitting down on the road, and him he anxiously accosted. "What may be the number ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... In overweening exultation so Vaunted a Trojan. Fool!—he had no vision Of ruin onward rushing upon himself And Troy, and Penthesileia's self withal. For not as yet had any tidings come Of that wild fray to Aias stormy-souled, Nor to Achilles, waster of tower and town. But on the grave-mound of Menoetius' son ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... superior officers have thrown a halo round their bloody graves, the stern truth still forces itself upon us, that the temporary eclipse of British glory was not the consequences of events beyond the power of human wisdom to foresee or ward off, but the natural results of an overweening confidence in our power, and of an infatuated blindness to the sure indications of the coming storm which for many months before it burst ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... after my arrival. We dined together with a large party at the consul's, and he seemed inclined to exact a deference to his dogmas, that was more lordly than philosophical. One of the naval officers present, I think the captain of the Salsette, felt, as well as others, this overweening, and announced a contrary opinion on some question connected with the politics of the late Mr Pitt with so much firm good sense, that Lord Byron was perceptibly rebuked by it, and became reserved, as ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... spurs, slashed boots, and tall plumes, of the young cavaliers of this and other high-born houses, moving through the streets and the church-yard with the careless ease, which indicates perhaps rather an overweening degree of self-confidence, yet shows graceful when mingled with good-humour and courtesy. The good old dames, too, in their white hoods and black velvet gowns—their daughters, "the cynosure of neighbouring eyes,"—where were they all now, who, when they entered the church, used to divide men's ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Potomac, the English General made his way north-westward at the head of twenty-two hundred men, four hundred and fifty of these being veteran Virginians under the command of Colonel George Washington. But the overweening Braddock considered these raw colonials to be the least effective of his troops. From the first the progress of this imposing force was painfully slow. "Instead of pushing on with vigour without regarding a ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... stood up before the world, a living statue, with unquenchable life-flame of patriotism streaming through its petrified limbs; you stood up a protest of eternal right against the sway of imperious might; a "Mene Tekel Upharsin," written in letters of burning blood on the walls of overweening despotism. Time, misery, and sorrow have thinned the ranks of your scattered Israel; you have carried your dead to the grave, and those who survive went on to suffer and to hope. Wherever oppressed Freedom reared a banner, you rallied ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... viciously. The game is up—is thoroughly played out. This he acknowledges to himself, and the knowledge does not help to sweeten his temper. It helps him, however, to direct a last shaft at her. Taking up his hat, he makes a movement to depart, and then looks back at her. His overweening vanity is still alive. ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... associations, and spent my time, when not employed in study, largely at the rooms of our Society, where Mrs. Marsh presided as secretary. There were countless circulars and pamphlets to be mailed, setting forth our purposes and needs. Mrs. Marsh, despite an inaccurate acquaintance with and an overweening curiosity regarding the doings of fashionable people, was a model of executive ability. With some one at hand to correct her grammar and spelling, she could transact a greater amount of business than half-a-dozen ordinary women. In my zeal to see things properly ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... "Because in our overweening pride and egotism we have ELECTED to be such," replied Heliobas. "As angels have fallen, so have we. But we are not altogether castaways now, since this signal," and he touched the cross on his ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli |
