"Pedantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pompous descriptions of these festive devices have come down to our times. They were conducted on a scale of grandeur and expense which may still surprise; but taste as yet was in its infancy, and the whole was characterized by the unmerciful tediousness, the ludicrous incongruities, and the operose pedantry of a ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Brother, in three lines, what the determination of my friends was; only, that then you would not have had room to display your pedantry by so detestable an allusion or reference to the Georgic. Give me leave to tell you, Sir, that if humanity were a branch of your studies at the university, it has not found a genius in you for mastering it. Nor is either my sex or myself, though a sister, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... equally peculiar; it cannot be called vulgar, nor yet genteel—for it is too passive for the one, and too pompous for the other; it forms, say, a sort of compromise between the two, with a slight infusion of pedantry that greatly adds ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... accumulated money may reasonably go to friend or kin. It is a question of public utility; Socialism has done with absolute propositions in all such things, and views these problems now as questions of detail, matters for fine discriminations. We want to be quit of pedantry. All that property which is an enlargement of personality, the modern Socialist seeks to preserve; it is that exaggerated property that gives power over the food and needs of one's fellow-creatures, property and inheritance in land, in industrial machinery, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... becomes closer and smaller; from thirty-eight lines to the page in "Waverley," he advances to between fifty and sixty in "Ivanhoe." The few alterations are usually additions. For example, a fresh pedantry of the Baron of Bradwardine's is occasionally set down on the opposite page. Nothing can be less like the method of Flaubert or the method of Mr. Ruskin, who tells us that "a sentence of 'Modern Painters' was often ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... they knew a good deal, and their knowledge, I believe, is shared by certain English visitors to Paris. She is one of the attractions of the Fantasies d'Arcadie, and her latest song, Bonjour Coco, is sung and whistled in every capital of Europe; so the jury, thrusting aside as mere pedantry the evidence of facts, set to work to find some verdict which would not eclipse the gaiety of La Ville Lumiere by cutting short the career of Mademoiselle Sidonie. The art of the chef appealed to only a few, and he dies a mute, but by no means inglorious martyr: the art of the chanteuse ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... conversation. So when in my turn I gave the dinner, which happened three or four times that year, I retired after the coffee, leaving him to the hands of a captain of ours, far better able than I was to lock arms with such a valiant antagonist. My comrades, like myself, saw nothing in this but absurd pedantry. We even believed that this magisterial tone which he assumed was meaningless until one day when he reasoned so forcibly on the rights of nations in general, his own in particular, Stupete gentes! ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... thee to be the slave of the house-painter or of the stone-cutter. And what awaiteth thee, when thou hast come forth victorious from this mechanic school—when thou hast succeeded in throwing off the heavy sum of a thousand unnecessary rules, with which pedantry hath overwhelmed thee—when thou takest as thy guide only those laws which are so plain and simple?... What awaiteth thee then? Again the Material! Poverty, need, forced labour, appreciators, rivals, that ever-hungry ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... for at least five minutes. But notwithstanding He and I now and then disagree, yet upon the whole we are very good friends, for there is so much of the Gentleman, so much mildness, and nothing of pedantry in his character, that I cannot help liking him, and will remember his instructions with gratitude as long as I live. He leaves Harrow soon, apropos, so do I. This quitting will be a considerable loss to the school. He is the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... as to incurable vice of method, and there are fervent disciples of Rousseau now living who will regard one's craving for method in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we may briefly remark on one or two detached objections to Rousseau's story. To begin with, there is no certainty as to there having ever been a state of nature of a normal and organic kind, any more than there is any one ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... he did not place Cibber in Theobald's shoes. Theobald walked off in his shoes into the shades. Samuel says, that by the substitution, Pope has "depraved his poem"—inasmuch as he has given to Cibber the "old books, the cold pedantry and sluggish pertinacity of Theobald." That is not true. Compare the places in the original Dunciad, in which Theobald figures at large, with that now filled by Cibber, and you will admire by what wizard power the transformation is effected. Many lines, far too good to be lost, are retained—and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... profession, but although called to the bar preferred to amuse himself with literary ventures. The first of these, with the exception of the satirical miscellany, "Salmagundi," was the delightful "Knickerbocker History of New York," wherein the pedantry of local antiquaries is laughed at, and the solid Dutch burgher established as a definite comedy type. When the commercial house established by his father and run by his brother began to go under in 1815, Irving went to England ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... xii. p. 635. Such an anecdote was perfectly suited to the taste of Montaigne. He makes use of it in his agreeable Essay on Pedantry, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... like them the more, the longer you see them. They are young men of merit, and without that puppy-like affectation which is so often found with young gentlemen of rank; and though remarkably well informed, they are very free from pedantry. ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... travelled with high reputation for several years, and made some campaigns in foreign service. After his DEMELE with the law of high treason in 1715, he had lived in retirement, conversing almost entirely with those of his own principles in the vicinage. The pedantry of the lawyer, superinduced upon the military pride of the soldier, might remind a modern of the days of the zealous volunteer service, when the bar-gown of our pleaders was often hung over a blazing uniform. To this must be added the prejudices ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... a kind of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference, liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and 'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two lines from The ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Livy, who was a man of fine imagination, these stories retain much of their genuine character. Nor could even the tasteless Dionysius distort and mutilate them into mere prose. The poetry shines, in spite of him, through the dreary pedantry of his eleven books. It is discernible in the most tedious and in the most superficial modern works on the early times of Rome. It enlivens the dulness of the Universal History, and gives a charm to the ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... desired in his will that it should be placed in his right hand when he was buried. Another version of the story is, that a spurious skull was foisted upon Rawlinson, who died happy in the possession of the doubtful treasure. Rawlinson was bantered by Addison for his pedantry, in one of the Tatlers, and was praised by ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... every rope in a vessel. You do not need to follow out every line in the standing rigging even, in order to paint a ship properly. To do this would miss the spirit of it, and make the thing rigid and lifeless. But ignorance will not take the place of pedantry for all that. Every kind of vessel has its own peculiar structure, its own peculiar proportions, and its own peculiar arrangement of spar and rigging. Whether you are complete or not in the detailing of the masts and rigging, ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... opinion! Is there another judge of morals than the Pope speaking ex cathedra, as I always did? Is the Church to frame herself after the prescriptions of heathen philosophers and profane jurists? How, then, shall she be terrible as an army with banners? Did I concern myself with such pedantry when the Kings of Spain and Portugal came to me like cats suing for morsels, and I gave them the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... Christianity could have intended seriously to discredit it, and yet certainly could not possibly believe the absurd theory of it concocted out of German philosophy; ergo, that we must regard the whole book as a piece of prolonged irony,—a little too characteristic of German pedantry, it is true, but sincerely designed to expose that extravagance of historic criticism and Biblical exegesis which had so distinguished the author's countrymen, by which Homer had been annihilated, a great part of ancient history rendered ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... without any pedantry or ostentation, much accurate knowledge, and a taste for literature, which made her the chosen companion of her husband's understanding, as well as of his heart. He was not obliged to reserve his conversation ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... on a par with the taste most in evidence two hundred years ago. They are the people who estimate literature by its correctness rather than by its fineness or power, who are impregnable in their little fortress of pedantry, and are for ever secure against the attacks ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... cousin, had lessened his own family, of which he was extremely fond. Besides, the Cardinal's infirmities made him look a great deal older than he was. And though all his other actions had no tincture of pedantry, yet in his amorous intrigues he had the most of it in the world. I had a detail of all the steps he had made therein, which were extremely ridiculous. But continuing his solicitation, and carrying her to his country seat at Ruel,—[The Cardinal ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... terms emulous of the great doctor's orotundity and ronderosity. I wonder now that I did not see how my physician avoided his medicine, but I did not, and I went on to spend myself in an endeavor as vain and senseless as any that pedantry has conceived. It was none the less absurd because I believed in it so devoutly, and sacrificed myself to it with such infinite pains and labor. But this was long after I read Macaulay, who was one of my grand passions before ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... are made of one conspicuous modern mental aspect; but below this aspect we are woven and coloured by the spirit of some preceding century, our chance inheritance, and Cooper was a sort of product of the pedantry of Johnson and the utilitarian mysticism of Comte. Perhaps the idea nearest to Cooper's heart was "the woman's cause." The misery and ignominy of human life had affected him, and he dreamed of the world's regeneration through women; and though well aware that ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... purposes of common interest on the same conditions. That is, they may form associations. Yet at bottom the powers of an association are something very different from the powers of the individuals composing it; and it is only by legal pedantry that the attempt can be made to regulate the behaviour of an association on principles derived from and suitable to the relations of individuals. An association might become so powerful as to form a state within the state, and to ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... technical ability. We have no reason to suppose that Donatello claimed to be a deep thinker. He did not spend his time, like Michael Angelo, in devising theories to explain the realms of art. He was without analytical pedantry, and, like his character, his work was naive and direct. Nor was he absorbed by appreciation of "beauty," abstract or concrete. If he saw a man with a humped back or a short leg he would have been prepared to make his portrait, assuming that the entity was not in ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... contemporaries in the opening years of the sixteenth century continued the manner of the so-called rhetoriqueurs, who endeavoured to maintain allegory, now decrepit or effete, with the aid of ingenuities of versification and pedantry of diction; or else they carried on something of the more living tradition of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former, Jean le Maire de Belges deserves to be remembered less for his verse than for his prose work, Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troie, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Simple lines in a landscape are of the same value as the naked parts of a richly-clothed figure. They act both as contrasts and as indications of the original substratum of the figure; but to say that severe simplicity is the highest ideal is mere pedantry and Manicheism.' ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... things-shame, disgrace, and ruin!—only because she don't understand the quality of our morality-that's all! There's no harm, after all, in these little enjoyments-if the girl would only understand them so. Our society is free from pedantry; and there-no damage can result where no one's the wiser. It's like stealing a blush from the cheek of beauty-nobody misses it, and the cheek continues as beautiful as ever." Thus philosophizes the chivalric gentleman, until he falls into a ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... will prove, Will lib'ral laughter doubtless move: When Pedantry shall cease to swell, Honour'd Humility will spell. The beauty then, of British truth, Resistless shall enamour youth; Shall evidence th' asseveration, Throughout th' etymologic nation; That one poetic exhibition Could, without ...
— A Minniature ov Inglish Orthoggraphy • James Elphinston
... and undistinguishing pedant that perhaps literature has to show. He sneers continually at the regular built academic pedant; but he himself, though no academic, was essentially the very impersonation of pedantry. No thought however beautiful, no image however magnificent, could conciliate his praise as long as it was clothed in English; but present him with the most trivial common-places in Greek, and he ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... book-worms of Universities—those scholastic giants who are great on small questions of quantity and etymology,—who buckle on the ponderous armor of the commentators in the contest with more subtle wits, on the interesting doubt of a wrong reading; such men, in the spirit of pedantry, have refused to Lord Brougham the merit of profundity, while they allow that he possesses a sort of superficial knowledge of the classics; they say that he can gracefully skim the surface of the stream, but that its depths would overwhelm him. Now, while this may be true as regards the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Pao-ch'eng, locality, Paper, invention of, Paranymphs, Pass, frontier, Paterfamilias, Patriarchal rule, Peace Conference, "Pechelee" Gulf, Pedantry, Pedigree, Peh K'i, General, Peking, modern, Peking plain, Pelasgi, People, the, Period, Protector, "Perpendicular and Horizontal" Period, Persia, Persian civilization, Personal causes of war, Personal names, Philosophy, Phoenicians, Physicians, Pigs, "Piled ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... died; Confine her walks to colleges and schools; Her priests, her train, and followers, show As if they all were spectres too! They purchase knowledge at th'expense Of common breeding, common sense, And grow at once scholars and fools; Affect ill-manner'd pedantry, Rudeness, ill-nature, incivility, And, sick with dregs and knowledge grown, Which greedily they swallow down, Still cast ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... and the same determination. Some of the most valuable of the antient reports are those published by lord chief justice Coke; a man of infinite learning in his profession, though not a little infected with the pedantry and quaintness of the times he lived in, which appear strongly in all his works. However his writings are so highly esteemed, that they are generally ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... course, be the height of pedantry to dwell upon this, as though a fictitious personage were to be in all respects bounded by the narrow limits of human capacity. It is not the object of a really good novelist, nor does it come within the legitimate means of high art in any department, to ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Catullus. The chief characteristics of the literature of this period are freedom and vigour. In every author the bold spirit of the Republic breathes forth; and in the greatest is happily combined with an extensive and elegant scholarship, equally removed from pedantry and dullness. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... successful manager. He was soon elevated to an official position, which he filled with honor and satisfaction. Many slaves were helped to their freedom by his efforts and advice. He was bold, yet discreet; wise without pedantry; humble without religious affectation; firm without harshness; ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... pleasures, to pure joys, to the highest, most intellectual enjoyments. All the arts, all the sciences, are fostered by it. All that is great and good, exalted and beautiful, is hailed there with delight, and only pedantry and stupidity are held aloof. Truth and nature are the two sacred laws observed in this society, and the noble, pure, free, and chaste Grecian spirit is the great exemplar of all its members. Therefore they ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... saying that you liked music, but didn't like dancing; music leads another person to dance, but not you; and dancing does not increase but diminishes the intensity of the pleasure you find in music. In like manner, it is a mere piece of pedantry to make a religious nation, like the English, more religious by placing images in the streets; this is not the English way, and only offends us. If it were our way, it would come naturally without any one telling us. As music incites to dancing, so religion ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... neither. No stranger could tell. Julius Laspara no doubt knew which of his girls it was who, after casually vanishing for a few years, had as casually returned to him possessed of that child; but, with admirable pedantry, he had refrained from asking her for details—no, not so much as the name of the father, because maternity should be an anarchist function. Razumov had been admitted twice to that suite of several small dark rooms on the top floor: dusty window-panes, litter of all sorts of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... letters; clearly the man was a pedant without imagination or taste. Such indeed was the age he lived in, and it is no marvel that he was like to his age. But there must have been more in him than mere pedantry; there was indeed a heart in the man, which Marcus found, and he found also a tongue which could speak the truth. Fronto's letters are by no means free from exaggeration and laudation, but they do not show that loathsome flattery which filled ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... conquest, how much more enlightened the world would have been now! We, alas, can only fight. France is unconquerable. We impose our narrow ideas, our prejudices, our obsolete institutions, our insufferable pedantry on the world by brute force—by that stupid quality of military heroism which shews how little we have evolved from the savage: nay, from the beast. We can charge like bulls; we can spring on our foes like gamecocks; when we are overpowered by reason, we can die fighting like rats. And we are foolish ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... world, and what a reader he was of every production of his contemporaries. The Banquet (Convito) is but an abstruse commentary on some of his minor poems; but the book on Monarchy (de Monarchia) is a compound of ability and absurdity, in which his great genius is fairly overborne by the barbarous pedantry of the age. It is an argument to prove that the world must all be governed by one man; that this one man must be the successor of the Roman Emperor—God having manifestly designed the world to be subject for ever to the Roman empire; and ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... it may be added that he was genial to all whom he did not consider his inferiors, a good though not a demonstrative husband; that as a lawyer he was learned without the least pedantry; and that he was a Bencher of his Inn, where he frequently dined, and a Member of Parliament, where he never ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... mere literature in exchange for life, partly in the natural revolution of poetic taste, partly for its faults. Faults and all, however, Gaston loyally accepted it; those faults—the lapse of grace into affectation, of learning into pedantry, of exotic fineness into a trick—counting with him as but the proof of faith to its own dominant positions. They were but characteristics, needing no apology with the initiated, or welcome even, as savouring of the master's peculiarities of perfection. He listened, he looked ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... want of hard-headed shrewdness in his remarks; indeed, in his rules for the adaptation of English words and accents to classical metres, he shows clearness and good sense in apprehending the conditions of the problem, while Sidney and Spenser still appear confused and uncertain. But in spite of his pedantry, and though he had not, as we shall see, the eye to discern at first the genius of the Faery Queen, he has to us the interest of having been Spenser's first, and as far as we can see, to the last, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the uprising Apollo. However inferior in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I own I am proud that I was the first in time who publicly demonstrated to the full extent of the position, that the supposed irregularity and extravagances of Shakespeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan. In all the successive courses of lectures delivered by me, since my first attempt at the Royal Institution, it has been, and it still remains, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... sickness thou wast wont to carry so many, Gypsy and Gentile, in thy cart of the tinkling bell? Oft in the reunions of the lettered and learned in this land of universal literature, when weary of the display of pedantry and egotism, have I recurred with yearning to our Gypsy recitations at the old house in the Pila Seca. Oft, when sickened by the high-wrought professions of those who bear the cross in gilded chariots, have I thought on thee, thy calm faith, without pretence,—thy ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... occupied less than ten minutes; but with the van going down headlong—as it ought—one ceases to wonder at the impression on the public produced by one who preferred lagging for laggards to hastening to support the forward, and that the populace suspected something worse than pedantry in such reasoning at such a moment. When way was resumed, it was again under the very leisurely canvas of topsails ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... of the Este and in the cultivated circles of Italy as a Latinist and a writer of comedies. He also wrote an epithalamium addressed to Lucretia. It is graceful, and not burdened with mythological pedantry, but it lacks invention. The poet congratulates Ferrara,—which will henceforth be the envy of all other cities,—for having won an incomparable jewel. He sympathizes with Rome for the loss of Lucretia, saying that ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... published, in 1576, a treatise concerning a northwest passage to the East Indies, which, although tinctured with the pedantry of the age, is full of practical sense and judicious argument."—P.F. Tytler's Life of ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... he had had any ear, or if his task had not been vitiated by the pursuit of wit; which, when it does not offer itself naturally, degenerates into tinsel or pertness. Pertness is the mistaken affection of grace, as pedantry produces erroneous dignity; the familiarity of the one, and the clumsiness of the other, distort or prevent grace. Nature, that furnishes samples of all qualities, and on the scale of gradation exhibits all possible ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... Lausanne, the wit, the beauty, and erudition of Mademoiselle Curchod were the theme of universal applause. The report of such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. I found her learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners; and the first sudden emotion was fortified by the habits and knowledge of a more familiar acquaintance. She permitted me to make her two or three visits ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... consequences. "I will even venture to assert," he continues in the same letter, "that two thirds of all the corruptions in our language have been introduced by learned grammarians, who, from a species of pedantry acquired in schools, and from a real ignorance of the original principle of the English tongue, have been for ages attempting to correct what they have supposed vulgar errors, but which are in fact established analogies.... In this country it is desirable that inquiries should be free, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... but not to their edification; their lucubrations may amuse those who have patience to read them, but they afford no instruction. Even the learned Samuel Lee, whose work on the temple abounds with valuable information, has strongly tinctured it with pedantry. It is seldom that a more curious jumble is found than in the following paragraph:—'The waxen comb of the ancient figures and typical eels is fully matted and rolled up in shining tapers, to illuminate temple students in finding out the honey that couches in the carcass of the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to be and seek to be friendly to, and interested in, all sorts of people, and truthful and helpful and hating concealment. To be that with any approach to perfection demands an intricate and difficult effort, introspection to the hilt of one's power, a saving natural gift; one has to avoid pedantry, aggression, brutality, amiable tiresomeness—there are pitfalls on every side. The more one thinks about other people the more interesting and pleasing they are; I am all for kindly gossip and knowing things about them, and all against the silly ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... critique of An Account of the Empire of Marocco.... To which is added an ... account of Tombuctoo, the great Emporium of Central Africa, by James Grey Jackson, London, 1809, the reviewer comments on the author's pedantry in correcting "the common orthography of African names." "We do not," he writes, "greatly object to ... Fas for Fez, or even Timbuctoo for Tombuctoo, but Marocco for Morocco ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... interesting—and that is why many also regarded me a bit mad—but to a degree sympathetic. For a Galician nobleman and land-owner, and considering his age—he was hardly over thirty—he displayed surprising sobriety, a certain seriousness, even pedantry. He lived according to a minutely elaborated, half-philosophical, half- practical system, like clock-work; not this alone, but also by the thermometer, barometer, aerometer, hydrometer, Hippocrates, Hufeland, Plato, Kant, Knigge, and Lord Chesterfield. But at times he had violent ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... authority in his paper! He listened and read haphazard, stirred the mixture up well in his sluggish brains, and arrogantly laid down the law for others; he wrote in a pretentious style, interlarded with puns, and plastered over with an aggressive pedantry: he had the mind of a schoolmaster. Sometimes, every now and then, he drew down on himself cruel replies: then he shammed dead, and took good care not to answer them. He was a mixture of cunning and thick-headedness, insolent or groveling as circumstances demanded. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... effect. They may foster conceit on the ruins of common sense, and render what was, at least innocently, sung by the Athenian mariner at his oar, or rehearsed by the shepherd in attending his flock, an occasion of vice, or the foundation of pedantry and scholastic pride. ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... of the above title-page is another attempt of the same sort as follows, showing that this deed of pedantry was committed ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... ways Ansell was a conceited man; but he was never proud of being right. He had foreseen Rickie's catastrophe from the first, but derived from this no consolation. In many ways he was pedantic; but his pedantry lay close to the vineyards of life—far closer than that fetich Experience of the innumerable tea-cups. He had a great many facts to learn, and before he died he learnt a suitable quantity. But he never forgot that the holiness of the heart's imagination can alone classify ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... of the country as if they were all to keep grammar-schools in little country-towns; and a nobleman, upon whose knowledge and liberality the honour and welfare of his country may depend, is diligently worried, for half his life, with the small pedantry of longs and shorts." ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... Men to asserting themselves and upholding their doctrines in papers and magazines of their own. The pedant may trace the fashion back to the Hobby-horse of the Eighties, or, in a further access of pedantry to the Germ of the early Fifties. He may follow its growth as late as the Blast of yesterday and The Gypsy of to-day. But I do not have to go further than my book shelves, I have only to look and see there the Dial ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... intelligence and sexual appetite; an adaptation which purifies love on both sides. Work in common, a common ideal, mutual respect full of affection but free from flattery, and a reciprocal education which does not degenerate into pedantry nor tyranny, are the principal conditions ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... soil.[45] Yet to the mine though the rich coin he trace, No current marks his early essays grace; For in each page we find a massy store Of English bullion mix'd with Latian ore: In solemn pomp, with pedantry combin'd, He vents the morbid sadness of his mind;[46] In scientifick phrase affects to smile, Form'd on Brown's turgid Latin-English style:[47] Too oft the abstract decorates his prose,[48] While measur'd ternaries the periods close: But all ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... and edifying books, and on all those places and occasions when morality is sought as an end—is a clean and able-bodied person, truthful to the extent that he does not tell lies, temperate so far as abstinence is concerned, honest without pedantry, and active in his own affairs, steadfastly law-abiding and respectful to custom and usage, though aloof from the tumult of politics, brave but not adventurous, punctual in some form of religious exercise, devoted to his wife and children, and ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the connoisseur who has devoted years of study to the work of the master, and who rejects such well established examples as the Dulwich Philip IV. and the Admiral Pulido Pareja, is surely more conclusive than the academic pedantry of ignorance masquerading ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... astonished—and resentful—at every new discovery, but in a short time accepts it as a commonplace. The layman resents all new ideas, but the adjustment of the human mind to the inevitable is common even among savages." Her slight affectation of pedantry was very well done and Clavering could not detect the flicker of a lash as her eyes rested indulgently upon ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... English, it is monstrous folly to encourage them in a loving fondness for their old language. Not only the energy and power, but the intelligence and music of Europe have come mainly from Teutonic sources, and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it were not pedantry, would be sheer ignorance. The sooner all Welsh specialities disappear from the face of ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... Selenin as a student, he was a good son, a true friend, and for his years an educated man of the world, with much tact; elegant, handsome, and at the same time truthful and honest. He learned well, without much exertion and with no pedantry, receiving gold medals for his essays. He considered the service of mankind, not only in words but in acts, to be the aim of his young life. He saw no other way of being useful to humanity than by serving the State. Therefore, as soon as he had completed his studies, he systematically ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... Men have a Mania for Greek and Latin quotations: this is peculiarly to be avoided. It is like pulling up the stones from a tomb wherewith to kill the living. Nothing is more wearisome than pedantry. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... senseless, if gallant, fanatics, but also that they had forfeited their technical legitimacy. To talk to-day of duty, civil or military, to such a perjured Government does not even deserve to be called constitutional pedantry, for it has not a splinter of constitutionalism to support it. Sedekiah held his vassal throne only by his oath to his suzerain of Babylon and when he broke that oath his legitimacy crumbled.(591) Of right Divine or human there was none in a government so ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... be distinguished by age—none by degree. For, as their qualification shall be gentility, they are all on a level. The instructors shall be women, except for the languages. Latin and Greek should not be learned;—the frown of pedantry destroys the blush of humility. The practical part of the sciences, as of astronomy, &c., should be taught. In history they would find that there are other passions in man than love. As for novels, there are some I would strongly recommend; but romances infinitely more. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... in his fiery imagination. It is a good thing to have the industry to collect facts. It is a greater and a rarer one to have the tact to know how to use them when you have got them. To be exact without pedantry, and thorough without being dull, that should be the ideal of the writer ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... remember, besides his transparent nobility of character, and the genial ways in which it exhibited itself, certain intellectual qualities for which he was remarkable. We here refer, not to his higher abilities as a thinker, but to such powers of mind as displayed themselves in conversation. Without any pedantry,—without any sort of intentional notification to those with whom he conversed that he was the greatest logician, metaphysician, moralist, and economist of the day,—his speech was always, even on the most trivial subjects, so clear and incisive, ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... England—accused of crudity in speech. I confess I like the crudities, the rawness, the colloquialisms. They smack of the new life in a new land. I should be sorry if Canadians ever began to Latinize their sentences, to "can" their speech and pickle it in the vinegar pedantry of the peeved study-chair critic. Because it is a land of mountain pines and cataracts and wild winds, I would have their speech smack always of their soil; and I would bewail the day that Canadians began to measure their phrases to suit the yard stick ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... compensated by the frank, social, and engaging qualities, both of disposition and manner, which, on a nearer intercourse, he disclosed, as well as by that entire absence of any literary assumption or pedantry, which entitled him fully to the praise bestowed by Sprat upon Cowley—that few could ever discover he was a great ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... self-complacency in Justine's eagerness to help. It was far easier for her to express it in action than in counsel, to grope for the path with her friend than to point the way to it; and when she had to speak she took refuge in figures to escape the pedantry of appearing to advise. But it was not only to Mrs. Dressel that her parables were dark, and the blank look in Bessy's eyes soon snatched her down from the height ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... dulness were at least as often well invented as true, it is perhaps the case that there is generally some ground for the popular caricatures of any given community. I duly discounted the humorous and would-be humorous stories of Boston's pedantry that I heard in New York, and found that as a rule I had done right so to do. Blue spectacles are not more prominent in Boston than elsewhere; its theatres do not make a specialty of Greek plays; the little boys do not petition the Legislature for an increase in the hours ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... quote, were I to enter in detail into your pages, so different from what one usually reads on similar subjects! In your arguments, and in the intrinsic and extrinsic proofs you adduce, what weight—without heaviness, what solidity—without stiffness, of strong and wholesome criticism—without pedantry! Ideas are plentiful in this by turns incisive, brilliant, reflected, and spontaneous style, in which learning comes in to enhance and steady the flow of a lively and luxuriant imagination. To all the ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... History; quotes from the Polychronicon, written by a Benedictine monk who died in 1360; from De Imagine Mundi, Isodorus, and frequently from the Bible. Of more than ordinary learning for his day and station, he did not escape a certain air of pedantry in his ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... to have nourished too violent a contempt for the king, on account of his pedantry and pusillanimity; and by that means struck in with the restless and martial spirit of the English nation. Had he lived, he had probably promoted the glory, perhaps not the felicity, of his people. The unhappy prepossession which men commonly ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Those of you who are scholastic-minded, or simply common-sense minded, will smile at the elaborate groans of my parturient mountain resulting in nothing but this mouse. Accept the spiritual agents, for heaven's sake, you will say, and leave off your ridiculous pedantry. Let but our 'souls' combine our sensations by their intellectual faculties, and let but 'God' replace the pantheistic world-soul, and your wheels will go round again—you will enjoy both life and ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... very narrow escape from total annihilation. Many have perished: many are but fragments; and chance, blind arbiter of the works of genius, has left us some, not of the highest value; which, however, have proved very useful, as a test to show the pedantry of those who adore antiquity not from true ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... party by common enmities, was the very opposite of a democratic politician. While attacking individuals with a ferocity which perpetually violated all the laws of literary warfare, he regarded the most defective parts of old institutions with a respect amounting to pedantry, pleaded the cause of Old Sarum with fervor, and contemptuously told the capitalists of Manchester and Leeds that, if they wanted votes, they might buy land and become freeholders of Lancashire and Yorkshire. All this, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... pride, learned without pedantry, good without severity, he was duly qualified to discharge the duties of the Christian and the Bishop. In the pulpit he enforced religion; in his conduct he exemplified it. The poor he assisted with his charity; the ignorant he blessed ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... be given up. For on what principle does it stand? This famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a description of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but too comprehensive!) vocabulary of finance,—a preambulary tax. It is, indeed, a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a tax of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but benefit to the imposers or ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... chance of a demand for repayment. Dr. Parr, who was one of Farmer's intimate friends, remarked of him 'that his munificence was without ostentation, his wit without acrimony, and his learning without pedantry.' Farmer was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the Society of Antiquaries. His only published work was an Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, which appeared in 1767 and went through four editions, besides being prefixed to ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... regeneration in German literature, unless either great political and social events should rouse the national mind from its languor, or the classical models of pure taste and true art should be studied again in a different spirit from that of professorial pedantry. Now, after the Thirty Years' War, there was no war in Germany in which the nation took any warm interest. The policy pursued in France during the long reign of Louis XIV. (1643-1708) had its chief aim ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... there is a theoretic side of morals. Even the most theoretic of sciences, Metaphysics, though, as Novalis said, it bakes no bread, is not without its direct bearing upon life. Dogmatic theology when divorced from practical interest is in danger of becoming mere pedantry; and ethical inquiry, if it has no dogmatic basis, loses scientific value and sinks into a mere enumeration of duties. Nor is the common statement, that Dogmatics shows what we should believe and Ethics what we ought to do, an adequate one. Moral precepts are ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... all, it is not so very stupid as all you gentlemen make it out to be; that it has good sense enough to appreciate everything; that some good taste can be acquired there; and that the common sense found there is, without flattery, well worth all the learning of pedantry. ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... and wraps them up in tissue-paper for preservation at home like bride-cake. She is severe on restoration, and merciless on whitewash. She plunges, in fact, gallantly into the spirit of the thing, but she gracefully denudes it of its bareness and pedantry. Her bugle sings truce at midday for luncheon. She couches in the deep grass of the abbey ruins, and gathers in picturesque groups beneath castle walls. A flutter of silks, a ripple of feminine laughter, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... of one of the most cultured and princely of the Popes. Born in 1398, he was himself one of the sons of the early Renaissance. Not altogether without pedantry, he yet by his learning, by his patronage of scholars and artists (and indeed he was perhaps the first Pope who preferred them to monks and friars), secured for the Renaissance the allegiance of the Church. He died in a moment of misfortune ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... Mr. Hartland, the story is designed as a satire on pedantry, and is as old in Italy as Straparola (sixteenth century). In passionate Sicily a wife disgusted with her husband's pedantry sets the house on fire, and informs her husband of the fact in this unintelligible gibberish; he, not understanding his own lingo, falls a victim to the flames, ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... mournfully rolls out the words to Lady Hester Stanhope, as she welcomes him in the hall of Bowling Green House, after his last journey to his home on Putney Heath.[761] The words probably fell from him on some occasion. But at the risk of incurring the charge of pedantry, I must point out that the news of Austerlitz did not come on him as one overwhelming shock: it filtered through by degrees. As we have seen, he wrote to Harrowby on 21st December, stating that reports from Berlin and other quarters represented the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... she married. I was very much in love with her, and yet I didn't trust her. I was sure that she lied; I believed that she could be cruel. Nevertheless, at moments, she had a charm which made it pure pedantry to be conscious of her faults; and while these moments lasted I would have done anything for her. Unfortunately they didn't last long. But you know what I mean; am I ...
— The Diary of a Man of Fifty • Henry James
... as is the disgrace with which it has forever covered the nation which tolerated such an abomination, it was relieved by some incidents which did honor to the country and to human nature. The murderers of Louis, in their ignoble pedantry, wearied the ear with appeals to the examples of the ancient Romans, of Decius[5] and of Brutus. But no Roman ever gave a nobler proof of contempt of danger, and devotion to duty, than was afforded by the intrepid lawyers, Malesherbes, De Seze, and Tronchet, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... it puts Sachs back again into the position from which the importance of Walther's song has thrust him: it is a last reminder that the opera is a glorification of song, and that the masters have a sacred trust—to guard song pedantry and commercialism. The work closes with a grand chorus made up of familiar music, a glorious blaze and riot of ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... materials. It is one of those uninviting bulky folios of which the reigns of James and Charles I. furnish us with so many specimens. Here we might fairly expect to discover abundant illustrations of patristic and scholastic theology, of learning and pedantry, of earnest devotion, and ill-temper no less earnest; but nothing whereby to illustrate the manners or customs, the traditions, or the popular usages or superstitions, of the common people. This may be a hint for us, however, to direct our attention to a class of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... dreariest of mechanical routine. How many a sweet-voiced chorister, even in our own days, reaches manhood with a love for music? It needs music in his soul. Haydn's soul withstood the numbing influence of pedantry. He realized that it lay with himself to develop and nurture the powers within his breast of which he was conscious. "The talent was in me," he remarked, "and by dint of hard work I managed to get on." Shortly before his death, when he happened to be in Vienna for some church festival, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden |
