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Audacious   Listen
adjective
Audacious  adj.  
1.
Daring; spirited; adventurous. "As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides Audacious."
2.
Contemning the restraints of law, religion, or decorum; bold in wickedness; presumptuous; impudent; insolent. " Audacious traitor." " Such audacious neighborhood."
3.
Committed with, or proceedings from, daring effrontery or contempt of law, morality, or decorum. "Audacious cruelty." "Audacious prate."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Audacious" Quotes from Famous Books



... water his team, and approaching the horse-trough prepared to remove Don Quixote's armor, which was in his way. Perceiving his intentions, Don Quixote cried to him in a loud voice, saying: "O thou, whoever thou art, audacious knight who drawest near to touch the armor of the bravest champion that ever girt on sword, look what thou doest, and touch it not, if thou wouldst not pay for thy ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... family, and show them to her lord, with a queer smile on her face. Miss Tavish, in the nervous consciousness of fleeting years, was she not still waiting, dashing here and there like a bird in a net for the sort of freedom, audacious as she was, that seemed denied her? She was still beautiful, everybody said, and she was sought and flattered, because she was always merry and good-natured. Why should Van Dam, speaking of women, say that ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... past, dialogue-writing after the fashion of the witty and audacious Syrian was not very frequently adventured. Just twenty years ago some writer or writers supplied to a weekly miscellany a few imaginative conversations between deceased worthies; but these were not particularly ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams

... unpleasant circumstances in which Andreas and his friends now found themselves, an incident occurred one morning, which raised their uneasiness to the very highest pitch. Never had so bold and audacious an action been heard of in Venice, as that which I ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis

... the searching of the house, and Warner's happy inspiration, by which Angela's hiding-place was discovered, and she rescued in a fainting condition. He described the defendant's audacious attempt to convey her to the coach which stood ready for her abduction, and his violence in opposing her rescue, and the fight which had well-nigh resulted in ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... vividly the human equation: "The negroes cannot be silent; they talk in spite of themselves. Every passion acts upon them with strange intensity, their anger is sudden and furious, their mirth clamorous and excessive, their curiosity audacious, and their love the sheer demand for gratification of an ardent animal desire. Yet by their nature they are good-humored in the highest degree, and I know nothing more delightful than to be met by a group of negro girls and to be saluted ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... character of Darwin's mind appears in his wariness in drawing the last consequences of his doctrine, in contrast both with the audacious theories of so many of his followers and with the consequences which his antagonists were busy in drawing. Though he, as we have seen, saw from the beginning that his hypothesis would occasion "a whole of metaphysics," he was himself very reserved as to the ultimate ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... quarter of an hour had elapsed, when they could perceive clouds of dust whirling up behind them which proved that the audacious adventurers, after discovering the fraud, were ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai

... husband my force to say what alone is important to me and to you. Disappointed in the hopes I had placed in you, I resolved to repair to Paris,—that great furnace of all bold ideas. I questioned learned formalists; I listened to audacious empirics. The first, with all their boasted knowledge, were too timid to concede my premises; the second, with all their speculative daring, too knavish to let me trust to their conclusions. I found but one man, a Sicilian, who comprehended the secrets that are called ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... was that I had fallen deeply in love with the sweet dainty girl whose father was the most audacious and cunning crook the modern world had produced. I believed, on account of the small confidence we had exchanged, that Lola, on her part, did not ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux

... Anglicanism, together with the strange, saddening fact that the Christian religion appeared to be more divided than, Peterborough regretted to say, the forms of idolatry established by the Buddha, Mahomet, and other impostors. He claimed the audacious merit for us, that we did not discard the reason of man we admitted man's finite reason to our school of faith, and it was found refractory. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... circumstances, Mr. Nawby would have simply declined to hold any communication with Mat, until his identity had been legally proved. But the prosperous solicitor of Dibbledean had a grudge against the audacious adventurer who had set up in practice against him; and he therefore resolved to depart a little on this occasion from the strictly professional course, for the express purpose of depriving Mr. Tatt of as many ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... the river, to reach the other shore, and to ride madly over the plain in chase of their audacious foes, was the work of an instant. In vain, however, they strained their eyes to catch another glimpse of the retreating party, until again the flashing of the spear-heads was seen near at hand, and plunging ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various

... generalizes with marvellous facility, but often with an infatuation, or even fatuity, equally marvellous. Specious and audacious generalization is, however, a vice of thinking more attractive to most than any virtue,—above all, if it flatter their wishes and opinions. There are few to appreciate an exquisite temperance, an exquisite virgin modesty, continence, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... loosened freshet bursting banks, By mount and fort they thread to swamp the sluggard plains. Shines his gold-laurel sun, or cloak connivent rains. They press to where the hosts in line and square throng mute; He watchful of their form, the Audacious, the Astute; Eagle to grip the field; to work his craftiest, fox. From his brief signal, straight the stroke of the leveller falls; From him those opal puffs, those arcs with the clouded balls: He waves and the voluble scene is a quagmire shifting ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... at the new camp they were visited by lions, which were audacious enough, in spite of the fire, to pretty well frighten the oxen into a stampede; but they were ultimately calmed down; while the poor horses suffered so that they were haltered up to the side of the waggon, with their heads so near the ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn

... of ridicule are not to be employed too often, lest we sink into scurrility;—nor in loose and indecent language, lest we degenerate into wantonness and buffoonery; —nor with the least degree of petulance and abuse, lest we appear audacious and ill-bred;—nor levelled against the unfortunate, lest we incur the censure of inhumanity;—nor against atrocious crimes, lest we raise a laugh where we ought to excite abhorrence;—nor, in the last place, ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... their yearning for posthumous notoriety was gratified, inasmuch as the sentimental articles written to order by dexterous pens, and the verses composed in honour of the two lunatics by Beranger, in which a romantic halo is thrown over their audacious crime, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... the most convincing proofs that the Iliad, on the whole, is the production of a single age, not the patchwork of several changeful centuries. This may seem an audacious statement, as archaeology has been interpreted of late in such a manner as to demand precisely the opposite verdict. But if we can show, as we think we can, that many recent interpretations of the ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... heard—this had happened when had been described the falling of the mantle of black hair and the little oaths with which Mistress Clorinda had sat on her hunter binding it up—and at this point—at this other picture of the audacious beauty and her broken glass each man almost started again—my Lord Dunstanwolde indeed suddenly rising and taking a ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... characteristic. No less a hope for instance had Heinrich von Kleist than with an unheard of creation to strike at Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe and concerning the last named he uttered this audacious sentiment, "I will rend the crown from his brow!" Since he fails to attain this goal in spite of repeated most earnest onslaughts, he rushes away to die upon the battlefield. He writes to his sister, however, ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger

... nothing out of the common order of nature can be long borne. I had no inclination to a wife who had the ruggedness of a man without his force, and the ignorance of a woman without her softness; nor could I think my quiet and honour to be entrusted to such audacious virtue as was hourly courting danger, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... with the new word what they can. I add no more today; reserving a little nook for the answer I hope to get two days hence. Adieu, my Friend: it is silent Sunday; the populace not yet admitted to their beer- shops, till the respectabilities conclude their rubric- mummeries,—a much more audacious feat than beer! We have wet wind at Northeast, and a sky somewhat of the dreariest:— Courage! a little way above it reigns ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... are the respective forces, the more plainly does the victory of the weaker demand for its explanation the intervention of God. The old sneer, that 'Providence is always on the side of the strongest battalions,' is an audacious misreading of history, and is the very opposite of the truth. It is the weak battalions which win in the long run, for the history of every good cause is the same. First, it kindles a fire in the hearts of two ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... Martin. "It's I knows about the River Plate; none so well. Who'd ever been there, nor heard of it nether, before Captain Will and me went, and I lived among the savages a whole year; and audacious civil I found 'em if they 'd had but shirts to their backs; and so was the prince o' mun, that Captain Will brought home to King Henry; leastwise he died on the voyage; but the wild folk took it cruel well, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... will tell you all about a funny ecclesiastic who had a Hat, and whose name was Henry Edward Manning. It will not take us long, and ever afterwards, if you hear that name mentioned, you will know everything about him which you need to remember." It is audacious, and to many people will seem shocking, but it ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... for the hindmost. But at the very time these were relieving the thirsty and hungry, there were not wanting others who endeavoured to steal from them the very things which had been given them. At last, to prevent worse consequences, they were obliged to fire a load of small shot at one who was so audacious as to snatch from one of the men the bag which contained every thing they carried with them. The shot hit him on the back, on which he dropped the bag, ran a little way, and then fell; but he afterwards got up and walked, and what became of him they knew not, nor whether he was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... Del Mar sort obtained at Cedarwild, else Michael would not have lived. A real surgeon, skilful and audacious, came very close to vivisecting him as he radically repaired the ruin of a shoulder, doing things he would not have dared with a human but which proved to be ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

... her wickedness, did not shock him. He admired her tremendous and audacious enterprise; it appealed strongly to every cell in his brain. He felt that she and he ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... found the night operator who had received the message. He got a photograph of her, too, and, from the society file, an old one of Audrey, very delicate and audacious, and not greatly resembling the young woman who lay in her bed and read the article aloud, between dismay and laughter, to ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... of fraudulent beggars who were strongly suspected of being marauders of the worst kind, but, having been notified in time, they decamped.... The enterprises of the vagabonds, the thieves, and the mauvais garcons became more and more audacious; they had for chiefs three bandits, Esclaireau, Barbiton, and Jean de Mets, who spread such terror that the archers who were sent against them preferred to advise them to fly, through fear of being killed by them; however, the salt barges having been ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... in addition, Colette felt that she was weak, and cowardly, and possessed of instincts of which she was not proud, though she was not inclined to deny them. It pleased her to allow herself to be persuaded by the audacious and nicely calculated confessions of her friend that others were just the same, and that human nature must be taken for what it is. And so she gave herself the satisfaction of not resisting inclinations that she found very agreeable, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... with his performances, and with a great deal of tranquillity mounts up Parnassus, in his own conceit, in loftier tracts than Virgil or Theocritus ever knew. But, alas! what would become of him, if some audacious person should dare unbind his eyes, and make him see his weak and graceless lines, which, however smoothly they may run, are, at best, but exquisitely dull; contain terms that have no meaning in them, and have no other ornament, but unintelligible ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus

... tend to peace or war, to be turned this way or that by the results of a Presidential election, there is a rightful interest in all the States and in every Congressional district that will not be deceived or silenced by the audacious pretense that the question of the right of any body of legal voters in any State or in any Congressional district to give their suffrages freely upon these general questions is a matter only of local concern or control. The ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison

... 1887 he startled the town and made a Society sensation by means of an exceedingly original enterprise which any man of less audacious and prodigious power of work would have shrunk from in its very inception. For years this Titanic task was in hand. This was his celebrated 'artistic joke,' the name given by the 'Times' to a bold parody on a large scale of an average Royal Academy Exhibition. This great show was held at the Gainsborough ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... beaten, and we submit with our best grace. I submit, with my best grace, on certain conditions. Let us revert to the statement of your pecuniary position. I have an objection to you, my dear sir—a most amazing, a most audacious objection, from a man in my position to a man ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

... conscience by force of noise and tumult. In short, although dignified and reserved, she showed herself compassionate, which prevented her companions from being exasperated at her coldness. This is not all. A month ago there came here an unruly creature, called La Louve, so violent, audacious, and ferocious is her character. She is a girl of about twenty; tall, masculine, rather a fine face, but very coarse. We are often obliged to put her in confinement to subdue her turbulence. Only the day before yesterday ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... but one, Chopin has in the F major Prelude attempted a most audacious feat in harmony. An E flat in the bass of the third group of sixteenths leaves the whole composition floating enigmatically in thin air. It deliciously colors the close, leaving a sense of suspense, of anticipation ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... fantastic device or motto, and most of them pertaining individually and sacredly to some regular and unfailing customer. In one particular corner of the highest shelf, greatly at his ease and in nowise to be disturbed, slept Wotan, the huge grey house-cat, dreaming doubtless of certain nimble and audacious mice down in the cellar three floors below, whose nimbleness and audacity were as precious to him as the forwardness of the birds is to a skilled gun on a grouse moor. Once every day Wotan came marching in stately fashion across ...
— When William Came • Saki

... struck with silence and astonishment at the audacious spirit of the convention, and suspecting that they were backed and supported by the voice of the people, were greatly puzzled what measures they should take to recal them to the obedience of legal authority. Some ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt

... of which we have already spoken, were well known to the emigrant, and he had already to complain of divers injuries at their hands. It is not, therefore, matter of surprise, that he should place his sentinels, and prepare even for the most audacious attack. ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... the first gun is heard, Grey sidles nervously to the front of the crowd as if he were doing something very audacious, and draws Hardy's attention, exchanging sympathizing nods with him, but saying nothing, for he knows not what to say, and then disappearing again in ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... room. Mrs Knox looks anxiously and excitedly from the window. Then she throws up the sash and leans out. Margaret Knox comes in, flustered and annoyed. She is a strong, springy girl of eighteen, with large nostrils, an audacious chin, and a gaily resolute manner, even peremptory on occasions like the present, when ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw

... its private door. Natur is natur still, and there is as much of that that is condemned in his books now, as there was then. There is a horrid sight of hypocrisy now, more than there was one hundred years ago; vice was audacious then, and scared folks. It ain't so bold at present as it used to did to be; but if it is forbid to enter the drawing-room, the back staircase is still free. Where there is a will there is a way, and ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... which this audacious man committed against the Arabs was the halting of an Ujiji-bound caravan, and the demand for five kegs of gunpowder, five guns, and five bales of cloth. This extraordinary demand, after expending more than a day in fierce controversy, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... and Victory, companion of the dance; the quickstep march of the trochaic tetrameter to tell how the Attic wasps, true children of the soil, charged the Persians at Marathon; and above all—the chosen vehicle of his wildest conceits, his most audacious fancies, and his strongest appeals to the better judgment of the citizens—the anapaestic tetrameter, that "resonant and triumphant" metre of which even Mr. Swinburne's anapaests can reproduce only a faint and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... and weary years this process of undermining the nation's health, vigor, and pride, without much protest from the disinherited and oppressed, has been going on. Maddened by success and victory, the money powers of this "free land of ours" became more and more audacious in their heartless, cruel efforts to compete with the rotten and decayed European tyrannies for supremacy ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... victors succeeded, however, in forcing their way to the extreme end of the quadrangle, where, as every Edinburgh man knows, the full-length statue of Sir David Brewster looks down upon the classic ground which he loved so well. An audacious Radical swarmed up upon the pedestal and balanced the obnoxious notice on the marble arms of the professor. Thus converted into a political partisan, the revered inventor of the kaleidoscope became the ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of Cadillac to the court are unique. No governor of New France, not even the audacious Frontenac, ever wrote to a minister of Louis XIV. with such off-hand freedom of language as this singular personage,—a mere captain in the colony troops; and to a more stable and balanced character ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman

... continued silent, for I was unwilling discourteously to say to a stranger so much older than myself, that he seemed to me to reverse all the maxims of the philosophy to which he made pretence, in founding speculations audacious and abstruse upon unanalogous comparisons that would have been fantastic even in a poet. And Sir Philip, after another pause, resumed ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... there was no need of it. But I am satisfied, that the less frighted and timorous their Passengers are, the more cautious and careful the Watermen are, and the least apt to run into Danger. Whereas, if their Passengers appear frighted, then the Watermen grow saucy and audacious, show themselves venturous, and contemn the Dangers they ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson

... on the childish side of their character and conduct, they soon displayed a determination to test by actual experiment the utmost extent of the liberty allowed, and the nature and sufficiency of its limits. Eunane was always the most audacious trespasser and representative rebel. Fortunately for her, the daring which had bewildered and exasperated feminine guardians rather amused and interested me, giving some variety and relief to the monotonous absurdity of the situation. Nothing in her conduct was more ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... with smoke, it was difficult to distinguish the officer from his men, and it was under these levelling circumstances that I had the honour of making the acquaintance of my distinguished brother officer, whose audacious courage on the occasion of Havelock's advance over the Charbagh bridge had won the admiration of everyone in the force, and gained for him the ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts

... dressed, Russell and he began to amuse themselves on the sea-shore. The little translucent pools left on the sands by the ebbing tide always swarm with life, and the two boys found great fun in hunting audacious little crabs, or catching the shrimps that shuffled about in the shallow water. At last Eric picked up a piece of wood which he found lying on the beach, and said, "What do you say to coming crab-fishing, Edwin? this bit of stick will do capitally to thrust between ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar

... own fate; lastly Hermes, insolent messenger of the gods, who tries in vain to extort Prometheus' secret knowledge of the future. Oceanus, the well-meaning palavering old mentor, and Hermes, the blustering and futile jack-in-office, gods though they be, are vigorous, audacious and very human character-sketches; the soft entrance of the consoling nymphs is unspeakably beautiful; and the prophecy of Io's wanderings is a striking example of that new keen interest in the world outside which was felt by the Greeks of the 5th century, as it was felt by the Elizabethan English ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... obvious: the hidden craft was a pirate which had somehow managed to sneak up alongside and surprise her in the pitchy darkness of the early hours of the morning—Henderson had actually caught a glimpse of the very act of capture—and now she was being plundered by the audacious scoundrels under our ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... writ, and, evidently in violation of his feelings, was forced by John Putnam to arrest Burroughs, thereby breaking up the proceedings asked for by the parish and ordered by the Court, for a debt which he did not owe,—it must be allowed, that it was one of the most audacious and abominable ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... a bevy of girls were grouped round the piano in the billiard-room, Lizzie Fermor—who indulged in the wildest latitude of discourse—was audacious enough to ask Miss Granger how she would like ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... But Cleo's audacious mistake had wrought a miracle on the audience, destroying the stage-illusion, and rousing its dormant light of intelligence. Its capacity for being profoundly played upon and emotionally excited by the inartistic ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... fingers fumbling his mustache or his clothing or the papers on his desk. He puffed, snorted, and floundered; seemed to make assertions without proof and phrases without point; when suddenly he would utter a statement so pregnant as to clear up a whole policy, or a sentence so audacious as to paralyze a whole line of his opponents, or a phrase so vivid as to run through the nation and electrify it. Then, perhaps after more rumbling and rambling, came a clean, clear, historical illustration carrying conviction; ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... of his triumph, Colonel Maslianikov of the 16th Caucasian Rifle Regiment described to a gathering of us fur-clad figures how, with his regiment and some other troops hastily scraped together, he had brought the leading Turkish divisions to a standstill, largely by pure bluff and by audacious handling of an inferior force, and so had prepared the way for the dramatic overthrow of three Osmanli army corps which transformed a situation that had been full of menace into one which became rich in ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... energy with which two hens and a bantam cock pecked out the crumb of a wheaten loaf. If the latter were the goat's occupation, it must have been charmed beyond expression; for the half of the loaf had been devoured by the audacious trio, and, just at the moment of Mr Sudberry's appearance, the bantam's body was buried over the shoulders, and nothing of it was visible to the horrified master of the house save its tail, appearing over the ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne

... "An audacious spirit unceasingly disquieted him, and his mind harboured great thoughts, but alas! his rudeness and ignorance displayed the triumph of barbarism. He knew neither poetry, nor science, nor even the tongue of the Greeks, and he was ignorant, too, of the ancient traditions concerning the origin ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... has she unearthed all that? What country gave birth to such an audacious woman? Oh! you wretch! I should not have thought ever a one of us could have spoken in public with such impudence. 'Tis clear, however, that we must expect everything and, as the old proverb says, must look beneath every stone, lest it ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... while the imperial army on the land side utterly destroyed together emissary priests and rebels, and forever excluded Spain and her emissaries from the islands, and even England after the negotiation of a Spanish marriage. Nor were his treasure-ships safe from these audacious Dutch, who prowled about the West Indies and seized his galleons. The ships from Goa, laden with the treasures of the East, had to take a circuitous route to avoid the Dutch, who were continually on the look-out at the Cape of Good Hope. As if this was not enough, the failure of ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... his See of Durham, of which he completed the cathedral, and also added to the works of the great castle there. The window from which he is supposed to have escaped is over sixty-five feet from the ground, and his evasion was evidently considered at the time a most audacious and remarkable feat, as more than one contemporary chronicler gives a very detailed and ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... lured Leicester into relaxing his precautions. His enemies took advantage of his remissness to hatch an audacious plot which soon enabled them to renew the struggle under more favourable conditions. Since his nominal release, Edward had been allowed the diversions of riding and hunting, and on May 28 he was suffered to go out for a ride under negligent or corrupt guard. Once well away from Hereford, the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... of the smaller men, a modern specialist like Arnold or Rossetti, we could better understand it. But Browning's work was not limited to any particular or temporary phase of human nature. He set himself to represent, as far as he could, all types of human nature; and, more audacious still, types taken from many diverse ages, nations and climates. He told us of times and folk as far apart as Caliban and Cleon, as Karshish and Waring, as Balaustion and Fifine, as St. John and Bishop Blougram. The range and the contrasts of his subjects are equally great. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... brave; valiant, valorous; gallant, intrepid; spirited, spiritful^; high-spirited, high-mettled^; mettlesome, plucky; manly, manful; resolute; stout, stout-hearted; iron-hearted, lion-hearted; heart of oak; Penthesilean. bold, bold-spirited; daring, audacious; fearless, dauntless, dreadless^, aweless; undaunted, unappalled, undismayed, unawed, unblanched, unabashed, unalarmed, unflinching, unshrinking^, unblanching^, unapprehensive; confident, self-reliant; bold as a lion, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... that this Legislature had been chosen to protect popular principles, and that here was an opportunity for the Democratic party to fulfil its pledges and serve the people. Stringer and his associates were uttering in the Senate burning words against the audacious menace of what they termed the franchise octopus. Did the people realize that this bill to combine gas companies, which looked so innocent on its face, was a gigantic scheme to wheedle them out of a valuable franchise for nothing? Did they ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... introduction to this present inquiry that even to-day, after a lapse of a quarter-century, I really see no important changes to be made in this old declaration, except to add that it now appears to me to have been rather audacious on the part of a man so very young, and that it forthwith won him many hearty enemies among ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... a thing," he replied, "that he never would have wished." "Ah, but if he had wished it?" said I. "I would have obeyed." The wickedness of such a speech needs no comment. And in point of fact he was as good and better than his word for he did not wait for orders in the audacious proceedings of Tiberius Gracchus, but was the head and front of them, and was a leader rather than an abettor of his madness. The result of his infatuation was that he fled to Asia, terrified by the special commission appointed to try him, joined the enemies of his country, and paid ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... his limbs had often been in danger; he had known what it was to feel thumpings of the heart and catchings of the breath from sheer fright. He had come face to face with surprise, with astonishment, with audacious turnings of Fortune's glass. But never in all his life had he been so surprised as he now was, and after one long, low whistle he relieved his feelings by ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher

... clear that Mr. Jebb is mistaken in thinking that it was "a blunder of Malone's." It seems, as far as we can see, to have been, not a blunder, but an audacious fabrication; and how it came into the Irish edition, seems to me incomprehensible. The printer of the Dublin edition, Exshaw, was a respectable man, an alderman and a Protestant, and he could have no design to make William Shakspeare pass for a papist; nor indeed ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various

... that the authorities ought to take cognizance of the matter and pronounce me unworthy of the office of teacher and cause me to be removed therefrom forthwith. Confounded at receiving such an impudent and audacious reproof at the hands of my own kindred, I knew not what to do or say, or what reply I should make; nor could I divine for what reason this unseemly and grievous affront had been put upon me. It afterwards came to light that the letter was written in order to serve as an occasion for ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... the fellow had, in spite of his grinning, an audacious and sinister kind of face; and as he curvetted right into the village, the old stumpy appearance of his pumps excited no little suspicion; and many a burgher who beheld him that day would have given a trifle for a peep beneath the white cambric handkerchief which hung ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... frost has driven them from the high ground, and they are contemplating a raid on our porkers and cattle. We must send them to the right-about, or they will become audacious." ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston

... standing with a clean shirt, dancing shoes, a good horse and a pedigree, was heartily welcome. The solid men, whose names appeared as managers, paid scot for everything—they left the actual arrangements to the lads. But they came in shoals to the bran-dances, and were audacious enough often to take away from some youth fathoms deep in love, his favorite partner. Sometimes, too, a lot of them pre-empted all the prettiest girls, and danced a special set with them. Thus were they delivered into the hands of the ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams

... from some desire to get fresh proof against Hilda? No; that was impossible, for she must already have found out proof enough. The withdrawal of her money would of itself be enough to show Hilda's complicity; but her assumption of the role of Lady Chetwynde was too audacious for a true wife to bear ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... natural benignity, always merciful, slow to anger, ready to hear whatever the accused might have to say for himself, and to pardon as long as pardon was possible. Notwithstanding the rebellious and audacious contempt of all authority but their own shown by the Douglas party, notwithstanding the standing danger of their insolent power, their promises so often broken, their frequent submissions and actual defiance, his aim in all his dealings with them was rather to do justice to the oppressed than ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... odd remark, did not quite know what to make of this audacious young man, whose hazel eyes and lazy smile were queerly lovable, but whose face in repose had such a broad gravity. He took from his pocket a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... frightened. The statement was an audacious perversion of the truth. But then Frank Lavender knew very well what his aunt meant by going into the open air every afternoon, wet or dry. At one certain hour her brougham was brought round: she got into it, and had both doors and windows hermetically sealed, and then, in a semi-somnolent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... said, "considers that the letter to the King of Spain should stand over, so long as one cannot be sure that Italy will permit the transit of foodstuffs destined for the people." He desired no mediation between himself and the Italians. Perhaps the most audacious act of spoliation was the sale of the State stores at Gallipoli, just when the Allied offensive on the Salonica front was leading to the collapse of the enemy. Instead of forwarding the 25,000 greatcoats, the 20,000 kilos of leather, and great quantities of material, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... at the calmness of this audacious recital. As for John, he looked on surveying his brother's philosophical demeanour at first with speechless wrath, and then with an inscrutable mixture of expressions, in which, however, any one accustomed ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Miss Susie speak of the town and buying sweets; and she's that audacious by times she might have dragged the poor child off without stopping to think—and it's a long three miles, and ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow

... what extent Idris had observed it and had begun to get uneasy, understanding that, in case the pursuing party should capture them, he could not depend upon the boy's intercession. Idris was always ready for the most audacious deed, but as a man not deprived of reason, he thought that it was necessary to provide for everything and in case of misfortune to leave some gate of salvation open. For this reason, after the last occurrence he wanted in some manner to conciliate Stas and, with ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... of that. Another more audacious but equally youthful and enthusiastic idea had taken possession of his mind, and he lay awake half that night revolving it. It was true that it was somewhat impractically mixed with his visions of Mrs. Peyton and Susy, and even included his previous scheme ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... These audacious and iconoclastic performances of the reformer were not exactly adapted to turn from him the wrath of the idol worshipers. They more likely added fuel to the hot anger burning in Boston against him. Three weeks ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... the course Rake instantly bonneted an audacious dealer who had ventured to consider that Forest King was "light and curby in the 'ock." "You're a wise 'un, you are!" retorted the wrathful and ever-eloquent Rake; "there's more strength in his clean flat legs, bless him! than in all the round, thick, mill-posts ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... need. The smile of satisfied vanity, of stimulated ambition, was on his lips; and his good-humour inclined him more than ever to Marcella, and the pleasure of a woman's company. He passed with ease from triumph to homage; his talk now audacious, now confiding, offered her a deference, a flattery, to which, as he was fully conscious, the events of the evening had lent a ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... sycamores, where the children were disposed in a ring, in the centre of which, with a handkerchief in each hand, Concha the melancholy!—Concha the devout!—was dancing that most extravagant feat of the fandango—the audacious sembicuaca! ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... jokes with them in Greek or in Latin, has a ready answer and a witty quip for every turn of the discourse; will even interrupt his Majesty in one of those anecdotes of his Scottish martyrdom which he tells so well and tells so often. Lucifer himself could not be more arrogant or more audacious than this bewitching boy-lover of mine, who writes verses in English or Latin as easy as I can toss a shuttlecock. I doubt the greater number of his verses are scarce proper reading for you or me, Angela; for I see the men ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... inviting the civilized world to come and admire the transformation which, in half a century, had converted the commercial metropolis of Belgium into the first port of the European continent. This audacious project has been carried into execution, and the buildings of the Universal Exposition, including the Hall of Industry, the Gallery of Machinery, and the innumerable annexes, cover 2,368,055 sq. ft. of ground. Even this large space has proved too limited. These buildings ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... a popular summer hotel among the mountains or by the sea, with its constant round of drives, rides, tennis and golf matches, picnics, "germans," bathing, boating, and loafing, all permeated by flirtation of the most audacious and innocent description. The focus of the whole carnival is found in the "piazza" or veranda, and no prettier sight in its way can be imagined than the groups and rows of "rockers" and wicker chairs, each occupied by a lithe young girl in a summer frock, or her athletic ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... Then said, "Who art thou? and why com'st thou here?" To which King Robert answered with a sneer, "I am the king, and come to claim my own From an impostor, who usurps my throne!" And suddenly, at these audacious words, Up sprang the angry guests, and drew their swords; The angel answered with unruffled brow, "Nay, not the king, but the king's jester; thou Henceforth shalt wear the bells and scalloped cape, And for thy counsellor shalt lead ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... modify mine, so that I should become amenable to these social demands. I stand in hopeless opposition to the scheme of life that I have grown up amongst, to the universal scheme of life indeed, as understood by the world up to this day. Audacious, is it not?" ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... and although he could not read Sir Thomas Browne or Walter Pater with pleasure, he felt sure that his book was written in a straightforward and gentlemanly style. He was prepared to be told that his use of the colon was audacious, and looked forward with pleasure to an agreeable controversy ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... Court of Arches to answer a charge of appearing publicly in mannish apparel. The august tribunal had no terror for her, and she received her sentence to do penance in a white sheet at Paul's Cross during morning-service on a Sunday with an audacious contempt. 'They might as well have shamed a black dog as me,' she proudly exclaimed; and why should she dread the white sheet, when all the spectators looked with a lenient eye upon her professed discomfiture?' For a halfpenny,' she said, 'she would have travelled to every market-town ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... De Maupassant was suddenly made famous by two published volumes. The one was a volume of Verses (Des Vers), twenty pieces, most of them of a narrative character, extremely brilliant in execution, and audacious in tone. One of these, slightly exceeding its fellows in crudity, was threatened with a prosecution in law as an outrage upon manners, and the fortune of the volume was secured. The early poems of De Maupassant like those of Paul Bourget, are not without sterling ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... the most profoundly cultivated of all peoples; that a larger proportion of men lived complete, well-rounded, harmonious lives in ancient Athens than in any other known community. Keen, nimble-minded, and self-possessed; audacious speculators, but temperate and averse to extravagance; emotionally healthy, and endowed with an unequalled sense of beauty and propriety; how admirable and wonderful they seem when looked at across the gulf of ages intervening,—and what a priceless possession to humanity, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... day, to a level slab you feel reluctant to leave it. The old lady was Mistress (which is Miss) Tibbie McQuhatty, and she nearly split the Auld Licht kirk over "run line." This conspicuous innovation was introduced by Mr. Dishart, the minister, when he was young and audacious. The old, reverent custom in the kirk was for the precentor to read out the psalm a line at a time. Having then sung that line he read out the next one, led the singing of it, and so worked his way on to line three. Where ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie

... earliest remaining Letter,—which gives record of a crowning escapade of his, the first and the last of its kind; and so may be inserted here. A very headlong adventure on the boy's part; so hasty and so futile, at once audacious and impracticable; emblematic of much that befell in ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... very often that Foma would suddenly say something which seemed audacious even to himself, and which, at the same time, elevated him in his own eyes. There were certain unexpected, daring thoughts and words, which suddenly flashed like sparks, as though an impression produced them from Foma's brains. And he noticed more than once that whatever he had carefully ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... up, you observe with a sort of horror that the ceiling is of massive granite and flat. The sacristan has a story that when Philip saw this ceiling, which forms the floor of the high choir, he remonstrated against it as too audacious, and insisted on a strong pillar being built to support it. The architect complied, but when Philip came to see the improvement he burst into lamentation, as the enormous column destroyed the effect of the great altar. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... bill-posters was let loose, and as they drove to the evening meeting the town was red with it. Withdrawn, disclaimed, apologised for? It was insisted on, relied on, made a trump card of, flung full in young Terence's audacious face. May sat by her husband in that strange mixed mood that he roused in her, half pride, half humiliation; scorning him because he would not bow before the truth, exulting in the audacity, the dash, and ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... "do you know that the slimness and the sheerness and the audacious foothold and the beauty of that thing remind me of you? It is covered all over with the delicate frostbloom you taught me to see upon fruit. I find it everywhere but you have never told me what ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... told her all. She listened with a feeling of terror and disgust. So those passionate letters, that audacious pursuit were not the result of tenderness and love. It was money that he desired. The poor girl felt that she had in a sense been an accomplice in the death of her benefactress. She began to weep bitterly. Herman ...
— The Queen Of Spades - 1901 • Alexander Sergeievitch Poushkin

... its wings and, in the ten ensuing seconds, there followed a terrible series of sounds, for a bomb had just fallen and exploded very near at hand. But so entrancing was it to observe the flight of this pirate who, in spite of everything, continued in his audacious course, that I gazed at the heavens, trying to determine whether or not I saw once more the little white cloud, the precursor ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne

... Walter. "Why, I could show such a person how to multiply it by ten inside of two months." And he rapidly outlined to Cleggett a scheme so audacious and so brilliant that it fairly took our hero's breath away. Moreover, it stood the test of reflection; it was sound. Not to descend to the sordid details, in three weeks Cleggett found himself possessed of a million dollars' gain. Half of this he ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... harassed it to death, left nothing undone to humiliate it, and wrung from its weakness, despairing of itself, laws that cost it the last vestige of respect with the public. Bonaparte, occupied with his own fixed Napoleonic idea, was audacious enough openly to exploit this degradation of the parliamentary power: When the National Assembly, on May 8, 1849, passed a vote of censure upon the Ministry on account of the occupation of Civita-Vecchia by Oudinot, and ordered that the Roman expedition ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx

... Tuesday,' Georgiana said on the Friday evening. 'I don't know why you should suppose anything of the kind,' the father replied. Poor Lady Pomona was urged by her daughters to compel him to name a day; but Lady Pomona was less audacious in urging the request than her younger child, and at the same time less anxious for its completion. On the Sunday morning before they went to church there was a great discussion upstairs. The Bishop of Elmham was going to preach at Caversham church, and the three ladies were dressed in their best ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... Various as the color of the hair, the odor of the armpit is infinitely divisible; its gamut covers the whole keyboard of odors, reaching the obstinate scents of syringa and elder, and sometimes recalling the sweet perfume of the rubbed fingers that have held a cigarette. Audacious and sometimes fatiguing in the brunette and the black woman, sharp and fierce in the red woman, the armpit is heady as some sugared wines in the blondes." It will be noted that this very exact description corresponds at various points with the remarks ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... knightly men in gold and satin and coats of mail! And, above all, the maddening mystery of that king at her side whose glances were now melting with melancholy, now ablaze with eagerness, and whose whispered words, muffled behind his mask, were not those of a monarch, but rather those of a bold and audacious lover! He poured his vows into her blushing ear; he set her wits to scampering madly; his sincere passion, together with the dream-like unreality of the scene, intoxicated her. Who could he be? How dared ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... dare to resist the Emperor Napoleon and his army?" exclaimed one. "We were audacious enough to do so, and what has become of us! Our houses have been demolished—our money is gone—our sons, brothers, and fathers, have been crippled or killed! When Napoleon once stretches out his hand toward ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... impotent either for freedom or for any change of sovereignty. To ask the Nation sprung from the successful revolt of the thirteen colonies to acknowledge and act on an immoral doctrine like that, was, indeed, ingenuous—or audacious. The American Commissioners pronounced it alike repugnant to common sense and menacing to liberty and civilization. The Spanish Commissioners resented the characterization, but it is believed that the considerate ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... Europe, and it was this same California lawyer in khaki, turned food man, who, when the communist Kun had passed and the pendulum had swung as dangerously far in the other direction, allowing the audacious Hapsburg, Archduke Joseph, to slip into power, had ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg

... retort, 'there would have been plenty of time afterwards—in either world.' I think he seemed to us, baffled as we were by youth, or by infirmity, a triumphant figure, and to some of us a figure from another age, an audacious Italian fifteenth century figure. A few weeks before I had heard one of my father's friends, an official in a publishing firm that had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley who was 'no use except under control' and praising Wilde, 'so indolent ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats

... understand anyone being done to death at once: but the idea of condemning anyone in cold blood to starve, to wrestle with his own body, to strive with his own heart and stomach, I always regarded as cruelty. I deemed that if I took one of those little cakes, which that audacious girl had piled up before me so forcibly, and put it in my pocket, it would ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... smiling and vaguely audacious, changed subtly. She lay looking up at me very wistfully for a moment, then lifted her hands a little way. I laid them to my lips, looking over them down into her ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... shared the name of Grep, wishing to regulate and steady his promiscuous wantonness, ventured to seek a haven for his vagrant amours in the love of the king's sister. Yet he did amiss. For though it was right that his vagabond and straying delights should be bridled by modesty, yet it was audacious for a man of the people to covet the child of a king. She, much fearing the impudence of her wooer, and wishing to be safer from outrage, went into a fortified building. Thirty attendants were given to her, to keep guard and constant watch ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... timid, and wanted to be told when she could be bold with perfect safety, while Hazard's grasp of all subjects, though feminine in appearance, was masculine and persistent in reality. To be steadily strong was not in Esther's nature. She was audacious only by starts, and recoiled from her own audacity. Before long, Hazard began to dominate her will. She felt a little uneasy until he had seen and approved her work. More than once he disapproved, and then she had to do it over again. ...
— Esther • Henry Adams

... Rochester's account, as soon as ever she could make her escape she regained her garret; where Rochester, having repaired thither at the appointed hour, was fully informed of all that had passed in the bathing room. He was astonished at the audacious temerity of Hobart, in daring to put such a trick upon him; but, though he rightly judged that love and jealousy were the real motives, he would not excuse her. Little Sarah desired to know whether he had a real affection for Miss Temple, as Miss Hobart said she supposed that ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton

... same familiar bow he might have awarded a friend he met in the Agora. Mardonius was troubled. The supreme usher was horrified. The master-of-punishments, ever near his chief, gazed eagerly to see if Xerxes would not touch the audacious Hellene's girdle—a sign for prompt decapitation. Only the good nature of the king prevented a catastrophe, and Xerxes was moved by two motives, pleasure at meeting a fellow-mortal who could look him in the eye without servility or fear, delight at the beautiful features ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... routes, of seven or eight hundred miles in extent, these men had threaded their way in manifold disguises through the very midst of the emperor's camps. According to this man's gigantic enterprise, in which the means were as audacious as the purpose, the conspirators were to rendezvous, and first to recognise each other at the gates of Rome. From the Danube to the Tiber did this band of robbers severally pursue their perilous routes through all the difficulties of the road and the jealousies of ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... the lazy, or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating to the intolerant to find writers, young in experience if not always young in age, talking of themselves as discoverers—brave or audacious discoverers—as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or Cortez, or Ponce de Le['o]n; and then, to hear some of the old and conventional violently attacking these verse makers as if they were new ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... cooking for a shearers' or a navvies' camp; and that a wideawake boy could earn 'good money' while learning it, as a rouseabout assistant. It seemed to me that there would have been something too absurdly incongruous in attempting to talk of such things to Mr. Rawlence. Hence, perhaps, my audacious suggestion of the literary career. There I might secure his interest. And, sure enough, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... blasphemous and sacrilegious supremacy and arbitrary power in magistrate over church and state. There was little conscience made of constant endeavours to preserve the reformation, when there was not a seasonable testimony exhibited against these audacious and heaven-daring attempts; when our ministers were by a wicked edict ejected from their charges, both they and the people too easily complied with it. Albeit, in the National Covenant, the land is ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery

... pandemonium of riot and revelry, that prolonged the night into the day, and defied the very order of nature by its audacious disregard of all decency of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... knows when he is justified, and all the wits in the world cannot enlighten him on that point. The murderer always knows that he is justly punished; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step towards its own dissolution. Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good? Is there any ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau

... over darkness. With her evil flourished like a green bay-tree, while righteousness was its own reward—and a very dull one. She was religious, after the conventional fashion of the people with whom she consorted; she enjoyed going to a church where there was good music or an audacious preacher to be heard. But she never wanted to be better than she was; her wants were for the further satisfaction of her material ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... sentence of acquittal; but they eagerly admitted such evidence as was stained with perjury, or procured by torture, to prove the most improbable charges against the most respectable characters. The progress of the inquiry continually opened new subjects of criminal prosecution; the audacious informer, whose falsehood was detected, retired with impunity; but the wretched victim, who discovered his real or pretended accomplices, were seldom permitted to receive the price of his infamy. From the extremity ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... brilliant, his wit keen, and his energy of the bold and dashing military type. This audacious energy leads him very often into sprawling situations, a worship of imperialism, and reckless statements concerning moral and spiritual laws. Unlike Bret Harte, who was in many respects one of Kipling's ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... captivating in the very arrogance and recklessness of this audacious stranger. Never in all his experience had Coquenil known a criminal or a person directly associated with crime, as this man must be, to boldly confront the powers of justice. Undoubtedly, the fellow realized his danger, ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett

... can happen in an age like this, how easily could they happen in ages like those in which Christianity produced its scriptures. Credulity was boundless, fraud was audacious, and lying for the profit of the Church was regarded as a virtue. There was no printing press, no free inquiry, no keen investigation, no vivid conception of the laws of evidence; and the few brilliant critics, like Celsus and Porphyry, who kept alive in their breasts the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... the Constable spoke, seemed to produce a corresponding effect upon the deportment of his followers. The minstrel dropped at once the cynical and audacious tone in which he had hitherto seemed to tamper with the passions of his master; and in language simple and respectful, and which even approached to sympathy, informed him of the evil news which he had collected during his absence. It was ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... were closed incidents when those befell which two or three final pages linger to recount. The siege of Spanish Fort was the war's last great battle. From March twenty-sixth to April the eighth it was deadly, implacable; the defense hot, defiant, audacious. On the night of the eighth the fort's few hundred cannoneers spiked their heavy guns and, taking their light ones along, left it. They had fought fully aware that Richmond was already lost, and on the next day, a Sabbath, as Kincaid's Battery trundled through the town while ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... lifted and heeled on the swings and swerves of the bends. First one, and then another, without apparent rhyme or reason, three faces limned themselves on his consciousness: Joy Gastell's, laughing and audacious; Shorty's, battered and exhausted by the struggle down Mono Creek; and John Bellew's, seamed and rigid, as if cast in iron, so unrelenting was its severity. And sometimes Smoke wanted to shout aloud, to chant a paean of savage exultation, as he remembered ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... pamphlet claims the highest admiration, its audacious courage. On the very eve of the Restoration, and with full though tardy recognition of its probable imminence, he protests as loudly as ever the righteousness of Charles's execution, and of the perpetual exclusion of his family from the throne. When all ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... of the invaders. Moreover their neighbors and subjects were ready to rise against them and become allies of the Spaniards. In a few months of crowded battle and massacre they lay broken and helpless at the feet of the audacious conqueror, who promptly sent to Spain a glowing account of his new empire and a tribute of gold and silver. Albert Duerer in August, 1520, saw at Brussels the "things brought the king from the new golden land," and describes ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... scarce conscious glance over the apartment. It was small and simply furnished. Opposite to her was an old-fashioned bureau, one of those quaint, elaborate monuments of Dutch ingenuity, which, during the present century, the audacious spirit of curiosity-vendors has transplanted from their native receptacles, to contrast, with grotesque strangeness, the neat handiwork of Gillow and Seddon. It had a physiognomy and character of its own—this fantastic ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... and halted, leaving the door open behind him. He had his knapsack on his shoulders, his cudgel in his hand, a rough, audacious, weary, and violent expression in his eyes. The fire on the hearth lighted him up. He was hideous. It was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... guests were several distinguished warriors, and each at an opportune time would rise and recount his great deeds in warfare against the Sioux. The strangers could read their gestures, and Antelope was once or twice almost on the point of stringing his bow to send an arrow through the audacious speaker. ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... every asylum were collected magazines of stolen or smuggled goods. From every asylum ruffians sallied forth nightly to plunder and stab. In no town of Christendom, consequently, was law so impotent and wickedness so audacious as in the ancient capital of religion and civilisation. On this subject Innocent felt as became a priest and a prince. He declared that he would receive no Ambassador who insisted on a right so destructive of order and morality. There was at first much murmuring; but his resolution was so evidently ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... give the onset: I was much perplexed hereat, for should I attempt her, and be slighted, she would never care for me afterwards; but again, I considered that if I should attempt and fail, she would never speak of it; or would any believe I durst be so audacious as to propound such a question, the disproportion of years and fortune being so great betwixt us: however, all her talk was of husbands, and in my presence saying one day after dinner, she respected not wealth, but desired an honest man; I made answer, I thought I could ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly

... audacious and enterprising business men who would nowadays go into speculation in stocks, were then forced into speculation in land. Sometimes as individuals, sometimes as large companies, they sought to procure wild lands on the Wabash, the Ohio, the Cumberland, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt

... him confident and bold, she had only to settle with him as to the common plan of action which must bring about the eviction of the audacious candidate who wished to marry Micheline. If she found him discouraged and doubtful of himself, she had decided to animate him with her ardor ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet



Words linked to "Audacious" :   venturesome, brazen, daring, brave, brazen-faced, barefaced, audaciousness, insolent, audacity, venturous, intrepid, dauntless, unfearing, bodacious, adventurous, fearless, bald-faced



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