"Boorish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Aytta van Zuichem was a learned Frisian, born, according to some writers, of "boors' degree, but having no inclination for boorish work". According to other authorities, which the President himself favored, he was of noble origin; but, whatever his race, it is certain that whether gentle or simple, it derived its first and only historical illustration from his remarkable talents and acquirements. These in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... battle. Even in times of peace you would hardly have a quiet hour here: for great herds of cattle come crowding down every day to my lake for water; the noisy ploughman, driving his team afield, disturbs the morning hour with his boorish shouts; and boys and dogs keep up a constant din, and make life in ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... if I grew ashamed of my people, ashamed even of their boorish manners, their ignorance, their crudity, you would ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... distinctive quality of Japanese poetry is undoubtedly due to the air in which it flourished. It is never religious, and it is often immoral, but it is always suffused with a certain hue of courtliness, even gentleness. The language is of the most refined delicacy, the thought is never boorish or rude; there is the self-collectedness which we find in the poetry of France and Italy during the Renaissance, and in England during the reign of Queen Anne. It exhibits the most exquisite polish, allied with an avoidance of every shocking or perturbing theme. It seems to combine the ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... might give you now. Only one thing I can't help saying, though you know it already and will doubtless see it proved again and again. There are many deceivers in the world. Don't trust the outward look of things or people. Be cautious; yet conceal your caution under courtesy, for nothing is more boorish than open suspicion. And remember, too, not to think bad, either, from appearances alone. You may do injustice that way. Hold your opinion till the matter is tested. When appearances are fair, be wary without showing it; when they are bad, regard your safety but don't condemn. In other words, always ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... speaking of Clarendon Beverley!" he exclaimed, almost fiercely. "These Yankees have no respect for any thing on earth, but their own boorish selves." ...
— Hurrah for New England! - The Virginia Boy's Vacation • Louisa C. Tuthill
... history of the movement in its palmy days—the brutal and cowardly baiting of a penalised class; the boorish insult to ideals held sacred by sensitive devotees; the deliberate cultivation of intra—parochial blood-feud; the savage fostering of hate for hate's own sake; the thousand squalid details of affray, ambuscade, murder, maltreatment, malicious injury to property—these, happily or unhappily, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... boorish hayseeds from out of town trying to sell their produce, unaccustomed to the fashionable Latin-Greek speech of the city folks, gaping with their mouths wide open, greedily at the steaks of sacrificial meat displayed behind enlarging glasses in the cheap ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... itself between the high culture of Germany and the end at which she aims, the means which she employs in the present war? Is it enough to explain this contrast, to allege that in spite of all their science the Germans are but slightly civilized, that in the sixteenth century they were still boorish and uncultivated and that their science, an affair of specialists and pundits, has never penetrated their soul or ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... Wilde's wax flowers of speech, nor the excessively stiff and conventionalized action of "Salome," that bores one with the Strauss opera of that name. It is not even the libretto of "Der Rosenkavalier," essentially coarse and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powdered preciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or the hybrid, lame, tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns one against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and insufficient music in which Strauss has ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Which he sir? Clo. He sir, that must marrie this woman: Therefore you Clowne, abandon: which is in the vulgar, leaue the societie: which in the boorish, is companie, of this female: which in the common, is woman: which together, is, abandon the society of this Female, or Clowne thou perishest: or to thy better vnderstanding, dyest; or (to wit) I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy libertie into bondage: I will deale in ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... in his view the clearest invalidation of marriage, the frustration of the noblest and most divine ends of the institution; an essentially worse frustration, he dares to say in one place, than even that conjugal infidelity which "a gross and boorish opinion, how common soever," would alone resent or recognise. It is marvellous with what richness of varying language he paints to the reader the horrible condition of a man tied for life to a woman with whom he can hold no rational ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... scintilla. Bluff, blunt, outspoken, downright, brusk, curt, crusty. Boast, brag, vaunt, vapor, gasconade. Body, corpse, remains, relics, carcass, cadaver, corpus. Bombastic, sophomoric, turgid, tumid, grandiose, grandiloquent, magniloquent. Boorish, churlish, loutish, clownish, rustic, ill-bred. Booty, plunder, loot, spoil. Brittle, frangible, friable, fragile, crisp. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... bear, he was a success—he was a good bear—. But then, it was objected, that he was an objectless bear—a bear that meant nothing in particular, signified nothing,—simply stood there snarling over his shoulder at nothing—and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that—none were satisfied. They hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no paint to him. But presently Harte took a pencil and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... given the peel of an onion for him, so deformed he was in body, and ridiculous in his gesture. He had a sharp pointed nose, with the look of a bull, and countenance of a fool: he was in his carriage simple, boorish in his apparel, in fortune poor, unhappy in his wives, unfit for all offices in the commonwealth, always laughing, tippling, and merrily carousing to everyone, with continual gibes and jeers, the better by those means to conceal his ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... willing to work at one semi-mechanical task, can be hired for less than a Fifth Avenue butler is paid in America, and a certain pre-eminence in military affairs reached by subjecting the mass of the people to the brutal, boorish, non-commissioned officers and the galling yoke ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... belligerent manner in which, ten minutes later, Mr. Stanley Forde stormed down the walk to the waiting taxicab, gave glaring proof of the dire result of his untimely call. From the garden, where Grace had fled to recover from the irritation of having been so grossly misunderstood, she saw the boorish young man depart. Privately she marveled that Arline should have so deceived herself in regard to her feelings for him. He was undoubtedly handsome, yet his regular features indicated a certain lack of strength and nobility which she thought totally marred his claim to good ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... came trotting up with an old straw hat on his head. He was dressed in the coarsest brown homespun cloth. His face was rather sallow from fever-and-ague, and his tall figure, though strong and sinewy was quite thin, and had besides an angular look, which, together with his boorish seat on horseback, gave him an appearance anything but graceful. Plenty more of the same stamp were close behind him. Their company was raised in one of the frontier counties, and we soon had abundant evidence of their rustic breeding; dozens ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... inculcate—slippers, and coffee, and care, and courtesy—ought indeed to be done, but the others ought not to be left undone. And to the former women seldom need to be exhorted. They take to them naturally. A great many more women bore boorish husbands with fond little attentions than wound appreciative ones by neglect. Women domesticate themselves to death already. What they want is cultivation. They need to be stimulated to develop a large, comprehensive, catholic life, in which their domestic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... think the thing too boorish to be pardoned. On the face of it it was rude to you—and the ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... affection. His hair, worn in ailes de pigeon, and duly powdered every morning by the barber from the Ecole Polytechnique, described five points on his low forehead, and made an elegant setting to his face. Though his manners were somewhat boorish, he was always as neat as a new pin and he took his snuff in a lordly way, like a man who knows that his snuff-box is always likely to be filled with maccaboy, so that when Mme. Vauquer lay down to rest on the day ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... the time. As for my sister, he's willing to give her whatever her heart desires, even his last kopek, just to please her, so that she does absolutely nothing, and lives like a lady. But his manners are boorish, and his conversation embarrasses us very much. Altogether this is not the kind of happiness I wished for Tanya. Judging by her beauty and the standing of her former admirers, she should now be riding in a carriage. As ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... gumption of a Kansas Gopher he would know that neither Mrs. Davis nor any other American woman made such "demand." Perhaps he did not know it,—if it be possible for the editor of such a quintessential extract of utter idiocy to know anything—but couldn't resist the boorish impulse to insult an aged woman, because he's built that way. The case of Senorita Cisneros appealed to the sympathy of every manly man and noble woman throughout the world—to every living creature within whose hide there pulses one drop of human blood ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... one or two who were to go to Court the day after, but to me and some others not a syllable of any description was uttered, and when some more English were shewn in who were, I presume, as respectable as myself, his behaviour was quite boorish, he did not condescend to look towards the door. These things went on till a throng of Spaniards with Stars and orders came in; with these he appeared tolerably intimate, and also with three Englishmen who afterwards appeared. ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... over in my head and wondering what their boorish conduct could mean, when I saw, as I rode from the village, a great T new carved upon a tree. I had already seen more than one in my morning's ride, but I had given no thought to them until the words of the beer-drinker gave them an importance. It chanced that a respectable-looking ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... threatened to exclude her sons, whose guardian he was, from the possession of any of their father's property, if she married elsewhere. She therefore suffered herself to be betrothed to Sicinius Clarus, 'a boorish and decrepit old man,' but put off the marriage, until her father-in-law's death released her from all embarrassment. Pontianus and Pudens succeeded to the property, and Pudentilla felt herself free ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... how, on one occasion, she had openly preferred Aleck Dorr to himself; Aleck Dorr, with his ugly face and boorish manners, who was cutting a dash with a ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... the tickled world a'dancing. In a word, as the progress of Christianization mellows those in manner whom it cannot mend in mind, much the same will it prove with the progress of genialization. And so, thanks to geniality, the misanthrope, reclaimed from his boorish address, will take on refinement and softness—to so genial a degree, indeed, that it may possibly fall out that the misanthrope of the coming century will be almost as popular as, I am sincerely sorry to say, some philanthropists of the ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... be consistent, elucidate sceptically and explain naturally all the rest in the same way.... But even if such a labour could be accomplished, it would in any case be no proof of superior talents in the one carrying it out, but only of superficial wit, boorish wisdom, and ridiculous haste.... Therefore I leave on one side all such enquiries, and believe what is generally thought about the myths. I do not examine them, as I have just said, but I examine myself to see whether I too may perhaps be a monster, more ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... gratefully accept an invitation proffered in such friendly terms? It would have been boorish to refuse. I therefore returned to my modest hotel, paid my bill, and made the best of my way to Maycroft, where I was received with such kindness and cordiality as I have no ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... more, called Flemengs, infidels, dun, heavy, and boorish; who are amongst the Franks what the Armenians are amongst us,—having no ideas beyond those of thrift, and no ambition beyond that of riches. They used to send us a sleepy ambassador to negotiate the introduction of their cheeses, butter, and salt-fish; but their ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... throne was undeniable, and whose accession to it, at the death of his sister, by far the greater part of the English people would have preferred, to the having a petty German prince for a sovereign, about whose cruelty, rapacity, boorish manners, and odious foreign ways, a thousand stories were current. It wounded our English pride to think that a shabby High-Dutch duke, whose revenues were not a tithe as great as those of many of the princes of our ancient English nobility, who could ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... such a prevision may seem at first, it has a fundamental element of truth. Two obstacles bar the way to civilization and the normal development of new ideas, which are the foundation of progress. First of all, there is the naive and boorish ignorance of the common people; then the resistance which every established society instinctively offers to ideas of reformation. Of these two conservative forces, Russia knows but one, pure and simple ignorance, while the second, which can have art and ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... the generic name of Arya, [449] and those coming from Hindustan into the Nerbudda valley as Pardeshi, while in the same locality the Brahmans and Rajputs of Central India are designated by the Marathas as Rangra. This term has the signification of rustic or boorish, and is therefore a fairly close parallel to Kamathi, if the latter word has the meaning given above. In the Thana District of Bombay [450] people of many classes are included under the name of Kamathi. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... of them. "Among your fraternity, I understand, there is a certain holy and benevolent blacksmith; a man of iron, in more senses than one; a rough, cross-grained, well-meaning individual, rather boorish in his manners, as might be expected, and by no means of the highest intellectual cultivation. He is a philanthropical lecturer, with two or three disciples, and a scheme of his own, the preliminary ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... But of this I am certain (for I know my countrymen) that until every other country in the Christian world, even to barbarian Muscovy and the hamlets of the boorish Germans, have its playhouse at the public charge, England will never adventure. And she will adventure then only because it is her desire to be ever in the fashion, and to do humbly and dutifully whatso she seeth everybody else doing. In the meantime ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... felt boorish. He had never liked and disapproved of Lady Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment. And he had no ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... loathsome to those who were uncomfortable enough already, unless he was very sure it would do good,—in which case, he never played with drugs, but gave good, honest, efficient doses. Sometimes he lost a family of the more boorish sort, because they did not think they got their money's worth out of him, unless they had something more than a taste of everything he ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... lost time. Mrs. Malling's round face shone again in her relief, and a sigh of content escaped her. Word was sent at once to the bride, and all was enthusiasm again. Then followed a terrible shock. Peter Furrer, more long-sighted than the rest, delivered it in a boorish fashion all his own. ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... dispirited and hungry, and hunger alone makes a man angry. He looked at the girl for whose sake he had raced all these miles of wild-goose chase, and a boorish longing to hurt her, to let her ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... highest aim. For the acquisition of this spirit of respect, military training is superior to civil. One officer salutes another, the private salutes his officer, simply because the person saluted is an officer. It may be that he is disagreeable or boorish in manners, or even notoriously incompetent. This matters not: so long as he wears the epaulettes he is entitled to an officer's salute. Honor is shown, not to the transient owner of the title, but to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... brother, there are some things which may be said about the tactics of renewing the broken tie. There is needed a certain tactful considerateness. In all such questions the grace of the act depends as much on the manner of it, as on the act itself. The grace of the fairest act may be hurt by a boorish blemish of manner. Many a graceful act is spoiled by a graceless touch, as a generous deed can be ruined by a grudging manner. An air of condescension will destroy the value of the finest charity. There is a forgiveness which is no forgiveness—formal, constrained, ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... their own estates nor with trade and commerce, which they hold to be discreditable; they either loiter at home or ride about on horseback. The Roman nobility also despise trade, but farm their own property; the cultivation of the land even opens the way to a title; it is a respectable but boorish nobility. In Lombardy the nobles live upon the rent of their inherited estates; descent and the abstinence from any regular calling, constitute nobility. In Venice, the 'nobili,' the ruling caste, were all merchants. Similarly in Genoa the nobles and nonnobles were alike merchants ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... pressed the magic rose of deference and subjugation. But neither his environment, - a gloomy apartment tastelessly furnished in bourgeois style, - nor his outward appearance, a bony, half jovial, half cautiously cunning, more or less boorish face upon a heavy unwieldy body, was adapted to strengthen my illusion. He was very genial, talkative, good-natured, and made a little kindly intended speech to which I sat and listened with the conviction that I must be making a confused, ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... Mrs. Cockayne continued, "it is quite refreshing, after the boorish manners of your London shopkeepers, to be waited upon by these polite ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... continental ideals. France was more than ever the arbiter for the "gentry and civiller sort of mankind." Travellers such as Evelyn, who deplored the English gentry's "solitary and unactive lives in the country," the "haughty and boorish Englishman," and the "constrained address of our sullen Nation,"[301] made an impression. It was generally acknowledged that comity and affability had to be fetched from beyond the Seas, for the "meer Englishman" was defective in those qualities. He was "rough in address, ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... a rowdy, and will endeavor to change your ways once you come under my jurisdiction. We have a reputation to sustain in this establishment, young man. You would have to try and be a gentleman here. Take a lesson from my son, who so nobly forgave your boorish actions, and hearing that you and your mother were in want kindly interceded with me to forget the past. I cannot disappoint such a charitable spirit, and I am about to take you into my employ at the advice of Ferdinand. Can you start to work ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... likeness can be found between these two aspects of the same person. The man who falls into the most graceful operatic poses, as he pours sweet nothings into your ear by the fire at night, may be entirely destitute of those more intimate charms which a woman values. On the other hand, an ugly, boorish, badly-dressed figure may mark a man endowed with the very genius of love, and who has a perfect mastery over situations which might baffle us with our superficial graces. A man whose conventional aspect accords with his real nature, who, in the intimacy of wedded love, possesses that inborn grace ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... neither boorish nor blunt, but even these are preferable to simpering and crawling. I wish every English youth could see those of the United States of America; always civil, never servile. Be obedient, where obedience is due; for, it ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... commercial aristocracy these people wear. Now, by birth and breeding, Diamond, you are a true aristocrat, but with you blood is everything, and it rather galls you to witness the boorish air of superiority assumed by some of these millionaire pork packers with neither education nor refinement. I don't wonder. When you came to Yale you had some silly notions about aristocracy, but you have gotten over ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... the painter's fixed principles: he does not, with German sentimentality, make shepherds and peasants graceful or sublime, but he purposely vulgarizes them, not by making their actions or their faces boorish or disagreeable, but rather by painting them ill, and composing their draperies tamely. As far as I recollect at present, the principle is universal with him; exactly in proportion to the dignity ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... rude men. But I am friendless in your boorish town, and this is a friend; and one who knows, what you know not, how to treat ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... up with it no longer; and in consequence I take the boorish liberty of suggesting that this ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... to make things pleasant—at any rate so long as it does not involve the doer in loss. There is less gratuitous insolence. Servility, with its attendant hypocrisy and deceit, is conspicuously absent; and the general spirit of independence, if sometimes needlessly boorish in its manifestations, is at least sturdy and manly. In England we are rude to those weaker than ourselves; in America the rudeness is apt to be directed against those whom we suspect to be in some way our superior. Man is regarded by man rather as an object of interest than as ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... his pocket, as a small testimony of her gratitude, he could not be prevailed upon to avail himself of her generosity; but following her to the other end of the room, thrust it into her sleeve without ceremony, exclaiming, "I'll be d—d to hell if I do." Peregrine, having checked him for his boorish behaviour, sent him out of the room, and begged that Miss Sophy would not endeavour to debauch the morals of his servant, who, rough and uncultivated as he was, had sense enough to perceive that he had no pretension to any such acknowledgment. But she argued, with great vehemence, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... theirs. They had neither so many ways nor so many means of sinning; but the sum of their moral turpitude was greater than ours. We have a sort of decency and good breeding, which lay a certain restraint on our passions; they were boorish and beastly, and their bad passions ever in full play. Civilization prevents barbarity and atrocity; mental cultivation induces decency of manners—those primitive times were generally without these. Who that knows them would ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... of the time, which the Fool is undertaking to translate into the vernacular, when he puts the question, 'Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' And we have all the Novum Organum in what he calls, in another place, 'the boorish,' when he answers it; and all the choicest gems of 'the part operative' of the new learning have been rattling from his rattle in everybody's path, ever since he published his digests of that doctrine: 'Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... seems to have existed among the uneducated Romans that irregularity in the use of h which marks the language of the English cockney to-day. Nigidius Figulus, the grammarian, said: "Your speech becomes boorish if you aspirate wrongly." Catullus in one of his epigrams ridicules the cockneyism of a person who said chommoda for commoda, and hinsidiae for insidiae. [3] In later Latin, the varying spelling shows the growing irregularity of usage. H seems to have ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... strange character was that of an overgrown country lout with boorish manners and silly mind. He did not and would not go to school, and he asserts now that if he had done so he "would have become as big a fool as other people." A shiftless fellow, left to his own devices, he ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... in Tavasland are fair-haired, slow, but exceedingly tenacious, and also somewhat boorish. Here the principal towns, manufactures, etc., are to be found. Many of the inhabitants speak Swedish, and all have been influenced ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... lead, Olga Semyonovna. It's enough to make one cry. One works and does one's utmost, one wears oneself out, getting no sleep at night, and racks one's brain what to do for the best. And then what happens? To begin with, one's public is ignorant, boorish. I give them the very best operetta, a dainty masque, first rate music-hall artists. But do you suppose that's what they want! They don't understand anything of that sort. They want a clown; what they ask for is vulgarity. And then look at the weather! ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... coat tried to give it. At a slap on the shoulder he turned about, showing to the merchant a ruddy, sea-tanned skin, light brown hair, gray eyes, and a chin and mouth hidden by a two months' beard, still too bristly to give him other than an unkempt, boorish look. ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... Scottish country gentleman may be a scholar without the pedantry of our friend the Baron, a sportsman without the low habits of Mr. Falconer, and a judicious improver of his property without becoming a boorish two-legged ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... idle complaints made by them against our mariners. I found him and the president of their factory very impatient, calling us insolent English, threatening that our pride would have a fall, with many other disgraceful and opprobrious words.[134] Such was the entertainment we received from that boorish general, named Garrat Reynes, in his own house. He had formerly shewn the like or worse to Mr Ball, on going aboard his ship at Banda: And four of our men, who took passage with him from thence to Cambello, were brought all the way in the bilboes, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... already mentioned, there is another exceedingly large class of society, which, far from being boorish by nature, yet from circumstances lacks the cultivation which alone will bring the conduct into such training as will fit it practically for exhibition in society. To the persons comprising this class, it is not only a source of regret, but of absolute pain, to ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... well up the next morning when the procession of buckboards was ready to start for Gold City. Andrew Malden and the shrewd fellow had gone an hour before, the rest were off, and only the boorish Devonshire was left to ride down with Tony. Job stood, with heart palpitating and conscience goading him, down by the big pasture gate to let them through. All his peace of mind was gone. A few moments and the crime would be carried out to its end, and he would be equally guilty with the avaricious ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... the lofty political ends involved and the interests of nation and nation; who cannot grasp political schemes as well as plans of campaign and combine the science of the tactician with that of the administrator, are bound to live in a state of ignorance; the most boorish peasant in the most backward district in France is scarcely in a worse case. Such men as these bear the brunt of war, yield passive obedience to the brain that directs them, and strike down the men opposed to them as the woodcutter fells timber in the forest. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... house, from whom he does not expect advantage of some kind, and to those from whom he does, he can be civil enough. An Englishman thinks that, because he is in his own house, he has a right to be boorish and brutal to any one who is disagreeable to him, as all those are who are really in want of assistance. Should a hunted fugitive rush into an Englishman's house, beseeching protection, and appealing to the master's feelings of hospitality, the Englishman ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... By Respiration, and Chaos, and Air, I have not seen any man so boorish, nor so impracticable, nor so stupid, nor so forgetful; who, while learning some little petty quibbles, forgets them before he has learned them. Nevertheless I will certainly call him out here to the light. Where is Strepsiades? Come forth with ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... to the world, bequeathed to it also a consciousness of its nerves and a pride in its very defects. When Coleridge had taught his successors to glorify the poetic perception and vision, to give to the secret feelings a new warrant and value, they came to think it boorish to conceal their fine feelings, and they acquired the habit of expressing feelings which the common man scarcely experiences without a sense of shame. The poet came to be essentially the man who felt acutely, and anything that was a "feeling" came to have a sort ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... received us, as I thought, something shortly, hurrying us into the house. But once inside, he made ceremony enough, with endless speeches about the condescension of His Royal Highness. All this too obsequious, in a boorish taste, so that the Prince bade him have done and come to business. Therewith Colonel Boyce was as full of apologies as he had been of servilities. I vow I never heard him ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... sight of her, though she did not happen to perceive him. He called a sleigh and drove to the barracks for his own skates. Then to the Kuh-brucke, where a reach of the Mottlau was cleared and kept in order for skating. He overpaid the sleigh-driver and laughed aloud at the man's boorish surprise. There was no one so happy as Charles Darragon in all the world. He was going to tell Desiree ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... in the midst of his triumph and exultation, had not leisure to recollect, nor perhaps penetration to perceive, the effect that this little sally might have upon his interests. Despotic and boorish as was the genius of Mr. Hartley, it cowred under that of Sophia with the most abject servility. And that lady now vowed eternal war against the ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... continued. "You persist, in a rude and boorish manner, in interrupting my conversation with the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the tone in which it was uttered would have been discourteous under any circumstances; at this particular time and in the painful situation in which we all found ourselves it was boorish almost ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... mischief is that we like anything from a man of power. If he is insolent, we think it grand; if he is stupid, we think it a sort of condescension; if he is mild and polite, we think it marvellous; if he is boorish, we think it is simple-minded. It is power that we admire, or rather success, and both can be inherited. If a man gets a big position in England, he is always said to grow into it; but that is because ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... considered decidedly boorish to utter complaints against the ladies. But I am for the present a bachelor, and in that capacity claim freedom of speech as my peculiar privilege. In virtue of my unhappy position, then, I proceed to utter the first of a series ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... then resolve this puzzle? He the birthday-wit, For so we thought him—keener yet, if aught is so— Becomes a dunce more boorish e'en than hedge-born boor, If e'er he faults on verses; yet in heart is then 15 Most happy, writing verses, happy past compare, So sweet his own self, such a world at home ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... irony at his own presumptuousness. Now he understood Leonora's mocking tone, and the violence she had used in repulsing all boorish liberties he had tried to take. But despite the contempt he began to feel for himself, he lacked the strength to withdraw now. He had been caught up in the wake of seduction, the maelstrom of love that followed ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a very boorish way of thanking you for the premiere representation of your little poem. "To Delia in Girton" you call it, "recommending her to avoid the Muses, and seek the society of the Graces and Loves." An ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... said Standish, disarmed to some extent at the outset, for he felt it would be boorish and "bad form" to have a row with a man who seemed to hold him in high regard. "No, I won't have a drink. As a matter of fact, Don Carlos, I have called to see you in connection with—er—with a ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... The boorish cynicism of a Cato and a Metellus—though it never expressed the real feelings of the majority of Romans—gave way, however, under the Empire to a generous expression of the equality of the sexes in the realms of morality and of intellect. "I ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... love of home generally calls the mountaineer back to his rugged hills. The Galicians of the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain leave their poor country for a time for the richer provinces of Portugal and Spain, where they become porters, water-carriers and scavengers, and are known as boorish, but industrious and honest. The women from the neighboring mountain province of Asturias are the professional wet-nurses of Spain. They are to be seen in every aristocratic household of Madrid, but return to the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... but the veriest chance,' the adventurer answered with some little confusion of manner. 'It was the fortuna belli, or more properly pacis. I had asked my brothers to put into Portsmouth that I might get rid of these letters, on which they replied in a boorish and unmannerly fashion that they were still waiting for the thousand guineas which represented my share of the venture. To this I answered with brotherly familiarity that it was a small thing, and should be paid ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... about five minutes, then the door was opened again by the domestic, and a remarkable gentleman walked very slowly in. He was a tall individual, with small cunning eyes, black eye-brows, and a beard. He was rather shabbily attired, and not washed with care. He had thick boorish hands, and he smelt unpleasantly of tobacco smoke; an affected grin at variance with every feature, was planted on his face, and sickened an unprejudiced observer at the very first gaze. His mode of uttering English betrayed him for a foreigner. He was a native of Poland. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... with a more boorish air than he had before manifested, and muttered something about a cow that needed his attention, and that he could not spare the time from his herd for all that the Prioress was like ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shouted:—"Be off! I know you're an obstinate fellow! Go and look after the business; else I shall scold you severely; But don't fancy I'll ever allow you to bring home in triumph As my daughter-in-law any boorish impudent hussy. Long have I lived in the world, and know how to manage most people, Know how to entertain ladies and gentlemen, so that they leave me In good humour, and know how to flatter a stranger discreetly. ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... literary works are "The Rambler," "Rasselas," "The Lives of the English Poets," and his edition of Shakespeare. In person, Johnson was heavy and awkward; he was the victim of scrofula in his youth, and of dropsy in his old age. In manner, he was boorish and overbearing; but his great powers and his wisdom caused his company to be sought by many eminent men ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... off in high dudgeon, and he was left to curse his ill-timed jest. What a blundering fool he had been! Her first, timid little advance,—and he had met it with boorish, clownish wit! A scurvy jest, indeed! She was ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... But his inward anger is revealed in the contents itself of De servo arbitrio (On the Will not free). For here he really did what Erasmus had just reproached him with—trying to heal a dislocated member by tugging at it in the opposite direction. More fiercely than ever before, his formidable boorish mind drew the startling inferences of his burning faith. Without any reserve he now accepted all the extremes of absolute determinism. In order to confute indeterminism in explicit terms, he was now forced to have recourse to those primitive metaphors of exalted faith striving to express ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... himself, when he unawares rushed, head foremost, into lady Feng's arms. Lady Feng speedily raised her hand and gave him such a slap on the face that she made the young fellow reel over and perform a somersault. "You boorish young bastard!" she shouted, "where ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... That was a fine answer of Sophocles to a man who asked him, when in extreme old age, whether he was still a lover. "Heaven forbid!" he replied; "I was only too glad to escape from that, as though from a boorish and insane master." To men indeed who are keen after such things it may possibly appear disagreeable and uncomfortable to be without them; but to jaded appetites it is pleasanter to lack than to enjoy. However, he cannot be said ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... books. Then he kept Mrs. Barry's accounts; copied my own interminable correspondence with my lawyers and the agents of all my various property; took a hand at piquet or backgammon of evenings with me and my mother; or, being an ingenious lad enough (though of a mean boorish spirit, as became the son of such a father), accompanied my Lady Lyndon's spinet with his flageolet; or read French and Italian with her: in both of which languages her Ladyship was a fine scholar, and with which he also became conversant. It would make my watchful old mother very angry to ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to become head of their school. He might easily have accepted. He was not altogether happy at Groningen. His countrymen had done him honour, but they had no real appreciation for learning, and some of them were boorish and cross-grained. It was the old story of Pegasus in harness; the practical men of business and the scholar impatient of restraint. His parents, too, were now both dead—in 1480, within a few months of each other—and such homes as he had had, with his father amongst the nuns ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... fighter, the rugged accomplisher the boisterous enthusiast, among their men. Whether these are atheistic, immoral, boorish, cruel, are considerations of secondary importance. The daughters marry them with little hesitation. Men are men, supreme, to be adored. Women are to be tolerated, stepped on, sat upon. Man is the master, woman ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... return, the whole personnel of the convent came to assist, with the inhabitants of a little village adjoining, which finds protection and Christian charity from the convent. The monks, excepting two or three, seemed of an ignorant and boorish quality, but hard-working and kind-hearted. Here, evidently, a certain kind of bliss was in ignorance, and the most learned were not wise enough to be accused of much folly. The Hegoumenos, in bidding us good by, begged ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... was what you wished to speak to me about. This was why you were so—so boorish and disagreeable in that shop. Tell me—was that the reason? Was that why you followed me there? Did you think—did you presume to think of preventing my buying what ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... continued Eleanor, "that first sight of the great Earl. My brothers had teased me for going so far north, and told me the English were mere rude islanders—boorish, and unlettered; but, child as I was, scarce eleven years old, I could perceive the nobleness of the Earl. 'If all thy new subjects be like him,' said my brother to me, 'thou wilt reign over a race of kings.' And how ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be no subject, but them Bernilillo hold-ups snatches onto him in spite of his protests, an' passes him up onto the stage to the professor. They're plenty headlong, not to say boorish, them Bernilillo ruffians be; speshully if they've sot their hearts on anythin', an' pore Emil stands about the same show among 'em as a cottontail rabbit ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... men of the lowest class emigrate to more favoured provinces, since their own is too poor to support them; they work hard, and return with their savings to their native hills. Their fellow-countrymen consider them boorish in manners, uneducated, and of a low class; but they are good-natured and docile, hard-working, temperate, and honest. "In your life," wrote the Duke of Wellington, "you never saw anything so bad as the Galicians; and yet they are the finest body of men ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... Flood that will really cover the whole ground. I want to get people to understand that in the future we shall not divide water, in this petty way, into potty little ponds and lakes and rivers: it will be one big satisfying thing, the same everywhere. Apres moi le Deluge. Belloc in his boorish boozy way may question my knowledge of French; but I fancy that ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... brought us to the little mountain village of Tagiamamanono. It was occupied by the rebel troops from the Island of Savai'i. Their chiefs were very courteous, and, of course, we were asked to "stay and rest and drink kava". To refuse would have been looked upon as boorish and insulting, so I cheerfully acquiesced, and Marchmont and I were escorted to a large house, where I formally presented him to our hosts as a traveller from "Peretania," whom I was "showing around Samoa". Any man of fine physique attracts the Samoans, and a number of pretty girls ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... still, and he who drives Eumelus is, the same who drove before. To whom the Cretan Chief, angry, replied. Ajax! whom none in wrangling can excel Or rudeness, though in all beside thou fall 605 Below the Argives, being boorish-rough, Come now—a tripod let us wager each, Or caldron, and let Agamemnon judge Whose horses lead, that, losing, thou may'st learn. He said; then sudden from his seat upsprang 610 Swift Ajax Oiliades, prepared For harsh retort, nor ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... watched me narrowly as I took off my waistcoat (pretending to be too hot), nor did he forget to eye the waistcoat. "See here," he said. "Do you know how a sailor folds a waistcoat? Give it to me now. I'll show you." He snatched it from my hands with that rudeness which, in a boorish nature, passes for fun; he only wished to feel it over so that if any letter were sewn within it he might hear the paper crackle. The sailor's way of folding a waistcoat, as shown by him then, was just the way which bent all the cloth ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield |
