"Sophistication" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as gay as a lark. She chattered with the childish artlessness that at times veiled her sophistication. Jack was given to understand that she loved to be natural and simple, that she detested the shams of social convention to which she was made to conform. Her big lovely eyes were wistful in their earnestness as they met his. It was not ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... me. I am in a land where Time has lagged, where simple people timorously hug the Past. How far away now seems the welter and swelter of the city, the hectic sophistication of the streets. The sense of wonder is strong in me again, the joy of looking at familiar things as if one were seeing them for the ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... marriage with Rajput families in Rajasthan and it is therefore possible that during a visit to Udaipur, Raja Kirpal Pal recruited his atelier. Udaipur painting, however, can hardly have been the only source for even in its earliest examples Basohli painting has a smooth polish, a savage sophistication and a command of shading which suggests the influence of the Mughal style of Delhi. We must assume, in fact, a series of influences determined to a great extent by Raja Kirpal Pal's political contacts, his private journeys and individual taste, but perhaps above all ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... always despising the surroundings in which they find themselves temporarily, and their chief claim to distinction is a genuine or pretended knowledge of life on a large scale. Greatness is to them inseparably connected with crowdedness, and what they call sophistication is at bottom nothing but a wallowing in that herd instinct which takes the place of mankind's ancient antagonist in Hamsun's books. Above all, their standards of judgment are ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... types, those furnished by the peasant, was the outcome of his conception of art, such as the Greek of the early schools conceived it, the expression of humanity in a simple and therefore noble state, and of the honest, open, healthy nature of the man himself, averse to all sophistication of society, reverent of an ideal in art, and intolerant of affectations. He conceived and executed his pictures in the pure Greek spirit, working out his ideal as his imagination presented it to him, not as the model served him. The form is of his ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... their own simplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of the beautiful. They have always cast about for the instruction of some one who professed to know better, and who browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self-distrust that ends in sophistication. They have fallen generally to the worst of this bad species, and have been "amused and misled" (how pretty that quaint old use of amuse is!) "by the false lights" of critical vanity and self-righteousness. They have been taught to compare what they see and what they ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... protested, simple-heartedly. Then he recollected his sophistication to say: "Unless its being of that particular shade between brown ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... whose outlook upon life was so far advanced beyond his, even in those days of adolescence, that he looked upon her as the eighth wonder of the world. She had poise, manner, worldly wisdom of a pleasantly superficial character that stood for sophistication in his blissful estimate of her advantages over him, and she was so adroit in the art of putting her finger upon the right spot at precisely the right moment that he found himself wondering if he could ever bring himself up to her ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... to make. His thought was busy with the phenomenon before him: a child of man, but one who, like Israel of old, saw God and heard His voice at every turn of her daily walk. Untutored in the ways of men, without trace of sophistication or cant, unblemished as she moved among the soiled vessels about her, shining with celestial radiance in this unknown, moldering town so far from ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fascinations of the forbidden fruit are not dangled at first before Eve, but an apparently innocent doubt is filtered into her ear. And is not that the way in which we are still snared? The reality of moral distinctions, the essential wrongness of the sin, is obscured by a mist of sophistication. 'There is no harm in it' steals into some young man's or woman's mind about things that were forbidden at home, and they are half conquered before they know that they have been attacked. Then comes the next besieger's trench, much nearer the wall—namely, denial of the fatal consequences ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... wholehearted simplicity of his present hostess, Miss Martha Phipps. It was something of a contrast. Mrs. Buckley was rich and sophisticated and—in her own opinion—cultured to the highest degree. Now Miss Phipps was, in all probability, not rich and she would not claim wide culture. As to her sophistication—well, Galusha gave little thought to that, in most worldly matters he himself was unsophisticated. However, he was sure that he liked Miss Phipps and that he loathed Mrs. Buckley. And he liked East Wellmouth, bareness and bleakness and lonesomeness and all. He rather ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... first night at the Banner Club he had kept his promise to Hattie Sterling and had gone often to meet her. She had taught him much, because it was to her advantage to do so. His greenness had dropped from him like a garment, but no amount of sophistication could make him deem the woman less perfect. He knew that she was much older than he, but he only took this fact as an additional sign of his prowess in having won her. He was proud of himself when he went behind ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... considered that to the formation of healthy feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain vantage-ground is pre-requisite. It is not every man that is likely to be improved by a country life or by country labours. Education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the minds of the inhabitants of Medora the idea that in ten years their city would rival Omaha. Meanwhile, Little Missouri and the "boomtown" were leading an existence which seemed to ricochet back and forth between Acadian simplicity and the livid sophistication of a mining-camp. ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... as a wit, flushed, and laughed as heartily as they. She had spoken incautiously, as a child, and without sophistication. But she accepted responsibility for her joke. She was not in the least flurried, but was pleased at being considered an adept in the ways of marriage. At heart she was despising herself for not having been ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... Once the argument has been pitched on the plane of 'Strange Meeting,' the rest of the contents of the book become irrelevant. But for the sake of symmetry we will characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as false sophistication. There are the same contemporary reminiscences. Compare Mr Osbert Sitwell's English Gothic with Mr T.S. Eliot's Sweeney; and you will detect a simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal with the emotions of a complex one. The spectacle ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... The curious sophistication of Guinglain by Renaud de Beaujeu has been fully described and criticised by M. Gaston Paris in one of his essays (Hist. litt. de la France, xxx. p. 171). His comparison with the English and Italian versions of the story brings ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... tool builders Maudslay, Roberts, Clement, Nasmyth, and Whitworth developed machine tools of increasing size and truth. The design of other machinery kept pace with—sometimes just behind, sometimes just ahead of—the capacity and capability of machine tools. In general, there was an increasing sophistication of mechanisms that could only be accounted for by an increase of information with which the individual ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... preciosity. What he kept, however, was of permanent value. The new poetry, which had emerged from a society that was deeply interested in science, had taught Vergil to observe the details of nature with accuracy and an appreciation of their beauty. It had also taught him that in an age of sophistication the poet should not hide his personality wholly behind the veil. There is a pleasing self-consciousness in the poet's reflections—never too obtrusive—that reminds one of Catullus. It implies that poetry is recognized in its great role of a criticism of life. But ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... admitted the Resident Destinyworker. "All right, Althea, I'll give him a week's dream kinesis if you insist but just remember the Sophistication Curve in the Twentieth. You'll probably have to supplement it with ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight
... case for an answer to its suspicions. That she was young, lovely, and yet had sold herself to an old man for his millions, would go far in itself to condemn her; and he was aware that there were many who would accept her very childish innocence as the sophistication of ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... weight of his immense learning, we need not fear that the Alantean shoulders of Shakspeare would have been oppressed by a similar load. The knowledge of antiquity may operate on the recipient so as to produce mere bookishness and intellectual sophistication; but in itself it is a real and legitimate part of all knowledge, a portion of that truth with which poets are conversant, a lesson set in other schools than those where man is teacher. We know not what were Shakspeare's feelings with respect ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... sophistication, and strength, terrorist organizations share a basic structure as depicted in ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States
... they run the risk not merely of being reproached, but of being hanged; but this reading is a mere sophistication by some one who did not understand the true reading, rearward. Leonato threatens to take his daughter's life after having ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... efficacy, and one must doubt the healthiness, of reaction into cynicism and sophisticated cleverness. There are curious signs, especially in what we may call the literature of New York, of a growing sophistication that sneers at sentiment and the sentimental alike. "Magazines of cleverness" have this for their keynote, although as yet the satire is not always well aimed. There are abundant signs that the generation just coming forward will rejoice in such a pose. It is observable now in the colleges, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... and one of the most accessible avenues to that union with Reality which the mystic declares to us as the very object of life. But the poet must take that living stuff direct from the field and river, without sophistication, without criticism, as the life of the soul is taken direct from the altar; with an awe that admits not of analysis. He must not subject it to the cooking, filtering process of the brain. It is because he knows how to elude this dreadful sophistication of Reality, because his attitude to ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... in fact, consistency cannot exist—is simplicity: consistency of conduct can never be maintained by characters in any degree double or sophisticated, for it is not of simplicity as opposed to craft, but of simplicity as opposed to sophistication, that I would here speak, and rather as the Christian virtue, single-mindedness; the desire to be, opposed to the wish to appear. We have seen how rarely influence can be gained where no faith can be yielded; now an unsimple character can ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... forth in volleys and in running fires. The arousing of the fundamental instincts of these human beings had, indeed, enormously emphasized the animal in them. They had swung back a hundred centuries towards original crude life. The sophistication which embroiders the will-to-live had been stripped clean off. These men helped you to understand the state of mind which puts a city to the sack, and makes victims especially of the innocent and the defenceless. Hilda was strangely excited. She was afraid, and enjoyed ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... surprise that the dark, handsome features looked almost boyish when he smiled. There had been no hint of boyishness before, in fact something of baffling inscrutability in the black eyes, gave the man an expression of extreme sophistication. "Do not call it a mine," he laughed. "At least, not yet. A mine is a going proposition. If your father actually succeeded in locating the lode, it is a strike. Had he filed, it would be a claim. Had he started operation it would be a proposition—but ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... wealth of it showed more, even, than when it was down in its accustomed braids. Her surprising black brows and lashes, with the innocence of her blue eyes, and the half-wistful, half-daring expression she had, made her seem a combination of sophistication and childishness such as ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... second mug of the white liquor, Lord became slowly aware of something else. Divested of their distinguishing uniforms, he and his crew seemed puny and ill-fed beside the natives. If physique were any index to the sophistication of a culture—but ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... knowledge possessed by the critics. Thus, for instance, in the Comedy of Errors (I. i. 152) the Duke bids Aegeon to "seek thy help by beneficial help." At once there is a chorus from all of us, sciolists, of "Corruption!" "Sophistication!" "Cacophonous repetition!" etc. etc. "But gently, friends," says Dr. Ingleby: "may not 'help' have borne a different or a special meaning in Elizabethan English?" and turning to medical writers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... all mediaeval poetry are no doubt discoverable here. There is some sophistication of the keeping in the episodes of Coart and Chanticleer, and the termination is almost too audacious in the sort of choice of happy or unhappy ending, triumph or defeat for the hero, which it leaves us. Yet this very audacity suits the whole scheme; and the part dealing with the death (or ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... then returned to Mrs. Winscombe, to himself. His entire attitude toward her, his observations, had been upset, disarmed, by her unexpected air of soft melancholy. In her lavender wrap she resembled a drooping branch of flowering lilac. She seemed very young; her air of sophistication, her sensuality of being, had vanished. Traces of her illness on shipboard still lingered darkly under her eyes. Asleep, he suddenly thought, her face would be very innocent, purified. This came to him involuntarily; there was none of the stinging of the senses ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly tripping dactyls. Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... morning. He was a successful farmer (born in Connecticut), of a Yankee shrewdness and industry. He recognized that in order to get a crop of wheat, it was necessary to do something more than trust in the Lord. But in administering the affairs of the Church, he seemed to have no such sophistication. ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... hair with restless sigh; more than once he unconsciously sprang to his feet, walked across the floor two or three times, and then sat down again. He was not a sharp schemer, he had not even reached the stage of sophistication which would have suggested to him that sharp scheming might be a necessary adjunct in the engineering of such matters as Government claims. From any power or tendency to diplomatise he was as free as the illustrative bull in a china shop. His bucolic trust in ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling. So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions—some of us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... so much true and sound policy, so much delightfull and pertinent history, so many liuely descriptions of the shipping and wares in his time of all the nations almost in Christendome, and such a subtile discouery of outlandish merchants fraud, and of the sophistication of their wares, that needes you must acknowledge, that more matter and substance could in no wise be comprised in so little a roome. [Footnote: The poem here alluded to was written between 1416 and 1438, as ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... simpler to take on the cold glaze of sophistication than to remain simple. When the eyelids become weary, it is as if little red dancing shoes were being wrapped away forever, or a very tight heartstring had suddenly sagged, and when plucked at could ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... spirit would find peace! And then one day he had wandered into Lovell's Harbor and there he had stayed ever since. For several seasons he had taken out sailing parties of summer boarders or piloted amateur fishermen out to the Ledges; but the timidity and lack of sophistication of these city patrons at length so rasped his nerves that he gave up the task and was about to betake himself to pastures new when he fell beneath the eye of Mr. Glenmore Archibald Crowninshield, a New York banker, who had ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... this study Two Wars, but I was afraid lest I should be under the domination of the title, and an elaborate comparison of the Peloponnesian War and the War between the States would undoubtedly have led to no little sophistication of the facts. Historical parallel bars are usually set up for exhibiting feats of mental agility. The mental agility is often moral suppleness, and nobody expects a critical examination of the parallelism itself. He was not an historian of the first rank, but a phrase-making rhetorician, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... it not very important that we who shall constitute a portion of the jury should get our best judgments to work and base them upon Christian forbearance and Christian principles, upon the idea that it is impossible by sophistication to establish that a thing that is wrong is right? And yet, while we are going to judge with the absolute standard of righteousness, we are going to judge with Christian feeling, being men of a like sort ourselves, suffering the same temptations, having the same weaknesses, ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... their way of refining, who corrupt our English idiom by mixing it too much with French: That is a sophistication of language not an improvement of it; a turning English into French, rather than a refining of English by French. We meet daily with those fops, who value themselves on their travelling, and pretend they cannot express their meaning in English, because they would put off to ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... over the hump of one shoulder. Nineteen summers had breezed lightly over her, and her lips were cherry-like, but tilted slightly as if their fruit had been plucked from the tree of sophistication. ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... reticence and a rising enmity, blockading all investigation save the obligatory inquisition of a coroner's jury. An object of ever-recurrent scrutiny was a stranger in the vicinity, who had been subpoenaed also. The facial effect of culture and sophistication was illustrated in his inexpressive, controlled, masklike countenance. He was generally known as the "valley man with the lung complaint," who had built a cabin on the mountain during the summer, banished hither by the advice ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... woman, unlike the home-keeping Alimentive, enjoys being a widow and remains one. She usually has many chances to remarry but her changeable, gaiety-loving nature revels in the freedom, sophistication ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... out the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan's gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to practical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou, and into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of sophistication which comes from daily contact with the artificial world of the footlights. It is the look of those who must make believe as a business, and are a-weary. You see it developed into its highest degree in the face of a veteran comedian. It is the thing that gives ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... fine creatures sailing along, in her taudry robes of silk and gauze, frilled, and flounced, and furbelowed, with her false locks, her false jewels, her paint, her patches, and perfumes; I cannot help looking upon her as the vilest piece of sophistication that art ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... in the living-room, where Hood, inspired by specimens of the work of several of the later French painters, discussed art with sophistication. Deering observed him intently. There was something immensely attractive in Hood's face; his profile, clean-cut as a cameo, was thoroughly masculine; his head was finely moulded, and his gray ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... "Miss Alicia would never have the courage to suggest it. It takes courage and sophistication to do that sort of thing. Mr. Temple Barholm evidently wants us to remain. He will be willing to make as much of the relationship as we ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of morals—Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don't complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... prelude in the sinister key of E flat minor, and its heavy, sullen-arched triplets recalls for Niecks the last movement of the B flat minor Sonata; but there is less interrogation in the prelude, less sophistication, and the heat of conflict over it all. There is not a break in the clouds until the beginning of the fifteenth, the familiar prelude in ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... humanity, in the plenitude of twentieth century sophistication, fully determined that there is no such thing as luck?—that all things are ordered, if not by Providence, at least by an unchangeable sequence of cause ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... and Charlie Brady to drink himself to death. Nobody interrupted his attempts to do so. His drunken outburst of speech had echoed a growing sentiment in the town, but it grew slowly, for under its thin veneer of sophistication Green River was only a New England town still, conservative and slow ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... in formal research. Occasionally such a book as The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets by Jane Addams throws a flood of light upon the contrasts between the warmth, the sincerity, and the wholesomeness of primary human responses and the sophistication, the coldness, and the moral dangers of the secondary organization ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... distinctions were stripped off, shown to be the mere cloaks and masks they were, and every man brought once again to a clear realization of his actual relations to his fellows! It was as if trained and sophisticated men had been rid of a sudden of their sophistication and of all the theory of their life, and left with nothing but their discipline of faculty, a schooled and sobered instinct. And the fact that we kept always, for close upon three hundred years, a like element in our life, a frontier people always in our van, is, so ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... far too deeply absorbed her to leave her much attention for other people's. She had only noticed that Helen had been kind to Franklin. She suspected that it was now his ingenuousness that idealised Helen's tolerant kindness. But though her superior sophistication made a little touch of irony unavoidable, it was overwhelmed in the warm ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... newcomer in conversation. Paris and its theaters served admirably as a theme. Lois clearly knew her Paris well; and she had met Rostand—at a garden party—and spoke of the contemporaneous French drama with the light touch of sophistication. French phrases slipped from her tongue trippingly, and added to her charm and mystery, her fellowship with another and wider world. From Hastings she turned to embrace them all in her talk. The immobile countenances of her sisters, reflecting ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... that one hears. I tried to make clear in the first chapters of this book the irresistible elemental power of the uncurbed sexual instincts. And this force is at least as strong now as it was in the beginning of life. For in sex we have, as yet, learnt very little. We who are living among the sophistication of aeroplanes, the inheritors of the knowledge of all the ages, have still to pass in wonder along the paths of love, entering into it blindly and making ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... She had an instinct for the truth in its purest sense, the innate impulse toward the verities unspoiled by the taint of sophistication. Perhaps in the restricted conditions of her life she had never before had adequate temptation to a subterfuge. Even now, consciously reddening, her eyes drooping before the combined gaze of her little world, she had an inward protest of the literal ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... cutters on wood was in making the popular prints, or illustrated broadsides, which had been sold in city and village throughout the country since the early 1600's. Plank and knife could be used for these prints because of the generally large size of the pictures and the lack of sophistication of the audience. They are described by Bewick from his memories as a ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... the sophistication of chimney-pots," she replied. "I've always longed to see a sunset in London, with ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... discover a remedy; but I fear that so long as our paper manufacturers study expedition and economy in preference to quality, the case is hopeless. The ashes left after the combustion of a sheet of paper clearly indicate the amount of modern sophistication, and greatly exceed those of more ancient paper. In fact, some paper may now be classed, with more propriety, among mineral than vegetable productions. Mildew, arising from damp in old books, may be arrested, if not removed, by exposure to ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... it that there is not more nature in the present age, and less sophistication in society, and that mothers do not teach their daughters to fit themselves for wives and mothers? For they all seem to be setting traps to get husbands. Why, the young ladies of the present day are quite ashamed should they be ignorant of the ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... poet, and are interesting as showing how rapidly he had outgrown the influence of any other of his poetic kindred. "Johannes Agricola" is significant as being the first of those dramatic studies of warped religiosity, of strange self-sophistication, which have afforded so much matter for thought. In its dramatic concision, its complex psychological significance, and its unique, if to unaccustomed ears somewhat barbaric, poetic beauty, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the possession of bards whose clients are peasants and not nobles; from being court poetry it becomes the poetry of cottages and taverns. It may survive as this. Finally, it may be taken up again by the courts, and become poetry of much greater sophistication and nicety than it was in either of the preceding stages. But each stage leaves ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... hearts which they dare lay open to themselves, and of which, by whatever accident exposed, they do not shun a distinct and continued view; and certainly what we hide from ourselves, we do not show to our friends. There is, indeed, no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... Our sophistication is such that this sort of thing amuses us, and, it is produced only too abundantly. Luckily, in contrast to it, we have no lack of that harmless jesting which is more typically English. For example, the kindly old lady in the ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... giving it up so long as I can make the engine turn over," she said. "I told you how Father always took me around with him, and there's nothing in this world I am so sure of as I am sure that I am spoiled for a house cat. I have probably less feminine sophistication than any girl of my age in the world, and I probably know more about camping and fishing and the scientific why and wherefore of all outdoors than most of them. I just naturally had such a heavenly time with Daddy that it never has hurt my feelings to be left out of any ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the liberty he took. It was slightly embarrassing to her, too, to meet that uninterpretable look of inquiry and homage; but she felt her necessity as well as her good-breeding, and made allowance for her visitor's want of sophistication. He was like an Indian before a mirror, in a stolid excitement of apprehension and delight. The most beautiful thing he ever saw was within the compass of his full sight at last, and whether to detain it by force or persuasion he ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... would give you a wrong idea of Sylvia if I did not make clear that along with this sophistication as to the play-aspects of sex, there went the most incredible ignorance as to its practical realities. In my arguments I had thought to appeal to her by referring to that feature of wage-slavery which more than even child-labour stirs the moral sense of ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... great deal younger, Duncan thought, than when they had been classmates, what time Duncan shared his rooms with Kellogg: very much younger and suffering exquisitely from over-sophistication. His drawl barely escaped being inimitable; his air did not escape it. "Smitten with my old trouble," Duncan appraised him: "too much money... Heaven knows ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... anything hopelessly out of key. Stories seemingly born out of nothing, and written—to judge by the typing—in ten minutes, but in reality, as a rule, based upon actual incident, developed by a period of soaking in the peculiar chemicals of Ben's nature, and written with much sophistication in the choice of words. There were dramatic studies often intensely subjective, lit with the moods of Ben himself, not of the things dramatized. There were self-revelations characteristically frank and provokingly debonaire. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... part in this change. Along with better food, pay, and living conditions provided by the services, many Negroes were given new work experiences. Along with many of their white fellows, they acquired new skills and a new sophistication that prepared them for the different life of the postwar industrial world. Most important, military service in World War II divorced many Negroes from a society whose traditions had carefully defined their place, and exposed them for the first time to a community where racial equality, although ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... magnolia on the family tree, the bloom on a century plant that was heavy with its first bud. Even at this time, slightly before her internationalism as a song bird was to carry her name to the remote places of the earth, a little patina of sophistication had set in, glazing her over and her speech, which carried the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... witty as he was earnest. More than most Western writers, Rhodes was conscious of art. He had the common touch and also he was a writer for writing men. The elements of simplicity and the right kind of sophistication, always with generosity and with an unflagging zeal for the rights of human beings, were mixed in him. The reach of any ample-natured man exceeds his grasp. Rhodes was ample-natured, but he cannot be classed ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... that one of the major difficulties is not the software. Rather, in creating a product that will be used by scholars representing a broad spectrum of computer sophistication, user documentation proves to be the most important service ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... stories, new particulars, further tending to his glory, are "borne in" upon their minds. Now, Dr. Cumming, as we have said, is no enthusiastic pietist: within a certain circle—within the mill of evangelical orthodoxy—his intellect is perpetually at work; but that principle of sophistication which our friends the Methodists derive from the predominance of their pietistic feelings, is involved for him in the doctrine of verbal inspiration; what is for them a state of emotion submerging the intellect, is with him a formula imprisoning the intellect, depriving it of its proper function—the ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... all the sad sophistication of the lowly-born, yet with it an invincible sense of purity, a delicate horror of the physical phases of love. She was a finely motived creature with impossible ideals, but out of her stark knowledge of life she was ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... a less technical discussion as the group was joined by the professor of rhetoric, an ambitious young man with an insatiable craving for sophistication, who felt himself for once entirely in his element in the crowd of celebrities. "It's incredibly good luck that our little two-for-a-cent college should have so fine a thing," he said knowingly. "I've been wondering how such an old skinflint as Gridley ever got the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... belied these hopes. Abdul Hamid's failure was owed in the main to facts independent of his personality or statecraft. The expansion of Islam over an immense geographical area and among peoples living in incompatible stages of sophistication, under most diverse political and social conditions, has probably made any universal caliphial authority for ever impossible. The original idea of the caliphate, like that of the jehad or holy war of the faithful, presupposed that all Moslems were under governments ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... seemed so strange, possibly because automobiling has its own point of view, and certainly people have their own and widely varying views of automobiling. In the presence of the machine people everywhere become for the time-being childlike and naive, curious and enthusiastic; they lose the veneer of sophistication, and are as approachable and companionable as children. Automobiling is therefore doubly delightful in these early days of the sport. By and by, when the people become accustomed to the machine, they will resume their ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... centre of a region of novelty and charm for the visitor from the North and East. The intimate communion of prairie and rich forested valley, the sophistication of the bustling little city in contrast with the rough life of the outlying ranches, the mingling in common intercourse of such differing human elements as the Eastern tourist, the free and easy Western townsman, the cowboy and the ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... then, is the first point needing general notice in the designs in Plate XVI. The second is the difference between the freedom of the Northern and the sophistication of the classical cornices, in connection with what has been advanced in Appendix 8. The cornices, a, d, and b, are of the same date, but they show a singular difference in the workman's temper: that at b is a single copy of a classical mosaic; and many carved cornices ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... contended. Her natural haughtiness had caused her to lose valuable time; pride, and finally desperation drove her to attempt to outdo her foreign rivals; her native modesty became a thing of the past, her Roman initiative, unadorned by sophistication, was often but too successful in outdoing the Greek and Syrian wantons, but without the appearance of refinement which they always contrived to give to every caress of passion or avarice. They wooed fortune with an abandon that soon made them the objects of contempt in the eyes of their lords ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... modesty. Her figure, too, was lithe and rounded; and so swathed, rather than clothed, that every curve was emphasized. I suppose this effect was the result of the Spanish mode rather than of individual sophistication; just as the succession of lazy poses and bendings were the result of a racial feminine instinct rather than of conscious personal coquetry. Certainly we four red-shirted tramps were poor enough game. Nevertheless, whatever the motive, the effect was certainly real enough. She was ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... spectacular cafe whose tables are engaged for New Year's eve a year in advance. There were two "gentlemen friends"—one without any hair on his head—high living ungrew it; and we can prove it—the other a young man whose worth and sophistication he impressed upon you in two convincing ways—he swore that all the wine was corked; and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible excellencies in Nancy. His taste ran to shop-girls; and here was one that added the voice and manners of his high social world to the franker ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... argue merely for arguing's sake. It was said of the great Lord Holland that he always put his opponent's case better than the opponent put it for himself. No one ever said this of Mr. Balfour; and his tendency to sophistication led Mr. Humphrey Paul to predict that his name "would always be had in honour wherever hairs were split." His manner and address (except when he was debating) were always courteous and conciliatory; ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Atlantic, the typical humanistic concepts of the rights of man and the sovereignty of the individual person. Skepticism and even atheism became a fashion in our infant republic. It was a mark of sophistication with many educated men to regard Christianity as not worthy of serious consideration. College students modestly admitted that they were infidels and with a delicious naivete assumed the names of Voltaire, Thomas Paine and even of that notorious and notable ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... up. He'd expected more of an air of dedication in the Octagon and in such ethereal departments as that of Interplanetary Justice, however, he was in now and not adverse to picking up some sophistication beyond the ken of ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... presence of naturalness; and there is a certain style of ignorance which attitudinizes before the gate of knowledge. The return to nature has always been the dream of the conventionalized soul, while the simple Arcadian is forever longing for the maddening honey of sophistication. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... gentleman, scholar and poet, exemplified without self-advertisement the richer qualities of his own people. When Couper's statue of Longfellow was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His freedom from the sophistication of a more experienced country; his simplicity, due in large measure to the absence of social self-consciousness; his tranquil and deep-seated optimism, which is the effluence of an unexhausted soil; his happy and confident expectation, born of a ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... this statement lies in the fact that it is so seldom told. Preachers tell people what they wish to hear, and indeed this must be so as long as the congregation that hears the preaching pays for it. People will not pay for anything they do not like. Hence, preaching leads naturally to sophistication and hypocrisy, and the promise of endless bliss for ourselves and a hell for our enemies comes about as a matter of course. What men will listen to and pay for is the real science of theology. That is to say, the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... eyes. Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature!—ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your tear, your respectability, that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating extasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... we must look ahead to the 1980's and beyond. The sophistication of modern weapons requires that we make decisions now if we are to ensure our security 10 years from now. Therefore, I have consistently advocated and strongly urged that we pursue three critical strategic ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... breath and fetidity of the armpits, is carefully recorded, and would suffice to establish the fortune of any of our modern specialists in female beauty. Finally a long chapter entitled "De sophisticatione vulvae" introduces us to a phase of decoration and sophistication which I would fain believe little known or studied in the development of modern civilization, in which we are prone at least to follow the advice of ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... Jim studied them with shameless objectivity. He hardly heard what they said. He watched the pantomime of their so different souls and bodies: Charity, lean and smart and aristocratic, beautiful in a peculiar mixture of sophistication and tenderness; Kedzie, small and nymph-like and plebeian, beautiful in a mixture of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... essential meanings, a threat of diminished humanity. For dependence on that environment, intricate and deep-rooted, psychological as well as physical, has not grown less with the human advance toward power and sophistication. ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... and optimism both in society and in literature which has given to the adjective 'mid-Victorian' a very definite denotation. The adjective and its period are commonly spoken of with contempt in our own day by those persons who pride themselves on their complete sophistication and superiority to all intellectual and emotional weakness. But during the 'mid-Victorian' years, there was also a comparative healthiness in the lives of the well-to-do classes and in literature which had never ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... stoop to sophistication, with you, my friend. Dishonesty is dishonesty all the world over; and to plunder Rajahs on a large scale is no less vile than to pick a ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... alloyage[obs3], matrimony; junction &c. 43; combination &c. 48; miscegenation. impregnation; infusion, diffusion suffusion, transfusion; infiltration; seasoning, sprinkling, interlarding; interpolation &c. 228 adulteration, sophistication. [Thing mixed] tinge, tincture, touch, dash, smack, sprinkling, spice, seasoning, infusion, soupcon. [Compound resulting from mixture] alloy, amalgam; brass, chowchow[obs3], pewter; magma, half-and-half, melange, tertium quid[Lat], miscellany, ambigu|, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... who, but for Karen, might well have become Mrs. Jardine one day. He observed, with a lover's fond pride, that Karen, in her shrunken white serge and white straw hat, Karen, with her pleasant imperturbability, her mingled simplicity and sophistication, did, most decisively, make the Lavingtons seem flavourless. Among them, while Mrs. Lavington walked her round the garden and Evelyn elicited with kindly concern that she played neither golf, hockey nor tennis, and had never ridden to ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Goodwin to halt, facing him at the edge of the sidewalk, where a beetle-browed saloon projected its awning above them. Like Goodwin, he was young and brown; but unlike Goodwin there was a touch of sophistication, of daunting experience, in the seriousness of his face. The two had met and chummed after the fashion of sailors, who make and lose their friends as the ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... hardly retain gravity of feature before the self-indulgent, self-deceiving sophistication of a canon, which actually excludes from grasp and mastery in the intellectual sphere Dante, Milton, and Burke. Pattison repeats in his closing pages his lamentable refrain that the author of Paradise Lost should have forsaken ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... an impression of glorious many-sidedness as of precious time wasted in futile puttering. But who shall dare to say that it was so in reality? The genius of life tells every great man what he can do, and it is for posterity to accept him and understand him as he was, without complaint and without sophistication. What Goethe and Schiller did in the midst of all their other doings, was to set their stamp upon the culture of their time; to create a new ideal of letters and of life, and to enrich their country's literature with a number ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... below her own standard, because she had been hypocritical with herself, played herself false, and acted contemptibly, hatefully! Professor Fortescue's mere presence had hunted out the truth from its hiding-place. He had made further self-sophistication impossible. She buried her face in her hands, in an agony of shame. She had known all along, that this had not been a profound and whole-hearted sentiment. She had known all along, of what a poor feverish nature it was; yet she had chosen to persuade herself that it ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... representation proportionnelle (Paris, 1910); ibid., Representation proportionnelle, in Revue de Paris, Nov. 15, 1910; ibid., L'Application de la representation proportionnelle, in Revue Politique et Parlementaire, Dec. 10, 1910. See also Anon., La sophistication du suffrage universel, in Annales des Sciences Politiques, July, 1909, and May, 1910; E. Zevort, La France sous le regime du suffrage universel (Paris, 1894). The subject of proportional representation in France is fully discussed in a Report of the British Royal Commission on Electoral Systems ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... than Gordon, and was a larger man in every way, ideally endowed for heavy parts, there was yet a certain boyish freshness clinging to him in subtle fashion. He wore his clothes in a loose sort of way which suggested the West and the open, in contrast to Gordon's metropolitan sophistication and immaculate tailoring. He was every inch the man, and a splendid actor—I knew. Yet there was the touch of youth about him. He seemed incapable of a crime such as this, unless it was in anger, or as the result of some ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... of self-consciousness had disappeared, too. If it had remained unnoticed, even undetected before, now its absence was noticeable, for there was no longer any attitude about him, no policy to sustain, nothing of that humourous, bantering sophistication which ignores conventionality. For it is always a conscious effort to ignore it, an attitude to disregard ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... disfavor. "Can't see the house fur the trees," he muttered, for the great oaks, accounted so magnificent an appurtenance in Glaston, were to him the commonest incident of entourage, and a bare door-yard, peeled of grass, a far more significant token of sophistication. As he approached, however, the stately mansion presently appeared, situated on a considerable eminence, and with long flights of stone steps from a portico, enriched with Corinthian columns, and from two successive terraces at some little distance in front. Here were tall stone vases on either ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... least, and it may have been for longer, Mr. William Smith became the mentor to whom I owed the most of such urban sophistication as I acquired. He was a very kindly and practical mentor, worldly, but in many respects not a bad adviser for such a lad so situated. When I recall the stark ugliness of his views and advice to me regarding a young man's needs and ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to. It is a credit to our human nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (and God knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still. When a stranger says to me, with a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing about "Twain and one flesh," and all ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... method. At present gin is cheaply manufactured by leaving out the berries altogether, and giving the spirit a flavour by distilling it with a proportion of oil of turpentine, which resembles the Juniper berries in taste; and as this sophistication is less practised in Holland than elsewhere, it is best to order "Hollands," with water, as a drink for dropsical persons. By the use of Juniper berries Dr. Mayern cured some patients who were deplorably ill with [293] epilepsy when all other remedies had failed. "Let the patient ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... hadn't he relayed his wireless across when the opportunity had offered? All his hopes seemed to be slipping from his finger ends. Was this Vagabondia? It seemed different somehow. He was aware of his neatly creased trousers, his bowler hat, his gloves, and the leather bag which reeked of sophistication. He was an anachronism, or VallÂŽcy was. They were not attune. ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... removed from realistic rusticity (which they detected in Spenser and Theocritus) and refinement (as in Virgil's eclogues); but to one group the term meant the innocence of those remote from academic learning and social sophistication, and to the other the refined simplicity of an age when all men—including kings and philosophers—were shepherds. With reservations, the first group tended to prefer Theocritus and Spenser; and the second, Virgil. Hence, too, the first group approved of Philips' efforts to create a fresh and ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... surer thing than he had ever known them to reflect before; all hint of lost-dog sophistication was gone; even the smile that touched his thin, pain-straightened lips was different somehow. It was just as whimsical as before, and just as half-mirthless—gentle as it always had been whenever he thought at all of her—but there was no wistful hunger left in it, and little of boyishness, ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... what is brought from the East Indies. Some years ago a friend of mine paid sixteen guineas for two ounces of it; and, in six months after, it was sold in the same shop for five shillings the pound. In short, we live in a vile world of fraud and sophistication; so that I know nothing of equal value with the genuine friendship of a sensible man; a rare jewel! which I cannot help thinking myself in possession of, while I repeat the old declaration, that ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... of their ancestral Calvinism,—him who made the garden and the serpent, and pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell. Some of them have found humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology; but, both alike, they {46} assure us that to have got rid of the sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. Now, to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to sophistication; and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... it to make the pupil acutely aware of how his mind works on unfamiliar facts. Until he has such a model, the teacher cannot hope to prepare men fully for the world they will find. What he can do is to prepare them to deal with that world with a great deal more sophistication about their own minds. He can, by the use of the case method, teach the pupil the habit of examining the sources of his information. He can teach him, for example, to look in his newspaper for the place where the dispatch was filed, for the name of the correspondent, the name of the press ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... though the historical periods which interest him are bounded, one may say, by the minuet and the music-box, he permits the least possible contagion of prettiness to invade his plots. They are fresh and passionate, simple and real, however elaborate their trappings. With the fullest intellectual sophistication, Mr. Hergesheimer has artistically the courage of naivete. He subtracts nothing from the common realities of human character when he displays it in some past age, but preserves it intact. The charming erudition of his surfaces is added to ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... dinner-table, in sentiment as in amusement, in literature as in music, in government as in religion. This civilization, which boasts of its splendor, is simply the restlessness of over-excited, servile monkeys each imitating the other, and each corrupting the other to, through sophistication, end up in worry and boredom. Human culture, accordingly, is in itself bad, while the fruit it produces is merely excrescence or poison.—Of what use are the sciences? Uncertain and useless, they afford merely a pasture-ground for idlers ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... employment. Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence, energy, health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained from seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses, people of means and social sophistication, and of manners other than rural. From that direction of gentility Black Care had come. Society might be better than she supposed from her slight experience of it. But she had no proof of this, and her instinct in the circumstances was to ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... book. Some very admirable books have been written by men who gave no especial thought to literature as an art. They wrote because they were so fortunate as to find themselves in possession of ideas, and not because they had determined to become authors. Literature as such implies sophistication, and people who devote themselves to literature do so from a variety of motives. But these writers of whom I now speak have a less complex thought back of their work. They do not, for example, propose pleasure to the reader as an object in writing. Their aim is ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... he was in physical appearance. He was a short little man, who walked with a sailor's swing, and who laughed like a fog-horn. He had ruddy cheeks, and the manners of a Chesterfield. If he lacked the air of aristocratic calm which gave distinction to Judge Bannister, he supplied in its place a sophistication due to his contact with a world which moved faster than ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... with which he punctured the flanks of his swine and cattle: what devils did they exorcise? Back to the microscope for an explanation of the disease-process, a sophistication the Murnans had lost in the years since they'd left Kano. What were the bits of blue and pink paper Aaron pressed into mudballs picked up in the various precincts of his property? Why did those slips oftentime ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... I'm going to take him through all the main phases of life—wild adventure, city, society, something of the "under world," and among many characteristic planes of the phases. I want him to acquire all the sophistication that experience can give him, and always preserve his individual honest HUMAN view, and have him tell ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen a chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental salt-and-pepper 'caster' which had been one of their most prized wedding presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... in her. She was like no phase of the many phases in which he had known her; she was a Rachael who had never known the sordid, the disillusioning side of life. Even her seriousness had the confident, eager quality of youth, and her gayety was as pure as a child's. She had cast off the old sophistication, the old recklessness of speech; she was not even interested in the old associates. The world for her was all in him and their love for each other, and she walked back to Quaker Bridge, at his side, too wholly swept away from all self- consciousness to know or to care that they ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... moment to realize that greater men had lost greater stakes through that little illusion of being irresistible to the sex. He turned sick with humiliation, hot with hate. He had prided himself on his sophistication, and this country woman had laid a trap for him into which he had obligingly blundered. To attempt an ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... season in the vaudeville theatres [the American equivalent of our music halls], where he played How He Lied to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the press censorship of the theatre, or by that sophistication of the audience through press suggestion from which I suffer more, perhaps, than any other author. Vaudeville authors are fortunately unknown: the audiences see what the play contains and what the actor can do, not what the papers have told them to expect. Success under such ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... woods and copses where they dwelt. In the gardens some of the spring blossoms had already unfolded. The wallflowers and polyanthuses had looked out again, unhesitatingly, on the genial sky—deprived, by sophistication and culture, of the instincts necessary to their preservation: the wild untutored denizens of the field and the quiet woods rarely betray such lack of presentiment. But such are everywhere the results of civilisation; which, however beneficial to society in the aggregate, gives its ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... himself a prig that he could not sooner get over this habit of embarrassment, and every time Madam Villenauve insisted on calling him into her dressing-room when she was in much more of dishabille than he would have thought permissible in ordinary people, he felt that same painful lack of sophistication. ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester |
