"Cant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you are turning the thoughts of our children to war, our children who should be to us the symbol of a nobler, purer future rising out of the sordid wreckage of the present—you make them drunk with your cant about national glory—glory!—until their innocent faces glow feverishly up to you, hungry for battle. You will not rest until you hear the terrible savage cry from their lips—War, war! You shall not hear it if I can prevent it! I am ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... according to 2 Cor. 5:14: "The charity of Christ presseth us." Hence it is that the soul is spiritually nourished through the power of this sacrament, by being spiritually gladdened, and as it were inebriated with the sweetness of the Divine goodness, according to Cant 5:1: "Eat, O friends, and drink, and be inebriated, my ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... noble words which once fascinated his age, and which, in after years, men would not willingly let die. But we shall be able to say "he had a genial manner, a firm, sound sense; he had a kind of cant of insincerity, but we always knew what he meant; he had the brain of a ruler in the clothes of a man of fashion". Posterity will hardly understand the words of the aged reminiscent, but we now feel their effect. The House of Commons, since it caught its tone from such ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... skepticism and sneering acquiescence in the world as it is; or if you like so to call it, a belief qualified with scorn in all things extant. The tastes and habits of such a man prevent him from being a boisterous demagogue, and his love of truth and dislike of cant keep him from advancing crude propositions, such as many loud reformers are constantly ready with; much more of uttering downright falsehoods in arguing questions or abusing opponents, which he would die or starve rather than use. It was not in ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... man, hates cant and humbug, and has no prejudices—hating the French he will not acknowledge is a prejudice, but considers the bounden duty of an Englishman; and, though fierce enough upon other subjects of taxation, thinks no price too high for drubbing them. He was once ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... Post said, "If ever there was a man who in trying times avoided offenses, it was Mr. Lincoln. If there ever was a leader in a civil contest who shunned acrimony and eschewed passion, it was he. In a time of much cant and affectation he was simple, unaffected, true, transparent. In a season of many mistakes he was never known to be wrong.... By a happy tact, not often so felicitously blended with pure evidence of soul, Abraham Lincoln knew when to speak, and never spoke too early ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... greater part of the sect, it is, we apprehend, of little consequence what they study or under whom. It would be more amusing, to be sure, and more reputable, if they would take up the old republican cant and declaim about Brutus and Timoleon, the duty of killing tyrants and the blessedness of dying for liberty. But, on the whole, they might have chosen worse. They may as well be Utilitarians as jockeys ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... visit there was nothing but the market, which was in complete possession. "This intricate, curious, but lifeless town," Murray calls it; yet to me it appeared overflowing with life. Its streets are mere crooked, dirty lanes, bordered with perfectly insignifi- cant houses; but they were filled with the same clatter and chatter that I had found at the hotel. The market was held partly in the little square of the hotel de ville, a structure which a flattering wood-cut in the Guide-Joanne had given me a desire to behold. The ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... my friend,' pursued the Alderman, 'there's a great deal of nonsense talked about Want—"hard up," you know; that's the phrase, isn't it? ha! ha! ha!—and I intend to Put it Down. There's a certain amount of cant in vogue about Starvation, and I mean to Put it Down. That's all! Lord bless you,' said the Alderman, turning to his friends again, 'you may Put Down anything among this sort of people, if you only know the way to ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... Owing to the cant of the vessel, the masts hung far out over the water, and from my perch on the cross-trees I had nothing below me but the surface of the bay. Hands, who was not so far up, was, in consequence, near ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... take my pen in and to inform you that I'm stayin here and cant get away for the reason that I lorst my cloes at cribage larst night, also my money, and everything beside. Don't speek to a living sole about it as the mate wants my birth, but pack up sum cloes and bring them to me without saying nuthing to noboddy. The mates cloths will do becos I havent ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... Simon observed, a soldier of the old school, with powdered head, side locks, and pigtail. His face is shaped like the stern of a Dutch man-of-war, narrow at top, and wide at bottom, with full rosy cheeks and a double chin; so, that, to use the cant of the day, his organs of eating may be said ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... therefore, suggest by your tone or manner that they belong to another day, and that they are, in some sense, to be shut out from common life and speech. This does not mean such common use of Biblical phrases in every day conversation as to cause it to grow into that form or irreverence known as cant, but it does mean simple usage of Bible thought, and the effort to fit it to the conditions of daily life. Such a habit in itself will force any family to discriminate as to what things in the Bible are living and eternal, and what things belong ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... have casually alluded to the flash song of Jerry Juniper, I may, perhaps, be allowed to make a few observations upon this branch of versification. It is somewhat curious, with a dialect so racy, idiomatic, and plastic as our own cant, that its metrical capabilities should have been so little essayed. The French have numerous chansons d'argot, ranging from the time of Charles Bourdigne and Villon down to that of Vidocq and Victor Hugo, the last of whom has enlivened the horrors of his "Dernier Jour d'un Condamne" ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... which confined government to its simple duties, while it left opinion unfettered, was especially present in Julius Caesar himself. From cant of all kinds he was totally free. He was a friend of the people, but he indulged in no enthusiasm for liberty. He never dilated on the beauties of virtue, or complimented, as Cicero did, a Providence in which he did not believe. He was too sincere to stoop to unreality. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... and apples from ungrafted limbs—as was enterprising enough to grow and ripen without tending or harvesting. The trunks of the neglected trees were studded with knobs like enormous wens, and the branches had a jaunty earthward cant that made climbing the easiest sort of work, and swinging an irresistible temptation. In the higher boughs were cosey crotches where one could sit, and read, and even sleep, without danger of falling. I and my court of small darkies had spent ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... from his dream of peace. Awake! ye hypocrites, and deign to scan The actions of your "brotherhood of Man." Could your shrill pipings in the race impair The warlike impulse put by Nature there? Where now the gentle maxims of the school, The cant of preachers, and the Golden Rule? What feeble word or doctrine now can stay The tribe whose fathers own'd Valhalla's sway? Too long restrain'd, the bloody tempest breaks, And Midgard 'neath the tread of warriors shakes. On to thy death, Berserker bold! And ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... power, commodities. As a matter of fact, a modern intelligent community is quite capable of doing all these things infinitely better for itself, and the beneficent influence of commerce may easily become, and does easily become, the basis of a cant. Exploitation by private persons is no doubt a necessary condition to economic development in an illiterate community of low intelligence, just as flint implements marked a necessary phase in the social development of mankind; but to-day ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... reads his Bible; daily assembles his servants round him to worship God. He comforts persecuted ministers, is fond of preachers; nay, can himself preach,—exhorts his neighbors to be wise, to redeem the time. In all this what "hypocrisy," "ambition," "cant," or other falsity? The man's hopes, I do believe, were fixed on the other Higher World; his aim to get well thither by walking well through his humble course in this world. He courts no notice: what could notice here do for him? "Ever ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... her way to attack Turkey, who has uttered, moreover, no word of protest against the late Ukase (of mid-November) by which the independent rights of Finland have been finally crushed—Britain, I say, need talk no cant about Belgian neutrality. Britain, for her own absolute safety, has always required and still requires Belgian neutrality to be respected. And that by itself is a sufficient, and the most honest, reason. But in the eyes of the world ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... will be found that, while most of our counties have given family names, sometimes corrupted, e.g. Lankshear, Willsher, Cant, Chant, for Kent, with which we may compare Anguish for Angus, the larger towns are rather poorly represented, the movement having always been from country to town, and the smaller spot serving for more exact description. An exception is Bristow (Bristol), Mid. Eng. brig-stow, the place ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... what Rolf had been hoping for. Without such a remark, he would not have dared do as he did. He threw the tent cover over the canoe amidships, causing the unstable craft to cant: "That won't do," he remarked, and took out several articles, including the medicine chest, put them ashore under the bushes, and, when he replaced them, contrived that the medicine ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... rejecting the Old Cant of Forty One, and giving the great Rebellion its true Name Forty Two: But, if I had been he, I would not have named it at all. For there are a great many Men in England, who, tho' they were not ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... on religious subjects, avoid all cant. Cant words and phrases may be used in good faith from the force of habit, but their use subjects the speaker ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... when they prate of you and me, As the two gifts they want, Say Classic lore and Cookery Are things for which they pant; Believe me, my dear Heptarchy, They plumb profoundest Cant!" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... question. From the Restoration to 1682, says Malone, no more than four plays of Shakspeare's were performed by a principal company in London. "Such was the lamentable taste of those times, that the plays of Fletcher, Jonson, and Shirley, were much oftener exhibited than those of our author." What cant is this! If that taste were "lamentable," what are we to think of our own times, when plays a thousand times below those of Fletcher, or even of Shirley, continually displace Shakspeare? Shakspeare would himself have exulted in finding that he gave way only to dramatists so excellent. And, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... difficult task was yet to be performed—the loading of the grand piano. We found it necessary to remove the raft to a place where the bank was more shelving, so that the shore side of the structure would rest on the ground, because the weight of the piano on one side would cant it over so that we ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... Guthrie, James Hamilton, in Dumfreis, Bernard Sanderson, John Levingstoun, James Bonar, Evan Camron, David Dickson, Robort Bailzie, James Cuninghame, George Youngh, Andrew Affleck, David Lindsay, Andrew Cant, William Douglas, Murdo Mackenzie, Coline Mackenzie, John Monroe, Walter Stuart Ministers; Archbald Marquesse of Argyle, William Earle Marshall, John Earle of Sutherland, Alexander Earle of Eglingtoun, John Earle ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... highly dramatic declaration. It was not his tale; it was the little people's! And observe: not only was the secret kept, the story was told with really guileful craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is (in the cant phrase) psychologically correct, and the emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising climax. I am awake now, and I know this trade; and yet I cannot better it. I am awake, and I live by this business; and yet I could not outdo - could not perhaps equal - that crafty artifice ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into the consequences of our commercialism and luxury and absorption in the outward never fails. Man is God's son, but the effort to realise that sonship in the joy and trust of a devout heart and in the humble round of daily life sometimes seems to him cant or superstition. The humble life of godliness made an unspeakable appeal to him. He had known those who lived that life. His love for them was imperishable. Yet he had so recoiled from the superstitions and hypocrisies of others, the Eternal ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... incident (of anointing with ointment) is one quite in accordance with the customs of the time and country, and there is not the least improbability in its repetition under different circumstances. (Eccles. 9:8; Cant. 4:10; Amos 6:6.) The ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... the bully to stand up, and warned him against experimenting on strangers. He then, in quaint, old-world phraseology, the outcome of much deep reading of Butler, Baxter, and Jeremy Taylor, and wholly without cant or ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... dignities, potences; it is especially meet that we say, to-day, all institutions. It is the grossest wrong practically to hold otherwise. It is loss, too, and nowhere more palpably than in the educational sphere. It is no cant saying to affirm, and that in a more than merely spiritual sense, that in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.' At his throne the lines of all science terminate; above all, the science that has man for its subject. Of all history, for example, rightly read, how is ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... whisper that in her ear, my youthful friend; for Eve Effingham fancies herself as much American in character as in birth. Single-minded and totally without management,—devoted to her duties,—- religious without cant,—a warm friend of liberal institutions, without the slightest approach to the impracticable, in heart and soul a woman, you will find it hard to persuade her, that with all her practice in the world, and all her extensive ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... And of the salt of the good God's earth are the chaplains. There was Major the Reverend John Pringle, of Yukon fame, whose only son Jack was killed in action after he had walked two hundred miles to enlist. No cant, no smug psalm-singing, mourners'-bench stuff for him. He believed in his Christianity like a man; he was ready to fight for his belief like a man; he cared for us like a father, and stood beside us in the mornings as we drank our stimulant. Again, I repeat if a man is found drunk while on ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... accumulated sufficient to enable mother to start for Canada, and oh! how rejoiced I was when that dear, overworked mother approached the time, when her hard-earned and long-deferred holiday was about to begin. The uses of adversity is a worn theme, and in it there is much of weak cant, but when it is considered how much of sacrifice the poverty-stricken must bear in order to procure the slightest gratification, should it not impress the thinking mind with amazement, how much of fortitude and patience the honest poor display in the exercise ...
— From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom • Lucy A. Delaney
... your lover, but your cousin—your own flesh and blood. Trust yourself to me! You'll see! Why should that preaching fellow Meynell interfere? I'll take care of you. You come to me, and we'll show these damned scandal-mongers that what they say is nothing to us—that we don't care a fig for their cant—that we are the masters ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Prisons, a cant term in the French Revolution for a spy under the jailers.—C. Dickens, A Tale of Two ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... national interest upon great leading principles in which they were agreed; government by parties was the very soul of representative institutions; it had raised England to her present power and protected the liberty of the people; while the cant, "measures not men," had always been the pretext for getting loose from every ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit. This is the supreme end of the talk of Socrates, and it is the supreme end of the talk of Johnson. 'My dear friend,' said he, 'clear your mind of cant; . . . don't THINK foolishly.' The effect of long companionship with Boswell's Johnson is just this. As Sir Joshua said, 'it brushes away the rubbish'; it clears the mind of cant; it instills the habit of singling out the essential thing; it imparts discernment. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... of ethics in the same breath with war may seem like sheer cant and hypocrisy. But in the possibility that those who best understand the use and nature of armed power may excel all others in stimulating that higher morality which may some day restrain war lies a main chance for the future. The Armed Services of the United States do not simply ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... history. Sneer. Most obligingly communicative indeed! and your confession, if published, might certainly serve the cause of true charity, by rescuing the most useful channels of appeal to benevolence from the cant of imposition. But, surely, Mr. Puff, there is no great mystery in your present profession? Puff. Mystery, sir! I will take upon me to say the matter was never scientifically treated nor reduced to rule before. Sneer. Reduced to rule! Puff. O Lud, sir, you are very ignorant, I am afraid!—Yes, ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... Fillan's Fair. In Strathfillan are the ruins of St. Fillan's chapel, and hard by is the Holy Pool, in which the insane were formerly bathed {19} to obtain a cure by the saint's intercession. Scott refers to it in Marmion (Cant. I. xxix): ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... seems a useless thing our goin' up to the oak. I know the Cap' sayed we were to wait for them under it. Why cant we just as well stay heer? 'Taint like they'll be long now. They wont dally a minute, I know, after they've clutched the shiners, an' I guess they got 'em most as soon as we'd secured these pair o' petticoats. Besides they'll come ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... to me to arise from the Endeavour of avoiding the Imputation of Cant, and the false Notion of it. It will be proper therefore to trace the Original and Signification of this Word. Cant is, by some People, derived from one Andrew Cant, who, they say, was a Presbyterian Minister in some illiterate Part of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... The more usually recognized forms are easily learned and committed to memory and may be utilized as occasion requires. I pass over such rudimentary formulas as "Ed, shake hands with Jim Taylor," or, "Boys, this is Pete, the new hand; Pete, get hold of the end of that cant-hook." In fact, we are speaking only of polite society as graced by the fair sex, the only kind that we need ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... the old celestial cant, Confess'd his flame, and swore by Styx, Whate'er she would desire, to grant— But ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... that he became reckless, and, instead of slinking off, he, too showed the same insubordination and disregard for Mr. Arnot's power and dignity that had been so irritating in Haldane. Clapping his hat on one side of his head, and with such an insolent cant forward that it quite obscured his left eye, Pat rested his hands on his hips, and with one foot thrust out sidewise, he fixed his right eye on his employer with the expression of sardonic contemplation, and ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... came by, Says Jack I'll try, If I cant ride this prancer, He gave a jump, On old sows rump, But she led him a ...
— Jack and Jill and Old Dame Gill • Unknown
... has rendered you superstitious, Cornelius. I have no faith in the religious cant of the present ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... COACHING. A cant term, in the British universities, for preparing a student, by the assistance of a private tutor, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Sunday when I found seraphim in the dictionary I was ashamed I had made it serrafim but seraphim is not a word you can guess at like another long one outlandish in this letter which spells itself. Miss Dearborn says use the words you CAN spell and if you cant spell seraphim make angel do but angels are not just the same as seraphims. Seraphims are brighter whiter and have bigger wings and I think are older and longer dead than angels which are just freshly dead and after a long time in heaven around the great white ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... not got before. I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology. But while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... shed? He could not suppose that any consideration would induce me to resign my duty to another officer, when apprised of this fact.' All this was said with the air of one really interested in my honour; but in my increasing impatience, I told him I wanted none of his cant; I simply asked him a favour, which he would grant or decline as he thought proper. This was a harshness of language I had never indulged in; but my mind was sore under the existing causes of my annoyance, and I could not bear to have my motives reflected on at a moment when ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... surprise was felt at finding this expectation realized, as a matter of course, while resentment was almost a stranger to his nature. We all shed tears, the girls sobbing aloud; and we were both solemnly blessed. Nor am I ashamed to say I knelt to receive that blessing, in an age when the cant of a pretending irreligion—there is as much cant in self-sufficiency as in hypocrisy, and they very often go together—is disposed to turn into ridicule the humbling of the person, while asking for the blessing of the Almighty through ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... should go about to tell the reader by what accident I became master of these papers, it would, in this unbelieving age, pass for little more than the cant or jargon of the trade. I therefore gladly spare both him and myself so unnecessary a trouble. There yet remains a difficult question—why I published them no sooner? I forbore upon two accounts. First, ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... "is the mere cant of ignorant enthusiasm, which appealeth from learning and from authority, from the sure guidance of that lamp which God hath afforded us in the Councils and in the Fathers of the Church, to a rash, self-willed, and arbitrary interpretation of the Scriptures, wrested according ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... It was a custom at that time for persons of the first rank and distinction to give their birthday suits to the most favoured actors. I think Mr. Thurmond was honoured by General Ingolsby with his. But his finances being at the last tide of ebb, the rich suit was put in buckle (a cant word for forty in the hundred interest). One night, notice was given that the General would be present with the Government at the play, and all the performers on the stage were preparing to dress out in the suits presented. ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... had whispered tidings to him. He was, said Papa Isbister, immensely proud of his plaything, this huge gaunt sailor, who had been bent into the shape of a rainbow—the foot of a rainbow—by a chance shot, which shattered his hip and gave him an impressive forward cant, which appeared to women, it seemed—I quote my old friend—in the light of an ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... unrepenting, unforgiven, unchanged; if with your whole heart and habits you have departed from the living God, and not returned to him through the Mediator,—will all be atoned for and made up by the single fact that to all your other sins you did not add the cant of a hypocrite? It is true, a hypocrite is a loathsome creature; but his badness will not make a profane man good. When he is cast away for his hypocrisy, it will be no comfort to you as you keep him company that it is for open ungodliness, and not for lying pretensions to piety, that ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Wittmore, there's nothing so comical as to hear me cant, and even cheat those Knaves, the Preachers themselves, that delude ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... Writing again a few days later to Jefferson, he says that "the fiscal party in Alexandria was an overmatch for those who wished to testify the American sentiment." Indeed, he thinks it certain, he says in the same letter, "that Genet will be misled if he takes either the fashionable cant of the cities or the cold caution of the government for the sense of the public,"—falling himself, before he reaches the end of the sentence, into the cant of assuming neutrality in the government to be only a "mask" behind which to hide its ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... thing is not to be afraid. Now, between you and me, I don't want to hang - that's practical; but for all cant, Macfarlane, I was born with a contempt. Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the old gallery of curiosities - they may frighten boys, but men of the world, like you and me, despise them. Here's to the memory ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Dekker are marked by a fiery yet careful style, Oriental richness of imagery, and originality and independence of thought. He wrote as social reformer, and attacked with unrivaled power of sarcasm all manner of cant, sham, and red-tape. His works betray the disappointment of a defeated idealist. He was a man of marked individuality, and strongly attracted or repelled others. For the last few years of his life he ceased to write, and lived ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Edward's court was no doubt that of drawing, for we find that 'He was buried with much pomp at Thetford Abbey under a tomb designed by himself and master Clarke, master of the works at King's College, Cambridge, & Wassel a freemason of BuryS. Edmund's.' Cooper's Ath. Cant., i. p. 29, col.2. ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... is that Christian never met Mr. Common-Sense with his daughter, Good-Humour, and her affianced husband, Mr. Hate-Cant; but if he ever saw them in the distance he steered clear of them, probably as feeling that they would be more dangerous than Giant Despair, Vanity Fair and Apollyon all together—for they would have stuck to him ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... and original pages. We have often heard fault found with them by the artificial, as fault is always found with things fresh and natural; but for ourselves we would not willingly lose a single line she has ever written. No affectation, no cant, no sickly feeling, no weakness, no inflation, no appealing for petty sympathy, no writing for the sake of seeming fine, does she ever indulge in. She coins words at will, for she writes from her heart and is no purist; but we feel them to be appropriate, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... I am correct in my estimate of her character. If I am, I do not fear. She's very clear-headed, sharp, and clever; a hater of humbug, a despiser of cant." ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... looking-glass, Would force his features to a frowning sternness? Young lord! I tell thee, that there are such beings,— Yea, and it gives fierce merriment to the damn'd, 100 To see these most proud men, that loathe mankind, At every stir and buz of coward conscience, Trick, cant, and lie, most whining hypocrites! Away! away! Now let me hear more ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... escaped.... I am now going to tell you the horible and wretched plaege (plague) that my multiplication gives me you can't conceive it the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself cant endure." ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... The cant of civilization fatigues. Civilization is a fine and beautiful structure. It is as picturesque as a Gothic cathedral. But it is built upon the bones and cemented with the blood of those whose part ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... sundowners come, And cunningly ask if the master's at home, 'Be off,' she replies, 'with your blarney and cant, Or I'll call my son Andy; ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... herself cast adrift, was a curious microcosm and full of contrasts. A mixture of unabashed blackguardism and cloistered prudery; of double-beds and primness; of humbug and frankness; of liberty and restraint; of lust and license; of brutal horse-play passing for "wit," and of candour marching with cant. The working classes scarcely called their souls their own; women and children mercilessly exploited by smug profiteers; the "Song of the Shirt"; Gradgrind and Boanerges holding high festival; Tom and Jerry (on their last legs) and Corinthians wrenching off door knockers and upsetting ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Religion plead her stronger bands; Bid parents, children, wife, and friends, If they come 'thwart his private ends— Unmoved he hears the general call, And bravely tramples on them all. Who will, for him, may cant and whine, And let weak Conscience with her line Chalk out their ways; such starving rules Are only fit for coward fools; 340 Fellows who credit what priests tell, And tremble at the thoughts of Hell; His spirit dares contend with Grace, And meets ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... the translation of the Greek expression. I replied that, in my opinion, there was; and that I had myself always been irritated by the entire irrelevance of the English word, and by something very like cant, on which the whole burden of the passage is thrown. How was it any natural preparation for a vast spiritual revolution, that men should first of all acknowledge any special duty of repentance? The repentance, if any movement ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... unused to a vessel that in the smoothest weather he cannot walk fore and aft without holding onto something with both hands. This fear proceeds from the fact that he is so tall and slim that if he should get a cant it might be fatal to him. I did not think America could furnish such a specimen of the negro race... nor did I ever see such a simpleton. It is impossible to teach him anything and... he can hardly tell ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... one habit,—I said to our company a day or two afterwards—worse than that of punning. It is the gradual substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen expressions. All things fell into one of two great categories,— ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... another man will take his place. He must disguise himself at all costs. But disguises are not easy to make; they require time and care, which he cannot afford. So he must snatch up ready-made disguises—unhook them, rather. He must know all the cant-phrases, the cant-references. There are very, very many of them, and belike it is hard to keep them all at one's finger-tips. But, at least, there is no difficulty in collecting them. Plod through the 'leaders' and 'notes' in half-a-dozen ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... specks like Whacker Chadwick had when he had the measles. i have et them like that and they taist jest like those yeller spots in creem tarter bisquit when it gets way in a corner of your mouth up under your ear on the inside and you cant reech it with a drink of water. ennyway it dident rane and i had to ho whitch is jest my luck. mother let me go at 4 oh clock to go in swimming with the Chadwicks and Potter and Skinny Bruce. we had ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute
... other hand, the philosopher is likely to be a comparatively poor doctor, because he knows nothing of medicine, and so can see only the other half of the picture. There is much to be said for the religion of medicine if it can be kept free from cant, if it can be simple and rational enough to be available for ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... cultivation, fond of light and fanciful pursuits, and among others of forming verbal conceits. Hence, we find that the disciples were first called Christians at Antioch, no doubt, derisively,[30] and in Julian's time they had a cant saying that they had suffered nothing from the X or the K (Christ or Constantius). A celebrated school of rhetoric was established here, and no doubt some of the effusions penned at this time, abounded ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Lynch came to be known as homeless, without a man, though with the prospects of motherhood approaching, yet she "had never lived with a Chink." To Pell Street that was heroic. It would have forgiven all the rest, had there been anything to forgive. But there was not. Whatever else may be, cant is not among the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... urged by all the lower and more vulgar schools of infidelity throughout the world. In all these schools, called schools of Rationalism in Germany, Socialism in England, and by various other names in various countries which they infest, this is the universal cant. The first step of all these philosophical moralists and regenerators of the human race is to attack the agency through which religion and Christianity are administered to man. But in this there is nothing new or original. We find the same mode of ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... cant? Don't answer, if you think that. I can't trust my own mind any more, anyway; and," with an ugly laugh, "I'll know it all some ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... young—a world beautiful, ornate, unutilitarian; a world to which trams, advertisements and telegraph poles had not yet come; a world that still had illusions, myths and mysteries; one in which religion and poetry went hand in hand—a world without newspapers, hypocrisy and cant. ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... found it beyond his power to express: "It was he," he writes to Emerson, "that first proclaimed to me (convincingly, for I saw it done): 'behold, even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that Man be Man.'" "He was," says he, "king of himself and his world;... his faculties and feelings were not fettered or prostrated under the iron sway of Passion, but led and guided in kindly union under the mild sway ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... dictionary I was ashamed I had made it serrafim but seraphim is not a word you can guess at like another long one, outlandish, in this letter which spells itself. Miss Dearborn says use the words you can spell and if you cant spell seraphim make angel do but angels are not just the same as seraphims. Seraphims are brighter whiter and have bigger wings and I think are older and longer dead than angels which are just freshly dead and after a long time in heaven around the ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... led to take her first step on the downward path. Soon daily contact with vice removes abhorrence to it. Familiarity makes it habitual, and another life is ruined. The heartless moral code of the cynical young pleasure-seeking male is summed up in the cant phrase anent women: "Find, ... and forget!" It is these girls, who are victimized by their lack of self-restraint or moral principle, their ignorance or weakness, who make possible the application of such ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... Forty-five, long, Lincoln-bodied, and bony; coal-black hair, coal-black eyes, and charcoal-black mustache; neck like a loop in standing rigging; arms long as cant-hooks, with the steel grips for fingers; sluggish in movement and slow in action until the supreme moment of danger tautened his nerves to breaking point; then came an instantaneous spring, quick as the recoil of ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Throughout that large collection of letters, which bears the name of St. Thomas, we find, in all the retainers of the aspiring prelate, no less than in himself, a most entire and absolute conviction of the reason and piety of their own party, and a disdain of their antagonists: nor is there less cant and grimace in their style, when they address each other, than when they compose manifestos for the perusal of the public. The spirit of revenge, violence, and ambition, which accompanied their conduct, instead of forming a presumption of hypocrisy, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... to say to his patients, "I am familiar with your symptoms, because I have seen other people in your condition; and I will bring the very little knowledge we have to your treatment; but except in that very shallow sense I dont know what is the matter with you; and I cant undertake to cure you," he would be a lost man professionally; and if a clergyman, on being called on to award a prize for good conduct in the village school, were to say, "I am afraid I cannot say who is the best-behaved child, because I really do not know what good conduct is; but I will gladly ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... Corn-bread, baked tater, collard. Git to Bucksport, people gin to whoop and holler! Three flat gone round wid all the vittles." (And with the very young and very old) Easier coming home. Current helped. Going up against the current, only poles and cant hooks—tedious going. "Git 'Tip Top' (Plantation) all right. Come home den! Git to double trunk (rice-field trunk) at 'Tip Top' Whoop! Come bring flat! Mother Molly dead on flat! Bury she right to Longwood ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... spoiled so many, men as well as women. Her mind was admirably balanced by her home affections, which remained unsullied and unshaken to the end of her days. She had, in common with her three brothers and her charming sister, the advantage of a wise and loving mother—a woman pious without cant, and worldly-wise without being worldly. Mrs. Porter was born at Durham, and when very young bestowed her hand and heart on Major Porter; an old friend of the family assures us that two or three of their children ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... marched towards Jerusalem. Passing Sinjil, Lubban, and Sawiyeh, we rested just beyond Sawiyeh under the great oak, at the divergence of the valley of Laithma. Beneath its wide-spreading branches a flock of sheep was resting at noon (Cant. i. 7.) From these we got ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... at last, to come to the conclusion that we would fain draw from all these descriptions—why does this immorality exist? Because the people MUST be amused, and have not been taught HOW; because the upper classes, frightened by stupid cant, or absorbed in material wants, have not as yet learned the refinement which only the cultivation of art can give; and when their intellects are uneducated, and their tastes are coarse, the tastes and amusements of classes ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Cant and hypocrisy is a fashion of theirs, if you like," she interrupted. "You are not going the right way about it if you wish me to pay ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... woman. Guided by the self-evident axiom that humanity is to be judged by literature, and not literature by humanity, he detected the analogy between Lycidas and Annie. Only the dullard would object to the nauseous cant of the one, or to the indiscretions of the other. A sober critic might say that the man who could generalize Herbert and Laud, Donne and Herrick, Sanderson and Juxon, Hammond and Lancelot Andrewes into "our corrupted Clergy" must be either an imbecile or a scoundrel, or probably both. The judgment ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... on a contemptuous sneer at this, and replied, "Ay, ay, I will venture him with you. He is too well grounded for all your philosophical cant to hurt. No, no, I have taken care to ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... stands on the centre. For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact that some men, namely poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Cromwell's government, and to the fanaticism which preceded it, we owe the reaction of Charles the Second's reign, when licentiousness in manners, and servility in politics succeeded in making virtue and freedom synonymous with hypocrisy and cant. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... before the baize and challenges all comers, his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed by your modern moral world. It is a conspiracy of the middle classes against gentlemen: it is only the shopkeeper cant which is to go down nowadays. I say that play was an institution of chivalry: it has been wrecked, along with other privileges of men of birth. When Seingalt engaged a man for six-and-thirty hours without ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Ralph, 'there's no such thing. I can understand a man's dying of a broken neck, or suffering from a broken arm, or a broken head, or a broken leg, or a broken nose; but a broken heart!—nonsense, it's the cant of the day. If a man can't pay his debts, he dies of a broken heart, and ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... she wrote some weeks after this. "I like my teacher; her name is Holt. She is just as nice as she can be. She is cousin to the one who came with me; I live with her uncle, and I can go to soshibles whenever I want to; but the other girls cant. I am feeling pretty good, but I ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... has a quality which all men feel; and which may be called a sudden antiquity. Its classicalism was not altogether a cant. When it had happened it seemed to have happened thousands of years ago. It spoke in parables; in the hammering of spears and the awful cap of Phrygia. To some it seemed to pass like a vision; and yet it seemed eternal as a group of statuary. ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... idiot, cease thy loathsome cant! Day-labourer, slave of toil and want! I hate thy babble vain and hollow. Thou art a worm, no child of day: Thy god is Profit—thou wouldst weigh By pounds the Belvidere Apollo. Gain—gain alone ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... slang are often confused in the popular mind, yet they are not synonymous, though very closely allied, and proceeding from a common Gypsy origin. Cant is the language of a certain class—the peculiar phraseology or dialect of a certain craft, trade or profession, and is not readily understood save by the initiated of such craft, trade or profession. It may be correct, according to the rules of grammar, but it is not universal; ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... with the smoke of tobacco, and the fumes of beer, that the tallow candles burnt but dimly. A crowd of students were sitting at three long tables, in the large hall; a medley of fellows, known at German Universities under the cant names of Old-Ones, Mossy-Heads, Princes of Twilight, and Pomatum-Stallions. They were smoking, drinking, singing, screaming, and discussing the great Laws of the Broad-Stone and the Gutter. They ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... great contempt. "You have learned that cant word in the Cabinet of the King himself, before he thrust you out. He eternally prates of justice, yet, much as I loathe him, I have no wish to compass his death, either directly or through ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... moment he would be holding high discourse of Goethe, and translating illustrative passages into classic French; at the next, whining about la deche, and begging for a petite salete de vingt sous, in the cant of the Paris gutters. Or, from an analysis of the character of some conspicuous personage he had known, he would break into an indecent song, or pass to an interchange of ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... But, against the cant of the bigot or the hypocrite, no reasoning can aught avail. If you would argue until the end of life, the infallible creature must alone be right. So it proved with the laird. One Scripture text followed another, not in the least connected, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... the old sinner's stuff," said Anne, "when your own sons laugh at him and say he is a fool? Besides, I am told he is ever abusing the Catholics, and I heartily despise his nonsensical, lying cant." ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... Yet we find in the condition to which we have drifted such a one may be pilloried by wasters, gamblers, rioters, a crew that are the curse of every community. We lash the atheist and the age but give little heed to the insincerity and cant of those we do not refuse to call our own. What an example for the man anathematised. He sees the vice and meanness of those we allow to pass for orthodox, and when he sees also the complacency of the better ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... prescription of murder in Scotland[272]. 'A jury in England would make allowance for deficiencies of evidence, on account of lapse of time; but a general rule that a crime should not be punished, or tried for the purpose of punishment, after twenty years, is bad. It is cant to talk of the King's advocate delaying a prosecution from malice. How unlikely is it the King's advocate should have malice against persons who commit murder, or should even know them at all. If the son of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... original score is published, and then only a Russian or a musician familiar with the Russian tongue and its genius. The production of the opera outside of Russia and in a foreign language ought to furnish an occasion to demand a stay of the artistic cant which is all too common just now ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... it might be—the question was deep, too deep, probably, for his wisdom; at any rate he had to control himself not to interrupt angrily such dry, interested palaver, the false voice of commerce and of cant. He stared tragically out of the window and saw the stupid rain begin to fall; the day was duller even than his own soul, and Jersey Villas looked so sordidly hideous that it was no wonder Mrs. Ryves couldn't endure them. Hideous as they were ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... any one of the Christian virtues. Charity and kindness of heart exist, they would have us to believe, in an inverse ratio to income, and the warmest men, in city parlance, are invariably those of the coldest feelings. The sickly cant of this style of writing in a country where charity, both public and private, is so extensive and practical; and its probable ill effects in rendering the poorer classes discontented, are too evident ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... Puritans in his conversation with them, the Protector answered, "Cousin Waller, I must talk to these men in their own way;" an anecdote which is sometimes quoted as if it proved that Cromwell had no religion; whereas it only proved that he had at heart no cant. It was not as if he had privately avowed infidelity to his kinsman. Cromwell found cant prevalent on his stage, just as any great actor of that century found rant on his, and, like the actor, he used it occasionally as a means of gaining ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... been as fortunate in their chroniclers as they deserve. The tumid cant of Nicholas is grotesque enough to be more amusing than the tract-and-water style of Yate and Barret Marshall, or the childishness of Richard Taylor. Much better in every way are Buller's (Wesleyan) "Forty Years In New Zealand," and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... intend. Can, use of; model conjugation of. "Cant expressions," in letters. Capitalization, rules for. Cases, classified and defined; case forms of pronouns; case of word in apposition; case forms of relative pronouns; outline for use of case forms; ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... am sorry you don't like Harry White: [3] with a great deal of cant, which in him was sincere (indeed it killed him as you killed Joe Blackett), certes there is poesy and genius. I don't say this on account of my simile and rhymes; but surely he was beyond all the Bloomfields [4] and Blacketts, and their ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... man; "we of the thimble, as well as all clyfakers and the like, understand cant, as, of course, must every bonnet; so, if you are employed by me, you had better learn it as soon as you can, that we may discourse together without being understood by every one. Besides covering ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... keepeth it." He railed bitterly ever and anon against John Calvin, and his brood, the Presbyterians, and against the present term, now in use, of "tender consciences." He ripped up Hugh Peters (calling him the execrable skellum—[A villain or scoundrel; the cant term for a thief.]—), his preaching and stirring up the maids of the city to bring in their bodkins and thimbles. Thence going out of White Hall, I met Captain Grove, who did give me a letter directed to myself ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... I cracked him up in my book—you see I could do no less after the handsome way he cracked me up in his—and I cant go back on it now. (Breaking loose from Balsquith.) No: its no use, Balsquith: he can ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... left to my own way, I would rather manage a class of twenty American boys than of twenty English. The common cry about Young America's disrespect for authority or worth seems to me to be founded on a misconception, when, indeed, it is anything but the wailing of ignorance or cant. I am strongly possessed of a belief that American children know intuitively where respect is really due, and that there they fully and unhesitatingly award it. I at least have found among them a more genuine, spontaneous sentiment of regard ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... greatness and disinterestedness. "His very failings were those of a sincere, a generous, and a noble mind," says a biographer who knew him well. His contempt for base actions; his love of equity; his passion for truth, which was carried almost to a hatred of cant and hypocrisy, were the immediate causes of his want of fairness in his opinion of himself and of his self-accusation of things most ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... mercantile part of the people, the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable; many of their terms are formed for some temporary or local convenience, and though current at certain times and places, are in others utterly unknown. This fugitive cant, which is always in a state of increase or decay, cannot be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language, and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... bottom of a hillside meadow I was hunting for the entrance of a path into a patch of woods. Auber, instead of helping me, kept gazing back at the fading light while he made random observations on the nature of the sky-line,—one of his cant hobbies. "See how crudely the character of everything is defined up there against the sky," I heard him say, while I continued to search for the path. "Now even a sheep or a cow, or an inanimate thing, like that stone wall, for instance,—see how its character ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... hesitated a little. "Yes, it sounds like cant, I know, but sometimes I feel as if I'd like to do some good in the world, if father only wouldn't insist upon God's putting it into ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... the singer, "but ef I hadn't a knowed it was old man Newcome as took Serlizer away, I'd be cant-hooked and pike-poled ef I wouldn't ha' sung jest them words, that's ef I had a paiun in my chaist and wanted to lay down." When they reached the third lake, through a channel similar to the last, the Captain said sternly: "I'm in command of this vessel, and expect orders to be obeyed. No more ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... word, of which examples are cited from Beaumont and Fletcher, and Swift. It is formed from flam, which Johnson calls "a cant word of no certain etymology." Flam, for a lie, a cheat, is however used by South, Barrow, and Warburton, and therefore at one time obtained an admission into dignified style. See Nares' Glossary ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... splendid sun, and a fine fresh healthy trade that stirred up a man’s blood like sea-bathing; and the whole thing was clean gone from me, and I was dreaming England, which is, after all, a nasty, cold, muddy hole, with not enough light to see to read by; and dreaming the looks of my public, by a cant of a broad high-road like an avenue, and with the ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there was something serious. These young men and women, who were themselves terribly in earnest, were systematically hostile not only to accepted conventionalities in the matter of dress, but to all manner of shams, hypocrisy, and cant in the broad Carlylean sense of those terms. To the "beautiful souls" of the older generation, who had habitually, in conversation and literature, shed pathetic tears over the defects of Russian social and political organisation without ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... is a real man under all circumstances, having no awe of authority, no hesitation in speaking his mind, but a great reverence for women and a real respect for a religion that does not savor of cant. ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... and read parts of "Patience Strong's Outings"—an ugly title, and a transcendental style, but beautiful in conception, and taken off the stilts, in execution. I do not like the cant of Unitarians any better than they like ours, but I like what is elevating in any sect. I have had a present of a lot of table-linen, towels, etc., for Dorset, and feel a good deal like a young housekeeper. I wonder how soon you go back to Northampton? How queer it must be to be able to ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... all day, between times when I'm thinkin' of licker, of Polly Hawks; an' I'll say right yere she's my first an' only love. She's a fine young female, is Polly—tall as a saplin', with a arm on her like a cant-hook. Polly can lift an' hang up a side of beef, an' is as good as two hands at ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the artists. At this the professor became passionately serious—"Do you mean to tell me," he bawled, "that there has ever been a painter who did not try to make his objects as lifelike as possible? Dismiss such silly nonsense from your head." It is the old story: "Clear your mind of cant," that is to say, of anything which appears improbable or unpalatable ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... built on the northern slope and plain. The dimensions of the work are fifty-five metres each way. The curtains, except the western, where stood the Bab el-Bahr ("Sea gate"), were supported by one central as well as by angular bastions; the northern face had a cant of 32 degrees east (mag.); and the northwestern tower was distant from the sea seventy-two me'tres, whereas the south-western numbered only sixty. The spade showed a substratum of thick old wall, untrimmed granite, and other hard materials. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold. Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe. And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is from its primitive state, when my Lady Townshend all the way she came up the stairs, cried out, "Lord God! Jesus! what a house! It is just such a house as a parson's, where the children lie at the feet of the bed!" I cant say that to-day it puts me much in mind of another speech of my lady's, "That it would be a very pleasant place, if Mrs. Clive's face did not rise upon it and make it so hot!" The sun and Mrs. Clive ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... sacred vessel used by our Blessed Lord at His "Last Supper," and explain why this chalice was called the "Holy Grail" or "Grayle?" Tennyson has a short poem on the knightly search after it, called "Sir Galahad." And in Spenser's Faerie Queene, book ii. cant. x. 53., allusion is made to the legend that "Joseph of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... reasoning," says an American Unitarian divine, "partial observation, intellectual grouping, moral obliquity, spiritual ignorance,—in short, of puerility and superstition involved in a large part of the appeals, the preaching, the cant terms, the popular dogmas, the current conversation of Christendom,—are discouraging evidences how backward is the religious thought of our day, as compared with its general thought; how little harmony there is between our schools and our churches, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst |
