"Cant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... back and take up his wanderings and his discoveries. Some day, I will tell you how he broke his promise to help a friend. That was long since, and he has, by this time, been nearly spoilt for what he would call shikar. He is forgetting the slang, and the beggar's cant, and the marks, and the signs, and the drift of the undercurrents, which, if a man would master, he must always ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... was not altogether unpardonable; few, indeed, would have even guessed that the appearance of utter neglect which surrounded the use of Cant and Slang in English song, ballad, or verse—its rich and racy character notwithstanding—was anything but of the surface. The chanson d'argot of France and the romance di germania of Spain, not to mention other forms ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... mean, Lois? The garden work is for our eating, and the sewing is for your own back, or grandma's. I understand religion, but I don't understand cant." ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... involving any serious tendency—in fact, all that exceeded a misdemeanour—in the regular chronological succession according to which they came before the magistrate. Here, in this vast calendar of guilt and misery, amidst the aliases or cant designations of ruffians—prostitutes—felons, stood the description, at full length, Christian and surnames all properly registered, of my Agnes—of her whose very name had always sounded to my ears like the very echo of mountain ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... nevertheless with a certain reserve. He was not quite certain if Baltic's conversion was genuine, and if he found proof of hypocrisy, was prepared to fall foul of him forthwith. Sir Harry was not particularly religious, but he was honest, and hated cant with all ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... problems, was George Wythe. To both of these Jefferson confessed the deepest debt for their efforts to strengthen his mind and make his footing firm. Now, of all men in this country at that time, these two were least likely to support pro-slavery theories or tolerate pro-slavery cant. For while to Small's soundness there is abundance of general testimony, there is to Wythe's soundness testimony the most pointed. We have but to take the first volume of Jefferson's Works, published ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... qualification be not secured, you should aim at being tutor in a great family, accompany a lad on the grand tour, or write some pamphlet on a great man's behalf. Paley gained credit for independence at Cambridge, and spoke with contempt of the practice of 'rooting,' the cant phrase for patronage hunting. The text which he facetiously suggested for a sermon when Pitt visited Cambridge, 'There is a young man here who has six loaves and two fishes, but what are they among so many?' hit off the spirit in which a minister was regarded at ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... don't want to go on those terms," replied Howe, in disgust. "That's some more of Shuffles's cant! One of his sensations! He thinks he whipped us out on board of the Josephine, and now he wants to be magnanimous with his victims. If we go with the crowd, it will be because Lowington is afraid to leave us behind. We are not a set of babies, Sheffield, to be whipped and sent ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... 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 ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... and that wittily, handled the juggle of religion, and withal discover'd with what impudence and ignorance priests pretend to be inspir'd: But are not our wrangling pleaders possest with the same frenzy? who cant it? These wounds I receiv'd in defence of your liberty; this eye was lost in your service; lend me a hand to hand me to my children, for my faltering hams are ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... was held in the highest respect by the medical profession because physicians generally felt, in the words of Dr. Ransohoff, that "his life had a spiritual significance; there was no cant, only humility." Sometimes he walked to the operating room beside a fearful patient, and one man later said, "Something came through him to me. The fear was gone." He often went with parishioners to a doctor's office, ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... 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, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... more than at the same period a Warrington would confess that he was a contributor to the leading journals of the day. The members were on the look-out for any indications of intellectual originality, academical or otherwise, and specially contemptuous of humbug, cant, and the qualities of the 'windbag' in general. To be elected, therefore, was virtually to receive a certificate from some of your cleverest contemporaries that they regarded you as likely to be in future an eminent man. The judgment so passed was perhaps as significant as that implied by ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... sympathetic lie. Would that the writers and speakers of plain English, and of their mother-tongue in every vernacular, might take example from the conscientious creator, who would not put a particle of cant into the crooked marks and ruled bars which are such a mystery to the uninitiated, blot with one demi-semi-quaver of falsehood his papers, or leave aught but truth of the heavenly sphere at a single point on any line! Then our sternest utterance with each other would be concord, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... cant that would represent the merchant and the banker as people disinterestedly toiling for mankind, and then most useful when absorbed in their transactions; for the man is more important than ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Dear Sir,—i cant make much of your letter except a riglemerole about pigs and dinamite and pictures but what they have to do with one another i dont know if you want some pork why dont you say so strait out like mr Hobson does i shall be killing one this week ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Your very words, Scrooge. Decrease the surplus population. (SCROOGE hangs his head in shame.) Man, if man you be in heart, forbear that wicked cant. Will you decide what men shall live, and what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... to himself, 'Bedad, I must raycrout the force agin, or thim that's left 'ull think I cant do widout 'em an' thin there'll be no ind to their impidince. Begorra, this marryin' is a sayrious business,' says he, sighin', fur he'd got about all the wimmin that wanted to be quanes an' didn't just know where to find anny more. But, be pickin' up wan here an' there, afther ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... see about it," said he,—"we'll see about it in the morning; but, at the same time, let me assure you, the affair is not so easy as you may at first blush suppose. These worthy people have been so often 'done'—to use the cant phrase—before, that scarcely a ruse remains untried. It is of no use pleading that your family won't consent; that your prospects are null; that you are ordered for India; that you are engaged elsewhere; that you have nothing but your pay; that you are too young ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... countenances of my fellow-mortals. I should find peace and pleasure and wisdom and worth, I should find fascination and a measure of success in it—out of the din and the dust and the scramble, the world of party labels, party cries, party bargains and party treacheries: of humbuggery, hypocrisy and cant. The cleanness and quietness of it, the independent effort to do something, to leave something which shall give joy to man long after the howling has died away to the last ghost of an echo—such a vision solicits me in the watches of night with ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... the sayings: 'Might is Right,' and 'Right is Might.' They're both half-truth, but the first was beating the other out of the field. All the rest of it is cant, you know. And by the way, sir, your Church is solid for punishment of the evildoer. Where's mercy there? Either its God is not merciful, or else it doesn't ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the feelings and passions of men, the Honorable Member had great advantages in dwelling on this topic; because it was a subject which those who disliked everything that had the air of cant and profession on the one hand, or of indifference on the other, found it awkward to meddle with. Establishments, tests, and matters of that nature, were proper objects of political discussion in that House, but not general charges ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... she fancied there might be some error in 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, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... true story. It happened in Markdale to an uncle of my mothers. He wanted to marry Miss Jemima Parr. Felicity says Jemima is not a romantic name for a heroin of a story but I cant help it in this case because it is a true story and her name realy was Jemima. My mothers uncle was named Thomas Taylor. He was poor at that time and so the father of Miss Jemima Parr did not want him for a soninlaw and told him he was not to come near the house or he would ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... plays the game. It, at all events, is free from self-consciousness, and pride; from dignity, nerves, scruples, cant, moralities; from hypocrisies, and wisdom, and fears for pocket, and position in this world and the next. Well did the old painters limn it as an arrow or a wind! If it had not been as swift and darting, Earth must long ago have drifted through ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... admire the personal appearance of Abou Saood. A judge of physiognomy would have objected to the downcast look of humility, the un-certain squint of one eye, the furtive expression of countenance, added to the ultra-holiness of his ejaculations when called upon for an answer, and the pious cant of his protestation against all wrong-doings. At the same time that he was acting the part of saint, I knew him to be a bird of the same feather as the rest of ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... downhill—there is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflection, except the sense of having worked according to one's capacity and light, to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts. That was the lesson I learned from Carlyle's books when I was a boy, and it has stuck by ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... speaking seriously now. Muller felt that this was none of the whining cant people in authority among the Boers find it desirable to adopt. It was what he thought, and it chilled Muller in spite of his pretended scepticism, as the sincere belief of an intellectual man, however opposite to our own, is apt to chill us into ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... an essay on "Imitations of the Ancient Ballads," and spoke very leniently of imitations passed off as authentic. "There is no small degree of cant in the violent invectives with which impostors of this nature have been assailed." As to Hardyknute, the favourite poem of his infancy, "the first that I ever learned and the last that I shall forget," he says, "the public is surely more enriched by the contribution than injured by the deception." ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... to you. I have got quite a library. The Master has not taken his rattan out since the vacation. Your little kitten is as well and as playful as ever and I hope you are to for I am sure I love you as well as ever. Why is grass like a mouse you cant guess that he he he ho ho ho ha ha ha hum ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... I learned afterwards, was the cant name by which king's officers were known to the buccaneers. The fact that I was an officer, of which they had apparently been ignorant, seemed to give the men much pleasure. Some of them, no doubt, had once been king's men, and knew without any telling the gravity of their offense. I ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... interesting, it exhibits with amazing candour the first, purely sexual, stage of the young man of twenty-one. It was the period when "young Germany's" device was the emancipation of sensuality. Wagner himself says that his "conception was mainly directed against Puritan cant, and led to the bold glorification of unrestrained sensuality. I was determined to understand the grave Shakespearean subject only in this sense." And in his "Autobiographical Sketch" he says: "I learned ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... rendered happy and contented, by a trifling improvement of outward appearance, I cannot help thinking that the object is very cheaply purchased, even at the expense of a smart gown, or a gaudy riband. There is a great deal of very unnecessary cant about the over- dressing of the common people. There is not a manufacturer or tradesman in existence, who would not employ a man who takes a reasonable degree of pride in the appearance of himself and those about ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... much given to this silly sort of cant, more gratifying to vulgar prejudice, than becoming a scholar, or a man of science. One knows not how to show its absurdity better than, by merely directing the reader to consider for a moment, the things that are put in contrast ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... But first with thy resistless light, Disperse those phantoms from my sight, Those mimic shades of thee: The scholiast's learning, sophist's cant, The visionary bigot's rant, The ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... Sub-Prior, sternly, "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
... poor one often hears words which make one suspect that they do NOT believe it. I am very much afraid that a great many have got into the trick of saying that it was God's mercy that they were cured, and that it pleased the Lord to raise them up from a sick bed, very much as a piece of cant. They say the words by rote, because they have been accustomed to hear them said by others, without thinking of the meaning of them; just as, on the other hand, a great many people curse and swear without thinking of the awful oaths they use. Ay, and often enough the very ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... famous dish in Java. It is served at tiffin, and after you have eaten it you waddle to your room in a congested state and sleep it off. After my first rice tafel I dreamed I was a log jam and that lumber jacks with cant hooks were trying to ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... taste or morals, he entertained, at all times, the most profound contempt; and if, frequently, his real feelings of admiration disguised themselves under an affected tone of indifference and mockery, it was out of pure hostility to the cant of those, who, he well knew, praised without any feeling at all. It must be owned, too, that while he thus justly despised the raptures of the common herd of travellers, there were some pursuits, even of the intelligent and tasteful, in which ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... "Lion of the forest," may have been conferred by the popular voice on more than one favorite general, distinguished for irresistible valour? Is it not also possible that "BUONA PARTE" may have been originally a sort of cant term applied to the "good (i.e., the bravest or most patriotic) part" of the French army, collectively; and have been afterwards mistaken for the proper name of an individual?[23] I do not profess to support this conjecture; but it is certain that such mistakes may and ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... 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 ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... thrust down their throats in the evening. A keener, cleverer, bolder, and more heart- stirring harangue than that which Mr. C. delivered from Haworth pulpit, last Sunday evening, I never heard. He did not rant; he did not cant; he did not whine; he did not sniggle; he just got up and spoke with the boldness of a man who was impressed with the truth of what he was saying, who has no fear of his enemies, and no dread of consequences. His ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Battery Park, where the one would invoke the Statue of Liberty for a thought, or the gilded domes of Broadway for a metaphor, while the other would be scouring the horizon for the Nothingness, which is called, in the recondite cant of the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... manhood ever owes to the weak and helpless. Search London over and you will not find elemental goodness in a shape more worthy than it was to be found in the caves—nor can we forego a moment's reflection upon the cant which ever preaches the vice of the poor and so rarely ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... third of the preceding verses, seems to have been a cant term among the early Shakers for a sluggard and selfish fellow, a kind of creature they have pretty thoroughly extirpated; and presumably by such free speech as is used in the following ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... Tom Jones of the present day, without perhaps being in the ground a better man, would have perished rather than submit to be kept by a harridan of fortune. Therefore this novel is, and, indeed, pretends to be, no exemplar of conduct. But, notwithstanding all this, I do loathe the cant which can recommend Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe as strictly moral, though they poison the imagination of the young with continued doses of 'tinct. lyttae', while Tom Jones is prohibited as loose. I do ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... as a kind of mental slavery. He had the courage to give his reasons for his opinion. His reasons filled the churches with hatred. Instead of answering his arguments they attacked him. Men who were not fit to blacken his shoes blackened his character. There is too much religious cant in the statement of Mr. Thorburn. He exhibits too much anxiety to tell what Grant Thorburn said to Thomas Paine. He names Thomas Jefferson as one of the disreputable men who welcomed Paine with open arms. The testimony of a man who regarded Thomas Jefferson as a disreputable person, as to the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... 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 ...
— From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom • Lucy A. Delaney
... towards the Eternal Kingdoms grown. No fixed highway more; the old spiritual highways and recognized paths to the Eternal, now all torn up and flung in heaps, submerged in unutterable boiling mud-oceans of Hypocrisy and Unbelievability, of brutal living Atheism and damnable dead putrescent Cant: surely a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals; Darkness, and the mere shadow of Death, enveloping all things from pole to pole; and in the raging gulf-currents, offering us will-o'-wisps for loadstars,—intimating that there are no stars, nor ever were, except certain ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... to say something on the "condition-of-women" question, but it is one on which so much cant has been talked, that one feels a sort of reluctance to approach it. I have always been accustomed to think that the necessity of earning one's living is not, in itself, an evil; though I feel it may become a heavy evil if health fails, if employment lacks, if the demand upon ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... understand. And I had such an unpleasant sense of being outside, and not understanding, as I never felt before, and I did not like it a bit. I knew quite well that if Father had been there, he would have said it was all stuff and cant. But I did not feel so sure of my Aunt Kezia. And suppose it were not cant, but was something unutterably real,—something that I ought to know, and must know some day, if I were ever to get to Heaven! I did not like it. ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... means," replied Vincent. "It is a cant antithesis in opinion to oppose them to one another; but, so far as mere theoretical common sense is concerned, I would much sooner apply to a great poet or a great orator for advice on matter of business, than any dull plodder who has passed his whole life in a counting-house. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sighing deeply, "if I am fated, I must; I know there is no resisting one's fate." This is a common cant with poor deluded girls, who are not aware that they themselves make their fate by their folly, and then complain there is ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... this kingdom. To this fortunate circumstance are we indebted for the production of those brilliant efforts of genius, his fashionable novels, which so long as good taste, unsullied by exaggeration, cant, and quackery, continues to exist, cannot fail to instruct and amuse the thinking ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... an attack on cant. It was a story written by Dickens to protest against all he hated in the nature of oppression. Dickens hated the vulgar cant that only helps to bring self-advertisement: the ethic that the poor must listen to the rich, not because the rich are the best law-givers, but because ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... complaint that the publishers make large fortunes and leave the authors to starve—that they are, in fact, a kind of moral vampire, sucking the best blood of genius, and destroying others to support themselves. A great deal of very unhealthy, one-sided cant has been written upon this subject. Doubtless, there is much to be said on both sides. That publishers look at a manuscript very much as a corn-dealer looks at sample of wheat, with an eye to its selling qualities, is not to be denied. If books are not written only ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... so, but his treatment of Martin cannot be called reverent. Indeed, reverence was impossible to Swift. There is much good to be said of him. There was a fierce righteousness about his spirit which made him a better parish priest than many a more pious man. He hated shams, he hated cant, he hated bondage. "Dr. Swift," it was said, "hated all fanatics: all fanatics hated Dr. Swift."* But with all his uprightness and breadth he was neither ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... mathematical investigations assure us on every hand, notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood, that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies. The forms of ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... diversities. And that is the objection 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 ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... find a pool an' go in, Wayland. Dry farmin' may be good for crops; but this dry bath business o' y'r Desert,—'tis not for a North man. Better come along! If A can find it to my neck, y'll need a cant hook to ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... just as I had satisfied a natural want for which I had risen. To rush to her, to embrace her tenderly, to fasten the door, and compel her, not much against her will, to come towards the bed, to beg her to lie on her belly on the bedside, to cant her petticoats up, to kneel and gamahuche her cunt from behind until she begged me to rise and fuck her, was but the work of a minute or two. And then my stiff-standing pego, aided by the mouthful of thick saliva occasioned by the gamahuche, ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... could read these stories, or have them read to him, there would be fewer rogues in the world. Straightforward, honest stories, without cant, without moralizing, full of genuine fun and hard common sense, they are just the tales that are needed to make a young fellow fall in love with simple integrity and fair dealing. They are noble ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... the cant with which Viglius was ever ready to feed not only his faithful Hopper, but all the world beside. The president was naturally anxious that the fold of Christ should be entrusted to none but regular shepherds, for he looked forward to taking one of the most lucrative ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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, ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... would tend to make woman less amiable and attractive, less regardful of her peculiar duties and obligations as wife and mother, a wanderer from her proper sphere, bringing confusion into domestic life, and strife into the public assembly, is the cant of Papal Rome as to the discordant and infidel tendencies of the right of private judgment in matters of faith; is the outcry of legitimacy as to the incapacity of the people to govern themselves; is the false allegations which selfish and timid conservatism is ever making against every new measure ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... being biassed by what has been done by other painters; it is as absurd as if they would recommend a youth to learn astronomy by lying in the fields, and looking on the stars, without reference to the works of Kepler, Tycho Brahe, or of Newton." There is indeed a world of cant in the present day, that a man must do all to his own unprejudiced reason, contemning all that has been done before him. We have just now been looking at a pamphlet on Materialism (a pamphlet of most ambitious verbiage,) in which, with reference to all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Sir, this Sect, as I have been told, is very frequent in the great Town where you live; but as my Circumstance of Life obliges me to reside altogether in the Country, though not many Miles from London, I cant have met with a great Number of em, nor indeed is it a desirable Acquaintance, as I have lately found by Experience. You must know, Sir, that at the Beginning of this Summer a Family of these Apes came and settled for the Season not far from the Place where I live. As they were Strangers in the Country, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... in pagan night, And take my chance with Socrates for bliss, Than be the Christian of a faith like this, Which builds on heavenly cant its earthly sway, And in a convert mourns to lose a prey. Intolerance. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... perceive and enjoy the romantic element in Greek life and art; yet it is a mistake to call him a Greek. An Athenian of the time of Pericles was, he thought, the noblest specimen of humanity that history had to show, and of that nobility he assimilated what he could. He acquired a distaste for cant, prudery, facile emotion, and philanthropy; he learnt to enjoy the good things of life without fear or shame; to love strength and beauty, and to respect the truth. For all that, he was a modern too; sharp eyes can see it in his verse. A touch of gloating and uninquisitive ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... accusations returned to their former opinion. The bigots and devotees, all who made a profession of kneeling in the churches, of publicly crossing themselves and dipping their fingers in the holy water, and who lived on cant and repetitions of "Amen" and "Alleluia," talked of persecution, of martyrdom, until Derues nearly became a saint destined by the Almighty to find canonisation in a dungeon. Hence arose quarrels and arguments; and this abortive trial, this unproved accusation, kept the public ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... lifting his head for a moment, then dropping it again on the ground; "take your cant to some other market, I don't believe in a God, or heaven or hell: and the sooner I die the better; for I'll be out ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... "A cant phrase, from what rise I know not, but it is made use of when one thinks it is not worth while to give a distinct answer, or think themselves ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... 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 ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... of promise were assessed in advance and without respect of sex. Whichever side repented of the bargain undertook to pay ten pounds by way of compensation for the broken pledge. As a nation, Israel is practical and free from cant. Romance and moonshine are beautiful things, but behind the glittering veil are always the stern realities of things and the weaknesses of human nature. The high contracting parties were signing the document ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... It seemed as if the whole stern of the ship was about to be carried away. Her larboard quarter next came in contact with the ice, but the severity of the shock saved her; for after the damage which has been described was received, she again bounded off with a cant to starboard. The jib was instantly run up, and it and the other headsails catching the wind, away she glided from the berg. Those who had their eyes turned aft, however, could not refrain from uttering a cry of horror, for at that instant the berg, shaken by the concussion, ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... presence of God in your own hearts, who is always speaking, always instructing, always illuminating the heart that is attentive to Him.' Jonathan Edwards called the poor parish minister of Ettrick 'a truly great divine.' But Law goes on to say, 'A great divine is but a cant expression unless it signifies a man greatly advanced in the divine life. A great divine is one whose own experience and example are a demonstration of the reality of all the graces and virtues of the ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... beery old one-eyed vagabond in tatters. It was strange to witness his transitions. At one 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 mildewed chaff ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... Cummy, his nurse, whose library was chiefly the Bible, the shorter catechism, and the Life of Robert Murray McCheyne. He said that the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah was his special chapter, because it so repudiated cant and demanded a self-denying beneficence. He loved Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; but "the Bible most stood him in hand." Every great story or essay shows its influence. He was not critical with it; he did not understand it; he did not interpret it fairly; but he felt it. His Dr. Jekyll and ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... Cant? Philosophy! But don't forget the third, The Divine Virgin—Womanhood fashioning itself independently after its own ideal. She has driven us, naked and ashamed, ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... of cant," said Sir Richmond in a fierce parenthesis, "that the supplies of oil are inexhaustible—that you can muddle about with oil anyhow.... Optimism of knaves and imbeciles.... They don't want to be pulled up ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... in the act of hoisting the sixth and last log, and just about to cant it into its place, the iron hook of the principal purchase-block gave way, and the great beam, measuring fifty feet in length, fell upon the rock with a terrible crash; but although there were fifty-two men around the beacon at the time, not one ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... swore at old Ferris for his sins, with nothing to hear him but the busy waves that glistened between him and the shore. Ferris had stolen his chance; he was coming along with his rigging as fast as he could, with his quick French wood-choppers, and their sharp saws and stubborn wedges to cant the trunks; already he was not far from the farm. Old Ferris was going to set up his yellow sawdust-mill there—that was the plan; the great trunks were too heavy to handle or haul any distance with any trucks or sleds that were used nowadays. ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... [*] The cant word for luggage in the western states of America is "plunder." The term might easily mislead one as to the character of the people, who, notwithstanding their pleasant use of so expressive a word, are, like the inhabitants of all new settlements, hospitable ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... is a sign of wedlock. The virgins wear theirs loose, plaited in small plaits of three, which, being parted in the centre, allows the hair to fall evenly down all round the head like a well-arranged mop. On approaching these fairs, they seductively give their heads a cant backwards, with a half side-jerk, which parts the locks in front, and discloses a pretty little smiling face, with teeth as white as pearls, and lips as red as rubies. Pretty as they are when young, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... mention them only that Dr. Johnson's opinion of the works may be known; but many of them are examples of elaborate criticism, in the most masterly style. In his review of the 'Memoirs of the Court of Augustus,' he has the resolution to think and speak from his own mind, regardless of the cant transmitted from age to age, in praise of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... the interruption] Well, she cant see the doctor. Look here: whats the use of telling you that the doctor cant take any new patients, when the moment a knock comes to the door, in you bounce to ask whether ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... cant,' answered Jim, 'and I said nothing of sin or virtue. I don't ask you to trust God, but to trust man. Be ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... seemed to him so great. As he saw it, it was not alone military greatness but greatness of the soul, which was greater. Both were deeply religious— Lee, the Episcopalian, and Jackson, the Presbyterian, and it was a piety that contained no trace of cant. ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... its intrinsic merits: and finds admirers by the hundred, because it is there, and for no other reason on earth: there will be no lack of objects, very indifferent in the plain eyesight of any one who employs so vulgar a property, when he may wear the spectacles of Cant for less than nothing, and establish himself as a man of taste for the mere trouble ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... Defututa Mentula a worn-out voluptuary. Mentula is a cant term which Catullus frequently uses for a libidinous ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... up, boys! Walk her up! Come on, Angus! Where's yer porridge gone to? Move over, two av ye! Don't take advantage av a little man loike that!" Angus was just six feet four. "Now thin, yer pikes! Shove her along! Up she is! Steady! Cant her over! How's that, framer? More to the east, is it? Climb up on her, ye cats, an' dig in yer claws! Now thin, east wid her! Togither-r-r—heave! Aw now, where are ye goin'? Don't be too rambunctious! Ye'll be afther knockin' a hole in to-morrow mornin'. Back ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... but cant! I shall talk of my feeling for the wants of the people, while I pick their pockets; bestow my pity upon the manufacturers, while I tax the bread that feeds their starving families; and proclaim my sympathy with the farmers, while I help the arrogant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... could possibly do by any ill-judged activity. Undisturbed and undistracted by greed, envy, ambition, or desire, I see things in their true proportion. A dreamy spectator of the world's turmoil, I do not enter into the hectic hurly-burly of life; I merely withhold my approval from cant, shams, prejudice, formulae, hypocrisy, and lies. Such is the priceless service ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... is vulgar. It has become of late unfortunately prevalent, and we know many ladies who pride themselves on the saucy chique with which they adopt certain Americanisms, and other cant phrases of the day. Such habits cannot be too severely reprehended. They lower the tone of society and the standard of thought. It is a great mistake to suppose that slang is in any ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... so far as to say that the paper gives its holder a certain power in a certain quarter where such power is immensely valuable." The Prefect was fond of the cant of diplomacy. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... hatred and villification take the form of superb disdain and witty maliciousness worthy of the land of good stories and practical jokes,—a spirit which, alas! is yielding, day by day, to that other spirit which Lord Byron has characterized as "English cant." ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... cant of it too!' cries Montroymont. 'But I'll tell ye for all that. It's to try and see if we can keep the rigging on this house, Francie. If she had her way, we would be beggar-folk, and hold our hands out by the wayside. When ye hear her—when ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... read and praised by Charles II, and his court, and the one that best represents the spirit of the victorious party, is the satirical poem of Hudibras by Samuel Butler. The object of the work is to satirize the cant and excesses of Puritanism, just as the Don Quixote of Cervantes burlesques the extravagances and follies ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... leisure and 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
... 'Cant help it. I'm a lone, lorn grass-widow, dear, but I will not sleep in my stays. And such news too! Oh, do unlace me, there's a darling! The Dowd The Dancing Master I and the Hawley Boy You ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... have occupied a good deal of time in exposing the cant of these gentlemen about the sanctity of the Missouri compromise, and the dishonor attached to the violation of plighted faith. I have exposed these matters in order to show that the object of these men is to withdraw from public ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... no great 'arm. Poor old BUGGINS, he flushes and coughs; Gets hangry, he do, at my talk. I sez, keep on your hair, my good bloke, Hindignation ain't good for your chest; cut this Sosherlist cant, or you'll choke. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... an aunt? Then learn the rules of woman's cant, And forge a tale, and swear you read it, Such as, save woman, none would credit Win o'er her confidante and pages By gold, for this a golden age is; And should it be her wayward fate, To be encumbered with a mate, A dull, old dotard should he be, That dulness ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... she might entone the canticle of triumph, "I found him whom my soul loveth: I hold him: and I will not let him go. My beloved to me, and I to him who feedeth among the lilies. Till the "glorious dawn of eternity" break, and the shadows of time retire," (Cant. iii. 4, ii., 17.) "when I shall see Him as He is, face to face, and know Him even as I am known" (l Cor, xiii. 12). She seemed to have passed into a new state of being. Ardent as her love of God had been before, it ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... pendlums to clox, Or roots and airbs unto an Injun doctor, Or little pills unto an omepath. Or Boze to girls. Are is for us to brethe. What signifize who preaches ef I can't brethe? What's Pol? What's Pollus to sinners who are ded? Ded for want of breth! Why Sextant when we dye Its only coz we cant brethe no more—that's all. And now O Sextant! let me beg of you To let a little are into our cherch (Pewer are is sertin proper for the pews); And dew it week days and on Sundys tew— It aint much trobble—only ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... em [q] aqui se falla sam os a[c,]outes, & em este passo os tir[a] dos bacios & os presentam a alma & todos de joelhos adoram cant[a]do Aue flagellum, & despois ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... spelling, or the introduction of some words borrowed from a foreign language to express ideas of which no native term precisely conveyed the import. He may also remember hearing for the first time some cant terms or slang phrases, which have since forced their way into common use, in spite of the efforts of the purist. But he may still contend that "within the range of his experience," his language has continued ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... talkers who at present infest our literature, and whose parrot-like repetition of their own stereotyped phraseology, mingled with some barbarous infusion of half Anglicised German, threatens to form as odious a cant as ever polluted the stream of thought or disfigured the purity of language. Happily it is not likely to be more than a passing fashion; but still it is a very unpleasant fashion while it lasts. As in Johnson's day, every young ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... insinuations and questions shall be answered in their proper places; here I will but say that I scorn and detest lying, and quibbling, and double-tongued practice, and slyness, and cunning, and smoothness, and cant, and pretence, quite as much as any Protestants hate them; and I pray to be kept from the snare of them. But all this is just now by the bye; my present subject is my Accuser; what I insist upon here is this unmanly attempt of his, in his concluding pages, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... represented as elapsing be no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never veiled his scorn of those—Shakespeare among them—whom he conceived ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... than fiction,'" said the doctor. And I conclude the readers of this tale are all of the doctor's opinion; so sweet to the mind is cant. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... to live and die as free citizens under the protecting wing of the mother country. Recalling all this sickening sentimentalism, Mr. Paine uttered a loud and ringing BOSH! Let us clear our minds of cant, he said in effect, and ask ourselves what is the nature of government in general and of the famous British Constitution in particular. Like the Abbe Sieyes, Mr. Paine had completely mastered the science of government, which was in fact extremely simple. Men form societies, he said, to ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... 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, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... great boat swung into the wind, a jostling crowd of men poured out on the ice from under the flapping sail. Each man bore a tool of some sort, either ax, cant-dog, iron-shod peavey-stick, or cross-cut saw; and the moonshine flashed on the steel surfaces. It was plain that the party viewed its expedition as an opportunity for reckless roistering, and spirits ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... make the obscure transparent, the difficult plain. There is not a Sermon that does not furnish evidence of originality without extravagance, of discrimination without tediousness, and of piety without cant or conventionalism." ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson |
