"Conventional" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Others," one of the inimitable books of Edward Everett Hale, may be enjoyed in comfort. When midday comes the denser shade of tree or porch is sought, and coats come off. At noon dinner is welcome, and proves that the high cost of living is largely a conventional requirement. It may be beans or a bit of roast ham brought from home, with potatoes or tomatoes, good bread and butter, and a dessert of toasted crackers with loganberries and cream. To experience the comfort ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... depends on the conventional regulation of those who use it, it will be constantly changing; new words will be introduced, and the spelling of old ones altered, so as to agree with modern pronounciation. We have all lived long enough to witness the truth of this remark. The only rule we can give in relation to ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... Catherwood found herself on the way, of her own free will, to that Richmond from which she had recently escaped with so much trouble. There was no reason, real or conventional, why she should not go, as the precious pass from the Secretary removed all danger; and there in Richmond was Miss Grayson, the nearest of her blood. Helen removed the ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... He was a big, sturdy, red-faced man, with a plain bluff manner, an ideal dealer; but his eyes were shrewd and keen. In fact once I had looked into them I put him down as a better man than I had fancied. We exchanged a conventional word on either side, and then both of us instinctively glanced ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his early insipidities show only a capacity for rhyming and for the metrical arrangement of certain conventional combinations of words, a capacity wholly dependent on a delicate physical organization, and an unhappy memory. An early poem is only remarkable when it displays an effort of reason, and the rudest verses in which we ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... navy, and Engineer Melville, destined to bear a name great among Arctic men, together with two navy lieutenants, were assigned to her. The voyage planned was then unique among American Arctic expeditions, for instead of following the conventional route north through Baffin's Bay and Smith Sound, the "Jeannette" sailed from San Francisco and pushed northward through Bering Sea. In July, 1879, she weighed anchor. Two years after, no word having been heard of her ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... la Princesse which certainly was about her, and her especial devotion to Orleans, both to the city and the duke. A shadow of a supposed child of our own Queen Mary has also appeared in history, quite without warrant or likelihood. It is a little conventional and well worn even in the way of romance, yet there are certain ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... conception in order to approach the perfect face—so the poets and the philosophers, with their diverse conceptions of ideal manhood, divide the kingdom of character. "The true man cannot be a fragmentary man," said Plato. Is he not one-sided who masters the conventional refinement and the stock proprieties, yet indulges in drunkenness and gluttony? "Pleasure must not be his sole aim," said the accomplished Chesterfield. "I have enjoyed all the pleasures of the world, and consequently know their futility, and do not ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... schools and medical experts, just as its spiritual truth has been disdained by religious leaders, until it has grown to such strength that laymen are almost forced to question the sincerity and the efficacy of the conventional in religion as well as medicine. In May, 1907, the Emmanuel Church in Boston organized a clinic for the purpose of utilizing for neurasthenics particularly both the spiritual and the physical truths underlying religion ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... studies in which to cultivate the social graces. It was only when he spoke of his own subject that his face was filled with life and soul. At other times he was silent and embarrassed, too conscious of his own limitations in larger subjects, and impatient of that small talk which is the conventional refuge of those who have ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... according to Emerson, by pluck, vigor, independence. "Every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable." They are positive, methodical, cleanly, and formal, loving routine and conventional ways; loving truth and religion, to be sure, but ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... repel. If you desert your chambers, it will be repeated here. At present it is evidently localised. There are laws governing these things; laws as immutable as any other laws in Nature. One of them is this: the powers of darkness (to employ a conventional and significant phrase) cannot triumph over the powers of Will. Below the Godhead, Will is the supreme force of the Universe. Resist! You must resist, or ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... a spot shaded by the bushes, thinking over these things; but it was not long before I had got into my bathing costume. I thought of you, my pious friend, as I was buttoning the neck and the wrists of this conventional garment. How many times have you not helped me to execute this little task about which I was so awkward. Briefly, I entered the water and was about to strike out when the sound of the marchioness's voice assailed my ears. She was talking ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... production by the light of previous experience and of the orders received. According to the capability of each establishment and to the probable demand, the output of each is determined for the next few months. Infractions are punished with heavy conventional mulcts, and even expulsion. The capitalists do not conclude these agreements for the benefit of the public, but to its injury and to their own profit. Their purpose is to utilize the power of combination in order to secure the greatest advantages ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... think," she said, "it would be better if you came at a more conventional hour? I don't feel inclined to gossip on the doorstep and I'm afraid I can't ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... of the nineteenth century, Thomas Henry Huxley, son of an Ealing schoolmaster, was undoubtedly the most noteworthy. His researches in biology, his contributions to scientific controversy, his pungent criticisms of conventional beliefs and thoughts have probably had greater influence than the work of any other English scientist. And yet he was a "self-made" intellectualist. In spite of the fact that his father was a schoolmaster he passed through no regular course of ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... if Browning ever produced any finer long poem, except "Pippa Passes," which is a lyrical drama, and neither exactly a 'play' nor exactly a 'poem' in the conventional usage of the terms. Artistically, "Paracelsus" is disproportionate, and has faults, obtrusive enough to any sensitive ear: but in the main it has a beauty without harshness, a swiftness of thought and speech without tumultuous pressure of ideas or stammering. It has ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... to that of the tiger. We shall find this figure often repeated, and the identification is of importance. This is a case in regard to synonyms. The kind of symbolism so ably treated by Dr. ALLEN is well exemplified in the conventional sign for the crotalus jaw at the mouth of the mask over the head of each figure. This is again found on the body of the snake in Plate LX, and in other places. Other important questions can be settled by comparison of the ...
— Studies in Central American Picture-Writing • Edward S. Holden
... to a particularly large concern, the coal-yard which Hawkins honored by his patronage was much like other coal-yards. The high walls of the storage bins rose from the sidewalk, and there was the conventional arch for the wagons, and the little, ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... his vacillations of hope and despair, had been often elaborated amongst the brethren. But his was a conventional soul; its expression was in the formulae and platitudes of the camp-meeting. They sank into oblivion in the excitement attendant upon Purdee's wild utterances from the ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Dave," growled the sergeant, for the job was not to his liking. Dave did not plunge toward Hale, as the three others expected. On the contrary, he assumed the conventional attitude of the boxer and advanced warily, using his head as a diagnostician for Hale's points—and Hale remembered suddenly that Dave had been away at school for a year. Dave knew something of the game and the Hon. Sam straightway ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... and the emperor. The letter of Pius VII., sent by the hands of Cardinal Caprara, remained unanswered. Alquier alone, who had succeeded Cardinal Fesch at Rome, still informed Napoleon as to the state of feeling there. An old Conventional, intelligent and moderate, the Minister of France, reported to Talleyrand, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, "People are strangely mistaken as to the character of the sovereign pontiff, if they have thought his apparent ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... you have overtaxed yourself rather," I said, in conventional phrase; "I'm afraid you're ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... should have been delivered long ago," was the reply, with a conventional laugh. "If you please, I'll leave them there on my way back. Deucedly stupid blunder on Hafferman's part, I'm ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... thoughtless differentiation between the "bad" and the "good" feeble-minded, we find new evidence of the conventional middle-class bias that also finds expression among some of the eugenists. We do not object to feeble-mindedness simply because it leads to immorality and criminality; nor can we approve of it when it expresses itself in docility, submissiveness ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... volume. His object was twofold. On the one hand, he wished to be true to the Augsburg Confession; on the other hand, he would admit no doctrine that was not clearly supported by Scripture. The book was almost entirely in Scriptural language. The conventional phrases of theology were purposely omitted. In spite of his adherence to the orthodox faith, the writer never used such phrases as Trinity, Original Sin, Person, or Sacrament. He deliberately abandoned the ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... suspected Mary of regarding their possible relation in that light, she would have dismissed her pride, perhaps contempt. Nevertheless the sorely whelmed divine thing in her had uttered a feeble sigh of incipient longing after the real; Mary had begun to draw out the love in her; while her conventional judgment justified the proposed extraordinary proceeding with the argument of the endless advantages to result from having in the house, devoted to her wishes, a young woman with an absolute genius for dressmaking; one capable not only of originating ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... us have a few drops, at least, of gypsy blood in us, and in this land of sunshine and the open road we all become vagabonds as far as our conventional upbringing will let us. When you know that it won't rain from May to October, and the country is full of the most lovely and picturesque spots, how can you help at ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... and the English, though embarrassed, would not have been censorious. By so much has war brought to us an understanding of the simple honest hearts of our closest Allies. In ceasing to be insular we are ceasing to worship our wooden conventional gods. ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... of Thorpe Ambrose (built after the pulling down of the dilapidated old manor-house) was barely fifty years old. Nothing picturesque, nothing in the slightest degree suggestive of mystery and romance, appeared in any part of it. It was a purely conventional country house—the product of the classical idea filtered judiciously through the commercial English mind. Viewed on the outer side, it presented the spectacle of a modern manufactory trying to look ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... some beehives; the S—— house, where we boarded, and I fell down and broke a bone; the L—— house, where also we boarded, and there were many young girls. There I dreamed of an angel,—a person about eight feet long, flying along past the second-story side-windows, in the conventional horizontal attitude, so suggestive of a "crick in the neck," with great, wide wings, tooting through a trumpet as long as himself; and out of each temple, as I distinctly remember, grew a thing like a knitting-needle, with a cherry ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... morning and assuming his favourite attitude before us treated us to a little homily. It was a characteristic tirade delivered in the conventional Teuton gramophone manner. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... now become their pleasure, and, with the English genius of doing what they like, it may be that they overdo their pleasure. But at the worst the effect is more interesting than our uniformity. The conventional evening dress alone remains inviolate, but how long this will remain, who can say? The simple-hearted American, arriving with his scrupulous dress suit in London, may yet find himself going out to dinner with a company of Englishmen in white linen ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... that these figures must at one time have been more directly imitative. However that may have been, the image must have been very imperfect from the day that the rectilinear trace came into general use. Figures must then have rapidly degenerated into conventional signs. Those who used them could no longer pretend to actually represent the objects they wished to denote. They must have been content to suggest their ideas by means of a character whose value had been determined by usage. ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... received a letter from Madame Lalande—the beautiful, the wealthy, the idolized Madame Lalande. Her eyes—her magnificent eyes, had not belied her noble heart. Like a true Frenchwoman as she was she had obeyed the frank dictates of her reason—the generous impulses of her nature—despising the conventional pruderies of the world. She had not scorned my proposals. She had not sheltered herself in silence. She had not returned my letter unopened. She had even sent me, in reply, one penned by her own ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... opinion of Auguste Comte, that "the only true and firm friendship is that between man and woman, because it is the only one free from all possible competition." And she adds, "In this I am inclined to agree with him, and to regret that our conventional morality, or immorality, places men and women in such a relation socially as to render such friendships difficult and rare." Sydney Smith said, and the remark applies as forcibly to America as to ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... saddle and bridle. It was only the two eldest girls who had known him as a continual presence; and the intervening years had overlaid their infantine memories with a bashfulness which Grandcourt's bearing was not likely to dissipate. He and Lydia occasionally, in the presence of the servants, made a conventional remark; otherwise they never spoke; and the stagnant thought in Grandcourt's mind all the while was of his own infatuation in having given her those diamonds, which obliged him to incur the nuisance of speaking about them. He had an ingrained care for what ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... conventional in painting as in sculpture; it should result naturally from the good arrangement of the essential parts. The combined preparation of effect which implies perspective and colour will approach more or less the actual aspect of things, according ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... provincial associations. But so little did the nobility care for political power and active class prerogative that, in spite of the broadest possible charters, the associations of nobles were never more than social organizations in the conventional sense of the word. ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... cost them their positions, they have no right to bear aloft the banner of Him who rejected all life's comforts, all honor of the rich and cultured, respect, power, and popularity; who, turning His back at once on ease and conventional thought, chose to live without a roof, save the azure dome, that by mingling among the poor, the sin-diseased and miserables of his people, He might ease their suffering, bring sunshine into their darkened and wretched abodes, and lift them from the sewers ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... seriously. In her tone was no trace of impudence. She had divined her adversary's secret, and thrust home the question with a kind of anxious honesty. Miss Bracy, red and gasping, tingling with shame, yet knew that she was not being exulted over. She dropped the unequal fight between conventional argument and naked insight, and stood up, woman to woman. She neither denied nor exclaimed. She too told ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... quiet evidence of a defiant spirit hidden somewhere down under her general timidity, that, against a fierce conventional prohibition, she wore a bonnet instead of the turban of her caste, and carried ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... and arrogance of fashion should not prevent the son of a Scotch peasant from acquiring, or attempting to acquire, the conventional habits and manners of a gentleman. If he have already the grace of high culture, he should seek to add to it the knowledge of social laws, which will render him an agreeable person to be met in society. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... keen sportsman, and dearly loved a day with his gun. As a boy, on his own Highland hills, he had been addicted to sporting a good deal without the formality of a licence, and the absolute freedom from conventional trammels in the wild North was a source of much gratulation to him. Perhaps he enjoyed his outings all the more that he was a stern disciplinarian—so deeply impressed with a sense of duty that he would neither allow himself nor ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... man; he abhorred him in both relations. With them, the prejudice of race made the negro hateful only when he trenched on the sacred domain of their superior and self-controlling manhood; with him, hatred of the race overleaped the conventional relation and included the African wherever found, however employed, or in whatsoever relation considered. His horror of the black far overtopped his ancient antipathy to the slave. The fact that he is an exception, and that the extravagant rhodomontades of "Nojoque" are ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... was bred," she replied in that plain manner of hers, so plain indeed that conventional people sometimes complained of it as rude. "That's ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... king. And the son standing by his father's side is a reminder in his name of a disagreeable truth.[116] A little later the man is actually required to go about barefooted, and without clothing sufficient for conventional respectability, and to continue this for three years.[117] When we remember that he was not an erratic extremist, but a sober-minded, fine-grained gentleman of refinement and of a good family, it ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... Paul et Virginie, which Doggie, after reading it, thought the truest and most beautiful story in the world. Even in later years, when his intelligence had ripened and his sphere of reading expanded, he looked upon the passion of a Romeo or an Othello as a conventional peg on which the poet hung his imagery, but having no more relation to real life as it is lived by human beings than the blood-lust of the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, or the uncomfortable riding conversation ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the direction whence the shot came, realized with savage disgust that the space-hero had come after all. There stood a gorgeous young spark in absolutely conventional space-hero costume, not forgetting the top-boots or the close-clipped moustache. Parr moved back, as if to allow this young demigod ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... had practically no preparation at all for the stir and emotions of adolescence. Towards the young the world maintained a conspiracy of stimulating silences. There came no initiation. There were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind that insisted on certain qualities in every love affair and greatly intensified one's natural desire for them, perfect trust, perfect loyalty, lifelong devotion. Much of the complex essentials of love were altogether hidden. One read these things, got accidental glimpses of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... the stake, questioned and cross-questioned, and insulted, finally, beyond even his faculty of endurance, he breaks forth, at last, in strains of indignation that overleap all arbitrary and conventional bounds, that are only the more terrible for having been so long suppressed. Kent himself, when he 'came between the dragon and his ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... allowances for conventional exaggerations, it is clear from the correspondence that there was deep love between Marcus and his preceptor. The letters cover several years in succession, but soon after the birth of Marcus's daughter, Faustina, there is a large gap. It does not follow that the letters ceased ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... and conventional it may sound, it is the literal fact that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but offered in secret and in all sincerity at the Throne ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... abide. The philosophy, the religion, the tolerance, the civil forms, which are broad enough to suit the common people, must be nearly as broad as truth itself, and therefore as unconquerable. But the broader they appear, the more must they be offensive to the orthodox and conventional, who by the instinct of self-preservation will be impelled to attack them. There was never a more obvious chain of cause and effect than that which is revealed in the history of the United States; and having shown the conditions which led to the planting in the wilderness ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... pounds for the finding of Sir Gibbie, she rented a little shop in the gallery of the market, where she sold such things as she had carried about the country, adding to her stock, upon the likelihood of demand, without respect to unity either conventional or real, in the character of the wares she associated. The interest and respectability of this new start in life, made a little fresh opposition to the inroads of her besetting sin; so that now she did not consume as much whisky in three days as she did in one when ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... work of great difficulty. Could there be a systematic arrangement of all those known, with their definitions, it would be a very valuable work of reference,—a work in which one might pounce upon all the sacred symbols, classic types, signs, heraldic zoology, conventional botany, monograms, and the like ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... course to their landings, the officers might have been able to say at what hour we should reach our destination. As it was, they merely reiterated the characteristic "Ne znaem" (We don't know), which possesses plural powers of irritation when uttered in the conventional half-drawl. Perhaps they really did not know. Owing to a recent decree in the imperial navy, officers who have served a certain number of years without having accomplished a stipulated amount of sea service are retired. Since the Russian war ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... in detail. Situation follows situation in rapid success, demanding close attention to keep clear of the meshes of involvement. The writings of the Negro are full of soul. If, at times, there is a lacking of aptness in conventional adjustments, the hiatus is beautifully abridged with a freshness and wealth of expression that ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... general principles, [Footnote: Cf. Olmstead, Sargon, 111.] but now we have the proof that it is only history as the scribe would like it to have been written. For the new inscription, while giving the conventional picture of the despair of the defeated king, says not a word of any suicide. [Footnote: Tabl. 411ff.] However, the tablet does elsewhere mention the sickness of Rusash, [Footnote: Ibid. 115.] and it may well be that ...
— Assyrian Historiography • Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead
... pause, he therefore arrives at that point in which the whole circle of human science is to be explained. Symbols, we know, are in themselves arbitrary and of conventional signification, and the complete circle of human science might have been as well symbolized by any other sign or series of doctrines as by the seven liberal arts and sciences. But Masonry is an institution of the olden time; and this selection of the liberal arts and sciences as a symbol of the ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... for a minute," said Miss Pettigrew. "We've got to get Lalage out of this. I'm not given to taking conventional views of things and I'm the last woman in Ireland to want to make girls conform to the standard of what's called ladylikeness. But Lalage has gone too far. The newspapers are full of her and that's ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... quae nunc praescribere longum," said the Abbot, summing, with his own lordly voice, the advantages attached to the office of conventional bow-bearer. ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... condition of the free blacks in your Northern communities. If, in the early portion of their life, they escape the contempt and derision of their white associates—if the blessed unconsciousness and ignorance of childhood keeps them for a few years unaware of the conventional proscription under which their whole race is placed (and it is difficult to walk your streets, and mark the tone of insolent superiority assumed by even the gutter-urchins over their dusky cotemporaries, and imagine this possible)—as soon ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... himself in jumper and overalls on his way from work of an evening—meeting the Whitneys—meeting Janet Whitney! Like all Americans, who become inoculated with "grand ideas," he had the super-sensitiveness to appearances that makes foreigners call us the most snobbishly conventional people on earth. What would it avail to be in character the refined person in the community and in position the admired person, if he spent his days at menial toil and wore the livery of labor? He knew Janet Whitney would blush ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... consideration for the rights and feelings of others." And this is a good enough working standard for anybody. The Dictionary is careful to make—and this is important—a gentleman not one who conforms to an outward and conventional standard, but one who follows an inward ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... little in his chair, then said he blasphemously, "Marriage is the sin against the Holy Ghost. Don't be the conventional woman, Joan. Isn't this beautiful, this life ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... "It's conventional enough," he began. "Ghosts don't seem to have much originality. But it's firsthand, Jack, if that's what you want. I don't suppose any of you have ever heard me speak of my brother, Charles. He was my senior by two years, and was a quiet, reserved sort of fellow—not at all demonstrative, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... form: State of Eritrea conventional short form: Eritrea local long form: Hagere Ertra former: Eritrea Autonomous Region in Ethiopia ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... all the constellations in the political sky whose movements it has to compute, those must be included which arise when the nature of its relations imposes the necessity of a great War. It is only if we understand by policy not a true appreciation of affairs in general, but the conventional conception of a cautious, subtle, also dishonest craftiness, averse from violence, that the latter kind of War may belong more to policy ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... something, and on closer examination it is demonstrated that it was only a passing glance they threw on it. And it is still worse where something more than ordinary perception is being considered, when exceptionally keen senses or information are necessary. People trust the conventional and when close observation is required often lack the knowledge proper to their particular status. In this way, by presupposing especial professional knowledge in a given witness, great mistakes are ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Guardian.—'Bell's talk is full of salt and vivacity, a brilliant stream in which city slang reinforces rustic idiom, and both are re-manipulated by inexhaustible native wit. She is the most remarkable creation in a gallery where not a single figure is indistinct or conventional.... Mr. Gibson's essay—for there is confessedly something experimental about it—must be reckoned, with those of Mr. Abercrombie, to whom "Krindlesyke" is dedicated, among the most remarkable ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... all the woman said that made Howard feel she'd make the attempt. She didn't know that the struggle for a. place to stand on this planet was eating the heart and soul out of men and women in the city, just as in the country. But he could say nothing. If be had said in conventional phrase, sitting there in his soft clothing, "We must make the best of it all," the woman could justly have thrown the dishcloth in his face. He ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... successful; certainly not in this instance. They are mostly broad caricatures, and speak an outlandish jargon, more like Welsh than Irish, supposed to be the Ulster dialect: anything more unlike it would be difficult to conceive. The early conventional stage Irishman, tracing him from Captain. Macmorris in Henry V.,through Ben Jonson's Irish Masque and New Inn, Dekker's Bryan, Ford's Mayor of Cork, Shadwell's O'Divelly (probably Farquhar's model for Foigard), is truly a wondrous savage, chiefly distinguished by his use of the expletives ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... prim. She knew too much of the world to be easily shocked, in the old conventional sense. Besides, her Bleary Street work had brought her into contact with girls who had gone to the bad, and she had not found them different from other girls. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... are familiar to the student, and yet it is doubtful if they have been fully considered in connection with American democracy. For a century at least, in conventional expression, Americans have referred to a "glorious Constitution" in explaining the stability and prosperity of their democracy. We have believed as a nation that other peoples had only to will our democratic institutions in order ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... second place, the author of the rmur made precisely the changes that were necessary to remove the most irrational features of the story as we find it in the Hrlfssaga. The troll-dragon, which is an unusual creature, has been supplanted by the more conventional creatures, a wolf and a bear; and by the employment of two animals, the necessity of causing a dead animal to be propped up and be apparently killed again, is avoided. Consistency in the treatment of Bjarki as the descendant of a bear is also observed to the ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... a great deal to startle your commercial New Yorker. The small tailor, standing in his doorway, seemed in no way surprised at the spectacle of Archie, whom he had seen pass at a conventional walk some five minutes before, returning like this at top speed. He assumed that Archie had suddenly remembered that he wanted ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... is, Norman," she said, suddenly. "What music has ever equaled the whispers of the night-wind? It seems a sad pity after all that we are obliged to lead such conventional lives, and spend the greater part of them ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... use the results in forming for themselves any of the larger conclusions about organisms. Seeing and knowing—without the ability and habit of thinking—is not an uncommon or surprising result of our conventional laboratory work. There is only one way to get the habit of right "following through" in reasoning; this is, always to do the thing. When data are observed or are furnished it is a pedagogical sin on the part of the teacher ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... combined to produce his conception of virtue. First, in opposition to the Heraclitean doctrine of perpetual change, he contended for something real and permanent. Second, in antagonism to the Sophistic theory of the conventional origin of the moral law, he maintained that man's chief end was the good which was fixed in the eternal nature of things, and did not consist in the pursuit of transient pleasures. Hence, in two respects, Plato goes beyond Socrates. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... used both a darker and a lighter shade. Red was used to represent the human flesh, apparently from its being nearer the natural tint than any other simple colour; but many of their colours were evidently applied with a conventional meaning, for the representation of different races. The conquered people represented in the great temple of Abonsambel, or Ipsambul, have yellow bodies and black beards. In the grottoes of El Cab, the ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... as the inspiring motive in art instruction and toward social activities as factors in school training have been felt in other countries than our own. Germany has replaced the conventional art instruction by a system based upon the study of natural forms, growths, and coloring, and Belgium presents a remarkable object lesson in the use of local products and industries in a progressive scheme of practical instruction. ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... for L180), and of their successors, is the employment of small stamps, from half an inch to an inch in size, sometimes circular, more often square or pear-shaped, and containing figures, grotesques, or purely conventional designs. A circle, or two half-circles, formed by the repetition of one stamp, within one or more rectangles formed by others, is perhaps the commonest scheme of decoration, but it is the characteristic of these bindings, as of the finest in gold ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... every roadside. But some statues of Jiz[:o] are said to do uncanny things—such as to walk about at night in various disguises. A statue of this kind is called a Bak['e]-Jiz[o][56],—meaning a Jiz[o]; that undergoes transformation. A conventional picture shows a little boy about to place the customary child's-offering of rice-cakes before the stone image of Jiz[o],—not suspecting that the statue moves, and is slowly bending down ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... deal of pretty bowing, and each was the other's 'most obedient,' and declared himself honoured; and the conventional parenthesis ended, things ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... more marked. The introduction of the cigarette completed what the cigar had begun; barriers and prejudices crumbled and disappeared with increasing rapidity; until at the present day tobacco-smoking in England—by pipe or cigar or cigarette—is more general, more continuous, and more free from conventional restrictions than at any period since the early days of its triumph in the first decades ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... did take it out of the men, the old-time conventional setting-up exercises were shirked and the leaders were unable to detect this shirking; men went through the motions, but ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... to the door at the ringing of the bell, stared with astonishment at the unusual figure of Pownal's companion, but if disposed, as is the habit of his class, to be deficient in respect to one not bearing the conventional stamp, a glance of the young man's eye, and his marked deference toward the stranger, to say nothing of the latter's natural air of authority, soon restored his courtesy and usual obsequious attention. It was, therefore, with a gracious expression of ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... dependants, but marvellously suave in his manner to admiring strangers. These contrasted displays must have been particularly exasperating to his longsuffering family. After his second wife's death his boy, whom he persisted by a mere whim in educating at home, ran away in conventional style and, as if disgusted with the amenities of civilisation, threw himself, figuratively speaking, into the sea. The daughter (the elder of the two children) either from compassion or because women are naturally more enduring, remained in bondage to the ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... often a part of them, are the frequent synonyms so characteristic of Old English poetry. These synonymous expressions are known as "kennings." They are not to be thought of as occasional metaphors employed at the whim of the poet; they had, in most cases, already received a conventional meaning. Thus the king was always spoken of as "ring giver," "protector of earls," or "bracelet bestower." The queen was the "weaver of peace"; the sea the "ship road," or "whale ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... persons, both men of marvelous spiritual vision. The Song of Solomon was originally probably a Persian love-poem. The book of Job illustrates the human-mind problem of suffering, and the utter inadequacy of philosophy to heal it. It is a ringing protest against conventional theology. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... who can break a mainspring first and keep it from getting mended, is often the most esteemed in the community. Those who have broken the most, "secure results." The spectacle of the mechanical, barren, conventional society so common in the present day to all who love their kind is a sign there is no withstanding. It is a spectacle we can only stand and watch—some of us,—the huge, dreary kinetoscope of it, grinding its cogs and wheels, and swinging its weary faces ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and bones of seven thousand dead collected in the neighbourhood, washed clean with white wine and set out in neat rows, the majority Italian. A good warning, one would think, against war, and more compact and less wasteful of space than a conventional graveyard. ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... make them earnest in agricultural pursuits; we must elevate the character of labour; we must encourage the mechanic, and give tone to his pursuits; and, more than all, we must arrest the spread of conventional nonsense, and develope our natural resources by establishing a system of paid labour, and removing the odium which attaches itself to those who pursue such avocations as the slave may be engaged in. My word for it, Mr. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... fifteen hundred feet below snow-level. And why? Because it's too cold for them? Oh, dear, no: on sunny days in early English spring, when the thermometer doesn't rise above freezing in the shade, you will see both the honey-bees and the great black bumble as busy as their conventional character demands of them among the golden cups of the first timid crocuses. Give the bee sunshine, indeed, with a temperature just about freezing-point, and he'll flit about joyously on his communistic errand. But bees, one must remember, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... discovered that she was not ignorant even of books, but with no literary effect from them she had transmitted her reading into the substance of her native gentleness, and had both ideas and convictions. When Clementina most affected her as an untried wilderness in the conventional things she most felt her equality to any social fortune that might befall her, and then she would have liked to see her married to a title, and taking the glory of this world with an unconsciousness that experience would never wholly penetrate. But then again she felt that this would be somehow ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... science. Certainly I would welcome a physical proof that my mother still thinks and lives, and that Ernest and other of my dearest friends are at work on other planes and surrounded by other conditions, no matter how different from the conventional idea of paradise these environments might be; but the proof must be ample and ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I lost much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And since elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I surrounded myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is the business of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some persons after knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others after reading my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... am forced to admit even now, saturated though I now am with the æsthetics of different schools, is inherent in Cabanel's work; but at the time I am writing of my nature was too young and mobile to resist the conventional attractiveness of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, slender hips and hands, and I accepted Jules Lefebvre wholly and unconditionally. He hesitated, however, when I asked to be taken as a private pupil, but he wrote out the address of a studio ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... looking criminal," commented Ashton-Kirk, quietly. "However, you can seldom judge by appearances. The most astonishing crime that ever came to my notice was perpetrated by the meekest and most conventional man I had ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... has brought about an attempt to standardize spelling into conventional forms any departure from which is regarded as highly derogatory to the writer. In many cases these forms are fixed arbitrarily, and in some there is even now disagreement among the highest authorities. These difficulties and disagreements have two reasons: First, English is a composite ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... said Jem, turning with a smile to Louisa, 'is a noble animal in a comparatively natural state, quite free from the harness in which a conventional hack ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... about the stage in diaphanous costumes, with conventional mimicry and arm action, is classic or beautiful is a mistake; the term aesthetic may cover, but not redeem it. There is not even the art of the ordinary ballet-dancer discernible ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... were the bright-turbaned negresses, the gay Creole gowns and scarfs, the linen-jacketed, broad-hatted merchants, with those of soberer and more conventional dress, laughing and chatting, the children playing despite the heat. Many of these people greeted Monsieur Vigo. There were the saturnine, long-cloaked Spaniards, too, and a greater number than I had ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... violently assailed the whole body of editors, sub-editors, reporters, etc., of most of the papers of any note. And the more accustomed he became to the House of Commons, the greater liberties did he take with the conventional fairness and courtesy of debate. His personality and scurrility were so indiscriminating and excessive that he was perhaps at this time the most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... all too likely to overcome his deliberate resolves. She rather hoped that in spite of his promise he would venture to cross the border so that she could see and be near him, if only for a day or for an hour. The possibility frightened and yet pleased her. The conventional woman within her frowned, but her outlaw heart beat ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... as the type of self-sufficient stupidity and conceit—a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs, more conventional than fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... was; at least, for me. It became almost an obsession. I could see it as I sat down to my work. And the first thing I knew I was writing Fannie into my play. There was a maid's part in it,—the conventional, table-dusting, note-carrying, tea-serving maid, with not half a dozen words to speak. But before I knew it this insignificant part had become so elaborated, I had sketched in Fannie's personality so vividly, that the whole action ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... by levying exorbitant contributions, and connived at such outrages as degraded his own dignity, and reflected disgrace on the character of his nation. The court of London, to make a merit of necessity, affected to consider the conventional act as a provisional armistice, to pave the way for a negotiation that might terminate in a general peace, and proposals were offered for that purpose; but the French ministry kept aloof, and seemed resolved that the electorate of Hanover ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... if it were you that went, they'd have no mother. Either way it's a pity, normally. Also, even if we stayed together always and weren't married, they'd have no legal name. Children often miss that, later on. Children of the school age are the most conventional, hide-bound creatures. They'd ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... extraction; but, though her parents were from the old country, she herself was born in Massachusetts, where for a time she had been a school-teacher. This, then, with the exception of two months at the village school, was the limit of young Edison's education—to use the conventional term. The world was now to take him in hand, and show what it could do with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... conventional long form: Republic of Iceland conventional short form: Iceland local long form : Lyoveldio Island ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Ellery Charming came up the avenue to join me in a fishing excursion on the river. Strange and happy times were those when we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes and delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the Indians or any less conventional race during one bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we turned aside into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a mile above its junction with the Concord, has never flowed on earth, ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... simply an attempt, and a big one in size, to amadigauliser, as the literary slang of the time went. The Histoire Veritable, owing nothing but its title and part of its idea to Lucian, and sub-titled Les Princes Fortunes, is less conventional. It has a large fancy map for a frontispiece; there are fairies in it, and a sort of pot-pourri of queernesses which might not impossibly have come from the author or editor of the Moyen in his less inconveniently ultra-Pantagruelist moments. Le ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... there may be about that often used and often misused word, I believe all who hear me will agree with me in believing from their hearts, and not merely in saying in conventional phrase, that the civilisation which does not carry the whole people with it, is doomed to fall, and give place to one which at least aims at ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... recognize and protect the original owners, or their assigns to whom they may convey the right, in an exclusive privilege for limited terms only. Literary property therefore is not a natural right, but a conventional one. The author's right to his manuscript is, indeed, absolute, and the law will protect him in it as fully as it will guard any other property. But when once put in type and multiplied through the printing-press, his claim to an exclusive right has to be guarded by a special statute, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... entry includes all forms of the country's name approved by the US Board on Geographic Names (Italy is used as an example): conventional long form (Italian Republic), conventional short form (Italy), local long form (Repubblica Italiana), local short form (Italia), former (Kingdom of Italy), as well as the abbreviation. See the Terminology note regarding the use of the ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the rudiments of the Roman drama, the rudiments of Roman historical composition belong to this period; both as regards the contemporary recording of remarkable events, and as regards the conventional settlement of the early ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... outburst of hatred against England in Germany is responsible for a new form of greeting which has displaced the conventional formulas of salutation and farewell: "God punish England!" ("Gott strafe England!") is the form of address, to which the reply is: "May God punish ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... praise him. When some one called him "good Master," he answered, quickly, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good save one, that is, God." But this simplicity has been taken with deprecation by his church, which persists in heaping compliments upon him in conventional, courtly style: ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... days and then advising him to eat once a day only, the ulcer became very much smaller, and no operation has had to be performed. Blood-poisoning of this nature, of course, is not caused by improper nutrition, but it may readily be believed to be aggravated by the ordinary conventional over-feeding to which, so far as I can see, we are all subjecting ourselves, especially as persons who put themselves in the way of contracting blood-poisoning do not generally belong to the class of those who ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... promptly done all he could, in every nook and corner, to obtain influence, and to find the means (of righting his position,) when he, unexpectedly, came across Yue-ts'un, to whom he therefore lost no time in offering his congratulations. The two friends exchanged the conventional salutations, and Chang Ju-kuei forthwith communicated the tidings ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... open!" repeat I, indistinctly. "How pleased he must have been, and what sort of a nose was it? already hooked? It never could have been the conventional button, that I am sure of; yours was, I dare say, but his—never. Good Heavens!" (with a sudden change of tone, and disappearance of mirth) "here he is! Come to look for you, no doubt! I—I—think I may ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... physics and chemistry he took his two coaches in literature and history into the Curry County hunting region of southwestern Oregon. He had learned the trick from his father, and he worked, and played, lived in the open air, and did three conventional years of adolescent education in one year without straining himself. He fished, hunted, swam, exercised, and equipped himself for the university at the same time. And he made no mistake. He knew that he did it because his father's twenty ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... chapter (chap. vi.) he returns to this subject, and emphasises the differences of the views of the ethical-minded man and the ordinary conventional materialist, in ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... to the other two plays here presented. It belongs to the school of Scribe and the "soliloquy," and the author avails himself of the recognised dramatic conventions of the day. At the same time, though the characters may be conventional in type, they are, thanks to Bjornson's sense of humour, alive; and the theme of the estrangement and reconciliation of the "newly-married couple" is treated with delicacy and charm. It is true that it is almost unbelievable that the ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... of the vocal bands. All use of the voice implies this much, but in most instances there are associated nervous mechanisms and ideas that are highly important in determining the exact volume, quality, etc., of the tone as related to expression of ideas and feelings according to conventional usage. ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... had struck him especially, although there was nothing conventional about her at all. He laughed weakly at the recollection, for she had been as innocent of garb as Eve before the fig-leaf adventure. Squat and lean at the same time, asymmetrically limbed, string-muscled as if with lengths of cordage, dirt-caked from infancy save for casual showers, she ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... plan a fair trial, but her boys must have been darker characters than Mrs. E——'s, for it merely set them to watching each other, so that they might cry out, "Pandy yourself quick, Miss Ailie; Gavin Dishart's drawing the devil on his slate." Nevertheless, when Miss Ailie announced a return to more conventional methods, Francie was put up (with threats) to say that he suffered agonies of remorse every time she pandied herself for him, but the thing had been organized in a hurry and Francie was insufficiently primed, and on cross-examination he let out that he thought remorse was a swelling ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... do not mean Etiquette. This is only a conventional set of rules adopted by what is called "good society;" and many of the rules of etiquette are of the essence of rudeness. Etiquette does not permit genteel people to recognize in the streets a man with a shabby coat ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... are joking or when serious." Brother Warboise, leaning on his staff, pondered Brother Copas's face. It was a fine face; it even resembled the conventional portrait of Dante, but—I am asking the reader to tax his imagination—with humorous wrinkles set about the eyes, their high austerity clean taken away and replaced by a look of very mundane shrewdness, and lastly a grosser chin and mouth ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... searching for new regions in the Art to which I am a servant, it seemed to me that they might be found lying far, and rarely trodden, beyond that range of conventional morality in which Novelist after Novelist had entrenched himself—amongst those subtle recesses in the ethics of human life in which Truth and Falsehood dwell undisturbed and unseparated. The vast and dark Poetry around us—the Poetry of Modern Civilisation and Daily Existence, is shut out from ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... "you must traffic with cans and pails, Nor keep the spoil of the good brown soil in the rim of your finger-nails! The morning path you must tread to your bath—you must wash ere the night descends, And all for the cause of conventional laws and the soap-makers' dividends! But if 'tis sooth that our meal in truth depends on our washing, Jill, By the sacred right of our appetite—haste—haste to the top of ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... their confederacy, the Delawares of the Susquehanna, the Mohegans, and several kindred bands, all had their representatives at the meeting. The conferences lasted nineteen days, with the inevitable formalities of such occasions, and the weary repetition of conventional metaphors and long-winded speeches. At length, every difficulty being settled, the Governor of Pennsylvania, in behalf of all the English, rose with a wampum belt in his hand, and addressed the tawny congregation thus: "By this belt we heal your wounds; we remove your grief; ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... beam. Here stood a large square bed covered with silken pillows, mattresses and blankets. The frame work of the bed was also of the Chinese blackwood and carried, especially on the posts that held the roof-like canopy, finely executed carvings with the chief motive the conventional dragon devouring the sun. By the side stood a chest of drawers completely covered with carvings setting forth religious pictures. Four comfortable easy chairs completed the furniture, save for the low oriental throne which stood on a dais at ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... slaves it is permissible for women in some circumstances to propose marriage. Even in England it is so, where society is like a huge Clapham Junction, with human creatures moving like trucks and carriages on cast-iron, conventional rails, which they can only leave at the risk of a destructive collision. And a proposal of the kind was never more justifiable than in this case. Shut away from the sight of men in her dreary seclusion, haunted by nameless fears, her offer was to bestow her hand along ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... spirit which alienated Byron from his native land, because that great genius rebelled against the monotony, dullness, and pettiness of his country. It was Puritanism, too, that forced some of England's freest women into the conventional lie of marriage: Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, George Eliot. And recently Puritanism has demanded another toll—the life of Oscar Wilde. In fact, Puritanism has never ceased to be the most pernicious factor ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... most direct road to the attainment of justice rather than any longer and more indirect ones, of which it is at best doubtful whether they will attain the end at all. For be it remembered the moment you tamper with the sacredness of private property, no matter how mildly, you surrender the conventional bourgeois principle of justice, while the moment you talk of compensation you surrender the Socialist principle of justice, for compensation can only be real if it is adequate, and can only be adequate if it counterbalances, and thereby annuls, ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... natural right. I do not believe that society is authorized to impose any limitations upon it that do not spring out of the necessities of the social state itself. Sir, I have been shocked, in the course of this debate, to hear Senators declare this right only a conventional and political arrangement, a privilege yielded to you and me and others; not a right in any sense, only a concession! Mr. President, I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On the contrary, I believe ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... done by last Sabbath's sermon, because he had preached it to himself and had got good to himself out of it before he took it to the pulpit. Boston kept his eye on himself in a way that the minister of Mansoul himself could not have excelled. Till, not in his pulpit work only, but in such conventional, commonplace, and monotonous exercises as his family worship, he so read the Scriptures and so sang the psalms that his family worship was continually yielding him fruit as well as his public ministry. ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... by clockwork and provided with graduated circles, right ascensions and declinations are not given. All of the telescopic phenomena described are, however, represented in the maps. Star clusters are indicated by a conventional symbol, and nebulae by a little white circle; while a small cross serves to mark the places where notable new stars have appeared. The relative magnitudes of the stars are approximately shown by the dimensions of their symbols in the maps, the smaller stars being represented by white dots and ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... while, a certain mental as well as physical luxury in relaxation of rule and precept, permitting us a simplicity which sometimes, I think, becomes something less harmless. There is luxury in letting go of that live wire which keeps us all keyed to one conventional monotone in the North. I let go—for a moment—to-night. You let go when you said 'Calypso.' You couldn't have said it in New York; I couldn't have heard you, there.... Alas, Ulysses, I should not have heard you anywhere. But I ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... he was in agreement with it, they had a way of becoming reticent in the very moment of expansion. The current of sympathy was broken, and as often as not they turned the conversation altogether into a conventional and less interesting channel. That change of manner became apparent now. Sybil Linforth leaned back ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... sometimes in couples and trios and groups, left their chairs at command and performed the conventional dog tricks such as walking on hind-legs, hopping, limping, waltzing, and throwing somersaults. Wilton Davis's temper was short and his hand heavy throughout the rehearsal, as the shrill yelps of pain from the lagging ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... thought sea fights jolly, too, for he generally selected them as decoration for his clocks. I have heard there were two men in Roxbury who painted all his glass for him; one of them did lacy patterns of conventional design, and the other did naval battles. This fact helps us some in identifying genuine Willards. Of course the decoration could be copied by others; but add to it other hallmarks typical and now well-known and a ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... you called here first that afternoon. Mamma had asked you to, and you thought you might as well be civil; perhaps you really did think it would be pleasant to see us again—but it wasn't the same thing. Oh, I saw it in your face directly—you became conventional and distant and horrid, and it made me horrid too; and you went away determined that you wouldn't see any more of us than you could help. That's why I was so furious when I heard that papa had been to see you, ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... his examination as soon as possible, hospitality forced him to suggest dinner first, and I was surprised at the alacrity with which the visitor concurred, knowing, as I did, his intense interest in the case. But, after a few conventional remarks to the General and Myra, I was about to show him to his room when he ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... not marry until he was about forty. His wife was scarcely twenty. Of his courtship we know nothing, but sure it is Socrates did not go and sue for the lady's hand in the conventional way, nor seek to gain the consent of her parents by proving his worldly prospects. His apparel was costly as his purse could buy, not gaudy nor expressed in fancy. It consisted of the one suit that he wore, for we hear of his repairing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... been planned with reference to the ultimate possible good. I'm a renegade if you like, a hoyden with a shrewd sense of personal morality but with no other sense whatever. I was born under a mad moon with some wild humor in my blood from an earlier incarnation and I can't—I simply can't be conventional. I've tried doing as other—and nicer—girls do but it wearies me to the point of distraction. Their lives are so pale, so empty, so full of pretensions. They have always seemed so. When I used to romp like a boy my elders told me it was an unnatural way for ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... talk to him over the banisters when he returns; it's a little ungracious, I suppose, after all he has done, but it's more conventional.... And I'll sit here and read until they send somebody from Sandcrest with a gown I can travel in.... And then we'll catch ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... his mind is a storehouse of all the liveliest imageries of men and things. Nothing, if it really arrests eye or ear at all, is too trivial to note. Passing through the crowd of human beings, he notes the sounds alike of their solemn hymns and of their pettiest handicraft. A conventional philosopher might speak of "dumb matter," for instance; but Plato has lingered too long in braziers' workshops to lapse into so stupid an epithet. And if the persistent hold of sensible things upon him thus reveals itself in trifles, it is manifest no less in the ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Customs, in making his report, departed from the conventional forms so far as to suggest that the confiscated vessel be converted to the use of the government. The prize was the first capture to the credit of the department in ten years. The collector took opportunity to pat his ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... respects Anson resembles a rough diamond, his brusque manner and impulsive temper needing the keen polish of the refining wheel of the conventional amenities of life to make his inherent worth shine forth in its full brilliancy. Anson, too, reminds one somewhat of that old Western pioneer, Davy Crockett, inasmuch as his practical motto is, 'When you know you're right, go ahead.' This latter trait was conspicuously shown in the year ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... general depraves men. It places them in conditions of complete idleness, i.e., absence of all useful work; frees them of their common human duties, which it replaces by merely conventional ones to the honour of the regiment, the uniform, the flag; and, while giving them on the one hand absolute power over other men, also puts them into conditions of servile obedience to those of ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy |
