"Grandiose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I can only describe as the atmosphere of Infancy,—and a touching atmosphere it is too—is strengthened by keeping all the figures small and heightening this suggestion by contrast with a grandiose architecture. In both, too, the sacred scenes reveal themselves like visions unseen by the Oberriedt family, who face outward toward the altar and are supposed to be lighted by the actual lights of the church. The whole ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... one would believe it without proof—absolute proof." Then he leaned closer. "To me he made no such absurd claim, but from the way he talked—from his grandiose ideas, his strange philosophy, his fabulous hopes for humanity—I formed the opinion that the man is mad—not wholly mad, you understand, but touched, in one corner of the brain, by a wild hallucination. His daughter, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... any ruling class has been before or since. As Shakespeare is the amplest of poets, so were theirs the most fruitful of courts. From the great Medicis to our own Elizabeth they all partake of a certain grandiose vitality and variety ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... in results that he was grandiose. Hear him on the theme of a completed line, a newly-opened tunnel, or a finished viaduct—it was a Poem! Such a picture of gushing beatitude as he could paint! It was the golden age—prosperity, happiness, and peace on every side; ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... dispensary. The first stage in the journey is now over. Soon a couple of cars creep quietly up. One by one the casualties are lifted in or climb in stiffly. The doctor who has come up with them chats with the M.O., and the local gossip is exchanged for the wider knowledge (or more grandiose rumours) of the field ambulance. Our Jock, who has a bullet in his chest, is lifted in. Straps are fastened securely and tarpaulins tied. 'All aboard, sir!' 'Right! Well, so long, Hadley!' 'Cheero, Scott!' The ambulances start very cautiously, and crawl up the road. It ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... peerage-duchy), stands at the end of the little town close to a great arch which frames it. For buildings, as for men, position does everything. Shaded by a few trees, and thrown into relief by a neatly kept square, this solitary church produces a really grandiose effect. As the post master of Nemours entered the open space, he beheld his uncle with the young girl called Ursula on his arm, both carrying prayer-books and just entering the church. The old man took off his hat in the porch, and his head, ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... America were obliterated in the gust of affectionate noise. Minutes elapsed before that great audience remembered that it was at the play, and that the Prince had come to see the play. It sat down reluctantly, saving itself for his departure, watching him as he entered into enjoyment of the brave and grandiose ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... environment. Those readers desiring sheer exploration can get it in any library: those in search of sheer romantic adventure can purchase plenty of it at any book-stall. But the majority want something different from either of these. They want, first of all, to know what the country is like-not in vague and grandiose "word paintings," nor in strange and foreign sounding words and phrases, but in comparison with something they know. What is it nearest like-Arizona? Surrey? Upper New York? Canada? Mexico? Or is it totally different from anything, as is ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... I think one has to admit that there were two sides to our hero's character. On the one hand was the spirit of Don Quixote, devoted to chivalry, to heroic ideals, to grandiose romantic folly, but lacking the body of the celebrated hidalgo, that thin, bony apology of a body, careless of material wants, capable of going for twenty nights without unbuckling its breastplate and surviving for twenty-four hours on a handful ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... Little Missouri's hostile population. He began with the only man who, in that unstable community, looked solid, and appealed to Gregor Lang, suggesting a union of forces. Lang, who did not like the grandiose Frenchman, bluntly refused to ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... straight into Mrs. Turtle's blue bosom and stuck there. Her eyes, not overintelligent, turned once in her complacent face, then with an air of grandiose detachment, she occupied herself with the ends ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... called upon to decide and to overcome even more difficult problems than the foregoing, and by what colossal forces the levers of his far-flung tale are moved, and how eventually the horizon will become extended until everything assumes a grandiose and a lyrical tendency. Yes, many a verst of road remains to be travelled by a party made up of an elderly gentleman, a britchka of the kind affected by bachelors, a valet named Petrushka, a coachman named Selifan, and three horses which, from the Assessor to ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Doctor pensively and with entire gravity, turning to his assistant, "we shall have to diminish the numbers of the Visiting Committee. My dear friend Hymen planned it, in years gone by, on a war footing; and even so I remember suggesting to him at the time that the scale was somewhat—er—grandiose. But it was characteristic of him, and we have clung to it for that reason, in a spirit perhaps too piously conservative. Forty-two ladies! My good fellow"—he turned to the patient—"I really think— if your leg is equal to it—a short stroll in ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... excused on the ground that these acts were only reprisals against the villainous Spaniard. It was well that these more or less commercial undertakings should be successful, for it became more and more plain to Raleigh that the most grandiose of all his enterprises, his determined effort to colonise Virginia, could but be a drain upon his fortune. After Captain White's final disastrous voyage, Raleigh suspended his efforts in this direction for a while. He leased his patent in Virginia to a company of merchants, on March 7, 1589, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... given. They were usually of massive proportions and of extreme elaboration of marquetry. The North Italian cabinets, and especially those which were made or influenced by the Florentine school, were grandiose and often gloomy. Conceived on a palatial scale, painted or carved, or incrusted with marble and pietra dura, they were intended for the adornment of galleries and lofty bare apartments where they ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Gentleman,—a very opulent, splendid city. A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of permanence for much that is respectable. A great money-centre. San Francisco with the mines above-ground,—and some of 'em under the sidewalks. I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York, in all our cities. It makes 'em all look paltry and petty. Has many elements of civilization. May stop where Venice did, though, for aught we know.—The order of its development is just this:—Wealth; architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture. Printing, as ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... upheld the nobility of the untitled poet almost too strenuously, for his morbid pride makes him appear by all odds the worst snob in the poem. The less dignified contingent of the public annoys the poet by burlesquing the grandiose manners and poses to which his large nature easily lends itself. People are likely to question the poet's powers of soul because he forgets to cut his hair, or to fasten his blouse at the throat. And of course there have been rhymsters who have gone over to the side of the enemy, and who have ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... be sure, we come upon something that makes us hesitate again whether, after all, Dryden was not grandiose rather than great, as in the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... naturalism. Such a school, the creation of an alien Muslim dynasty, would at first sight seem unlikely to produce illustrations of Hindu religion. Its main function was to illustrate works of literature, science and contemporary history—a function which resulted in such grandiose productions as the Akbarnama or Annals of Akbar, now preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum.[74] None the less there are two ways in which Mughal painting, as developed under Akbar, contributed to the Krishna story. Akbar, although ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... simulation of the military is a favorite device. So we find Pseudolus addressing the audience in ringing blustering tones and with grandiose gesture (Ps. 584 ff.): ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... the components of the "struggle for existence," such as Fabre has described it, but with no other motive than to describe what he has observed and seen. Such are the ordinary themes of the grandiose battles which he has scattered through his narratives, and never did circus or arena offer more thrilling spectacles; no jungle ever hid more moving ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... opportunities before the war of forming an estimate of the Kaiser's character. I had only one, and it was not of the best. For years the English traveller abroad felt as if he were always following in the track of a grandiose personality who was playing on the scene of the world as on a stage, fond as an actor of dressing up in fine uniforms, of making pictures, scenes, and impressions, and leaving his visible mark behind him—as in the case of the huge gap in the thick walls of Jerusalem, torn ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... be careful not to give a false impression. Sutton is no palace in miniature, no grandiose expression of the spacious days of Elizabeth, no pompous outcome of Vanbrugh's magnificent mind, no piece of reticent elegance by Adams. Instead, it may well seem to the visiting stranger little more than a fortuitous concourse ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... in state, wearing a grandiose yellow dressing-gown. The change was accomplished just in time. Mr.. Bryany entered, and not only Mr.. Bryany but Mr.. Seven Sachs, and not only these, but the lady who had worn a ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... on. The beginning of weakness in judgment that he was to exhibit soon in the invasion of Russia manifested itself at the same time. His keen calculating ability attained the peak of its curve at Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland. Thereafter, the descent begins. A rash, grandiose, speculative quality enters his projects, and divorces the elaborate coordination of means and end from his plans. That his thyroid energy capacity did not fail him is indicated by the fact that at St. Albans he would ride ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... tomb favored nobles received permission to build their own tombs, similarly equipped but on a smaller, less grandiose scale than that of the pharaoh. By this means the courtiers who had attended the pharaoh in his life-time would be at hand to perform similar services in the after ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... melody in the first movement of Tschaikowsky's "Pathtique" symphony, but becomes more and more transfigured in its passionate loveliness when it aids the beatification of the more than ghoulish princess. There is no escape from the power of the music when it soars to grandiose heights in the duet between Salome 'and the prophet, the subsequent intermezzo and the wicked apotheosis. It overwhelms the senses and reduces the nervous system of the listeners ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... who have ended by triumphing over that double anguish, equally agonizing, of soul and body. Such men will well understand the lancinating pains of the cancer which was now consuming Athanase; they have gone through those long and bitter deliberations made in presence of some grandiose purpose they had not the means to carry out; they have endured those secret miscarriages in which the fructifying seed of genius falls on arid soil. Such men know that the grandeur of desires is ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... of wolves they watch me in the night; With eyes like moons. My gods are they; in each the evil grows, The grandiose evil darkens over each And each black god, silent Under the iron skies, dreams Of his omnipotence—the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... hurried out to Aunt Martha's to get the facts about his life for the paper. It was a bright October morning as she went up the walk to the old brick house, and she heard someone playing on the piano, rolling the chords after the grandiose manner of pianists fifty years ago. A voice seemed to be singing an old ballad. As the girl mounted the steps the voice came more distinctly to her. It was quavering and unsure, but with a moan of passion ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... peculiar exhalation of light and colour emanates from these fantasies of mine. I start with surprise as I note one good thing after another, and tell myself that this is the best thing I have ever read. My head swims with a sense of satisfaction; delight inflates me; I grow grandiose. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... us, all more or less connected with the sea, were dining in a small river-hostelry not more than thirty miles from London, and less than twenty from that shallow and dangerous puddle to which our coasting men give the grandiose name of "German Ocean." And through the wide windows we had a view of the Thames; an enfilading view down the Lower Hope Reach. But the dinner was execrable, and all the feast was ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... leaf or twig; the Zealots of Jehovah urging a last frenzied defence of Jehovah's Sanctuary against the Roman host; and now, last of all, the gloom and flames, the infernal palaces, the towering fiends, the grandiose and lumbering war of 'Paradise Lost': these things, together with the names and suggestions of 'Lias's talk—that whole crew of shining, fighting, haranguing men and women whom the old dreamer was for ever bringing into weird action on the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fairly evident that the present war is but a violent phase in the unfolding of a grandiose ground idea—the subjugation of Europe by the Teuton—which was being steadily realized ever since the close of the Franco-German campaign of 1870. It is likewise clear that, despite her "swelled head," ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... been used in the same way in Italy in the first century, had not the grandiose taste ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... reached upwards to the sun. In his youthful contempt for the hypocrisy with which he was surrounded, or for what he took to be hypocrisy, he did not see the high, practical wisdom of the race which little by little had built up for itself its grandiose idealism in order to suppress its savage instincts, or to turn them to account. Not arbitrary reasons, not moral and religious codes, not legislators and statesmen, priests and philosophers, transform the souls of peoples and often impose upon them a new nature: ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the unprejudiced observer the pleasing spectacle of a public which, considered as a moral person, showed itself a true connoisseur and a virtuoso in the comprehension and appreciation of an artistic performance which, in no wise grandiose, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... spend in the French capital, the incomparable city, and then was back in London, at the old life of hard work; but with even a stronger infusion than before of private theatricals—private theatricals on a grandiose scale, that were applauded by the Queen herself, and took him and his troupe starring about during the next three or four years, hither and thither, and here and there, in London and the provinces. "Splendid strolling" Forster calls it; and a period of unmixed jollity and enjoyment ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... theological tracts, edited sundry agricultural works, including, among others, those of Sir Richard Weston, and published his own observations upon the shortcomings of British husbandry. He also proposed a grandiose scheme for an agricultural college, in order to teach youths "the theorick and practick parts of this most ancient, noble, and honestly gainfull art, trade, or mystery." The work published under his name entitled "The Legacy," besides notices of the Brabant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... him not in seaports and large towns, but in lone and remote villages, like those of the Sagra. There he will find all that gravity of deportment and chivalry of disposition which Cervantes is said to have sneered away; and there he will hear, in everyday conversation, those grandiose expressions, which, when met with in the romances of chivalry, are scoffed at as ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... tendency to visionary dreamings. "He was predisposed to Utopian ideas by certain hereditary influences; his grandmother's nervous disorders became in him a chronic enthusiasm, striving after everything that was grandiose and impossible." His Uncle Antoine Macquart, who hoped through him to annoy the Rougons, encouraged him in his Republican views, and after the Coup d'Etat he joined the insurrection which then arose. Miette Chantegreil, ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... grandiose performance, and has been the theme of much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery and thunder and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... enceinte of Nineveh, at Nebbi-Younas; but it was chiefly upon Nimroud that Esarhaddon left marks of his magnificence. The palace called the South-western Palace, in consequence of its position in the mound, was commenced by him. It was never finished, but in plan it was more grandiose than any other of the royal dwellings. Had it been complete it would have included the largest hall ever provided by an Assyrian architect for the pomps of the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... motive was ever sadder. At moments, when he stopped to catch breath, the chorus of singers repeated the last verse; then Nero cast the tragic syrma from his shoulder with a gesture learned from Aliturus, struck the lute, and sang on. When he had finished the lines composed, he improvised, using grandiose comparisons in the spectacle unfolded before him. His face began to change. He was not moved, it is true, by the destruction of his country's capital; but he was delighted and moved with the pathos of his own words to such ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... high-shouldered, showing to what marks the male grub was expected to grow; and two-inch deep honey-magazines, empty, but still magnificent, the whole gummed and glued into twisted scrap-work, awry on the wires; half-cells, beginnings abandoned, or grandiose, weak-walled, composite cells pieced out with rubbish ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... to the fore in larger affairs. He blossomed out into something definite. He filled the public eye as the manager on the spot of the Tropical Belt Coal Company with offices in London and Amsterdam, and other things about it that sounded and looked grandiose. The offices in the two capitals may have consisted—and probably did—of one room in each; but at that distance, out East there, all this had an air. We were more puzzled than dazzled, it is true; but even the most sober-minded among ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... preceded it, the operas which had seemed the most secure of popularity were soon consigned to oblivion. It is a significant fact that Donizetti's lighter works have stood the test of time more successfully than his more serious efforts. Though the grandiose airs and sham tragedy of 'Lucia' have long since ceased to impress us, we can still take pleasure in the unaffected gaiety of 'La Fille du Regiment' and 'Don Pasquale.' These and many similar works were written currente calamo, and though their ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... charms steal upon you unawares. It is immense, insistent, arresting, almost thrusting itself on your imagination. It is a city for giants to dwell in, everything is on such an enormous scale, dealt out in such careless profusion. The river, first of all, is immense; the palaces grandiose, the very blocks of which they are fashioned seem to have been hewn by Titans. The names are full of romance and mystery. The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, for instance, how it brings back a certain red and gold book of one's ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... of Queen Elizabeth there were in England certain writers who were called "Euphuists." They got this name from the title of a book, "Euphues," written by one of them, John Lyly. The chief characteristic of the writings of these Euphuists was the grandiose way in which they wrote of the simplest things. Their writings were full of metaphors and figures of speech. The first Euphuists were looked upon as "refiners of speech," and Queen Elizabeth and the ladies at her court did ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... yes, or even further fare, And Afric's forest huge and poisonous Pigmies dare. But, to avoid the lonely traveller's pain, From Ludgate Circus drag the well-linked chain; As Amurath to Amurath succeeds, So COOK to COOK! THOMAS's grandiose deeds What Tourist may forget? The great one's gone, But his vast enterprise shall still march on. What THOMAS started, is pursued by JOHN. Peace to the dust of the Great Pioneer, "Great COOK is dead, long live Great COOK!" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... sight to the dragoman, who then went into one of his absurd babbling moods, in which he would have talked the head off any man who was not born in a country laved by the childish Mediterranean. Coleman could not understand what he said to the soldiers as they passed, but it was evidently all grandiose nonsense. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... a present to each of the little girls (if not too big and grandiose) of six pence (for which I send stamps), who are going to collect seeds for me: viz., Lychnis, white, red, and flesh-colour ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... observer when he insists on the unexpressed but inexorable scale by which Andrew and his following measured Lincoln. They had grown up in the faith that you could tell a statesman by certain external signs, chiefly by a grandiose and commanding aspect such as made overpowering the presence of Webster. And this idea was not confined to any one locality. Everywhere, more or less, the conservative portion in every party held this view. It was the view of Washington in 1848 when Washington had failed ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... speculations, but they were voted cranks by the majority, and the Consolidated Provident Savings Company grew and flourished. It paid large dividends, and its stockholders were duly impressed with the magnificence of its buildings and the grandiose tone of its officials. ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... be called the facade, remains are still discernible of inlaid work in coloured stone, and within the gateway, on the smooth slabs of the pavement, the wheel-ruts are still visible. Connect them with those metal war-chariots in Homer, and you may see in fancy the whole grandiose character of the place, as it may really have been. Shut within the narrow enclosure of these shadowy citadels were the palaces of the kings, with all that intimacy which we may sometimes suppose to have been alien from the open-air Greek life, admitting, doubtless, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... contemporary authors, his intimacies with women of refinement and fashion, his business struggles with creditors and publishers, his frequent journeys to the provinces and foreign countries; and finally his grandiose schemes to surround himself with luxury and the paraphernalia of power, not so much for his own sake as for the sake of her whose least smile was a delight and an inspiration. About each of these ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... are "bedazzled with the Infinite" and thirst for "totality" attain in their reveries to the same impersonal ecstasy. Amiel writes of a "night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched at full length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky Way. Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the Infinite!" The reverie of Senancour, on the bank of the Lake of Bienne, quoted ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... to electricity, they may not, on the contrary, give an electrical interpretation to the phenomena of matter and motion, and thus merge mechanics itself in electricity. One thus sees dawning afresh the eternal hope of co-ordinating all natural phenomena in one grandiose and imposing synthesis. Whatever may be the fate reserved for such attempts, they deserve attention in the highest degree; and it is desirable to examine them carefully if we wish to have an exact idea of the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... costly detail. He did not see himself winning her to complete subjugation without a plentiful spending fund. He had told her they would go North from Reno and travel eastward by the Canadian Pacific, stopping at points of interest along the road. He imagined his courtship progressing in grandiose suites of rooms wherein were served delicate meals, his generous largesse to obsequious hirelings adding to her dazzled approval. He had to have that money; he couldn't go without it; he had set it aside to deck with fitting ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... something almost grandiose and majestic in his statement of the ultimate destiny of ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... arrogant boy, a law to himself even in forging his parents' names to his school-notes, and meditating suicide because his father had beaten him for demanding more elegant clothes; patience with the emotional volcanic youth to whose grandiose soul a synod of professors reprimanding him seemed unclean crows and ravens pecking at a fallen eagle that had only to raise quivering wings to fly towards the sun; patience with his refusal to enter a commercial career, and carry on the prosperous silk business; patience even with his refusal ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Caracalla, where the picture is not set in a frame of hideous houses, awakened her native enthusiasm. "A grandiose ruin," she exclaims, "of colossal proportions; it is shut away, isolated, silent and respected. There you feel the terrific power of the Caesars, and the opulence of a nation intoxicated with ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... to get to the reason I have summoned you. Yesterday in my father's office you intimated that you had some grandiose scheme which would bring victory to the Haer colors. But then, on some thin excuse, refused to divulge just what ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... of the apartments— the marble pillars and niches of one; the remains of a richly-carved chimneypiece in another; the highly-wrought ceilings, to which ancient history and allegory have supplied grandiose figures—their deep colours unfaded, the ruddy burnish of their gilding as splendid as ever. Here and there great black-and-gold court-stools, raised at the sides, and finished off with bullet heads of dogs, arouse a recollection of Versailles or Fontainebleau, and look as if they had offered seats ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... the old skeleton of the story, in which the theme is treated in simple epic fashion, society is far freer than in later days and no one objects to eating beef, from the additional matter, in which the tale is recast in a far more grandiose vein and is padded out with enormous quantities of moral, religious, and philosophic sermons. The religion too is different in the different parts. In the older portions the gods who are most popular are Indra, Agni, and Brahma—not the neuter abstract Brahma, ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... actually have decided!... Life is very queer!" She had as yet no notion whatever of what she would do with her liberty and her income and the future; but she thought vaguely of something heroic, grandiose, and unusual. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... and effect, while it lessens the painfulness of life, adds to life's picturesqueness. The man to whom evolution is but a name looks at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle, which he can witness in August for three shillings third-class return. The man who is imbued with the idea of development, of continuous cause and effect, perceives in the sea an element which in the day-before-yesterday of geology was vapour, which yesterday was boiling, ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... garret, out of which some servants had been hurried to make room for them, was all that could be found. They, however, liked it for its space and its view. They looked sideways from their windows on to the upper end of the lake, three thousand feet below them. Opposite, across the blue water, rose a grandiose rampart of mountains, the stage on which from morn till night the sun went through a long transformation scene of beauty. The water was marked every now and then by passing boats and steamers—tiny specks which served ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and this, in turn, promotes discontent: if over-population is successfully checked, the spread of Socialism would be done for, and its Socialist State, together with all its glory, buried for all time. Thus we see one more weapon added to the arsenal to kill Socialism with—Malthusianism. The grandiose ignorance of the Socialist-killer Ferdy on Socialism, transpires strongest from the following sentence, which he perpetrates on ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... passed beneath a triumphal arch; before him was a glittering square, grandiose, yet severe; a stretch of temples and basilicas, in which masterpieces felt at home—the Forum of Trajan, the compliment of a nation to a prince. Dominating it was a column, in whose thick spirals you read to-day the one ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... Cooper was the only writer of stories worthy to be placed by the side of Walter Scott, and that his hero Leather-stocking was sublime. "I don't know," said he, "if the fiction of Walter Scott furnishes a creation as grandiose as that of this hero of the savannas and forests. Cooper's descriptions are the school at which all literary landscapists should study: all the secrets of art are there. But Cooper is inferior to Walter Scott in his comic and minor ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... at the impossible metres, the grandiose phrases, the verbose repetitions of my poem. Years ago I must have laughed at it, when I threw my only copy into the wastebasket. The copy I am now turning over was loaned me by Miss Dwight, who faithfully preserved it all these years, ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... pieces of cardboard which had come in Cynthia's letter. He dared not look at Jethro, and his eye was fixed instead upon the somewhat grandiose signature of Isaac D. Worthington, which they bore. Jethro took them and tore them up, and slowly tossed the pieces into a cuspidor conveniently situated near the foot of the bed. He rose and thrust his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... before their eyes: they are ill equipped with theoretical knowledge, but they understand the working of institutions and have a good eye for judging character: they have little constructive imagination of the more grandiose sort, but they have an instinct for the 'next step' which has often set them on paths which have led them far further than they dreamed; above all, they have a relatively high standard of individual character and public ...
— Progress and History • Various
... first time to realize vividly the nobility and grace of the landscape. And yet there was a difference in the appreciation of the two. More widely read and traveled, Evelyn's imagination took a wider range of comparison and of admiration, she was appealed to by the large features and the grandiose effects; while Alice noted more the tenderer aspects, the wayside flowers and bushes, the exotic-looking plants, which she longed to domesticate in what might be called the Sunday garden on the terraces in front of her house. For it is in these little cultivated places by the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Prince von Buelow ever spent a meditative hour looking down on the fragments of the Forum from the ilex of the Palatine, over the steep ascent of the Capitoline that leads to the Campidolgio, as far as the grandiose marble pile that fronts the newer city? ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... blond florescence in his arms. Then a certain contentment would possess him as he pictured her mother forced to stay home with blighted hankerings. What a ridiculous appearance he would have presented towing her around here in a waltz before all these florid and grandiose figures of state! ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... Thank you. Don't do it again." She hitched herself round in her chair, and settled down once more to her reading, while Maxwell slunk back to his seat. When Peggy was offended she invariably fell back upon Mariquita's grandiose manner, and the sting of her sharp little tongue left her victims ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... new house was getting a trifle old, as it waited for the completion of its rather disproportionate splendours; splendours which represented the ambitions rather than the achievements of the family. It towered, large, square, imposing, with hints of M. Mansard's grandiose architectural ideas in its style, in the very centre of a village block of land. From the first, it exercised a sort of "I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls" effect upon me, and in a vague way, at the back of my mind, floated the idea that when we passed ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appeared to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art. American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might attain ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... closed his bedroom door, carefully locking it, there stood beside him—Vance. The forgotten figure of Vance came up close—the watching eyes, the simulated interest, the feigned belief, the detective mental attitude, these broke through the grandiose panorama, bringing darkness. Vance, strong personality that hid behind assumed nonentity for some purpose of his own, intruded with sudden violence, demanding an ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... the first Viceroy of India was not so grandiose as that of his successor. He did not believe in building many forts or attempting to establish direct government in the East. He argued that Portugal had not sufficient inhabitants to occupy many posts, and his view was ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... "Angelo", of which the scene is laid in old Padua and is, therefore, full of the mysterious spirit of mediaeval Italian, and especially Venetian life. Miss Cushman has played in an English version of this drama, called the "Actress of Padua". But it is hardly grandiose enough in its proportions to be very well adapted to the talent of Miss Cushman. It was remarkable how perfectly the genius which had, the evening before, adequately represented Phedre, could impersonate ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... houses—he rapidly organized three, one after another—competed with a large number of other units in the oil business on somewhat more than even terms. At this time Rockefeller was merely one of a large number of successful oil refiners, yet during these early days a grandiose scheme was taking shape in that quiet, insinuating, far-reaching brain. He said nothing about it, even to his closest associates, yet it filled his every waking hour. For this young man was taking a comprehensive sweep of the ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... patron of the house. Those were the only artistic decorations of the modest habitation. The nobleman often said: "I have freed myself from the tyranny of objects." But with that marvellous background of grandiose ruins and that sky, the simple spot was an incomparable retreat in which to end in meditation and renouncement a life already shaken by the tempests of the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a few yards to the settlement. A 'Steam-launch' sounds grandiose, and so does a 'Great Central Depot'—seen on paper. And touching this place I was told a tale. Some time ago two young French employes, a doctor and an engineer, were sent up to the mines, and fell victims to the magical influence of the name. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... the elder Mr. Harper sitting at the head of his own dinner-table was a real pleasure. He never looked so well at any other time. His grandiose air was then so mixed with genuine kindliness that it only enriched his courtesies, like the "body" in mellow old wine. He leaned graciously back in the arm-chair peculiarly his own, surveying the long table shone over by soft wax-lights, ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the main platform or more commonly on a minor platform of its own in the middle of the steps. In most cases the chamber stands back behind a row, in some instances two rows, of columns, which support the characteristic entablature seen in the illustrations. In the case of the more grandiose temples a series of columns may run all round the building, carrying an extension of the roof, under which is thus formed a covered colonnade. More commonly the sides and back of the chamber have only what are known as "engaged" columns, as it were half-embedded ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... more than ordinary penetration to perceive anything but a kind of grandiose folly in Brother Hecker. The impulse to talk about the conversion of America, to plan it and advocate it, to proclaim it possible and prove it so, and to philosophize on the profoundest questions of the human reason, was irrepressible. ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... inadequate. Their wish is not to distort and cramp nature by bringing it within the limits of the ritual, but to enlarge and expand the ritual until it becomes cosmic. If they regard the whole universe as one long act of prayer and sacrifice, the idea is grandiose rather than pedantic, though the details may not always be to our taste[157]. And the Upanishads pass from ritual and theology to real speculation in a way unknown to Christian thought. To imagine a parallel, we must picture Spinoza beginning with ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... may rattle a shade noisily on the roof, the asbestos lining may be devoid of ornamentation, but as he lies in bed and contemplates that unadorned ceiling he is a deal better off than if he were gazing at the elaborate (and dust-harbouring) cornices of the So-and-So Club's grandiose smoking-lounge in Pall Mall. ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... "humour"— "In some places we have had somewhat more of Humour than the Original, to make it still more agreeable to our Age . . . ." (ibid., p. xxii). When speaking for himself alone in the Preface to the Plautus, Echard's claims were less grandiose. Here the translation seems much more specifically aimed at schoolboys, and Echard made firm claims for his literalness (sig. b1-2v). On the other hand, he went out of his way to praise Dryden's Amphitryon (1690) for the freedom it had taken with ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... confesses that his eye is out of focus. The furniture imported or (in Melbourne) made by the large upholsterers is, with few exceptions, more gorgeous than pretty; whence one may reasonably infer that the taste of their customers—when they have any—is better suited by the grandiose than the artistic. But most of the expensively furnished houses show plainly that the upholsterer has been given carte blanche to do what he will. Look at his shop-window, and you may make a shrewd guess ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... plenty of congenial companions about. I found pleasure in talking—more pleasure by far than others did in listening. In fact I talked incessantly, and soon made known, in a general way, my scheme for reforming institutions, not only in my native State, but, of course, throughout the world, for my grandiose perspective made the earth look small. The attendants had to bear the brunt of my loquacity, and they soon grew weary. One of them, wishing to induce silence, ventured to remark that I was so "crazy" I could not possibly keep my mouth shut for even ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... to write, soon after delivering to my students, in the library adjoining my study, a lecture on Preaching. Let me call it rather, a talk on Sermons, which is a term less grandiose and much more true; for in fact the discourse has been a most informal series of remarks and suggestions on topics suggested by a collection of sermons written for me, and which I now came to give back, annotated, to their writers. It occurs to me to offer my kind reader a written ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... spirit in this lonely woman after so many years of hard working, and hard living, my Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards! What is it that we call it in our grandiose speeches? British independence, rather perverted? Is that, or something like it, the ring ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... his aura; the aura of Arnold Schoenberg is, for me, the aura of subtle ugliness, of hatred and contempt, of cruelty, and of the mystic grandiose. He is never petty. He sins in the grand manner of Nietzsche's Superman, and he has the courage of his chromatics. If such music-making is ever to become accepted, then I long for Death the Releaser. More shocking still would be the suspicion ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... material. Byron, whom he adored and imitated, could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life; but though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Calderon's people, like Ben Jonson's, move. There is a resemblance between the autos of Calderon and the masques of Jonson. Jonson's are lyrical; Calderon's less lyrical than splendid, ethical, grandiose. They were both court poets; they both made court spectacles; they both assisted in the decay of the drama; they reflected the tastes of their time; but Calderon is the more noble, the more splendid in imagination, the more intense in his devotion to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... engulfed in the depths of empty stomachs, dispersed in the shops as they are opened, and the dark courts, or even to the fireless attics. That is the reason why there remains so little of it out of doors. But in that spacious and grandiose region of Paris, which was inhabited by Jenkins's clients, on those wide boulevards planted with trees, and those deserted quays, the fog hovered without a stain, like so many sheets, with waverings and cotton wool-like flakes. The ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... many men noted in their day, whose fame has passed away with their dissolving theories. Read Dr. Bartlett's comparison of the famous Benjamin Rush with his modest fellow-townsman Dr. William Currie, and see the dangers into which a passion for grandiose generalizations betrayed a man of many ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... flowers upon the table, and only very few wax candles burned in the ormolu and crystal chandelier overhead. Flowers and wax candles were luxuries which must be paid for with ready money—a commodity which was exceedingly scarce in the grandiose Chateau de Brestalou—but they also were a luxury which could easily be dispensed with, for did not M. le Comte de Cambray set the fashions and give the tone to the whole departement? and if he chose to have no flowers upon his supper table and but few candles in his ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... beginnings of grotesqueness in Michael Angelo's style. There are a few somewhat distorted figures, Haman, the knot of men and women adoring the snake, Jonas, as he flings himself backwards, but except these, what calm, what grandiose perfection! And which was still more remarkable, what imposing charm! Eve, in the picture of "The Fall," is perhaps the most adorable figure that Art has ever produced; her beauty, in the picture on ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... often found to be empty as well as spacious; the imagination is too often tainted with insincerity; in his dramas of the elements there are too many such falsehoods as abound in his dramas of the emotions. Again, he is sometimes grand and often grandiose; but he has a trick of affecting the grandiose and the grand which is constant and intolerable. He had the genius of style in such fulness as entitles him to rank with the great artists in words of all ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... all a question of somewhat restricted importance. The essential truth is that he was by nature an adventurer who, in the words of Hamilton, "believed all things possible to daring and energy," and that in 1806 he was a bankrupt and asocial outcast to boot. Whether, therefore, his grandiose project of an empire on the ruins of Spanish dominion in Mexico involved also an effort to separate some part of the West from the Union is a question which, if it was ever definitely determined in Burr's own mind, was determined, we may be sure, quite ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... by the power of his genius. As a man, he shared the misery of his fellow-men of the nineteenth century. He had the same turbulent preoccupations and futile gravity. Not satisfied with being great, he wished to appear grandiose, and it seems that this conceited mania did not in the least efface his real grandeur. He certainly does not belong to the race of dreamers who have made no incursion into life, masters with calm brows who have had neither period, nor country nor family. But this man cannot be separated from ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... which he follows up with the determination of a real Gorkyan hero. The life of the people appears to him in its sublime simplicity. And it is in the midst of a dazzling apotheosis—which reminds one of the most grandiose pages of Zola's "Lourdes"—that he finally confesses the God of his ideal: it ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... the Coumelie, the mule-path to the Cirque de Troumouse leading through a field above us, as we reached the zigzag's top. Still gently ascending round the foot of the Coumelie, the pointed summit of the lofty Taillon (10,323 ft.) came into view ahead, with the grandiose Campbieil (10,418 ft.) up the Heas valley; and the Pic de Saugue immediately above on the right, from whose height the splendid Cascade d'Arroudet, dashing past the shepherds' cottages, launches its foaming showers into the river below. A few more graceful curvings of the road ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... favourite corner of the domain—a kind of projecting spur or platform shaded by a few grandiose umbrella pines. Near at hand, on a slightly lower level, rose a group of flame—like cypresses whose shapely outlines stood out against the sea, shining far below like a lake of pearl. The milky sheen of morning, soon to be dispelled by the breeze, still hung about ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... motor-tour on the Continent in the Royce. Very likely they would go as far south as Capri, and Susan would stay with her new grand Italian connections. What she would be like when she got back Miss Mapp forbore to conjecture, since it was no use anticipating trouble; but Susan had been so grandiose about the Wyses, multiplying their incomes and their acreage by fifteen or twenty, so Miss Mapp conjectured, and talking so much about county families, that the liveliest imagination failed to picture what she would make of the Faragliones. She already alluded to the Count as "My brother-in-law ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... of a saloon in an old-fashioned country house (Florence Towers, the property of Count O'Dowda) has been curtained off to form a stage for a private theatrical performance. A footman in grandiose Spanish livery enters before the curtain, on its ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... these theorists the eternal question WHY?—why is the world in existence? why is there a universe? why do we live? why do we think and plan? why do we perish at the last?—their grandiose reply is, "Because of the Law of Universal Necessity." They cannot explain this mysterious Law to themselves, nor can they probe deep enough to find the answer to a still more tremendous WHY—namely, WHY, is there a Law of Universal Necessity?—but they are satisfied with the result of their reasonings, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... Church of Saint-Denis itself a funeral discourse in stone more grandiose and eloquent than that of the reverend orator? Regard on either side of the nave these superb mausoleums, these pompous tombs that are but an empty show, and since their dead dwell not in them, contemplate ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... the same sense as Case VI (see above), suffering from auditory hallucinosis (superior temporal atellitosis, data of the late W. L. Worcester); X, delusion of birth to superior station, possibly the object of mixed emotions, probably not pleasant; and XI, manic-depressive exaltation with grandiose utterances, long prior to death (if there had been lung tuberculosis at the basis of the ileac ulcers, it had long ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... nothing on the subject to his Government, as he had been informed of it in but a vague way by the late Cabinet. The French Minister stated that the subject had never been mentioned to him, and consequently he had not been in a position to make any communication to his Government.[6] Thus the grandiose Asiatic dominion of which M. Venizelos spoke so eloquently dwindled to "Smyrna and a substantial ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... then, is not habitually grandiose, or monumental, or beautiful, what is it? I should say, with much fear of contradiction and scornful laughter, that it was pretty, that it was endearingly nooky, cornery, curvy, with the enchantment of trees and flowers everywhere mixed with its civic turmoil, and the song of birds heard ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... And is doing or knowing the right, acting or thinking, his ultimate end? If science does not produce love it is insufficient. Now all that science gives is the amor intellectualis of Spinoza, light without warmth, a resignation which is contemplative and grandiose, but inhuman, because it is scarcely transmissible and remains a privilege, one of the rarest of all. Moral love places the center of the individual in the center of being. It has at least salvation in principle, the germ of eternal ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to Saint-Cloud, broken only by an occasional clump of trees or the smoke from some factory chimney. Perhaps, too, in a measure, to the disproportion between the humble hamlet of Judaea and that grandiose structure, that villa in the style of Louis XIII., built of small stones and mortar, and showing pink through the leafless branches of the park, where there were several large ponds with a coating of green slime. Certain it is that on passing the place one's heart contracted. When ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... their moral character. The Jews and the Persians went a step further, and conceived of a final general judgment, a final winding-up of human history, and a permanent reconstruction of the world on a basis largely moral, though tinged with local religious elements—a grandiose idea that has maintained itself up to the present time, embodying the conviction that the outcome of life depends on character, and that ethical retribution is the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... her leisure hours of weaving, with Helen and her heroic canvas, and the army of grandiose Biblical folk, and let us come westward into Europe in short review of the textiles called tapestry which were produced from the early Christian centuries to the time of the Crusades, and thus will we approach ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... index and a beautiful binding, for three and six, and I am exceedingly indebted to Messrs. Newnes for creating that volume. It was sheer genius on their part to do so. I get charming sensations from it, but sensations not so charming as I should get from Mrs. Paget Toynbee's many-volumed and grandiose edition, even aside from Mrs. Toynbee's erudite notes and the extra letters which she has been able to print. The same letter in Mrs. Toynbee's edition would have a higher aesthetic and moral value for me than in the "editionlet" ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... leaping flame. She turned about, fronting the perplexed and agitated congregation, her head carried high, her face austere for all its youthful softness, an heroic quality, something, indeed, superlative and grandiose in her bearing and expression, causing a shrinking in those who saw her and a certain sense ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... priests are the creatures elected, commissioned and delegated by the proletaire to perpetuate its grandiose and impossible image. And this they do. They are the custodians of the public morals, meaning the protectors of the huge trick mirror out of which the complexes, neurasthenias, and morbid fears of the public stare back at it in the guise of Virtue, Honor, Decency, and Love. These custodians ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam |
