"Insincerity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... same paths of reasoning, bring them to the desired destination. If exhortation, counsel, and encouragement are required, they must be at his command. Moreover, a leader who wishes to attract followers must be earnest and enthusiastic. The least touch of insincerity or indifference will ruin all. To analyze ideas, to present them clearly, and as a leader to enforce them enthusiastically and sincerely are ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... Miss Siddal was sincere in its insincerity. The art impulse was supreme in him and love was secondary. The nine years' engagement, with the uncertain, vacillating, forgetful, absent-minded habits of erratic genius to deal with, wore out the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... as God made it and had meant that it should be seen? Of nakedness and simplicity, and all things genuine, the civilised man had been taught to be ashamed. No, no, to-day, in the sunshine, he felt sure that he would not return to the insincerity, artificiality, and the blinkered-eyes of the town, were he given his choice. He wanted to breathe cleanness, and to see God's hand at work, and to be a man; in London, or any other city, individuality and all these ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... sincerity should seem to be leading us towards a similar revival; taking even very much the same forms. We went back, at the time of the Gothic revival, to the forgotten Gothic art of stained-glass; now tired, as it would seem, of the insincerity and mere spirit of imitation with which it and similar arts have been practised, a number of us appear to be ready to throw it aside, along with scholarly mouldings and traceries, and build our arts afresh out of the ground, ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... then, Marquis, not to let yourself be blinded by a false notion. The Countess may have spoken well of you with the sole object of doing you justice, without carrying her intention any farther. And be sure you are wrong when you suspect her of insincerity in your regard. After all, why should you not prefer to have her dissemble her sentiments toward you, if you are the source of their inspiration? Are not women in the right to hide carefully their sentiments from you, and does not the bad use you make of the certainty of their love justify ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... and pray! Praying alone is not enough, but oh for more real praying! We are playing at praying, and caring, and coming; playing at doing—if doing costs—playing at everything but play. We are earnest enough about that. God open our eyes and convict us of our insincerity! burn out the superficial in us, make us intensely in earnest! And may God quicken our sympathy, and touch our heart, and nerve our arm for what will prove a desperate fight against "leagued fiends" in bad men's ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... lover was gone. Beatrice lay back in her chair striving to collect her thoughts. Everything seemed to have happened so suddenly and unexpectedly. There were people about her now who were asking smoothly sympathetic questions in the hollow insincerity ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... man certainly has, and of a distinct quality, yet his intimates cannot explain the reason of their obedience to him. After a brief acquaintance he is revealed as the very soul of insincerity—he "works" his friends, he pays toll to his enemies, he frankly shows himself without the sense of moral obligation. I believe his talent resides in his capacity to select the proper type of man to "make ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... timid and distant, keep their doors closed to the general public. No one has yet dared to permanently set up here their Lares and Penates. The subordination of family life to externals, and insincerity of social compacts, are destined to make California a mere abiding place for several generations. The fibres of ancestry must first knit the living into close communion with their parents born on these Western shores. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... spring out to you,' said Madeline—'the spring in England. How many years is it since you have seen it? There will be a breath of the cowslips about her, and in her eyes the soft wet of the English sky. Oh, you will be very glad to see her.' The girl was well aware of her insincerity, but only dimly of her cruelty. She was drawn on by something stronger than her sense of honesty and humanity, a determination to see, to know, that swept these ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... which Shakespeare always in the first scenes prepares, yet how naturally, and with what concealment of art, for the catastrophe. Observe how he here presents the germ of all the after events in Richard's insincerity, partiality, arbitrariness, and favouritism, and in the proud, tempestuous, temperament of his barons. In the very beginning, also, is displayed that feature in Richard's character, which is never forgotten throughout the play—his attention to decorum, and high feeling of the kingly dignity. These ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... adopted in convention, the common sentiment was well expressed by the editor who said that "the platform was made for present use, and is marked with the taint of insincerity." ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... constant change alone, he will find his true unity. He will not consent to be the slave of his own opinions. For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere? The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth. You must not be frightened by word, Ernest. What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... comparative depth of soil in order to thrive, and Dannevig's mind was remarkable for territorial expanse rather than for depth. Of course, he did with astonishing ease assume the color of the person he was talking with; but this involved, with him, no conscious mental process, no deliberate insincerity. It was rather owing to a kind of constitutional adaptability, an unconquerable distaste for quarrelling, and the absence of any ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... apparent restoration of good feeling, Frank was discerning enough to detect the insincerity of both ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... one of hardly endurable distraction. Beneath assumption of respectful silence, it jarred, boomed, took notes, debated, questioned. Beneath assumption of solemnity, it peeped and stared. Her flayed nerves and desolated heart plagued her with suspicions of insincerity. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... popular operas, often by three or four different composers, strung together regardless of rhyme or reason. Even in Handel's lifetime the older school of opera was tottering to its fall. Only the man was needed who should sweep the mass of insincerity from the stage and replace it by the purer ideal which had been the guiding spirit of ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... pondering over the interview, and trying to trace out some motive for insincerity on the old woman's part. But she could see none. She resolved to investigate a little, and all that evening was the most attentive and agreeable of wives. Abundant and versatile was her conversation. Deftly she led the talk up to the proper point, ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... To show the insincerity of Lewis, we shall now quote parts of a second speech made by him in the evening of the same day on which he had spoken so eloquently in behalf of asserting the truth and not telling ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... about it," said "Karl" with ill-concealed insincerity. "You must know thieving is no more what it once was. Even I, too, often am put to ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... thought, but what he thought. If you wish to be sublime you must be natural—you must keep close to the grass. You must sit by the fireside of the heart; above the clouds it is too cold. You must be simple in your speech: too much polish suggests insincerity. The great orator idealizes the real, transfigures the common, makes even the inanimate throb and thrill, fills the gallery of the imagination with statues and pictures perfect in form and color, brings ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... certainly not a cordial one, there was a kind of demure restraint and over-consciousness in her manner that might be coquetry. Ira had vaguely observed this quality in other young women, but had never experienced it in his brief courtship. There had been no rivalry, no sexual diplomacy nor insincerity in his capture of the motherless girl who had leaped from the tail-board of her father's wagon almost into his arms, and no man had since come between them. The idea that Sue should care for any other than himself had been simply inconceivable to his placid, matter-of-fact nature. ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Daikagu-ji line received due consideration and were sufficiently provided with incomes, as witness the treatment of the ex-Emperor Go-Kameyama by Yoshimitsu. But subsequent and repeated neglect of the claims of the Southern branch in regard to the vital matter of the succession betrayed the insincerity of the Ashikaga, and provoked frequent appeals ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... his side will be the winner, but only signalizes that that side is his." The evasion came too late; persons who had inconvenient memories saw through the shuffling of a pseudo-prophet, who only managed to cast a retrospective gleam of insincerity over his fortune-telling, to convert blunder into bad faith, and to stultify his present along with his past position. The leek had to be eaten at last: why, after so many "prave 'ords" of superiority and defiance, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... he is prepared to sign the Confession of Faith. He is not asked to sign it then and there. To express his willingness to sign it does not seem to be so much of a tax on his candor as actually to sign it. Such a proceeding seems to me to put somewhat of a premium on insincerity. It is well known that there are reservations. Would it not be more honest to accept a short statement of evangelical truth, which could be ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... married lady in the pale-blue silk, whom she had singled out as the one approachable lady in the room, was Mrs. Farrant. She was very bright, and sunshiny, and talkative. Erica liked her, and would have liked her still better had not the last week shown her so much of the unreality and insincerity of society that she half doubted whether any one she met in Greyshot could be quite true. Mrs. Farrant's manner was charming, but charming manners had often turned out to be exceedingly artificial, and Erica, who was in rather a hard mood, would not let herself be won over, but held her judgment ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... are talking on religious subjects, avoid all cant. Cant words and phrases may be used in good faith from the force of habit, but their use subjects the speaker to a suspicion of insincerity. ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... to in this little trait of Ned's, is,' said Mr Chester, '—and the mention of his name reminds me, by the way, that I am about to beg the favour of a minute's talk with you alone—the only thing I object to in it, is, that it DOES partake of insincerity. Now, however I may attempt to disguise the fact from myself in my affection for Ned, still I always revert to this—that if we are not sincere, we are nothing. Nothing upon earth. Let us be ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... her heart is touched thinks insincerity charming]. Only one word. I heard you speak last night. Sublime! Just the sort of impassioned eloquence that your ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... told him plainly that he was not indifferent to her. This occurred so often, and was so frequently attended with evident confusion on her part, that he began to have a suspicion of the real truth, and to feel disgust at so marked an exhibition of insincerity. Besides, the thought of being experimented upon in this way, did not in the least tend to soften his feelings towards the fair one. He believed in frankness, honesty and reciprocal sincerity. He liked ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... writers Confucius has been accused of insincerity in a few minor matters; still, the wisdom contained in his religious doctrines, the philosophical value of his teachings relative to the regulation of human conduct, and, above all, his purity of purpose, justly entitles his name to be enrolled among the great reformers ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... matters to the whims and wishes of superiors, and of saying what they think Signori like. This habit, while it smoothes the surface of existence, raises up a barrier of compliment and partial insincerity, against which the more downright natures of us Northern folk break in vain efforts. Our advances are met with an imperceptible but impermeable resistance by the very people who are bent on making the world pleasant to us. It is the very reverse of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... were folded, and the perpendicular line up from between the eyebrows was quite in harmony with the rest of his appearance. He was weary, harassed, and divided against himself. Insincerity made him uncomfortable; it compelled continual exertion, and of a paltry and degrading kind; and it gave neither a sense of security, nor a prospect of future advantage. Five days from now he was to be married; the duties ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... nature; no ideal, personal, public or national, detains them in its wholesome influence; no great purpose allures them; they have no causes for which to die—save themselves. They are so honeycombed with insincerity and the vice of thought, that by-and-by all colours are as one, all pathways the same; because, whichever hue of light breaks upon their world they see it through the grey-cloaked mist of falsehood; and whether the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... absolutely clear to him that if he deliberately gives his daughter in marriage to one who will corrupt and destroy her soul with "heathen mysticism," his own must pay the forfeit, and not only is his personal damnation imminent, but his ministry will become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals of insincerity. He is entirely convinced of the divine inspiration of this revelation, and I am sure madness would follow any resistance I might make. I have therefore been obliged to promise him that I will break our engagement and end this correspondence, and I beg that you will not make it harder ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... The insincerity of the sovereign's agreement with the ideas, events, and men of his day was evident in the reaction which appeared only too soon. His conviction showed itself under different forms, but remained unchanged, both in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... tribute of admiration—that in which William, alone, brokenhearted, and almost crazed with the ruin of everything that made up his life, creeps home to find his old associates still glibly echoing the platitudes in which he once believed. A hint here of insincerity or conscious arrangement would have ruined all; as it is, the scene holds and haunts one with an impression of absolute truth, For the end, marked like all by an almost grim avoidance of sentimentality, I shall only refer you to the book ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... who was meant. But she repeated, as if at a loss, "The boy?" And immediately accused herself of insincerity. ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... feel honoured," remarked Abby. Not one of them would have thought that Lorne should feel especially honoured; but the insincerity was so obvious that it didn't matter. Mrs Murchison, cocking her head to read the card, tried hard not to ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Such insincerity gave weight to Randolph's words when he wrote: "My lord, I have but one thing to reminde your lordship, that nothing their agents can say or doe in England can be any ground for his majestie to depend upon." [Footnote: Randolph to Clarendon. ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... They discover to us no new truth about human nature; they only show us certain human beings so placed as to act out their naked selves,—to be neither influenced nor protected by the rewards and screens of conventional civilization. The affectation and insincerity of our daily life make such a spectacle fresh and pleasing to us. But we enjoy it because of its unexpectedness, its separateness, its unlikeness to the ordinary course of existence. It is like a huge, strange, gorgeous flower, an exaggeration and intensification ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... incandescent mouth of Vulcan's forge, the figures within being merely indicated, on the face of a hundred ledges. That was a shame, he freely admitted to me; the rocks looked better without. In fact, John Campbell's first manner soon came to be a humiliation and an intolerable bondage. He felt the insincerity of it deeply. 'You see, it's this way,' he explained to me, 'you don't see the shapes by firelight or at sunset, but you have seen them all day and you know they're there. Nobody that don't have those shapes in his brush can make you feel them in a picture. Everybody puts too little droring into ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... Hawthorne at that time of his desire to return to America, but stated that the President had just written to him, requesting him to remain until April, although he was determined not to do so. He excused himself on the plea of old age, and Hawthorne seems to have had a suspicion of the insincerity of this, but concluded on reflection not to harbor it. Pierce knew already that Buchanan was his most dangerous rival for renomination, and desired that he should remain as far off as possible; while Buchanan was aware that, if he intended to be on the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... knuckles. Oh, I know how trivial it is in the retrospect, and how what is called a disappointment is something to be humbly grateful for in most cases; but for a while it certainly makes you doubtful whether you were ever really intended to share the common lot." He was aware of an insincerity in his words; he hoped that it might not be perceptible, but he did ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... we stand, two spirits under the sky, two that believe in Truth and Freedom, parted by insincerity. The vile weed has crept up around us; we are parted by falsehood, even we. Goodnight. Perhaps I shall not write again. I shall send you a telegram before I ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... have striven hard to identify the personages of the satire with famous living writers, and there may be a chance that some at least of their identifications (as of Marston's Tubrio with Marlowe) are correct. But the exaggeration and insincerity, the deliberate "society-journalism" (to adopt a detestable phrase for a corresponding thing of our own days), which characterise all this class of writing make the identifications of but little ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... which,—in the name of the whole league, he complained that the duchess had, by violating her word, falsified in sight of all the Protestants the security given by the league, in reliance on which all of them had laid down their arms; that by her insincerity she had undone all the good which the confederates had labored to effect; that she had sought to degrade the league in the eyes of the people, had excited discord among its members, and had even caused many of them to be persecuted as criminals. He called upon her to recall ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... suffered from a strange form of insincerity, which he had often unsuccessfully tried to cure, partly because it advantaged unsympathetic acquaintances at his expense, and partly because his wife produced unanswerable arguments against it with mortal effect. Although ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... leaders against his own convictions is a pure figment of the popular imagination. No doubt an editor will sometimes ask a leader-writer not to put a particular view so strongly as he, the leader-writer, is known to feel it, but such reticence cannot surely be regarded as insincerity on the ethics of anonymity in journalism. The public are apt to suppose that anonymity is the cloak of all sorts of misdoings, and I have often heard people declare that in their opinion every leader-writer should be forced to sign his name. As I once heard ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... divinities, but failed to state that by the Messiah they meant Shabbethai Zebi."[475] The Bishop was apparently deceived by this manoeuvre, and in 1759 the Zoharites declared themselves converted to Christianity, and were baptized, including Frank himself, who took the name of Joseph. "The insincerity of the Frankists soon became apparent, however, for they continued to inter-marry only among themselves and held Frank in reverence, calling him 'The Holy Master.'"[476] It soon became evident that, whilst openly embracing the Catholic ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Catherine. "I now perceive the insincerity of your professions. This much I have said to try you. And now to my real motive for sending for you. I have in my possession certain letters, that will ruin ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... straightforwardness and simple structure of the Martial language enhanced this peculiar effect of her speech; and much that seems infantine in translation was all but eloquent as she spoke it. Often, as on this occasion, I felt guilty of insincerity, of a verbal fencing unworthy of her unalloyed good faith and earnestness, as I endeavoured to parry thrusts that went to the very heart of all those instinctive doctrines which I could the less defend on the moment, because I had never before ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... the negotiations I have no intention of pursuing. They are of no interest to any one,—a miserable tissue of insincerity on one side, and hesitating uncertainty on the other. There is no occasion for us to weary ourselves with the ineffectual efforts to postpone an issue which ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... Mr. Rushbrook on business. Your business—OUR business," she added, with a charming smile, using for the first time the pronoun that seemed to indicate their unity and interest, and yet fully aware of a vague insincerity in ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... of us. I have never in all my life seen anything more charming than the behaviour of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch to Trenchard. There is something about Russian kindness that is both simpler and more tactful than any other kindness in the world. Tact is too often another name for insincerity, but Russian kindheartedness is the most honest impulse in the Russian soul, the quality that comes first, before anger, before injustice, before prejudice, before slander, before disloyalty, and overrides them all. They were, of course, conscious that Trenchard's ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... hazy and somewhat incoherent about a number of the details of her life, but she had lived under such varied circumstances that this alone was not convincing of her insincerity. When we met her brother we were very sure that at least a part of her story was false. He seemed to be a very decent fellow and was really interested in her. Several months earlier he had trouble with her on account of her staying out late at night, and had threatened her. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... insincerity! Power and renown no mortal ever shared, Who could retain or grasp them to himself: And, for Covilla? patience! peace! for her? She call upon her God, and outrage Him At His own altar! she repeat ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... the joy of a temporary reprieve may outweigh even the annoyance of an anticlimax, they were pleased to see us and gave us another farewell only slightly less emotional than the last. But on the third of this series of week-ends a note of insincerity crept into the "Goodbye, old man," and the hand-pressure ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... Wertheimer hadn't believed his protestations, or else Bannon had rejected the report which must have been made him by the girl. In either case, the Pack had not waited for the Lone Wolf to prove his insincerity; it hadn't bothered to declare war; it had simply struck; with less warning than a rattlesnake gives, it had struck—out of the ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... rightly, in the individual; particularly in the life of a man of great and intense intellectual powers, who cannot avoid seeing through human beings and observing the vanity of their thoughts and of their avocations, their dishonesty and self-deceptions, the insincerity of their emotions, their cowardice, the pettiness of their real ambitions. Actually, considering that Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine, one must be amazed at the balance and justice of his observations; much greater maturity is required ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... frequently use the language of sentimental gallantry; they declare themselves the slaves of their mistresses, are eager to wear chains, to go through fire, to die for them, promising to take their love to the next world. But all these things are mere "words, words, words"—adulation the insincerity of which is exposed as soon as we examine the actions and the motives of these poets, of whom more will be said in a later chapter. Their flatteries are addressed invariably to hetairai; they are conceived and written with the selfish desire to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... reduce his teaching to the limits of his practice, instead of extending the former and having faith in his power to bring the latter up to this level. Indeed, when teachers and those who are taught are living so close together, both, from a not unworthy fear of insincerity, are liable to make themselves and their ideals out to be worse than they are. It is sympathy alone that can overcome this difficulty. Indeed, it is safe to say that without sympathy—sympathy that understands difficulties, working equally in those who are old and those who are young—religion ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation. And this would be the case, even though he were surrounded by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... The slave had no social standing and no respect for himself or his fellow slaves and hence exercised unbounded insolence and tyranny towards his fellows. This gave to the social intercourse between slaves a flavor of vulgarity and insincerity utterly incompatible with the development of the finer instincts ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... a very great man from the pen of a very ladylike writer—this is the best description we can give of M. Caro's Life of George Sand. The late Professor of the Sorbonne could chatter charmingly about culture, and had all the fascinating insincerity of an accomplished phrase-maker; being an extremely superior person he had a great contempt for Democracy and its doings, but he was always popular with the Duchesses of the Faubourg, as there was nothing in history or in literature that he could not explain away ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... which I have spoken of as being hostile to poetry. Although he perceives his subject with the right urgency, he is unwilling to be quite loyal to his perception. He makes some concession to the witty insincerity of the society in which he lives, and his poetry is soiled by the contact. It is not destroyed, not even changed in its nature, but its gold is left for ever twisted in a baser metal with which it does not suit. What we get is not a new compound with the element that corresponds ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... we consider dangers and joys with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility—innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the pitch of natural conversation—but ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... respecting character, I have no objection to prefer prodigality to avarice, in some few instances; but I appeal to your observation if you have not met, and often met, with the same disingenuousness, the same hollow-hearted insincerity, and disintegritive depravity of principle, in the hackneyed victims of profusion, as in the unfeeling children of parsimony. I have every possible reverence for the much talked-of world beyond the grave, and I wish that which ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... socially, one of the very worst sins, the parent of seven other sins,—of falsehood, suspicion, hate, murder, and a whole bevy of devils. The prevalence of adultery in any country has always been a sign and a cause of social insincerity, division, and revolution; where a people has learnt to connive and laugh at it, and to treat it as a light thing, that people has been always careless, base, selfish, cowardly,—ripe for slavery. And we must say that either the courtiers and Londoners of ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... discovered that I was worthless. My great failings are insincerity of character and sly ugliness. Any one who watched me a little while would discover my ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... which would have followed from her own countrywomen did not, however, break upon the trained faces of the "de Fontanges l'Hommadieus," yet while Rose would have joined in it, albeit a little ruefully, she felt for the first time mortified at their civil insincerity. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... conversation. They were the wise ones, he said. They lived for art and love, and what else was there in life? A few sonatas, a few operas, a few pictures, a few books, and a love story; we had always to come back to that in the end. He spoke with conviction, his only insincerity being the alteration of a plural into a singular. But no, he did not think he had lied; he had spoken what seemed to him the truth at the present moment. Had he used the singular instead of the plural a fortnight ago, he would have lied, but within the last week his feelings for Evelyn had changed. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... her, for there was misery in her eyes and in her laugh and in the very touch of her hand. Misery and insincerity, and that terrible mental state when weakness is roped up between the two and knows, for once in its life, that it has no ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... directed to disunite his antagonists, and to separate the forces of Illyricum from the cause of rebellion. It was an easy task to deceive the frankness and simplicity of Vetranio, who, fluctuating some time between the opposite views of honor and interest, displayed to the world the insincerity of his temper, and was insensibly engaged in the snares of an artful negotiation. Constantius acknowledged him as a legitimate and equal colleague in the empire, on condition that he would renounce his disgraceful alliance with Magnentius, and appoint a place of interview ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... not appear by any means as particularly fresh or untouched. She appears with all the weakness and weariness of modern England or of any other Western power. In her politics she has broken up exactly as England has broken up, into a bewildering opportunism and insincerity. In the matter of war and the national attitude towards war, her resemblance to England is even more manifest and melancholy. It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... fatalistic ambitions. What they did not perceive was, that in his nature lay that ingrained tendency to drift before the wind, which is the most dangerous thing in politics. In the mid-sea of events he might change his course without conscious insincerity, but with the self-abandonment of a mind which, under pressure, loses the sense of ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... (concealment) 528; simulation &c (imitation) 19; dissimulation, dissembling; deceit; blague^. sham; pretense, pretending, malingering. lip homage, lip service; mouth honor; hollowness; mere show, mere outside; duplicity, double dealing, insincerity, hypocrisy, cant, humbug; jesuitism, jesuitry; pharisaism; Machiavelism, organized hypocrisy; crocodile tears, mealy-mouthedness^, quackery; charlatanism^, charlatanry; gammon; bun-kum^, bumcombe, flam; bam [Slang], flimflam, cajolery, flattery; Judas kiss; perfidy &c (bad faith) 940; il volto ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... properly screened. She came and deposited her wine jelly and patted her sister's hand and went away again without leaving even a ripple in her wake. As she departed she gave further proof of her insolent insincerity ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... deathlike stillness of the study, calm and significant memories of the last few days rose one after another in his imagination, particularly of the battle of Borodino and of that vague sense of his own insignificance and insincerity compared with the truth, simplicity, and strength of the class of men he mentally classed as they. When Gerasim roused him from his reverie the idea occurred to him of taking part in the popular defense of Moscow which he knew ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Camford conversations—how impetuous, how interesting, how thoroughly hearty and unconventional they were! How utterly presumption and ignorance were scouted in them, and how completely they were free from the least shadow of insincerity or ennui. If I could but transfer to my page a true and vivid picture of one such evening, spent in the society of Saint Werner's friends—if I could write down but one such conversation, and at all express its vivacity, its quick flashes of thought and logic, its ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... household. One thing I can positively assert in regard to his Majesty, the King of Etruria, is that he did not sincerely feel either all the enthusiasm or all the gratitude which he expressed towards the First Consul, and the latter had more than one proof of this insincerity. As to the king's talent for governing and reigning, the First Consul said to Cambaceres at his levee, in the same conversation from which I have already quoted, that the Spanish Ambassador had complained ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... more firmly in mother earth, so have the trials to which we Republicans of the Daily News have been subjected for the four years riveted us all the more securely to the faith. We have been forced in the line of professional duty to turn humorous paragraphs upon the alleged insincerity of our beloved political leader, but every paragraph so turned shall eventually come home d.v. (and we hope d.q.) to roost, like an Ossa, upon the Pelion of Infamy, which shall surely mark the grave of Mugwumpery. Every poem which we persecuted ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... He had seen, on the previous day, no trace of jealousy or resentment in his betrothed: he could still hear the candid ring of the girl's praise of Mrs. Vervain. If she were such an abyss of insincerity as to dissemble distrust under such frankness, she must at least be more subtle than to bring her doubts to her rival for solution. The situation seemed one through which one could no longer move in a penumbra, and he let in a burst of light with the direct query: ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... the understanding of our sex, which the moderns call compliments, and are intended to pass for so many instances of good breeding, though the most hyperbolical, unnatural stuff that can be conceived, and which can only serve to show the insincerity of the complimenter, and the ridiculous light in which the complimented appears in his eyes, if he supposes a woman capable of relishing the ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... that, so far as to "hurt the feelings" of her companion. The effect, therefore, was only that Lucy laboured to maintain a little artificial conversation, which in its turn reacted upon her mind, showing that even in herself there was the same disposition to insincerity which she had begun to discover in the world. She could say nothing to Bice about the matters which a little while before, when all was well, she had grieved over and objected to. Now she had nothing to say ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... not unmindful of the very difficult tasks with which you were called to deal, and no one can ignore the insistent conditions which, during recent years, have called for the continued and almost exclusive attention of your membership to public work. It would suggest insincerity if I expressed complete accord with every expression recorded in your roll calls, but we are all agreed about the difficulties and the inevitable divergence of opinion in seeking the reduction, amelioration and readjustment of the burdens of taxation. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... dashed when only Harriet responded, although she immediately assured Miss Field cordially with bright insincerity that she had known of her return, and ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... particle of hypocrisy about him. I wish I could think the same of his wife. For some reason she always gives me the impression of insincerity. If I were as good as you are, aunty, perhaps I should not be so suspicious. One thing more, and my eulogy of Daddy—the only one he will ever receive, I fear—is over. He is capable of sincere friendship, and that is more than you can say of ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... satisfactory and intelligible reasons for this step. You are a beautiful and luxurious creature: life is to you full and complete only when it is a carnival of love. My case is just the reverse. Before three soft speeches have escaped me I rebuke myself for folly and insincerity. Before a caress has had time to cool, a strenuous revulsion seizes me: I long to return to my old lonely ascetic hermit life; to my dry books; my Socialist propagandism; my voyage of discovery through the wilderness of thought. I married in an insane fit of belief that I had a share of the ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... consider yourselves as discharged from duty and permitted to do so. Your Maire having confided to me his authority—not without your consent—(this I avow I added with some difficulty, for who cared for their assent? but a Republican Government offers a premium to every insincerity), I wait with confidence to see ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... was leaving. I was going back now to the vast tumult of the roaring towns, to the lip of mockery, the eye of insincerity, the hand of hypocrisy, where none may trust a neighbor. And moreover, I was going back without one look, face to face, into the eyes and the heart of the woman I had loved, and who, by force of these extraordinary circumstances had, for a miraculous moment, been thus set down with me, ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... remarkable about his appearance. He was an ordinary brown-haired, blue-eyed young man,—not, perhaps, ordinary, for that combination is rather rare,—and there were some people who said that something in his eye betrayed what they called insincerity; indeed there was generally about him an agreeableness, a ready self-adaptation to everybody's way of thinking, a desire to recommend himself, which is always open to censure. Mrs. Wilberforce was one of the people ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... driving this way, and so we stopped to see you," answered Polly, with a feeling of shame at her own insincerity. ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... Lung, "never was there a truer proverb than that which says, 'It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops.' Do Mandarins or the friends of Mandarins travel in mean garments and unattended? Indeed, the person who is now before you is none other than the outcast Kai ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... and with great charm of manner, she had completely fascinated the young officer. He had vowed his adoration of her almost before he knew her. His avowals had been repulsed with just that margin of insincerity that would ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... hundred places; while the Regent was to possess no power whatever over any office, reversion, or pension. This appeared to the Prince and his allies a monstrous proposition, calculated to introduce "weakness, disorder, and insincerity into every branch of political business;" to "separate the Court from the State;" to "disconnect the authority to command service from the power of animating it by reward;" and to impose on the Regent "all the invidious duties ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... completely. As he says himself, "I awoke one morning to find myself famous," and presently he styles himself "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme." The worst element in Byron at this time was his insincerity, his continual posing as the hero of his poetry. His best works were translated, and his fame spread almost as rapidly on the Continent as in England. Even Goethe was deceived, and declared that a man so wonderful in character had never before appeared in literature, and would ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... kind, if duly realised, bring out clearly the insincerity and the unreality of much of our professed belief. Hardly any sane man would desire to suppress Bank Holidays simply because they are the occasion of a considerable number of cases of drunkenness which would not otherwise have taken place. No ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... observed to the demon-guide: "Thou hast described the sand as hot, but it is not so." "True; and it is on account of the heavy showers of snow that have fallen and cooled the ground, a proof that thou art under the protection of the Almighty." Isfendiyar smiled, and said: "Thou art all insincerity and deception, thus to play upon my feelings with false or imaginary terrors." Saying this he urged his soldiers to pass rapidly on, so as to leave the sand behind them, and they presently came to a great river. Isfendiyar was now angry with Kurugsar, ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... some discreet congratulations. He preferred the piece, however, as it had been originally written, and suggested to Ford the advisability of returning to the first text. Then Ford went upstairs to take his paint off, and Hubert walked about the stage with Brown. Brown's insincerity was sufficiently transparent; but men in Hubert's position catch at straws, and he soon began to believe that the attitude of the public towards his play was not so unfavourable ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... himself states, his high rank by constantly drilling himself in the art of writing. This imitation of form to the point of perfection, rather than an expression of a great and moving idea, gives an air of insincerity to some of Stevenson's works. Yet, although seemingly artificial, he never chose words for the sake of mere sounds, but for their accuracy in truth and fitness. He was as an ephemeral shadow with an optimistic and real spirit. ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... more impetuous when a sudden emancipation of mind sweeps the old landmarks and restraints out of sight, and nothing has been foreseen which can serve as a guide. Then is the time when weak places in education show themselves, when the least insincerity in the presentment of truth brings its own punishment, and a faith not pillared and grounded in all honesty is in danger of failing. The best security is to have nothing to unlearn, to know that what one knows is a very small part of what ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... World of Fashion is a trivial world where all must appear trivial; it is a place where all must act a part, and where those are most regarded who are most affected; it is a world of shams and insincerity, and very ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... loose or was carelessly fastened, the breastplate would be sure to get out of position, so all the subsequent graces largely depend for their vigorous exercise on the prime virtue of truthfulness. Righteousness and faith will be weakened by the fatal taint of insincerity, and, on the other hand, conscious truthfulness will give strength to the whole man. Braced up and concentrated, our powers for all service and for all conflict will be increased. 'The bond of perfectness' is, no doubt, 'Love,' but that perfect bond will ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... agitating for this very thing in England. So that it need not seem surprising that I should be in earnest in this; and I trust that after the explanation I have made of my position and my doctrines. I shall not be charged either with insincerity or with a desire to ingratiate myself with the majority of this body, with the majority of the people, or with any one, because, thank God, I am free from all entanglements of that kind at this present speaking, and if I retain my senses I ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... smile, and answered in the insincerity of my pain, that it must have been a pleasant task to ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... by the specious dreams and lies of their false prophets, continued to sin, and so fell to their doom, abashed at last but unassoilable.(783) If at any time they were startled by disaster, this found them too enfeebled even for repentance by their habitual insincerity or self-indulgence; which made them incapable of truth even under pain, and of a real conversion to God.(784) All this is discovered to us by the eyes and the mouth of Jeremiah. What in it is arbitrary? The record is awful, nothing like it in literature. Yet every step is ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... respectable mainspring of action. But Ferdinand has been credited with neither. Whithersoever he moves one looks in vain for the guiding light of large ideas. Deeper than conscious volition lies the stored-up instinct of barren pettifogging egotism to which a fine moral atmosphere is deadly. Insincerity is second nature to him. He once boasted in my presence that he was a born actor, and it is fair to say that he played his roles—repellent for the most part—as behoves a mummer. The astonishing ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of each and every one of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brain-racking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could contemplate with edification. The glaring insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient to-day; it never will be sufficient while the world stands, perhaps. There is no school in all our land where the young ladies do not feel ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
