"Shrewdness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gathered, with an idea of forming for her certain contact points with the active life from which she was otherwise cut off. But she gave us, I am sure, more than we brought her, and, as will be seen later, her shrewdness was an important element in solving ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... fanatic hatred and hostility. No dog of healthy instinct is able to pass an echidna without some sort of an attempt upon its life. The long tubular nose of the echidna is the vital spot. This is guarded with such shrewdness and determination as to be impregnable. But the dog which pursues the proper tactics, and is wily and patient, sooner or later-regardless of the alleged poisonous spur—seizes one of the hind legs, and the conflict quickly ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... importance of the conservation of human strength and health, and the irreparable loss to society of energy uselessly dissipated, either in idle worry or in aimless activity. Most of us would reproach ourselves for lack of shrewdness if we spent for any article more than it was worth, yet few of us consider that we daily expend on domestic and business tasks an amount of energy far in excess of that actually required. The farmer who flails his grain instead of threshing it ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... expense of canvassing distant battle-fields for the soldiers' votes might have been saved. And it would have been easier for these women to vote than to pay their proportion of the tax incurred. Yankee thrift and shrewdness would have been vindicated if Connecticut had provided for the enfranchisement of her women by constitutional amendment, instead of wasting her money and butting her dignity against judicial vetoes in legislating ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and also that of navigation, to the fishermen and seamen of the locality. That he succeeded in this field in so little and poor a community is no small tribute to his powers. He was a man of decided ability and great natural shrewdness, and very soon began to climb, as such men do. The landlord of the district appointed him his Baron Bailie, an office which then had important judicial functions. He rose to high position in the town, being ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... however, a puzzle to Wadsworth, though he had been acquainted with him so long. In the intimacy of their relationship at the Emporium, Wadsworth found himself constantly amazed at the lad's shrewdness, at his vocabulary of slang, the readiness with which he could turn from the sheerest of jibing and fun-making to the recital of a bit of "Bill Shakespeare," or a scene from the plays of other authors. "Where on earth do you get it all from?" he asked William ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... soldiers stood quaking like aspen, but their leader was of stouter stuff. Never had his native Attic shrewdness guided ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... chief warmly. Bad as they were, both in private life and public conduct, they lacked neither shrewdness nor courage. They plundered their country—but were ready to fight for it against the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... child cogitated over the situation, but, as is the Indian's habit, without a word to her grand parent of what was occupying her mind. The old woman saw she was absorbed in some mental problem, and, with the shrewdness of the aborigine, guessed the subject, and sought to divert her thoughts into other channels. It was in vain, for one evening, after their simple meal of herbs, the girl, gathering courage, in the increasing dusk, asked ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... It seemed to him that if he came at all to the appointment, however late, he was clear from the charge of cowardice. Nay, now he began to suspect a hoax, and actually complimented himself on his shrewdness in having suspected and outmanoeuvred his mystifiers. So very idle a thing is a ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interposed George quickly, "you underrate Professor Keredec's shrewdness. His plans are not so simple as you think. He knows that my cousin Louise never obtained ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... of the greatest men in the whole work is Jaafar himself, called Jaafar the Barmekide, also vizier to Harun Ar-Raschid. Of his somewhat sardonic shrewdness this is a good example. Having learned that Ar-Raschid was much depressed in consequence of a Jewish astrologer having predicted to him that he would die within a year, he interviewed the Jew, who had been detained as a ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... condition of these men is far worse than that of the wretched labourers of Wilts or Dorset. Their earnings are as low and often lower; their trade requires a far longer instruction, far greater skill and shrewdness; their rent and food are more expensive; and their hours of work, while they have work, more than half as long again. Conceive sixteen or eighteen hours of skilled labour in a stifling and fetid chamber, earning not much more than 6s. 6d. or 7s. ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... that, with all the good opinion my father entertained of my shrewdness, he would have deputed me on the present occasion had he been able to go himself; but he was not able, being confined to bed by a severe attack of rheumatism. Be this as it may, however, the important business was put into my hands; and great was the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... preferred to have her under their own regime. La Fosse was sure Sir John would never again be free and could never, of course, claim his lands. He went so far as to make sure—as sure as was in his power—that Penwick should not be released. He, being a man of shrewdness, at once manipulated affairs without the knowledge of his sovereign or the higher powers about him. In a very short time these possessions were built upon by the Jesuits, who, through La Fosse, claimed all right and title. But La Fosse was forgetful. ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... 'assofeta', that is to say, her chief 'femme de chambre'; an office more considerable in Spain than with us. Laura had brought her husband with her, a peasant in every way, seen and known by nobody; but Laura had intelligence, shrewdness, cleverness, and ambitious views, in spite of the external vulgarity of her manners, which she had preserved either from habit, or from policy, for make herself less suspected. Like all persons of this extraction, she was thoroughly selfish. She was not unaware how impatiently Alberoni endured ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... containing deputies from each of the seventeen provinces; and eight years later a grand council was organized with supreme judicial and financial functions. Charles the Bold, who died in 1477, was prevented from constructing a great central kingdom between France and the Germanies only by the shrewdness of his implacable foe, King Louis XI of France. As we have seen, in another connection, Louis seized the duchy of Burgundy on the death of Charles the Bold, thereby extending the eastern frontier of France, but the duke's inheritance in the Netherlands passed to his daughter Mary. In 1477 Mary's ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... To this shrewdness of observation, he added a racy humor which those who knew him in his hours of relaxation and familiarity will not easily forget. His mind was stored with quaint and pithy phrases, and apt illustrations, which he not ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... would never have been such a monetary blockhead, had he not been now so generally tipsy; the fumes of beer had mingled with his plan, and all his usual shrewdness had been blunted into folly by greediness of lucre on the one side, and potent liquors on the other. The moment that the banker's parting speech had reached his ear, the absurdity of Roger's scheme was evident even to himself, and with a bare "Good day, Master," he hurriedly took his bundle from ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... affection for Sancho together with his impatience of the squire's loquacity and impertinence; but in the main, apart from his craze, he is little more than a thoughtful, cultured gentleman, with instinctive good taste and a great deal of shrewdness and originality of mind. ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of his father's recent and constant visits at the house; and without conjecturing precisely what were Olivier's designs, he connected them, in the natural and acquired shrewdness he possessed, with the wealthy widow. He resolved to watch, observe, and draw his own conclusions. As he entered Madame Bellanger's room rather abruptly, he observed her push aside amongst her papers something she had been gazing on,—something which sparkled to his eyes. He sat ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have but one result and that disastrous to the latter. One word from her would have ended everything for Baldos. She saw through the Iron Count's ruse as if by divine inspiration and profited where he least expected her to excel in shrewdness. Marlanx had deliberately invited the assault by the guard. His object had been to snare Baldos into his own undoing, and a horrible undoing it would have been. One blow would have secured the desired result. Nothing could have saved the guard who had struck his superior officer. ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... confidently hoped that the prophet would forget this theory, as he had apparently forgotten the many theories which had ere now proposed themselves to his excitable brain, and which he had found unworkable. His practical shrewdness acted as a critic on his visionary notions—never in thought, for he did not seem able to exercise the two phases of his mind at once, but always in practice—and Susannah could not conceive that a new order of marriage ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... She was not a distinctly beautiful person, perhaps, this slim-figured young woman, with the somewhat pale face, the high-arched eyebrows, and light-brown hair; but at least she had extremely pretty gray eyes, that had a touch of shrewdness and humor in them, as well as plenty of gentleness and womanliness; and she had a soft and attractive ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... peasant, with considerably less shrewdness than most border Englishmen or Scotsmen inherit; and no sense of humor: but gifted (in this singularly) with vivid sense of natural beauty, and a pretty turn for reflections, not always acute, but, as far ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Hodge-Podge. "There's water intilt," she said, "there's mutton intilt, there's pease intilt, there's leeks intilt, there's neeps intilt, and sometimes somethings else intilt." The analysis was an exhaustive one, and the intelligence displayed by the landlady was every way worthy of the shrewdness indigenous to her country; but her answer was not so lucid to her listener as to herself, as appeared by his bewildered looks, and his further half-despairing interrogatory. "But what is intilt?" said he, impatiently striking in before she had well finished. "Haven't I been tellin' ye what's ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... straight home. He sent a telegram to Mary Bartley: "Landlord gone to you with bracelet;" and this he signed with the name of the landlady, but no address. He was afraid to say more, though he would have liked to put his wife upon her guard; but he trusted to her natural shrewdness. He mounted his horse and went straight home, but he was late for dinner, and that vexed him a little, for it was a matter Colonel Clifford was particular about. He dashed up to his bedroom and began to dress all ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... keep himself any farther away from the girls: he went after them and sought them; he was spirited in conversation, choice in his dress, and that he might display his shrewdness, he courted both girls at the same time, the one out of courtesy, the ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... bought the block, the sidewalk of which he had swept; every man who stood in his way he removed this way or that. He was dishonest, but his dishonesty was of a Napoleonic order. He was uneducated, but he possessed that exact knowledge of mankind that makes leaders; and his shrewdness was the result of caution and suspicion. But like all men of his breed, he hated with peculiar venom the well-born; he loved to grapple with them, to wrest their idleness from them, to compel them to work for a living, to humiliate them. The fiber in McQuade was coarse; he possessed neither ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... were singularly successful in imparting private instruction to catechumens. Some deacons were frequently commissioned to administer to the wants of the sick; and others, who were remarkable for their shrewdness and discrimination, were employed to distribute alms to the indigent. In one of his epistles Paul pointedly refers to the multiform duties of these ecclesiastical office-bearers-"Having then," says ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... was a man of shrewdness. He knew he could not compete with the established solidity of the Trocadero, the Ritz, the Piccadilly, or the garishness of Frascati's, so he purchased and remodelled an unobtrusive building in an unobtrusive street ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... exhausted his shafts of wit and ridicule, and every expedient he could devise: it was of no use—the old lady was not thus to be put down; so, like others similarly situated, he was obliged to submit. His shrewdness, however, did not forsake him; from this seeming evil he contrived to educe some good; he conceived the idea of collecting the songs and ditties as they came from his mother, and such as he could gather from other sources, and publishing them for the benefit of the world—not forgetting himself. ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies - Without Addition or Abridgement • Munroe and Francis
... of his mind to his clergy was not altogether proof against a certain simple shrewdness, aided perhaps by an inclination to save money, to which he was said not to be insensible. Of course his grandfather, the enlightened and reforming Duke Leopold I., had not been at all in the good graces of the Church, and for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... Mary, who died very complaisantly in a short time and left him free to marry his first love, which he quickly did. We find the Judge after his daughter's death higgling over her marriage portion with Mr. Gerrish, Sr., and see that grief for her did not prevent him from showing as much shrewdness in that matter as he had displayed in ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... to be profound thought, till Pericles flung the door open. Violetta and Irma had departed. "Behold! I have it; ze address of your rogue Barto Rizzo," said Pericles, in the manner of one whose triumph is absolutely due to his own shrewdness. "Are two women a match for me? Now, my friend, you shall see. Barto Rizzo is too clever for zis government, which cannot catch him. I catch him, and I teach him he may touch politics—it is not for him to touch Art. What! to hound men to interrupt her while she sings in public ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... test of character or shrewdness or courage. Sharp distinctions are made, that require a child of ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... English officers were convinced that Ruiz was mad. How do you say that?—tile loose—eh? But the doctor, an observant Scotsman with much shrewdness and philosophy in his character, told me that it was a very curious case of possession. I met him many years afterwards, but he remembered the experience very well. He told me, too, that in his opinion ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... gesture with the two fingers that held his cigarette, which seemed to be a warning to the Sarrions not to make any mistake as to the shrewdness of ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... for gold. Arrived in the Sacramento Valley, he spent three or four years at farming. Perhaps his Yankee shrewdness saw larger profits in hay and cattle than in washing gravel. But certainly his New England integrity and soberness of character were more in keeping with the spirit of the pioneer than with ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... lines about the eyes when they twinkled with laughter, which was often. No individual feature was especially striking, but the general impression of her countenance was of animation and activity, mingled with geniality and with native shrewdness. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... the light in Mary's eyes with the instinctive shrewdness by which her race seem to divine the thoughts and feelings of their superiors, and chuckled to herself internally. Without ever having been made a confidante by any party, or having a word said to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... beautiful Sunday school simplicity and practicality prevailed, the 'Yankee' (citizen of the New England States) was hated with a splendid energy. But religion had nothing to do with it. In a trade, the Yankee was held to be about five times the match of the Westerner. His shrewdness, his insight, his judgment, his knowledge, his enterprise, and his formidable cleverness in applying these forces were frankly ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... known to all those here assembled— I may not justly claim the victor's crown, Adelma's shrewdness served me; not my own. Prince Kalaf vanquished me, and may command As prize of his achievement, my poor hand. (To KALAF.) But not in deference to lawful right I gave myself to thee, but through love's might. My heart was thine, when first ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... talent; Jkull is the best in all perilous adventures, but I,' he added, 'I am the least worth of us brothers, because the berserkr fits come over me, quite against my will, and I wish that you, my brother, with your shrewdness, would devise some ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... destinies of the town. He was Deputy-Mayor, and Chairman of the General Purposes Committee of the Town Council; he was also a Guardian of the Poor, a Justice of the Peace, President of the Society for the Prosecution of Felons, a sidesman, an Oddfellow, and several other things that meant dining, shrewdness, and good-nature. He was a short, stiff, stout, red-faced man, jolly with the jollity that springs from a kind heart, a humorous disposition, a perfect digestion, and the respectful deference of one's bank-manager. Without being a member of the Browning Society, ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... been Gathergold, he might just as suitably have been nicknamed Scattercopper. Still, nevertheless, with an earnest shout, and evidently with as much good faith as ever, the people bellowed 'He is the very image of the Great Stone Face!' But Ernest turned sadly from the wrinkled shrewdness of that sordid visage, and gazed up the valley, where, amid a gathering mist, gilded by the last sunbeams, he could still distinguish those glorious features which had impressed themselves into his soul. Their aspect cheered him. What did the benign ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... suggestion. Her will did not really accept it, any more than her intellect really weighed it; but she succumbed to it; and did not even write again, nor question the man further. Had she done this she might perhaps have found out the truth, that the man, a stupid rustic with enough shrewdness to lie, but not enough to lie cleverly, had had his foolish head turned by the buzz of London town and the splendour of Lambeth stables and the friendliness of the grooms there, and had got heavily drunk on leaving Anthony; ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... educate her brothers and sisters. Plus a marriage settlement for herself, and a sum in escrow in the Earth Union bank, should she ever divorce him for cruelty or mistreatment. But that had been only innate shrewdness. She would still have married him had he refused her demands for her family. For his wealth fascinated her, and the prospect of being a virtual queen, even of a distant outpost colony such as that on ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... snorted contempt for the advice of a mere male, she found the thought top-side of her mind as she started out next morning to pay Bascom a momentous call. After all, Jonathan had but echoed her own consistent philosophy of life. But with her usual shrewdness she decided to go armed ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... Harris's natural shrewdness in a measure overcame his fanaticism, and he continued to press Smith for a sight of the plates. Smith thereupon made one of the first uses of those "revelations" which played so important a part in his ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... inhabitants of eastern Lancashire and the West Riding are seldom born foolish, and Jasper had cautioned me. So it may have been native shrewdness that led to my leaving the draft for one hundred pounds intact at the Winnipeg office of the Bank of Montreal and determining to earn experience and a living at the same time as promptly as possible. Also, though I did not discover it until later, this is the one safe procedure for ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... of Tacitus[554], and I hazarded an opinion, that with all his merit for penetration, shrewdness of judgement, and terseness of expression, he was too compact, too much broken into hints, as it were, and therefore too difficult to be understood. To my great satisfaction, Dr. Johnson sanctioned this opinion. 'Tacitus, Sir, seems to me rather to have made notes for an historical work, than to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the first of these twin blessings. Then had come Africa, where his notions had been further dislocated by those natives who derided both the one and the other—such fine healthy animals, all the same! A candid soul, he allowed his natural shrewdness and logic to play freely with memories of his earlier experiences among the London poor. Those experiences now became fraught with a new meaning. The solemn doctrines he had preached in those days: ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... talk was brief and confined to the necessities. Then matters of opinion, disjointed, fragmentary, began to creep in. Finally the two came to know each other, less by what was actually said, than by the attitude of mind such confidences presupposed. One topic they avoided. Sam, for all his shrewdness, could not determine to what degree had persisted the young man's initial attraction for the girl. Of her devotion there could be no question, but in how much it depended on the necessity of the moment lay the puzzle. Her demeanor was inscrutable. Yet Sam came gradually to trust ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... bitter shrewdness and bleak realism in the suffering classes it is commonly supposed that the more leisured classes stand for certain legitimate ideas which also have their place in life; such as history, reverence, the love of the ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... at that period evidently understood Lord Byron better than either his future bride or myself; but this speaks more for Moore's shrewdness than for Byron's ingenuousness ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and some want of that fresh cleanliness and finish of general appearance which went to my idea of a gentleman's outside. I found him a warm-hearted, cold-mannered man, with a clear, strong head, and a shrewdness of observation which recalled the Rector to my mind more than once. The tones of his voice made me start sometimes, they were so like the voice that I could never hear again in this life. He spoke always in the broad dialect into which the Rector was only wont to ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... appearance, of a country preacher, and even when he was "on the underground" he used to do his daily "stint" of farm labor, secretly, either at night or in the very early morning. He was a successful farmer (born in Connecticut), of a Yankee shrewdness and industry. He recognized that in order to get a crop of wheat, it was necessary to do something more than trust in the Lord. But in administering the affairs of the Church, he seemed to ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... to a printer in the latter town. After remaining there four years and a half he removed to Leeds, finished his apprenticeship, and at once started in business for himself. He was always a most assiduous student, and quickly became known as a man of great practical shrewdness and ability, who took a keen interest in political and social movements. His political opinions led him to sympathize with nonconformity and he soon joined the Independents. In 1801 the assistance of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... but their gravity was completely outweighed in the adjutant's mind by this deplorable affair of Lieutenant Butler's. Without wishing to convey an impression that the blunt and downright O'Moy was gifted with any undue measure of shrewdness, it must nevertheless be said that he was quick to perceive what fresh thorns the occurrence was likely to throw in a path that was already thorny enough in all conscience, what a semblance of justification it must give to the hostility of the intriguers on the Council of ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... Asgill retorted, showing his greater shrewdness, "who has the spirit to say that he won't ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... servitors" of genius and passion. In conclusion we may say, that, in the combination of accurate observation, strong sense, and delicate spiritual perception,—in the union of humor and pathos, of shrewdness and sentiment,—and in the power of seizing character in its vital inward sources, and of portraying its outward peculiarities,—"The Pearl of Orr's Island" does not yield to any book which Mrs. Stowe has heretofore ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... evidence of his breadth of mind, his freedom from prejudice, his disposition to do the generous and the helpful thing. In fact, it was evidence of little more than his dominant and most valuable trait—his shrewdness. After one careful glance over the ruins of his plan, he appreciated that Victor Dorn was at last a force to be reckoned with. He had been growing, growing—somewhat above the surface, a great deal more beneath the surface. His astonishing ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... railroad official in this city a little while ago, that nearly every clerk in a certain department of the road understood that large sums of money were made by shrewd violations of the Interstate Commerce Law, was ready to admire the shrewdness with which it was done, and declared that they would all do the same thing if they were high enough in ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... Sir—I am still in the domain of practice and administration—I should put his singular, perhaps an unrivalled, tact in the management of men, and a judgment of intuitive shrewdness as to the best outlet from perplexed and often baffling situations. He had, in its highest and best development, the genius of common sense. These rare gifts of practical efficiency were, during the whole of his Kingship, yoked to the service of a great ideal. He was animated every day of his Sovereignty ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... American soil who came toward them with the long, loose limbs and swinging stride inherited from an ancestry bred to tramping the hills of Connemara. A pair of twinkling eyes and a mouth that was always on the point of breaking into a smile when it was not actually smiling tempered the peasant shrewdness of a face that got further softening, and a touch of superiority, from a ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... of the Surete, had telegraphed orders for the arrest of Sir Hugh and his daughter. But, thanks to the shrewdness of Fetherston, who had lingered in the vicinity to afford them protection if necessary, they had succeeded in escaping only a single hour before ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... been out of Bursley. Meshach, however, travelled sometimes in the British Isles, and thereby kept his ideas from congealing. And those who had met him in trains and hotels knew that porters, waiters, and drivers did not mistake his shrewdness for that of a simpleton determined not to be robbed; that he wanted the right things and had the art to get them; in short, that he was an expert in travel. Like many old provincial bachelors, while frugal at home he could be profuse abroad, exercising the luxurious freedom of the ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... region of her being—presented themselves in visual forms, taking the shapes of favourite saints—familiar to her in works of sacred art—attended by an hallucinatory brightness of light ('a photism'), and apparently uttering words of advice which was in conflict with Jeanne's great natural shrewdness and strong sense of duty to her parents. 'She MUST go into France,' and for two or three years she pleaded her ignorance and incompetence. She declined to go. She COULD resist her voices. In prison at Beaurevoir, they forbade her to leap from the tower. But her natural ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... he decided that society was in a low state, now he calls on all men to put their shoulders to the wheel and lift it out of the Slough of Despond, where it has been floundering to no purpose for so long. His investigations are aided by a keen shrewdness, that bespeaks the practical man, who knows where to find the vulnerable heel of circumstance, and aims at it his swiftest arrows. In his essay on Wealth this sharp practical insight hardens every sentence. The sentimentalist, who believes, with Henri Blaze, that romance must be the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Naida. The first result was that the ape-men started to quarrel over the one girl. From what Gori says, trouble started on all sides at once. It became inadvisable to let Naida live. So the Duca, in his shrewdness, planned a sacrifice. By sacrificing Naida, he rids himself of a source of contention amongst the ape-men. He also hopes his act will win favor from his Gods, and make them help him when he is ready to launch a new attempt to capture all ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... was of too robust a character, thanks to the Misses Farnham. Still less, of course, had she any reproaches to serve upon her mother, although for a long time I thought I detected—or was it my guilty conscience?—a spark of shrewdness in the glance she bent upon me when the talk was of Mr. Tottenham and the probabilities of his return to Agra. So well did she sustain her experience, or so little did she feel it, that I believe the impression went abroad that Dacres had been sent disconsolate away. One astonishing conversation ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... that if he were successful there would be no difficulty in inducing, or if necessary compelling, his wife to accept it. He could as easily have made Queen Victoria accept it. For with the inherited shrewdness of her class she had also their integrity. She would have kept any engagement she made even if it had ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... freight. Unfortunately the vessels met in a storm and sank. Then he became a hanger-on of the circus; in idle moments a tout. It was in the latter capacity that Antipas met him, and, pleased with his shrewdness and perfect corruption, had attached him to his house. This had occurred in years previous, and as yet Antipas had found no cause to regret the trust imposed. He was a useful braggart, idle, familiar, and discreet; and he had ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... exclaimed. "We are rich women from to-day," and as she said it I saw the shrewdness creep beck into her eyes and the long powerful features take on the expressive character which they had so pitifully lacked up to the moment. I realized that I had been the witness of a miracle. The reason, shattered, or, let us say, ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... sights, was not interested. Not so some of the others who went out to see, and among them was "King" Plummer, who began at once to calculate the number of cattle, their value, and how far they had come, all of which he did with great shrewdness. ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... owing to old Elsie's watchful shrewdness and address that the lovers came into this paradise by the gate of marriage; for the young man was ready to offer anything at the feet of his divinity, as the old mother ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... would declare exactly as if they were suggestions just made by some one else, almost persuading the parties to whom they were attributed that they had really advanced them. In his judgment of the men with whom he had to deal, he showed a strange mixture of shrewdness and simplicity. He seldom failed to discern and to take advantage of the ruling characteristics of those who approached him, and he could subsidize the knowledge and talents of other men with rare skill. He especially excelled in judging men collectively. ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... produces. He accumulated pictures by old masters, and precious sculptures. At fifty he had known all the most beautiful women of the stage, and many in society. He enjoyed everything worldly with the brutality of his temperament and the shrewdness ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... returned, "of the quality of your wits there can be no question. You have guessed for yourself the half of what I was come to tell you. Has your shrewdness borne you any further? Have you concluded aught concerning the nature ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... over to fathom the little rivulets of Parisian philosophy. This he did effectually, and thus unconsciously levelled the paths for Shakspeare, and for that supreme dominion which he has since held over the German stage, by crushing with his sarcastic shrewdness the pretensions of all who stood in the way. At that time, and even yet, the functions of a literary man were very important in Germany; the popular mind and the popular instinct pointed one way, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Low-Church doctrine—as evangelical as anything to be heard in the Independent Chapel; and he made a High-Church assertion of ecclesiastical powers and functions. Clearly, the Dissenters would feel that 'the parson' was too many for them. Nothing like a man who combines shrewdness with energy. The wisdom of the serpent, Mr. Barton considered, was one of his ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... was divided. It was wise, we have implied, for Ramsey to take the exhorter while he was in a manageable humor. He had come to the roof with an improved regard, got by his fall in the cabin, for the "'Piscopalian play-actoh," and with brute shrewdness was glad to make an outward show of good-will to Gilmore, and accepted with avidity every pretty advance of Gid Hayle's "bodacious brick-top gal." Hugh could hear him answering Ramsey's inquiries regarding various pieces of river seen or ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... drawn out of its mask of eternal shrewdness and suspicion by a beaming smile, "what can I say? How can ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... the substance, and all descriptions and incidents but accessories, as in "The Pilgrim's Progress." A fable is generally briefer, representing animals as the speakers and actors, and commonly conveying some lesson of practical wisdom or shrewdness, as "The Fables of AEsop." A parable is exclusively moral or religious, briefer and less adorned than an allegory, with its lesson more immediately discernible, given, as it were, at a stroke. Any comparison, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Cassandra had in her mind's eye when she cried, "O, Apollo—O, Apollo!" And this was your friend, forsooth, with his novel ideas upon poetry! Yet this vulgar piece of human mechanism is not without a little cunning shrewdness, characteristically marked in his little pig-eye; and I must tell you one piece of criticism of his, and an emendation, not unworthy the great Bentley himself. Yet I know not why I tell you, for you know it well already, I suspect; for he told me he had ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... say that Mr. Hahn picked up a good deal of valuable information in the course of his career as a waiter; and to him information meant money, and money meant power and a recognized place in society. The diplomatic shrewdness which enabled him to estimate the moral calibre of a patron served him equally well in estimating the value of an investment. He had a hundred subterranean channels of information, and his judgment as to the soundness or unsoundness of a financial enterprise ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... address and handsome fortune, it would have been strange indeed, if he had not been highly esteemed in the community where he dwelt. Besides, he was a man of sense and taste, witty, jovial, talkative, and of such extremely easy good-nature, that, if it had not been for the tact and shrewdness of his brother and partner in trade, who managed the business of the firm, the Doctor's income would have diminished, instead of increasing, as it did, year after year. As it was, his practice as a physician scarcely paid for his horsekeeping and the medicines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Concord. On the road Samuel Prescott joined them. When about half-way, four British officers, mounted and fully armed, stopped them. Prescott jumped over the low stone wall, made his escape and alarmed Concord. Dawes was chased by two of the officers until, with rare shrewdness, he dashed up in front of a deserted farm-house and shouted, "Hello, boys! I've got two of ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... handful of incense on the altar of Scott, versifying the tale of Il Bizarro, which the dying Sir Walter records in his Journal in Italy. The Churchwarden and the Curate is not inferior to the earlier peasant poems in its expression of shrewdness, humour, and superstition. A verse of Poets and Critics may be taken as the poet's last word on the ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... of money. He is described as having been a tall, dark man of mixed descent, Spanish, Creole, and mulatto. His great physical strength and brute courage are supposed to have given him precedence among his associates, added to which he possessed a large share of native shrewdness, cunning, and business tact. His masquerading capacity, if we may believe the current stories told of him, was very remarkable, enabling him to assume almost any disguise and to effectually carry it out, so as to go safely ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... answering quickly that he was delighted to welcome him. But a suddenly born shrewdness prevented him. To-day, like a guilty man, he was painfully conscious, painfully alert. He knew that Hermione was wondering about him, and realized that her question afforded him an opportunity to be deceptive and yet to seem quite natural and ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Mr. Bolton's shrewdness continued to rise as I noticed his close attention to my tale and how much to the point his questions were. Every now and then he stopped me while he made a jotting in a fat little brown leather pocket book, and at ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... country. The founding of Norman power there was largely the work of a noble named Robert Guiscard ("the Crafty"), a man almost as celebrated as William the Conqueror. He had set out from his home in Normandy with only a single follower, but his valor and shrewdness soon brought him to the front. Robert united the scattered bands of Normans in Italy, who were fighting for pay or plunder, and wrested from the Roman Empire in the East its last territories in the peninsula. Before his death ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... at Cedarcrest, there were two absentees; as there was, also, one guest who had not been expected, and who, for once in his life, was not entirely welcome at Sally Gardner's country home. For Sally had a wholesome respect for, as well as an intuitive perception of, the old lawyer's shrewdness. Quick to scent a plot of any sort, Mrs. Gardner saw in this incident—the arrival of Melvin with the Houston girls, and the absence of her star guest and escort—certain circumstances that smelled strongly of pre-arrangement. She remembered what her husband had said to her, ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... ROSE. Your shrewdness would have done you more credit if you had detected it before. As it is, I have your signet and your promise to save ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... north and east depends much upon the beholder's sympathy with Nature unadorned—wild stretches of seashore and pathless moors, mountain-defiles and wooded tarns. Wales and Cornwall, again, have the stamp of a race whose surroundings have taught them shrewdness and perseverance, and their scenery is such that in many places, though the eye misses trees, it hardly regrets them. In the midland counties, on the other hand, take the trees away and the landscape ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... to his crossing. Arcoll had assumed that he would swim the river and try to get over the road between Main Drift and Wesselsburg. But in this assumption he underrated the shrewdness of his opponent. Laputa knew perfectly well that we had not enough men to patrol the whole countryside, but that the river enabled us to divide the land into two sections and concentrate strongly on one or the other. Accordingly he left the Great Letaba ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... New England in it; and some of the expressions savoured a little of the stilts of the newspapers; but, on the whole, the language was sufficiently accurate and surprisingly good, considering the class in life of the speakers. The conjectures, too, manifested great shrewdness and familiarity with practical things, as well as, in a few instances, some reading. Hall, however, actually surprised me. He spoke with a precision and knowledge of mechanics that would have done credit to a scholar, and with a simplicity that added to the influence of what he said. Some ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... to the use of several kinds of animal and other manures, green crops were sometimes ploughed in by the Romans. The shrewdness which, more than inventiveness, characterized their husbandry comes out well in the following quotation from the 18th book of the Natural History of Pliny:—"Cato would have this point especially to be considered, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... occupations. Going about among the well-to-do houses, he talked with masters and servants and picked up ideas which made him the man of the world of the family, the shrewd head. We shall presently see that in making love to Rigou's servant-girl, Jean-Louis deserved his reputation for shrewdness. ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... conducted as a partnership, under the title of Murray and Highley. But in 1803 John Murray cancelled the partnership, and started for himself at 32, Fleet Street. Relieved from a timorous partner, he at once displayed his shrewdness, energy, and literary enthusiasm. He rapidly became, as Byron called him, "the [Greek (transliterated): Anax] of Publishers," or, as he was nicknamed, "The Emperor of the West." In February, 1809, he had launched the 'Quarterly Review'; in March, 1812, he published ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... sharp corner in business with Mr. Harper Freeman, Jr., he invariably found that frisky individual waiting for him round the corner with a cheery smile of welcome, shrewd and disconcerting. It was this cheery shrewdness of his that made him the most successful cattle buyer in the county and at the same time secretary of the Middlesex Caledonian Society. As secretary of this society he was made chiefly responsible ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... Bradwyn, Randall Hatchett, the youngest member of the Executive, lounged against a pillar. Proud of a distinction which he dared not comprehend (for a commercial shrewdness made him suspect that he owed his position less to merit than to the subtle promises conveyed by a weak chin), this distinguished person tried to look the secrets which his colleagues had never permitted him to learn. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... were not consuming desires with Phil. He had a life of work ahead of him; he had lost time to make up; he had ambitions to fulfil; great things to do; there were fortunes to be won by determination, shrewdness and ability, and he was not going to be behind in the winning of one ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... tail, capered about in front of Annie, and then with a wonderful shrewdness ran before her to the broken wall, where he stood with his head bent downward and his ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... looks of a strong hardy race, And his bonnet and jacket of plaid; With shrewdness and sense in his face, Proclaim him a true ...
— Harrison's Amusing Picture and Poetry Book • Unknown
... into the eyes of the young man. But behind all their shrewdness and intensity he saw a massive innocence. Mr. Bunner really believed a serious breach between husband and wife to be a minor source of trouble for ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... brilliant stroke of diplomacy worthy of the archic man. This {arkinoia} of the Hellene is the necessary sharp shrewdness of a brain, which, however "affectively" developed, is at bottom highly organised intellectually. H. S.[*] has it, all 'cute people and nations have it, the Americans, e.g.—every proposition must, however else it presents itself, be apprehended in its logical bearings: the result ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... "Here is where the shrewdness of Mose Kimmel, the shyster lawyer, came in. He arranged to have the Southern attorney identify the man he had served the paper on. For this purpose he was engaged in conversation with one of his own clerks when the lawyer was due to appear. Kimmel appeared to act confused, ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds |
