"Stiff-necked" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nervous alarm, of terror even, at the rustling, or, rather, bustling, of skirts in the hall—there was war in the very sound, and I felt it. Mrs. Ellersly appeared, bearing her husband as a dejected trailer invisibly but firmly coupled. She acknowledged my salutation with a stiff-necked nod, ignored my extended hand. I saw that she wished to impress upon me that she was a very grand lady indeed; but, while my ideas of what constitutes a lady were at that time somewhat befogged by my snobbishness, she failed dismally. She looked ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... to you to curb your damned tongue," said "Grandfather," his anger evaporating, his pride in the stiff-necked, defiant young rogue increasing. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... will neither betray me to your son and daughter, nor consider me as having in anywise committed myself—it was Paul of Tarsus's notion of the history and destinies of our stiff-necked nation. See what your daughter has persuaded me into reading!' And he held up a manuscript of the Epistle to ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... told that he is a very good man, but stiff-necked and disdainful. He regards me with scorn, because he knows no better. He may know our laws, but he knows nothing of our ways, to suppose that my men were in any danger. If I had been caught while the stir was on, a gibbet on the cliff would have been ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... once more for a season stood behind the cherub with the flaming sword, Ericson was teaching two stiff-necked youths in a dreary house in the midst of one of the moors of Caithness. One day he had a slight attack of blood-spitting, and welcomed it as a sign from what heaven there might ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... rejoined his lordship, "the whim is wearing off! One pellet drives out another. Behind the love in the popgun came the conviction that it would be simple ruin! But we Graemes are stiff-necked both to God and man, and ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... The stiff-necked old gentleman would in all human probability have expressed himself in this manner, and Rex knew Greif well enough to know the son would have fulfilled the father's injunctions and carried out his orders to the letter, no matter ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... Merrington, stiff-necked in his officialism, had been unable to see this changed aspect of the case, and, strong in his presumption of the girl's guilt, had acted with impulsive indiscretion in going to see Nepcote before attempting to trace ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... at times that no ridicule or abuse of this stiff-necked old fraud could be excessive; for, if he were not Wordsworth, as what but a fraud could we picture him in his later years, as he protests against Catholic Emancipation, the extension of the franchise, the freedom of ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... with stiff-necked obstinacy, has characterised the Jew ever since Jerusalem fell. 'If God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He also spare not thee.' Israel was first, and has become last. The same causes which sent it from the van to the rear have worked like effects in 'Christendom,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... released, when he went to Rome, where he was welcomed by the kindly old Pope, who remembered the benefits conferred by Napoleon on the Church, while he forgot the injuries personal to himself; and the stiff-necked Republican, the one-time "Brutus" Bonaparte, accepted the title of Duke of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... standard of rebellion had been raised; here and there might be found a Dutchman as stiff-necked as the fate that he defied. His father and his father's father had lived here upon the Lesser river, and nothing short of a cataclysm of nature should avail to budge him. The commissioners might cut up his cabbage-patch into building ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... felt that he could be pleased to allow Mr Slope just so much favour as that. But if—And then Mr Arabin poked his fire most unnecessarily, spoke crossly to his new parlour-maid who came in for the tea-things, and threw himself back in his chair determined to go to sleep. Why had she been so stiff-necked when asked a plain question? She could not but have known in what light he regarded her. Why had she not answered a plain question, and so put an end to his misery? Then, instead of going to sleep in his arm-chair, Mr Arabin walked about the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... year was full The thread was cut and finished the school. Death snapped the old worn-out tool, Snapped him short while he stood and stirred (Though stiff he stood as a stiff-necked mule) ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... me when they will not follow my advice. I do not say this as if I fancied myself to be a man of importance, for I will gladly be the meanest of these before the eyes of Jesus. When I think on my former resistance and stiff-necked behaviour in the work of conversion, I could strike myself. It causes deep sorrow and repentance within me, when I consider that I have been most faithfully instructed by my teachers for so many years, and yet have been like one that had no ears to hear. But now, not my ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... not love the Jews, but his hatred of Christianity was so great that he preferred to help the stiff-necked race in Palestine, in order to rouse them against Christ. For that purpose he had given orders that the Temple in Jerusalem should be rebuilt, and this was the matter which he wished to discuss with his philosophers and Eleazar. "What is your ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... besotted lover is bound to respect. You made love to her that summer at Croydon; you needn't deny it. And at the end of things you walk off to make your fortune without committing yourself; without knowing, or apparently caring, what your stiff-necked poverty-pride may cost her in years of uncertainty. You deserve to ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... Sure, my lad, I am no friend to the Company, a set of stiff-necked, ignorant, grasping, paunchy peddlers who fatten at home on the toil of better men. No, I am an adventurer, I own it; I am an interloper; and we interlopers, despite the Company's monopoly, yet contrive to keep ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... my children, that you are an obedient and a docile people, content to accept the word of God from those whom he has sent to teach it to you—that you are not a stiff-necked generation, prone to follow your own vain conceits, or foolish enough to conceive that your little earthly knowledge can be superior to the wisdom which comes from above, as others are. I have always rejoiced at this, my children, ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... came the click of slipper-heels upon the hardwood; and he turned from staring, puzzled, after the stiff-necked Manuel, and gave the girl a smile such as a man reserves for the woman who has entered into ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... would do a thing like that, Phyllis—be a girl's friend in private?" Roxanne asked, and her head went up into a stiff-necked pose like that portrait of her great-grandmother Byrd that looks so haughtily out of place hanging over the fireplace in the living hall in the little old cottage, in spite of the room full of old mahogany furniture and silver candlesticks brought from Byrd Mansion to keep her company. ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... to Cato.[96] He tells Cato that they two are alike in all things. They two only have succeeded in carrying the true ancient philosophy into the practice of the Forum. Never surely were two men more unlike than the stiff-necked Cato and the ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... pony is easy to guide, if you happen to be going the way he likes, and that is, ever from the park to the stable, from the stable to the park; otherwise, like the Israelites of old, he is a stiff-necked beast, whom I would rather eschew than commune with. And the wolf-hound, my lady, behaves so rudely to little Crisp, holding him by the throat in an unseemly fashion, and occasionally despoiling him of a fragment of his ears, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... only concerned itself with the circumstances attending her death. Mr. Armadale, at his friend's request, saw Miss Blanchard, and induced her to silence old Darch on the subject of the claim that had been made relating to the widow's income. As the claim had never been admitted, even our stiff-necked brother practitioner consented for once to do as he was asked. The doctor's statement that his patient was the widow of a gentleman named Armadale was accordingly left unchallenged, and so the matter has been hushed ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... particularly to Roscoe and MacNab, "did you know that this fellow is going out tiger shooting? Tiger shooting, if you please! Tiger shooting is to be his way of spending the Sabbath; what do you say to that, my stiff-necked Presbyterian?" ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... added that, it is possible that Alwin would have obeyed; but to yield in the face of a threat, that was too low for his stiff-necked pride to stoop. The earl-born answered haughtily, "Have your will,—and ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... that she shall hang 'em when they return to England, and afterwards shall account to him for all the goods and gold they have plundered. A most loving request! If Gloriana will not be Philip's bride, she shall be his broker and his butcher! Should she still be stiff-necked, he writes—see where the pen digged the innocent paper!—-that he hath both the means and the intention to be revenged on her. Aha! Now we come to the Spaniard in his shirt!' (She waved the letter merrily.) 'Listen here! Philip will prepare for Gloriana a destruction ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... been studying his Cruden, and bolstering himself up, too, with the very Scriptural texts that Prue had written out for her stiff-necked father. He had met other texts that she had not known how to find. The idea came to the preacher that, in a sense, since God made everything He must have made the dance, breathed its impulse ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... it out after she had gone to bed that night. She had been imperturbable with her sisters, who had finally come in a body to make entreaties, although not apologies or retractions. There was a stiff-necked strain in the Hempstead family, and apologies and retractions were bitterer cuds for them to chew than for most. She had been imperturbable with her father, who had quoted Scripture and prayed at her during family worship. She had been imperturbable even with Benny, who had ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... stiff-necked young man, ain't ye?" growled the big bear. "Let's understand the ground rules before we begin. How about a wild ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... theirs it was not probable that anything said by Sir Roger would have much effect. Those men would either abstain from voting, or vote for the railway hero, with the view of keeping out the de Courcy candidate. Then came the shopkeepers, who might also be regarded as a stiff-necked generation, impervious to electioneering eloquence. They would, generally, support Mr Moffat. But there was an inferior class of voters, ten-pound freeholders, and such like, who, at this period, were somewhat given to have an opinion ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... poor an enemy? Can you take hold of Marie Antoinette by the shoulders, shove her into the bottom of a cart and pile sacks of potatoes on the top of her? I did that to the Comtesse de Tournai and her daughter, as stiff-necked a pair of French aristocrats as ever deserved the guillotine for their insane prejudices. But can you do it to Marie Antoinette? She'd rebuke you publicly, and betray herself and you in a flash, sooner than submit to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... his side and stand before King Mark, as custom and seemliness demand, let him know that this shall in no wise happen if he have not before sought pardon of me for an uncondoned offence. Let him therefore cast himself upon my clemency!" As Kurwenal by a gesture signifies his stiff-necked resistance to her command, she repeats it, more regally peremptory than before: "Take careful heed of what I say and carefully report it. I refuse to make ready to accompany him to land, I refuse to walk beside him and stand before King Mark, unless he have before, as is ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... supported by their own nation." Again his grim smile. "No fear of that, when even a boy like you thinks of his people before gifts for himself. I wish," he half mused, "I wish that we had at least that virtue of your stiff-necked race." ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... opinion that Brotherton would get well and would come back; and she would then tell Mary how she ought to urge her husband to behave well to his elder brother, always asserting that George had been stiff-necked and perverse. But in the midst of all this she would refer every minute to Mary's coming baby as the coming Popenjoy—not a possible Popenjoy at some future time, but the immediate Popenjoy of the hour,—to ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... children were safe; and that, in case any trouble arose, they were to let me know, and I would myself come to their assistance. The tribes were, Lundu, Sarambo, Bombak, Paninjow, and Sow. The only other tribe on the right-hand river were the Singe, a powerful and stiff-necked people, with good reason to be shy; but when once they are treated justly, their strength will be advantageous, and give them confidence ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... too long," vociferated the advocate. "One half the period that heaven was vexed with a stiff-necked generation have I endured you, Babet. Housekeeper! eh? Keeper of the King's conscience next, a she Lord Chancellor,—but continue: call yourself Keeper of the Seals, and mistress—or master either—of the Rolls, so you unroll your secret. Tell all you may; empty ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... fear a little sunshine, June is the most beautiful of all the months, and the loveliest June days are those that follow showery nights. Then all the trees of the great villas are in full leaf and all the flowers are in bloom: the gorgeous, stiff-necked, courtly flowers in the formal beds and borders of the Pope's gardens; the soft, sweet-scented, shapely carnations that grow in broken pots and pitchers outside the humble windows of Trastevere; the stately lilies in ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... Cedric; "my hospitality must not be bounded by your dislikes. If Heaven bore with the whole nation of stiff-necked unbelievers for more years than a layman can number, we may endure the presence of one Jew for a few hours. But I constrain no man to converse or to feed with him.—Let him have a board and a morsel apart,—unless," he said smiling, "these ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Sister Medliker, the incorrigibility of his conduct, and how he has added the sin of 'false witness' to his breaking the Eighth Commandment. But I leave him to your Christian discipline! Let us hope that if, through his stiff-necked obduracy, he has haply escaped the vengeance of man's law, he will not escape the rod of the ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Baltic littoral which we now call Pomerania, and ravaged the Danish coasts so unmercifully that at the accession of Valdemar one-third of the realm of Denmark lay wasted and depopulated. The very existence of Denmark demanded the suppression and conversion of these stiff-necked pagan freebooters, and to this double task Absalon devoted the best part of his life. The first expedition against the Wends, conducted by Absalon in person, set out in 1160, but it was not till ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Abbot, your secrets are safe with me. Am I not your chaplain, and does not this wilful and rebellious King of ours work much mischief against God and His servants? Yet I tell you that I like it not, and cannot see the end. We English are a stiff-necked folk whom you of Spain do not understand and will never break, and Henry is strong and subtle; moreover, ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... Blessed Francis of the thorns besetting his path in life, of the difficulties of his holy calling, of the anxieties inseparable from it, but chiefly of the intractableness of stiff-necked Christians, who refuse to submit to the easy yoke of Jesus Christ, and to do what their duty requires. The Bishop replied that their obstinacy was not so much to be wondered at as the weakness of their Pastors who were so easily discouraged and impatient, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... seriously, my dear pretty Miss Rachel, possessing a host of graces and attractions, had one defect, which strict impartiality compels me to acknowledge. She was unlike most other girls of her age, in this—that she had ideas of her own, and was stiff-necked enough to set the fashions themselves at defiance, if the fashions didn't suit her views. In trifles, this independence of hers was all well enough; but in matters of importance, it carried her (as my lady thought, and as ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... to his cottage, thinking Miss Feemy Macdermot the most stiff-necked young lady it had ever been his hard lot ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... England: his interests are purely commercial. He came here with introductions to the Comte de Cambray from a mutual friend in England who seems to be a personage of vast importance in his own country and greatly esteemed by the Comte—else you may be sure that that stiff-necked aristocrat would never have received a tradesman as a guest in his house. But it was in Dumoulin's house that I first met Bobby Clyffurde. We took a liking to one another, and since then have ridden a great deal together. He is a splendid horseman, ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... "That young, stiff-necked, reviling town Beholds your fancies on her walls, And paints them out or tears them down, Or bars ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... different classes; and besides, if we look into the thing closely, we shall find that the term Philistine conveys a sense which [99] makes it more peculiarly appropriate to our middle class than to our aristocratic. For Philistine gives the notion of something particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children, and therein it specially suits our middle-class, who not only do not pursue sweetness and light, but who prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea meetings, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... tribes and nations are, as it were, personified. A chief, speaking for the Onondagas, will say, "I (that is, my nation) am angry; thou (the Delaware people) hast done wrong." This style of bold personification is common in the scriptures. Moses warns the Israelites: "Thou art a stiff-necked people." "Oh my people!" exclaims Isaiah; "they which lead thee ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... Antonio Agapida, "was the diabolical hatred and stiff-necked opposition of this infidel to our holy cause. But he was justly served by our most Catholic and high-minded sovereign for his pertinacious defence of the city, for Ferdinand ordered that he should be loaded with chains and thrown into a dungeon." He was subsequently ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... bordered with Moorish architecture, contain the native industry of Bona. It is about equally divided between the Jews and the M'zabites, who, like the Kabyles, are a remnant of the stiff-necked old Berber tribe. The M'zabites preserve the pure Arab dress—the haik, or small bornouse without hood, the broad breeches coming to the knee, the bare legs, and the turban rolled up into a coil of ropes. Thus accoutred, and squatting in the ledges of their small booths, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... summer a dry and dust-swept hollow: from this, the vast natural depression had been transformed into a graceful lake, some three hundred acres in extent. On its surface pleasure boats lay at their moorings by jetties and boatsheds; groups of stiff-necked swans sailed or ducked and straddled; while shady walks followed the banks, where the whiplike branches of the willows, showing shoots of tenderest green, trailed in the water or swayed like ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... saucy, stiff-necked rascal it is! I see my folly now.—I am undone by mine ain policy.—This Sidney is the last man that shou'd have been about my son:—The fellow, indeed, hath given him principles, that might have done vary weel among ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... was a beautiful old man, with long snowy hair flowing over his long white robes, who took the Bishop's hand between both of his, and blessed God for his coming, hoping that as Elijah brought back the stiff-necked Israelites, so the Bishop might turn the hearts ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of Vespasian, may be commissioned for the punishment of a stiff-necked and rebellious people. You may scourge our naked vice by force of arms; and then you may return to your own land exulting in the conquest of the fiercest enemy of Rome. But shall you escape the common fate ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... which this man wraps himself so closely. In the meantime, if he be a clerk, he is certainly an impostor of the most consummate art, for assuredly so gentlemanly a scoundrel I have never yet come in contact with. But, good heavens! if such a report should have gone abroad concerning that stiff-necked and obstinate girl, her reputation and prospects in life are ruined forever. What would Dunroe say if he heard it? as it is certain he will. Then, again, here is the visit from this conscientious old blockhead, Lord Cullamore, who won't allow me ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... wine, the king hearkened with condescending and approving nod to the report of the Prince as to his mad adventure in Hellas. Xerxes even reproved his brother-in-law mildly for hazarding his own life and that of his wife among those stiff-necked tribesmen who were so soon ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... very onset, and even these were broken into different parties and scattered all over the country. So far as our tale is concerned, we have only to relate the fate of Balmawhapple, who, mounted on a horse as headstrong and stiff-necked as his rider, pursued the flight of the dragoons above four miles from the field of battle, when some dozen of the fugitives took heart of grace, turned round, and cleaving his skull with their broadswords, satisfied the world that the unfortunate gentleman had actually ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Jerusalem his Kibla, toward which he turned in prayer five times a day. In return for this he expected them to receive him as a prophet; but this they refused to do. So he departed by degrees from their customs, changed his Kibla to Mecca, and at last denounced the Jews as stiff-necked unbelievers. The old quarrel between Esau and Jacob could not be appeased, nor an alliance ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... their stuff, among other things the steamer trunk. I lent them a hand, and they told me to help myself to the stuff. So I did after they were out of the country. That's how you come to have a wardrobe all ready to your hand. Now, you'd be awful foolish to act like a mean and stiff-necked female person. You're not going to, are you?" he wheedled. "Because I want to make you comfortable. What's the use of getting on your dignity over a little ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... or in those of the Memphite empire, nor, as a matter of fact, did the Assyrian pride himself on the gentleness of his manners: he did not overflow with love for his fellow-man, as the Egyptian made a pretence of doing; on the contrary, he was stiff-necked and proud, without pity for others or for himself, hot-tempered and quarrelsome like his cousins of Chaldaea, but less turbulent and more capable of strict discipline. It mattered not whether he had come into the world in one of the wretched cabins of a fellah village, or in the palace of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... little bundle, and a million of rich hopes, the grateful nephew now allowed himself to be shaken up hill and down hill, upon an uncommonly uncomfortable and stiff-necked peasant cart, and arrived, head-over-heels, in ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... on board, Mr. Grief, I'll save you the trouble. I know your kind, I foresaw your stiff-necked stubbornness. An' it's forestalled you are. 'Tis on the beach you'll find your ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... unto the Orcades! There let my verse get glory in the north, Making my sighs to thaw the frozen seas. And let the bards within that Irish isle, To whom my Muse with fiery wings shall pass, Call back the stiff-necked rebels from exile, And mollify the slaughtering gallowglass; And when my flowing numbers they rehearse, Let wolves and bears ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... of extraordinary obduracy," he said, "for one of your years. I should like to know how much the Stanbury influence has had to do with strengthening your unwise, unamiable, and stiff-necked resolution! If I were Claude Bainrothe, I should lay heavy damages against you in the courts of law, for your unjustifiable evasion of a formal contract—one your father sanctioned, one of which all your friends are and were cognizant and proud, and which has subjected him, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... reply; he was engaged in feeling his pulse. The Duke fixed his attention with some interest on a black swan that was swimming with haughty, stiff-necked aloofness amid the crowd of lesser water-fowl that dotted the ornamental water. For all its pride of bearing, something was evidently ruffling and enraging it; in its way it seemed as angry and amazed as the sparrow ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... forgiveness for our daily sins and trespasses, mercy and goodness must follow us; or as Moses has it, 'And he said, If now I have found grace in thy sight, O Lord! let my Lord, I pray thee, go amongst us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for thine inheritance' (Exo 34:9). Join to this that prayer of his, which you find in Numbers: 'Now I beseech thee let the power of my Lord be great, according as thou hast spoken, saying, The ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in the first year of her runaway marriage, had been the daughter of a stiff-necked, unforgiving old earl; she had bequeathed her child, besides these gentian eyes and wonderful, silvery blond hair, a warm, generous heart and a more ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... Gonzales," said Dugald, bowing in his stiff-necked fashion, "I am very happy to meet you. But as you represent His Excellency the President of the Republic of Santa Marina I suppose you come ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... amount of arresting the government might order. He was entirely willing to send a subaltern and a score of troopers to convoy the entire party—sheriff and deputies, posse and prisoners—to the territorial capital, but, like the old war-horse he was, he balked, stiff-necked and stiff-legged, at the sheriff's demand that the escort should report to him—should be, in point of fact, ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... (xxxvi. 6)—an impossibility of course before the capture of Jerusalem, which did not take place until the third month of his successor. The last prince of David's house, Zedekiah, having suffered more severely than all his predecessors, must therefore have been stiff-necked and rebellious (xxxvi.12, 13),—characteristics to which, according to the authentic evidence of the prophet Jeremiah, he had in reality the least ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... in the Courts by a Victim who wanted a final look at his Money, the Reporters came around and he was so stiff-necked and defiant that all of them referred to him ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... her hastily heterodox example; but the mass of them stood stoutly by their faith, and ended by making off with it intact to Valence. I admit that an appearance of improbability is cast upon this tradition by the unhindered departure from the Abbey of the stiff-necked nuns: who thus manifested an open scorn equally of the victorious Huguenots and of the Reformed faith. But, on the other hand, there are the ruins of the Abbey to prove conclusively that it truly was conquered; and there, slanting ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... all locked with two keys in a chest richly adorned with gold and precious stones, and preserved in a vault under the high altar. After having been borne in procession they were exposed on the high altar for fifteen days and then restored to their resting-place. The stiff-necked priests of Ratisbon, fortified with a papal bull of 1052, still maintained their claim to the possession of the body, but no diminution was experienced in the devotion either of the French peoples or of strangers of all nations to the relics ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Berlin were "Nurmahal," in 1825; "Alcidor," the same year; and in 1829, "Agnes von Hohenstaufen." Various other new works were given from time to time, but none achieved more than a brief hearing. Spontini's stiff-necked and arrogant will kept him in continual trouble, and the Berlin press aimed its arrows at him with incessant virulence: a war which the composer fed by his bitter and witty rejoinders, for he was an adept in the art of invective. Had he not been singularly ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... better; the history of Israel proves it. And the only mode of escaping this conclusion, to which some persons feel a great repugnance, is to fancy that the Israelites were much worse than other nations, which accordingly has been maintained. It has often been said, that they were stiff-necked and hard-hearted beyond the rest of the world. Now, even supposing, for argument's sake, I should grant that they were so, this would not sufficiently account for the strange circumstance under consideration; for this people was not ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... on duty, busy enough, ever since the late Siege of Neisse: Glatz Town the Young Dessauer soon got, when ordered; Town, Population, Territory, all is his,—all but the high mountain Fortress (centre of the Town of Glatzj), with its stiff-necked Austrian Garrison shut up there, which he is wearing out by hunger. We remember the little Note from Valori's waistcoat-pocket, "Don't give him Glatz, if you can possibly help it!" In his latest treaties with the French and their Allies, Friedrich has very expressly bargained for the Country ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his head. "I have seldom seen," he said, "a more stiff-necked and perverse offender, and one more deserving of ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... world, which is the instrument of godly wrath upon the wicked. The instrument in the hand of the State is not a garland of roses or a flower of love, but a naked sword. As I declared at the time, he says, so declare I yet: Let every one who can, as he may be able, cut, stab, choke, and strike the stiff-necked, obdurate, blind, infatuated peasants; that mercy may be shown towards those who are destroyed, driven away, and misled by the peasants; that peace and security may be had. It is better to mercilessly cut off one member rather than lose the entire body through ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... children of a Protestant father and a Papist mother were divided for the Heavenly Kingdom as follows,—the sons followed the religion of their father, and the daughters of their mother. If anybody made objections, a terrible storm fell upon his head. The Lord of Mitosin was a stiff-necked Protestant, who persecuted priest and monk in every possible way. He would not allow his daughter to bring a Catholic prayer-book or a rosary into the house. If anybody wished to pray, he could do it in the church; it was not far away. From the rear gate of the castle straight to ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... say nothing of the kind!" declared Huldah. "He said you was stiff-necked, and that he presumed you would act more like a stepfather than the real thing. Well, as I was saying, he asked their names, and he liked them fine. Said they were ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... as well, but it was brought to pass by means of lavish bribery, and sorely against the wish of the Irish patriots. Furthermore, the determination of Pitt to commend the act to Ireland by removing the political disabilities which barred Catholics from membership in Parliament was thwarted by the stiff-necked George III., who had got it into his head that such a concession would do violence to the Protestantism of his coronation oath. Pitt resigned in disgust, and Catholic emancipation had to await until England had finished Napoleon's European business and could turn her hand to the troubles ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... to confer with M. Otto, because they are of the same rank. Is not this as absurd as if Lord Whitworth were to be sent to Petersburgh, and told that he was not to treat but with some gentleman of six feet high, and as handsome as himself? Sir, I repeat, that this is a stiff-necked policy, when the lives of thousands ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... (white-bearded man), Barbicanos Barbilindo (beardless man), Barbilindos Boquirrubio (rosy-lipped), Boquirrubios Cojitranco (lame fellow—disparagingly), Cojitrancos Cuellierguido (stiff-necked man), Cuellierguidos Gallipavo (turkey), Gallipavos Manirroto (spendthrift), Manirrotos Marisabidilla (blue stocking), Marisabidillas Ojinegro (black-eyed), Ojinegros Ojizarco (blue-eyed), Ojizarcos ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... the way this here four-flusher von Brockdorff-Rantzau behaved the day they handed him the Peace Treaty, Mawruss," Abe said, "it looked like the Germans had made up their minds to be just so stiff-necked as they always was, Mawruss, and I begun to think that they were going to treat it as a case of so mechullah, so mechullah, y'understand, but the way them Germans is now crying like children, Mawruss, there ain't going to ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... rather by signs than by words, with the staff of Jesus made the sign of the cross on a stone there placed, and immediately the surface of the stone appeared divided into four parts, and showed the form of the cross thereon portrayed. Yet did this man, stiff-necked, and of heart more hard than stone, refuse to be melted unto penitence; but his wife, who was then in travail, entreated pardon of the saint, and fell at his feet. And the saint, beholding him thus hardened in perverseness, spake unto him with prophetic voice: "Even thus, had it so ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... letter, both of them on one sheet of paper, a letter full of love and kindness. They called me sister and invited me to your wedding, promising me that Jonathan should be there, too, and making me promise to come. And when they had written the letter they even coaxed the stiff-necked Aaron, who hates us Wallachians like poison, to add his signature to it, though I could see in the very way he wrote his name how he disliked to do it. I promised to come, and I kept my word. And Jonathan came with me—I brought him. That night I ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... The yoke of papacy had been lifted certainly, but the yoke of pseudo-Protestantism which had taken its place was quite as heavy on the necks of the people. So long as it had been new; so long as it had been of their own choosing, it had been endured willingly. But a generation was springing up—stiff-necked they might have been called, in that they fretted under the yoke of their fathers—that sought to be delivered from the tyranny of their pastors and the fossilised formalism of their creed. To ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... Instead, there were stealthy snores. The pair had slept through my playing. Imbeciles! I awoke them and soon packed them off to their canvas home in the woods hard by. They'll get no more dinners or wisdom from me. I tell this tale to show the hopelessness of arguing with this stiff-necked generation of pianists. But I mean to keep on arguing until I ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... "a fierce and stiff-necked aristocrat," was of the family of Scipios. When the consuls refused to resort to violence against Tiberius Gracchus, it was he who led the senators forth from their meeting-place against the popular assembly outside, with whom ensued a fight, in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... N. Farewell, you have no sentiment And are stiff-necked exceedingly, 710 All that's not worth an ancient saw. But me it grieves to see so spent A noble's life most witlessly, Since he's ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... high, mighty, swollen, puffed up, flushed, blown; vainglorious; purse-proud, fine; proud as a peacock, proud as Lucifer; bloated with pride. supercilious, disdainful, bumptious, magisterial, imperious, high and mighty, overweening, consequential; arrogant &c. 885; unblushing &c. 880. stiff, stiff-necked; starch; perked stuck-up; in buckram, strait- laced; prim &c. (affected) 855. on one's dignity, on one's high horses,on one's tight ropes, on one's high ropes; on stilts; en grand seigneur [Fr]. Adv. with head erect. Phr. odi profanum vulgus et arceo [Lat][Horace]. " a duke's revenues on ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the deep channels of the river, and allow us to steal upon the flocks of birds feeding at the edges. Often in memory I enjoy those days again—the planning, the modelling, the fitting, the setting-up, and at last, the visit of inspection of our parents. Alas, stiff-necked in our generation, we had insisted on straight lines and a square stern. Never shall I forget the indignation aroused in me by a cousin's remark, "It looks awful like a coffin." The resemblance had not previously ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... with the yellow dross that gave it birth. Fallacious hopes of coming "posts," averted for a time my coming wretchedness—three weeks, and not a line! The landlord suffered from an intermitting affection, characteristic of the "stiff-necked generation;"—he bowed to others—galvanism could not have procured the tithe of a salaam for me. His till was afflicted with a sort of sinking-fundishness. I was the contractor of "the small bill," whose exact amount would enable him to meet a "heavy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... she who was in a hurry, and so eager that she gave herself no time to look round before she was seated in the carriage, and the long, stiff-necked, braided coachman was driving her away along the road of her ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... 'A contuma-acious and stiff-necked generation,' said the old man, walking off and shaking his head. 'And yet he's a fine laddie; a gra-and laddie wad he be with good guidance. It's the Lord's doing, nae doot, and we daurna fault it; ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... silent, as God's commands, by direct inner revelation, might be laid upon him. And it appeared that God had laid his command upon many to go among the unregenerate bearing testimony, and with sharp-tongued reproach and reviling to prick as with thorns the seared conscience of a perverse and stiff-necked generation. Persecution they welcomed as the martyr's portion, the sure evidence of well-doing. "Where they are most of all suffered to declare themselves, there they least of all desire to come." And so, impelled by the force of the divine spirit, they came among the reserved and ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... clown. It is not necessary to feed on ambrosia in order to become divine; nor shall one be accursed, though he drink of the ninefold Styx. The Israelites ate angels' food in the wilderness, and remained stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. The white water-lily feeds on slime, and unfolds a heavenly glory. Come as the June morning comes. It has not picked its way daintily, passing only among the roses. It has breathed up the ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... superstition, if I can do so in no other manner, and that I may rid you either of heresy or of life. Notwithstanding, if you prefer to return to the Catholic faith and to the light of primitive days, send unto me your ambassadors and I will tell them what ye must do. If on the other hand ye will be stiff-necked and kick against the pricks, then remember all the crimes and offences ye have perpetrated and look for to see me coming unto you with all strength divine and human to render unto you again all the evil ye have done ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the pawn-broker's, no one would have such a jewel, and the ticket was home in the bureau drawer. Well, he must have it; she might starve in the attempt. Such a thing as going to him and telling him that he might redeem it was an impossibility. That good, straight-backed, stiff-necked Creole blood would have risen in all its strength and choked her. No; as a present had the quaint Roman circlet been placed upon her finger,—as a present should it ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore |
