"Vainglorious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contracted for carrying on the wars in which that country has been engaged, and in the maintenance of fleets and armies. If, on the one hand, it should be observed that the expenses incurred in the prosecution of the ambitious enterprises and vainglorious pursuits of a monarchy are not a proper standard by which to judge of those which might be necessary in a republic, it ought, on the other hand, to be remarked that there should be as great a disproportion between the profusion and extravagance of a wealthy ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... variously estimated by historians. Ostensibly a solemn revenge for the burning of Greek temples by Xerxes, it has been justified as a symbolical act calculated to impress usefully the imagination of the East, and condemned as a senseless and vainglorious work ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... any doubts. He knew how he was rated—berated is the better word for it. He knew acutely how bad his marks were: his shoulders too often bore witness to them. The words "dunce" and "sissy" buzzed about his ears like stinging gnats. So he wasn't made vainglorious by his mother's praise. He received it with cautious reservations. But her faith in him filled him with an immense tenderness for the little woman, and a passionate desire, a very agony of desire, to struggle toward her aspirations for him, to make good, to repay her for all the ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... kept up the appearance of being hurt every few minutes, just as a precaution. Then even that had ceased and I had dropped into vainglorious apathy. ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... and thrilled by his own importance in the scheme and the honors which his position in certain companies would heap upon him, that an abyss had yawned before him of which he had been wholly unaware. He was not unaware of it now. He was a vainglorious, ignorant man, whose life had been spent in common work done under the supervision of those who knew what he did not know. He had fed himself upon the comforting belief that he had learned all the tricks of any trade. He had been openly boastful of his astuteness and experience, ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... paradoxes, et risum teneatis amici? You shall find that of Aristotle true, nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae, they have a worm as well as others; you shall find a fantastical strain, a fustian, a bombast, a vainglorious humour, an affected style, &c., like a prominent thread in an uneven woven cloth, run parallel throughout their works. And they that teach wisdom, patience, meekness, are the veriest dizzards, harebrains, and most discontent. [715]"In ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Calm, solemn, and stately, they sat like towers upon their powerful chargers. On parades they manifested none of the show and ostentation of the other troops: neither, in battle, did they endeavor to signalize themselves by any fiery vivacity, or desperate and vainglorious exploit,—everything, with them, was measured and sedate; yet it was observed that none were more warlike in their appearance in the camp, or more terrible for their achievements ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... unconsciously used much of the actor's quick-witted method, that his delicately feathered barbs made no dent on the hard head of Pepys. Like his neighbor of the Avon, the author of "Hudibras" was a merciless scourge to the vainglorious follies of the time in which he poorly and obscurely lived; and like the truths which he told in his inimitable satires, the virtue and decency of his life was obscured by the disorder of the Commonwealth and the unfaith of the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... externals, as two distant trees whose leaves are fluttering on either side of some tangled forest, he yet felt that their roots were interwoven below ground, drawing common life and nourishment and sympathies from that old teeming soil of human aspirations. Nor was he vainglorious of his achievement. His superiority over the art-expert he took as a gift of the gods. Vanityi was abhorrent to his nature. He was not proud but glad—glad to have been able to reconquer his legitimate social position; glad, above all things, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... angels from Heaven watching over them, David, guiding them, showing them how. I believe good white angels are guiding every true minister,—not the bad ones— Oh, I know a lot about ministers, honey,—proud, ambitious, selfish, vainglorious, hypocritical, even amorous, a lot of them,—but there are others, true ones,—you, David, and some more. They just have to grow together until harvest, and then the false ones will be dug up ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... bring the stimulus of great events into the Concord life by writing stories, of which I would report the progress to my one or two confidantes. My father overheard some vainglorious boasts from my lips, one afternoon, when the windows of the little library where he sat were open; and the small girl who listened to me, wide-eyed, and I myself, proud and glad to have reached a thrilling denouement, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... proclamation asserted that the ladies of The Blended Rose excelled in wit, beauty, and accomplishment those of the whole world, and challenged any knight to dispute it. Thereupon appeared the seven knights of The Burning Mountain, and by their herald announced that they would disprove by arms the vainglorious assertions of the knights of The Blended Rose and show that the ladies of The Burning Mountain as far excelled all others in charms as the knights themselves surpassed all others in prowess. Upon this a glove of defiance was thrown, the esquires presented ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... threatening very sharp and boisterously the cowherds, shepherds, and farmers of Seville and Sinays. This done, the shepherds and shepherdesses made merry with these cakes and fine grapes, and sported themselves together at the sound of the pretty small pipe, scoffing and laughing at those vainglorious cake-bakers, who had that day met with a mischief for want of crossing themselves with a good hand in the morning. Nor did they forget to apply to Forgier's leg some fair great red medicinal grapes, and so handsomely dressed it and bound it up that ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... over all others in personal prowess and valor, in a manner very eloquent indeed, and in a style which it seems was very much admired in those days as evincing only a proper spirit and energy,—though in our times such a harangue would be very apt to be regarded as only a vainglorious and ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... glory" was to be the day of military power. Carlyle said of Germany and France in November, 1870, "that noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vaporing, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and oversensitive France, seems to me that hopefulest public fact that has occurred in my time." How did Germany attain to this position of "Queen of the Continent"? ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Walter, 'I should refrain from so doing; and therein I should only be acting according to the maxims of chivalry; for you know we are admonished to be dumb as to our own deeds, and eloquent in praise of others; and, moreover, that if the squire is vainglorious, he is not worthy to become a knight, and that he who is silent as to the valour of others is a thief and ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... fifteenth, the day he had settled for his departure, as he sat thinking how he would go down to the lake in a few hours, a letter started to his mind which, as well as he could remember, was written in a foolish, vainglorious mood—a stupid letter that must have made him appear a fool in her eyes. Had he not said something about—The thought eluded him; he could only remember the general tone of his letter, and in it he seemed ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... treaty with the barbarians is out of our power. It is the scourge of the empire, Alaric himself, who commands the invading forces! Vain were the dignified remonstrances of the grave Basilius, futile was the persuasive rhetoric of the astute Johannes, addressed to the slaughtering and vainglorious Goth! On their admission to his presence, the ambassadors, anxious to awe him into a capitulation, enlarged, with sagacious and commendable patriotism, on the expertness of the Romans in the use of arms, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... passed at length to Francis of Angouleme. There were in his nature seeds of nobleness,—seeds destined to bear little fruit. Chivalry and honor were always on his lips; but Francis the First, a forsworn gentleman, a despotic king, vainglorious, selfish, sunk in debaucheries, was but the type of an era which retained the forms of the Middle Age without its soul, and added to a still prevailing barbarism the pestilential vices which hung fog-like around the dawn of civilization. Yet he esteemed arts and letters, and, still more, coveted ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... excuse for idleness. "Our life," says Jeremy Taylor, "is too short to serve the ambition of a haughty prince or a usurping rebel; too little time to purchase great wealth, to satisfy the pride of a vainglorious fool, to trample upon all the enemies of our just or unjust interest: but for the obtaining virtue, for the purchase of sobriety and modesty, for the actions of religion, God gives us time sufficient, if we make the outgoings of the morning and evening, that is our infancy and old age, to be taken ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... leads the path To ampler fates that leads? Not down through flowery meads, 110 To reap an aftermath Of youth's vainglorious weeds, But up the steep, amid the wrath And shock of deadly-hostile creeds, Where the world's best hope and stay By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way, And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. Peace hath her ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... sailed for weeks, and all our provisions were mouldy or weevilly, and our water-casks warped and leaking so that we had to catch the rain in our shirts, we began to wonder what it was we had come for. The sea won't be mocked or threatened. She has ways of her own, the old witch, to tame the vainglorious. And 't is true enough," the old pilot went on with a quizzing look at Fernao on his insecure perch, "that sailors have a bad habit of doubling and trebling their recollections when they find anybody who will listen. I don't know why they do it. Maybe ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... parading through the streets the knight's vanity swelled more and more, for from every nook and corner there came great shouts of recognition. Soon he was unable to restrain his vainglorious nature, and he turned to his host and remarked to him with much satisfaction: "Great are the privileges knight-errantry involves, for it makes him who professes it known and famous in every region of the earth. See, ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... smile back. I got up off the floor and slumped on the cushions. As for Cap'n Jonadab Wixon, he'd stopped yellin', but his face was one broad, serene grin. His mouth, through the dust and the dirt caked around it, looked like a rain gully in a sand-bank. And, occasional, he crowed, hoarse but vainglorious. ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... your aqueduct. My cathedral, mighty as it will be, shall be completed before your little aqueduct." And he clinched his vainglorious assertion with an oath. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... would prove more disastrous than was that of Napoleon from Moscow. He promised his Tennessee and Kentucky soldiers that their feet should soon tread their "native soil," etc., etc. He made no concealment of these vainglorious boasts, and thus gave us the full key to his future designs. To be forewarned was to be forearmed, and I think we took ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... truth, this most vacillating, confused, and unfortunate of men perhaps scarcely comprehended the purport of his recent negotiations in Spain, nor perceived the drift of his daily remarks at home. He was, however, somewhat vainglorious immediately after his return, and excessively attentive to business. "He talks like a King," said Morillon, spitefully, "negotiates night and day, and makes all bow before him." His house was more thronged with petitioners, courtiers, and men of affairs, than even the palace ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... fellow was handsome and fine, and did him an honor by his notice—so soon does some dim notion of worldly splendor turn us into snobs! The next thing was his own attempt at skating, when he was set down from the bank by his brother, full of a vainglorious confidence in his powers, and appeared instantly to strike on the top of his head. Afterwards he learned to skate, but he did not know when, any more than he knew just the moment of learning to read or to swim. He became passionately fond of skating, and kept ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... 1016, and there was the passage in the quaint mediaeval Latin. It was indeed a Hosmer who unwittingly had so nearly brought Edmond Ironside to grief. "Was I descended from the man?" queried Freeman. Quite proud that my story had been substantiated and perhaps a bit vainglorious over the fact that a man of my name had looked like a king, I was not slow in saying that I probably was, that my line for six hundred years after that date, honest yeomen, had lived near the spot, in the fields of Kent. Freeman assented to the probability, but it was suggested ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... than his life had shown him to be, not one, indeed, who did not believe that his grievous errors were among the dispensations which an all-wise Providence employs to chasten the proud and humble the vainglorious. ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... travelled, in my time," said Marc'antonio with a touch of vainglorious pride. "I have made the acquaintance of many continentals, even with some that were extremely rich. But I ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Sibyl—having secured as many as she wanted—retired to a corner, and silently fell to plucking them, while Sedley, who was as vainglorious as a Comanche, capered about on his short legs, and boasted of imaginary exploits with ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... me, as I have said, I did not make any vainglorious boasts of the great educational progress of our own states these last twenty years: However much progress we have made, these brown Japanese "heathen" have beaten us. While there is no official census on the question ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... these whom we see before us, and around us, and beneath us, are but a herd of slaves; gulled and vainglorious slaves!" ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... servants, give them respectable and serviceable, rather than showy and gay ones, and divide them between thy servants and the poor; that is to say, if thou canst clothe six pages, clothe three and three poor men, and thus thou wilt have pages for heaven and pages for earth; the vainglorious never think of this new ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
