"Conceit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be a pleasure to them to see me," thought little Inger. "I have a pretty face, and am well dressed;" and she dried her eyes. She had not lost her conceit. She had not then perceived how her fine clothes had been soiled in the brewhouse of the Old Woman of the Bogs. Her dress was covered with dabs of nasty matter; a snake had wound itself among her hair, and it dangled over her neck; and from every fold in her garment peeped out a toad, ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... looked earnest and troubled. I could vow she was about to burst into tears. Her face was very expressive. No one who shows such sudden changes can help being a person of rare sensibility. I am almost out of conceit of making her the heroine of my story, though, to be sure, I am not likely to interfere with her personal rights, so long as I do not know either her name ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... of the honey cake was simply that it was a friendly present to the infernal gods; later came the conceit that it was a sop to fling to the dog Cerberus, who guarded ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... Her complexion was extremely fair, but not pale, blooming, but not ruddy. Her countenance was serious without being severe, mild and pleasant without levity or vulgarity. Her eyes were sparkling, but without indication of pride or conceit. Her whole figure was so finely proportioned that amongst other women she appeared with superior dignity, yet free from the least degree of formality or affectation. In walking or in dancing, or in other exercises which display the person, every motion ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... of God's bounty, engendering those spiritual tastes in men, philosophers and learned men, wise in their own conceit, obstinately shut their eyes to it, and look afar off for what is really close to them, so that they incur the penalty of being "branded on the nostrils" [Kuran, lxviii. 16], adjudged against unbelievers. This is illustrated by the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... their lips; they wear dresses made of the most expensive silks, and, like people generally who have sprung from nothing and find themselves lodged among higher folks than themselves, they give themselves airs, and cultivate a sickening conceit. Among the Coreans, however, they command and receive much admiration, and many an intrigue and scandal has been carried out, sometimes at the cost of many heads, through the mercenary turn of mind of ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... too long to explain, and you probably would not understand. Besides, you might take it—really, you might take it for a declaration. But it has nothing to do with you personally; it's what you represent. Fortunately you don't know all that, or your conceit would increase insufferably." ...
— The American • Henry James
... brightly, "Because I wouldn't like him if he was. No, no—now you listen here" as Baird had grinned. "This lad believes in himself, that's all. That's different from conceit. You can believe a whole lot in yourself, and still be as modest as a new—hatched chicken. That's what he reminds me ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... value forty shillings to my coson Hunton's credit, as I gaue her noe thankes. Mr Downes (Iheare) is sent for home by his father w{i}th an intent to keepe him w{i}th him, but I doe imagine that when my coson Hunton shall be other where disposed off, he shall returne; for my conceit is stronge that the feare of his beinge match'd to his disadvantage, who was placed w{i}th Mr Evelyn a youth to be bred for his p{re}ferment, hath caused this alteration; howsoever there be noe wordes made of it. Iconfess that when I have ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... told you are a pretty fighter," said she. "Well, I hold some small skill in arms myself, and have a conceit that I am something of a judge. To-morrow we will take a taste of battle together. But to-day I must carry through the honourable reception I have planned for you, Deucalion. The feast will be set ready soon, and you will wish to make ready for the feast. There are chambers here selected ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... heal mentally. Conceit cannot avert the effects of deceit. Taking advantage of the present ignorance in relation to Christian Science Mind-healing, many are flooding our land with conflicting theories and practice. We should not spread abroad patchwork ideas that in some vital ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... Though I must say," replied Mary Connynge, with indirection, "that I fancy the other far more, he being not so forward, nor so full of pure conceit. I like not a man so confident." This with an eye cast down, as much as though there were present in the room some man subject ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... own obstinacy and conceit," said Lord Marney. "I took you to Mowbray Castle, and the cards were in your own hands if you chose ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... loves his wife and children, but of what use is that love? We, so we are told in our own newspapers, love our great motherland, but how does that love express itself? Instead of knowledge—insolence and immeasurable conceit; instead of work—sloth and swinishness; there is no justice, the conception of honour does not go beyond "the honour of the uniform"—the uniform which is so commonly seen adorning the prisoner's ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... have discovered anything. You were too clever for him, piccinina! Besides, his conceit saved him—he had so good an opinion of himself that he would not have deemed it possible for you to ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... lifeless eyes glistened with malice and rancorous joy. She had read just enough to make her pedantic, and too little to give her any improving knowledge. Her understanding was naturally small, and her self-conceit great. In her person she was tall and meagre, her hair black, and her complexion of the darkest brown, with an additional sallowness at her temples and round her eyes, which were dark, very large and prominent, and entirely ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... it is not wrong to dream. My father was so modest as well as ambitious, so good as well as so gallant, that I would rather die than disgrace him by empty conceit and ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... o'er the very same; Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine, Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name. So that eternal love in love's fresh case Weighs not the dust and injury of age, Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place, But makes antiquity for aye his page; Finding the first conceit of love there bred, Where time and outward ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... man!" He laughed shortly. "Conceit, no doubt, Miss Crawford, but none the less I really do fancy that a Conniston is as good as the sort of men I have been herding with ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... perhaps five feet nine or ten in height, with a plain, heavy, rather sullen face, and quick, hot eyes. He was a mass of self-conceit, all bristling with suspicion, and in regard to money, prudent to meanness. He cared nothing for books, but liked outdoor sports and under a rather abrupt, but not discourteous, manner hid an irritable, violent temper. He was combative and courageous as very nervous people ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... the old lady, after a silence which lasted quite five minutes, "if you could not try giving him a good conceit of himself. My father used to say that if ye tell a dog all the time that he is a worthless puppy and will never be good for anything, he will herd the sheep ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... to the understanding, be taken as the whole of the world-pervading Anglo-Saxon family. The Negroes of the West Indies number a good deal more than two million souls. Does this suggester of extravagances mean that the prejudices and vain conceit of the few dozens whom he champions should be made to override and overbear, in political arrangements, the serious and solid interests of so many [187] hundreds of thousands? That "the two races are not ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... organisms live and why they die. And finally he defines a condition of things in which an organism would never die—in which it would enjoy a perpetual and perfect Life. This to him is, of course, but a speculation. Life Eternal is a biological conceit. The conditions necessary to an Eternal Life do not exist in the natural world. So that the definition is altogether impartial and independent. A Perfect Life, to Science, is simply a thing which is theoretically possible—like a ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... sister to feed him and tell him that his disaster was only an accident. He tried to think so, too, but serious doubts persisted in his mind. There had been a clean-cut finish to that swing and jab which disturbed his boy's conceit. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... realised that he had been less than an infant crying for the light, and with no language but a cry. He had shut out the light by a poor little conceit of his own. He had dared to judge life by paltry little standards. He had dared to say what was and what was not—he! ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... ten; fortunate that such a number are knocked opportunely on the head in what they call the flower of their years, and go away to suffer for their follies in private somewhere else. Otherwise, between sick children and discontented old folk, we might be put out of all conceit of life. ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at her startled. He dared not glance forward at any future with her. Nevertheless, in spite of himself, he was relenting. He would have relented quicker had she not continually put him out of conceit with himself by making him blush. Naturally, he blamed ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—for ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... bed in it. Oh, he's an awful ass! It was he who said at a public function 'The Mayor of Wymington must be like Caesar's wife—all things to all men!' Oh, he's a colossal ass! And his conceit! My word!" ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... Henry VI., who, tradition says, had been himself a prisoner in Ludgate, till released by a rich widow, who saw his handsome face through the grate and married him. St. Martin's church, Ludgate, is one of Wren's churches, and is chiefly remarkable for its stolid conceit in always getting in the way of the west ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... father, "take yourself off, it you cannot maintain civility. And your mother does not like fishing-tackle at the breakfast-table go! I believe," he said as Ransom bounded away, "I believe conceit is ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... classes rather than individuals, although certain characters like Fielding the plagiarist, in 'Armorel of Lyonesse,' are studied from life. The village of bankrupts in 'All in a Garden Fair' is a whimsical conceit, like the disguise of Angela in 'All Sorts and Conditions of Men,' and the double identity of Edmund Gray in 'The Ivory Gate.' In reading Besant we are constantly reminded that humanity is wider than the world; and though its simplest ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... bring food out of the earth, and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make him a cheerful countenance, and bread to strengthen man's heart. Whilst the unbeliever, blinded by his self-conceit, is worshipping his own little stock of knowledge, and neglecting God, let us be singing our Te Deum—"We praise Thee, O God, we acknowledge Thee to be ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... Mahometan (1718); and Pantheisticon (1720). The outcry raised by the orthodox party against the "poor gentleman" who had "to beg for half- crowns," and "ran into debt for his wigs, clothes, and lodging," together with his own vanity and conceit, changed him from being a somewhat free- thinking Christian into an infidel and atheist or Pantheist. He died in extreme poverty at Putney ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... for extending their influence. The Mississippi scheme of John Law, which so dazzled and captivated the French people, inspired them with an idea that they could carry on the same game in England. The anticipated failure of his plans did not divert them from their intention. Wise in their own conceit, they imagined they could avoid his faults, carry on their schemes for ever, and stretch the cord of credit to its extremest tension, without causing it to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... clung to the clean, unvarnished truth in dogged fashion, and had so impressed all by his simple story, in which he seemed only trying to tell facts, no matter how they bore upon himself, that even the prosecutor was out of conceit with his ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... a window and saw some one reading," thought Amy; and she smiled so sweetly at the conceit that Webb asked, "How many pennies will you take for ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... Conceit?" retorted Winnie, flushing angrily at her school-mate's contemptuous tone; "I presume a green-grocer's daughter is not exempted from possessing the same talented abilities which characterize your ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... always thoroughly intelligible and for the most part thoroughly natural, of suiting itself without effort to every change of mood, as quick, warm, and comprehensive as the sympathies it is taxed to express. The tone also is excellent. We are never repelled by egotism or conceit, and misplaced ridicule never disgusts us. When good is going on, we are sure to see all the beauty of it; and when there is evil, we are in no danger of mistaking it for good. No one can paint more picturesquely by an apposite epithet, or illustrate more happily by ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... a dirty staircase, into a mean, slovenly back-office, where a small, uncleanly man sat tipped back in his chair, picking his teeth. He seemed the personification of nonchalance, impudence, and conceit. As I entered, he looked up with a lazy insolence, which, had I been a woman, would have brought a hot flush of indignation to my face, and, on my mentioning my name, he rose and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... wouldn't be sure I wasn't killing you. Some folks would say the whole thing was perfectly dreadful, but I don't care so long as you—so long as you don't. I'm not conceited really, but it looks like conceit—me talking like this and assuming that you're ready to stand and listen. I assure you it isn't conceit. I only know—that's all. It's difficult for you to say anything—I can feel that—but I'd like you just to tell ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... obtaining nor for retaining this grace, great beyond all measure, has it ever done, or ever been able to do, anything of itself. It looks upon itself as most unworthy—for in a room into which the sunlight enters strongly, not a cobweb can be hid; it sees its own misery; self-conceit is so far away, that it seems as if it never could have had any—for now its own eyes behold how very little it could ever do, or rather, that it never did anything, that it hardly gave even its own consent, but that it rather seemed as ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... dispose of any subject at a moment's notice as would Mr. Uppinall; but, nevertheless, he was no fool. Sir Gregory, like many other wise men, thought that there were no swans but of his own hatching, and would ask, with all the pompous conceit of Pharisees in another age, whether good could come out of the ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... that John considered Gilbert smarter than himself, and his self-conceit was so great ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... insanity is on a more rational and efficient footing. The statistician collects, and invites the moral philosopher to collate, the records of crime. The naturalist studies the life of the lower animals, and gives the coup de grace to the uncompromising distinction drawn by human conceit between instinct and intelligence. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... man may as well show a smile to the world as a worried look, or a mean look, or one of the countless casts of countenance that are moulded by conceit and vanity. A smile is frequently misconstrued by the simple-hearted into the outward sign of inward kindness. Many think that it conciliates children and little dogs. But that which the many think ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... a good conceit of himself from the conspicuous position achieved so unexpectedly, the morning papers did nothing to allay it. Most of them slurred over, as lightly as possible, the fact of his journalistic connection; as in the evening ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to Vyas; but in the country itself, it is commonly said, that its proper name is Niyampal, derived from a certain Niyam, a Muni, or very holy person, the Nymuni of Colonel Kirkpatrick. {187a} This, however, is probably some modern conceit, as the Brahmans of both south and north agree in writing the name Nepala, or Nepal, and as the fables on which this etymology is built, as Colonel Kirkpatrick justly observes, {187b} ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... after classifying them, forwarded them to his firm friend and companion, Sir Gilbert Elliott, in England. So far as he was able, he continued to contribute to the guidance and protection of his country. He was patient and fearless, his only regret taking the form of a pardonable conceit that, could he but live, the Revolution could be controlled and guided, that the awful Reign of Terror, so soon to follow, could be averted. The progress of his decline was without hindrance, in spite of all that science could devise. It is reported ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... concluding chapter of the present work makes a powerful statement of the position which a man, conscious of great and noble aims, would then have occupied; and shows, too, how familiar the age was with all methods of secret communication, and of hiding thought beneath a masque of conceit or folly. Applicably to this subject, I quote a paragraph from a manuscript of the author's, not intended ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... (Demochares, the nephew of Demosthenes) wrote several Orations, and a regular History of what was transacted in Athens under his own observation; not so much, indeed, in the style of an Historian, as of an Orator. Hegesias took the former for his model, and had so vain a conceit of his own taste for Atticism, that he considered his predecessors, who were really masters of it, as mere rustics in comparison of himself. But what can be more insipid, more frivolous, or more puerile, than that very concinnity of expression ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... acquire or maintain a position can appreciate this social luxury. The sea exercises a delightful influence over the character—its perils induce self-reliance and fearlessness, which are redeemed from conceit by a child-like simplicity arising naturally from the contemplation of an element menacing, invincible, and symbolical of eternity. Then, too, the legends of the sea invest the mind with a sensitive, poetic passion as delightful as it is unworldly, as ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... history of the past two years, that all the people of our country, North, South, East, and West, have been undergoing a salutary political schooling, learning lessons which might have been acquired from the experience of other people; but we had all become so wise in our own conceit that we would only learn by actual experience of our own. The people even of small and unimportant localities, North as well as South, had reasoned themselves into the belief that their opinions were superior to the aggregated interest of the whole nation. Half our territorial nation rebelled, on ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... footing. He had a footing everywhere, and got information about everything. He was of an uneasy and envious temper. He was well aware of his own considerable abilities, and nervously exaggerated them in his self-conceit. He knew he would play a prominent part of some sort, but Alyosha, who was attached to him, was distressed to see that his friend Rakitin was dishonorable, and quite unconscious of being so himself, considering, on the contrary, that because he would ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... work was there; Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles’ image stood his spear Grip’d in an armèd hand; himself behind Was left unseen save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, Stood for the whole ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... and beckoning me for wine Seated himself to listen, Will himself, While Marlowe read aloud with knitted brows. "'Trust them not; for there is an upstart crow Beautified with our feathers!' —O, he bids All green eyes open:—'And, being an absolute Johannes fac-totum is in his own conceit The only Shake-scene in a country!'" "Feathers!" Exploded Ben. "Why, come to that, he pouched Your eagle's feather of blank verse, and lit His Friar Bacon's little magic lamp At the Promethean fire of Faustus. Jove, It was a faery buck, indeed, that Will ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... this conceit, Tom walked on, almost mechanically, for nearly twenty miles that day, with scarcely ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... many questions that at last he got the particulars from Hiram, which naturally he very much enjoyed. These particulars were recounted with modesty, without the slightest exhibition of egotism or conceit. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... rich death of day, And flourishing a silver pouncet-box With many a courtly jest and rare conceit, There as he sat in rich attire, out-braved The rest. Though darker-hued, yet richer far, His murrey-coloured doublet double-piled Of Genoa velvet, puffed with ciprus, shone; For over its grave hues the gems that bossed His golden ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... foreign out-of-the-way air: something that should be seen beneath the flowing wigs of the Stuart period. He had long wanted to do a statue of the ill-fated Monmouth, and another greater than that. Here was the very man: with a proud, daring, homeless look, a splendid body, and a kind of cavalier conceit. It was significant of him, of his attitude towards himself where his work was concerned, that he suddenly turned and shut the door again, telling Falby, who appeared, to go to his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... The man's self-conceit was unlimited; his sense of humour nil; and in less than a month he had been unanimously voted a "pukka[12] bounder" by that isolated community of Englishmen, who played as hard as they worked, and invariably "played the game"; a code of morals which had ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... go peddlin' names around here. You think nobody knows anything but you! You're the little boy that invented flyin'—got the idea from yore own head, by thunder, when it swelled up like a balloon with self-conceit! That there gas-head of yourn'll take yuh right up amongst the clouds some day, and you won't need no flyin' machine, neither! Skyrider—is—right!" Accidentally Johnny had touched Bud's self-esteem in ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... was old? Ah, woful Ere, Which tells me, Youth's no longer here! O Youth! for years so many and sweet, 'Tis known that Thou and I were one. I'll think it but a fond conceit— It cannot be that Thou art gone! Thy vesper-bell hath not yet tolled:— And thou wert aye a masker bold! What strange disguise hast now put on To make believe that thou art gone? I see these locks in silvery slips, This drooping ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... looking at him at all. Some time since I beheld a portrait of a very, very small literary man. It was easy to discern from it that the small author lives in the belief, that, wherever he goes, he is the object of universal observation. The intense self-consciousness and self-conceit apparent in that portrait were, in the words of Mr. Squeers, "more easier conceived than described." The face was a very commonplace and rather good-looking one: the author, notwithstanding his most strenuous exertions, evidently could make nothing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... was on the deck, kneeling once more in prayer. His hat had fallen before him; behind him knelt his slave. In thundering tones he was confessing himself "a plum fool," from whom "the conceit had been jolted out," and who had been made to see that even his "nigger had the ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... This pleasant conceit simply ravished my soul for some twenty minutes, and then the old sense of injury began to well up afresh, and to call for new plasters and soothing syrups. This time I took refuge in happy thoughts of the sea. The sea was my real sphere, after all. On the sea, in especial, ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... laying down the law to them as to the future in a fashion which made Maisie poke fun at me for a crowing cockerel. It was only natural that I should suffer a little from swelled head that night—I should not have been human otherwise. But Andrew Dunlop took the conceit out of me with a vengeance when Maisie and I told him the news, and I explained everything to him in his back-parlour. He was at times a man of many words, and at times a man of few words—and when he said ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... red"—asceticism appeared to him as a blasphemy against the order of nature and of nature's God. His vow of perpetual chastity, made with so passionate an enthusiasm, for the moment appeared to him an act of absolutely monstrous vanity and self-conceit. In his stupid ignorance he had tried to be wiser than his Maker, preferring the ordinances of man, to the glad and merciful purposes of God. In so doing had he not, only too possibly, committed the unpardonable sin, the sin against the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... it is only the monstrous conceit of mankind which makes him think that all this stage was erected ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... expected to read, perhaps to recommend to a publisher, at any rate to express a well-digested and agreeably flavored opinion about; which opinion, nine times out of ten, disguise it as we may, has to be a bitter draught; every form of egotism, conceit, false sentiment, hunger for notoriety, and eagerness for display of anserine plumage before the admiring public;—all these come in by mail or express, covered with postage-stamps of so much more cost than the value of the waste words they ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to write to a lady civil things, as Maria desires. Time was, when I could have told her, "I had received a letter from her fair hands; and that, if this paper trembled as she read it, it then best expressed its author," or some other gay conceit. Though I never saw her, I could have told her, "that good sense and good-humour smiled in her eyes; that constancy and good-nature dwelt in her heart; that beauty and good-breeding appeared in all her actions." When I was five-and-twenty, ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... "For fiddlesticks! For conceit and vanity and vainglory. Go away! My head is fit to split. Natalina, why haven't you given me my smelling salts? And why ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... You got it wrong, brother. It's to take the conceit out of a coward by making him realize he's no better than anybody else. That's ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... courtier and a country gentleman, and as one of the most prominent members of the recently established Royal Society, gave him a much higher degree of prominence than such adventitious aids would ensure in our present far more democratic days. Finally, he had no small confidence in his own ability ('conceit' his friend Mr. Samuel Pepys calls it in his diary); and this has been recognised in the numerous editions of Sylva that have from time to time been found worthy ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... green, and pink is simply detestable, though many people would consider it decidedly 'chic,' to use her favorite word. I suppose you will dress your wife like a Spartan matron of the time of Lycurgus," added Rose, much tickled by his new conceit. ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... out of conceit with the noble red man. Rectus took his proclamation out of his pocket as we walked along the sea-wall, and, tearing it into little pieces, threw it into the water. When we reached the steam-ship wharf, we walked out to the end of it, to get rid of the rope and grapnel. ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... impression of 'John' for you, to give you the notion of his 'perfect gentleness and lowlihood.' He certainly bursts out with a remark, and in a contradictious way, but only because he believes it, with no air of dogmatism or conceit. He is different at home from that which he is in a lecture before a mixed audience, and there is a spiritual sweetness in the half-timid expression of his eyes; and in bowing to you, as in taking wine, with (if I heard aright) 'I drink to thee,' he had a look that ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... of Henri III., pleased her till he was going to the army, when he begged for one favour before his departure, which was only to put her hand to the hilt of his sword, a compliment so insipid that her Majesty was out of conceit with him ever after. She approved the gallant manner of M. de Montmorency much more than she loved his person. The aversion she had to the pedantic behaviour of Cardinal de Richelieu, who in his amours was as ridiculous as he was in other things excellent, made her irreconcilable to his addresses. ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... what I had given her, although she still rode to grand dinners in the elevated trains, carrying her slippers in a bag. It was her patient industry, her cheerful acceptance of endless household drudgery which kept me clear of self-conceit. I began to suspect that I would never be able to furnish her with a better home than that which we already owned, and this suspicion sometimes robbed me ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... beat that for conceit! I will be the first to undergo the ordeal!" cried Glogowski, and with brimming glass, already a bit wobbly on his pins he ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... not be very profitable, but honorable it always is, and there is nothing to be ashamed of about it. The man who has reason to be ashamed is the one who does nothing, or is always on the lookout for an easy berth with good pay and no work. Let the young man whose conceit greatly exceeds his brains, be ashamed of his cane and kid gloves; but never let a man who works be ashamed of his hard hands. There is an old proverb which says, "Mere gentility sent to market, won't buy a ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... word, coz," laughed Armadas, "I think we have stumbled upon a pretty conceit intended to do honor to our master. Methinks His Royal Highness here has the right on't—the man who made that ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... of the customs being apprized of it, not only obliged him to relinquish his project but fined him in a heavy penalty for presuming to adopt the modes of a barbarous nation. So great is their national conceit that not a single article imported into the country, as I have elsewhere observed, retains its name. Not a nation, nor person, nor object, that does not receive a Chinese appellation: so that their language, though ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... Deborah, nodding her head; "and yet"—it was evident from her persistence that Miss Deborah had a grievance of some kind—"yet he seems to have more than a proper conceit. I heard him talk about whist, one evening at the rectory; he said something about a person,—a Pole, I believe,—and his rules in regard to 'signaling.' I asked him if he played," Miss Deborah continued, her hands showing a little angry ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... dancing forward into the centre of the darkened room, and seemingly blind to the two before her. "Eet ees I that am to ride. Bueno! eet vill be mooch fun! Senor Brown he not like let me go; he tink I do all eet for him. Oh, de conceit of de men, ven I care not for anyting but de fun, de good time! But I talk him long vile, an' Beell he talk, an' maybe he say si for to git us rid of. Tink you not ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... vanity and quiet strength of character would, in a measure, keep her safe from this troublesome spring disorder, but my uncle's account of her doings led me to fear that perhaps her wholesome armor of self-conceit was not so invulnerable as ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... interested. Incongruously enough a vein of romance ran through the massive strata of conceit, and intolerance, and vainglory, and pertinacity, and pugnacity that made up the very definite structure of his nature. He dearly loved a lover. He was as sentimental as a girl of eighteen, and he melted instantly into ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... inclined to think so at first; your fine acting and man's conceit, I reckon. But my conceit has been punctured, and you've slipped a bit in your acting; therefore, to descend to the extremely common-place, the jig ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... been well said that "New York is the best place in the world to take the conceit out of a man." This is true. No matter how great or flattering is the local reputation of an individual, he finds upon reaching New York that he is entirely unknown. He must at once set to work to build up a reputation here, where he will be ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... foreign correspondents had been sent to our shores, whose ignorance and confidence had led them into egregious blunders; for their travelling outlay merely, I would have guaranteed thrice the information, and my sanguine conceit half persuaded me that I could present it as acceptably. I did not wait to ponder upon this suggestion. The guns of the second action of Bull Run growled a farewell to me as I resigned my horse and equipments to a successor. With a trifle of money, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... subject that did cause sore feeling, and that was mosquitoes. We had thought we knew all about them, we were proud with the conceit of nets, ammonia, and veils, but our pride had a fall. Comparatively speaking, we had only known mosquitoes theoretically before (though that knowledge was bad enough); last night we learnt of them practically, none of us had thought ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... know that I am anxious about him? Let me tell you, my little girl, I shall not drag upon myself the responsibility of increasing the self-conceit of ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... respect for antiquity, conceit, prejudice, call it what we will, has something in it that extorts our respect. Let us imagine a dignified and cultivated Chinese official conversing with a pushing Manchester or Birmingham manufacturer, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... over the stones of sacrifice and service to a dignified usefulness. Her fresh young beauty and enthusiasm, her golden virginity and unself-consciousness, her unaffected joy in being alive, her superb health and vitality had shattered his conceit and self-obsession, broken down his aloofness and lack of scruple and filled the empty frame that he had hung in his best thoughts ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... connection Woodrow Wilson says, "And yet the surprising and delightful thing about this book (the Autobiography) is that, take it all in all, it has not the low tone of conceit, but is a staunch man's sober and unaffected assessment of himself and the circumstances of ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... but he was not a fool. He was modest and diffident, but, as is generally the case with modest and diffident persons, there existed, somewhere within the recesses of his consciousness, a very good conceit of himself. He had already learnt, the trout, to look up through the water from his hole and compare the skill of the various anglers on the bank who were fishing for the rise. And he decided that morning, finally: ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... of the examinations sent in by the bishop. In the letter which he sent along, he expressed doubt about the whole matter. "Conceit and malice," he wrote, "are so powerful with many in those parts that they will easily afford an oath to work revenge upon their neighbour." He would, he intimated, have gone further in examining the counter charges brought by the accused, had ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... of this Favourite, who only loved the Lover in the King, must have made her the happiest that ever was, if relying less on her Merit, or warned by a recent Experience, she had guarded against some of her own Sex, whom she must think envied her Elevation, and watch'd her Ruin; but as an illusory Conceit that a Passion which had subsisted for many Years, would never be extinguished, brought her into the very Misfortune from which Leutinemil's Death had ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... once for all, when I say we, please to understand that it is not out of conceit, for my share in our adventures was always very small, but to avoid uncling you all too much, and making so many repetitions of the names of Uncle Dick, Uncle ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... brand Till it is burnt out; Fire is kindled from fire; A man gets knowledge By talk with a man, But becomes wilful by self-conceit. Ha'vama'l. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... a long pause. The girls had been thrilled with the simple recital, so void of anything like conceit in the part that Denny himself had played ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... fact that he was caring for her victim was not lost on his shrewd understanding. He was gathering up and helping patch the wreckage she was making. It was a curious conceit, and Elijah Rasba, while he smiled at the humour of it, was at the same time conscious of its ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... cried in his great voice, "now shall you sing the rest. You have put me out of conceit with my own singing. Why are you not at the feast, where I would be if ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... learning; though men of credit now think that the helm has been snatched from their hands by Erasmus.' This is how Zwingli writes in 1521 of an Italian who had attacked Luther and charged him with ignorance: 'But we must make allowances for Italian conceit. In their heads is always running the refrain, "Heaven and earth can show none like to us". They cannot bear to see Germany outstripping them in learning.' Rarely a different note is heard, evoked by rivalry perhaps or the desire to encourage. Locher from Freiburg could call ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Montreal, mixing his metaphors as topers mix drinks. But I had long since learned not to remonstrate against these outbursts of explosive eloquence—not though all the canons of Laval literati should be outraged. "What, Sir?" he had roared out when I, in full conceit of new knowledge, had audaciously ventured to pull him up, once in my student days. "What, Sir? Don't talk to me of your book-fangled balderdash! Is language for the use of man, or man for the use of language?" ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... upon him that he was not figuring to great advantage in this adventure. Distinctly a humiliating sensation to one who ordinarily was by way of having a fine conceit of himself. It requires a certain amount of egotism to enable one to play the exquisite to one's personal satisfaction; Maitland had enjoyed the possession of that certain amount; theretofore his approval of self ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne. In some particulars, perhaps, the most imposing physiognomical view to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This aspect is sublime. In thought a fine ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... brushed me in passing, as I stood beside the gangplank trying not to stare at you; but you did not know that—did you?—although for an instant I thought you did. It was the conceit of ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... conceit. Barren, black, and desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling landscape of field and forest could—does yet, where enough of it remains. Far as eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain with its sombre pall. Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in the bog ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... beard, Abuse o' Magistrates might weel be spar'd: To liken them to your auld-warld squad, I must needs say, comparisons are odd. In Ayr, wag-wits nae mair can have a handle To mouth 'a citizen,' a term o' scandal; Nae mair the Council waddles down the street, In all the pomp of ignorant conceit; Men wha grew wise priggin' owre hops an' raisins, Or gather'd lib'ral views in bonds and seisins, If haply Knowledge, on a random tramp, Had shor'd them with a glimmer of his lamp, And would to Common-sense ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham |
