"Conventionality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can appreciate the growth of general comfort at the expense of caste; who delights in promising experiments in politics, sociology, and education; who is not thrown off his balance by the shifting of the centre of gravity of honour and distinction; who, in a word, is not congealed by conventionality, but is ready to accept novelties on their merits,—he, unless I am very grievously mistaken, will find compensations in the United States that will go far to make up for Swiss Alp and Italian lake, for Gothic cathedral and Palladian palace, for ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... poet's Indian is very different from the real native American who has been exposed to the corrupting influences-of the white man's civilization. The poet insists on seeing in the American Indian a noble manhood, simple tastes, freedom from all conventionality, heroic fortitude, and all those romantic qualities which a free forest life seems so well calculated to engender. He looks upon the deep, mysterious woods, traversed by nameless streams; the majestic mountains, haunted by shadows; the broad lakes, swept only by the ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... the family from a natural relation grew into a highly unnatural social anachronism. The loose ties of a roving life became fetters of a fixed conventionality. Bonds originally of mutual advantage hardened into restrictions by which the young were hopelessly tethered to the old. Midway in its course the race undertook to turn round and face backwards, as it journeyed on. Its subsequent advance ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... tread in the precise footprints in which every one else speaks, moves, walks, was the only evidence of honesty. What is a man's individuality worth, if it is to be trodden out in the treadmill tramp of senseless conventionality?" ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... while I have lived amongst them. So that although when the country settled down, and we built houses for ourselves and returned more to English modes of living, I felt that I was drifting away from them into the conventionality and ignorance of our official lives, yet I had in my memory much of what I had seen, much of what I had done, that I shall never forget. I felt that I had been—even if it were only for a time—behind the veil, where it is so hard ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... violence that betrayed real suffering. For it is suffering when the young creature finds itself ashamed of father or mother. Instinctively the child is proud of the parent, and if youth is wounded in its tenderest point, its sense of conventionality—for nothing is as conventional as adolescence—that natural instinct is headed off, and of course there is suffering. Mrs. Maitland, living in her mixture of squalor and dignity, had no time to consider such abstractions. ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... when in the glitter of parade uniform or the accurate and irreproachable evening dress of civilization. There is not a man in the group who is not quite at his ease in ball-room attire; most of them have held acquaintance time and again with the white tie and stiff "choker" of conventionality, but the average gallant of metropolitan circles would turn up his supercilious nostrils at the bare suggestion were he to see them now. The —th is in its element, however, for the order has come, and with the coming dawn it will be on the march for the Black ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... her side, white and pure, could he take it and press it to his lips the worst would be over—he would have admitted his desire. But the box curtain did not hide him, and the faces opposite seemed to watch; and then she spoke, and with her words brought a sense of distance, of conventionality. ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... the same quiet comfort, the same air of repose, and the same absence of library conventionality ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... Lord Torrington's tone suggested that this was a distinct advantage to Frank. "According to Miss Lentaigne then, the girl has asserted her right to live her own life untrammelled by the fetters of conventionality. That's the way she ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... follow: thus, science as a whole is relative to the particular order in which the problems happen to have been put. It is in this meaning, and to this degree, that science must be regarded as conventional. But it is a conventionality of fact so to speak, and not of right. In principle, positive science bears on reality itself, provided it does not overstep the limits of its own domain, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... to be a whole one and might have made good, although the old man has not much use for art. Unfortunately, however, I felt I had to kick against the conventionality of the life I led and the protest I put up was a little too vigorous. It made trouble, and in consequence, my folks decided I'd better be an engineer. I couldn't follow their arguments, ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... it was heroic in her to speak and smile at all when she was verily in torture. Nothing short of the worship due to the great god Society could have made her control herself so admirably; but Adelaide was a faithful worshiper of the divine life of conventionality, and she had her reward. Leam showed nothing, at least nothing directly overt. Perhaps her demeanor was stiller, her laconism curter, her distaste to uninteresting companionship and current small-talk more profound, than usual; but no one seemed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... the reason you do not wish me to stay with you?" and he smiled down at the bowed head. "Do you think conventionality should be considered when your father's comfort is in question?" he asked. "You know your father has often asked me to sit with him when he was restless and could not sleep, but you did not seem willing," he added, seeing she had no reply, ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... enflames his imagination. He is swept along on the torrent of conventional ideas; to rescue him you must urge him in the opposite direction. Imagination must be curbed by feeling and reason must silence the voice of conventionality. Sensibility is the source of all the passions, imagination determines their course. Every creature who is aware of his relations must be disturbed by changes in these relations and when he imagines or fancies he imagines others better adapted to his nature. It is the errors of the ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... describe in Mrs. ——'s disposition; or, at least, I would fain have her power of self- control and concealment; but I would not take her artificial habits and ideas along with her composure. After all I should prefer being as I am. . . You do right not to be annoyed at any maxims of conventionality you meet with. Regard all new ways in the light of fresh experience for you: if you see any honey gather it." . . . "I don't, after all, consider that we ought to despise everything we see in the world, merely because it is not what we are accustomed to. I suspect, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... none at all. People do not mince along the banks of streams in patent-leather shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy and home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that suit this region; and the frequenters of these paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or rubber boots, or bare-footed. The girdle of conventionality is laid aside, and the ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... Philip smiled, and was shocked at himself for smiling, and smiled again. For romance had come back to Italy; there were no cads in her; she was beautiful, courteous, lovable, as of old. And Miss Abbott—she, too, was beautiful in her way, for all her gaucheness and conventionality. She really cared about life, and tried to live it ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... quickly. The traditional formality and conventionality of the English are traditions only. There is none of it ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... afterwards what had been her emotions during these early talks. It was the first time in her life that she had ever listened to ideas that were hostile to her order, and she did so with tremblings and hesitations, combating at every step an impulse to flee to the shelter of conventionality. She was more shocked by my last revelation than she let me suspect. It counted for little that I had succeeded in trapping her in proposing for herself the economic programme of Socialism, for what terrifies her class is not our economic programme, it is our threat of slave-rebellion. ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... but drowned each other out. Only disconnected words reached her, but she recognized the well-known sentences from which they came . . . "puritanism . . . abundance of personality . . . freedom of development . . . nothing else vital in human existence . . . prudishness . . . conventionality . . . our only possible contact with the life-purpose . . . with the end of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... neighbourhood that though the maiden had been his grandson's governess, she was a welcomed and honoured acquisition to the family. Perhaps too he perceived the error of his middle age, when he contrasted that former wedding, the work of worldly conventionality, with the present. In the first, an unformed, undeveloped lad, unable to understand his own true feelings and affections had been passively linked to a shallow, frivolous, ill- trained creature, utterly incapable of growing into a helpmeet for him; ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... improve upon further perusal. From these three paragraphs you can construct the whole story: you know that the "dependent cousin" and the girl with the "handsome brunette features" will be rivals for the affections of some "nice young man" of corresponding conventionality, and that the poor relation will finally win him—chiefly because it always happens so in stories and seldom in real life. And you know from these specimen paragraphs that there will be nothing in the ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... too much conventionality. It is well for young people to air their views; it does ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... brothers of hers. From coping with the actual needs and stern realities of existence, from standing and facing fortune on their own feet, so to speak, they had mentally become more muscular. The old soft life of comparative dependence and conventionality was not such as educates sturdy characters or helpful men. This present life was just the training required. Linda discovered that Robert and Arthur were no longer boys to be petted or teased, as the case might be; but men in the highest attributes of manhood—forethought, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... associations gave a singular interest to the view; for here each man lives by the strength of his arm and the valor of his heart. Here society is reduced to its original elements, the whole fabric of art and conventionality is struck rudely to pieces, and men find themselves suddenly brought back to the wants and resources of their ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson and others were scarcely poets at all. Masters of language every one of them, able to command a fine rhetoric, but not poets. Gray in two or three pieces was a poet, but for Johnson that claim can scarcely be made. Cowper was the first to emancipate himself from the conventionality of his age, and Crabbe emancipated himself still further. He had boundless sincerity, and he is really a very great poet even if he has not the perfection of art of some later poets. Many know Crabbe only by the parody of his manner in ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... occupying the stage now, it was true, but there was something warm and human and ragged about the performance. Flint was not a mere spiritless allegory in red-satin doublet and hose to give flame to his conventionality. Instead, she saw sitting opposite her a ponderous, quick-breathing, drunken male, handsome in a coarse, rough-hewn way, speaking in the quick, clipped speech of passion and striking her to the ground ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... experience with every hour, and studying the needs and complaints of his people for himself;—but if we should be told of a modern monarch doing likewise in our own day, we should mount on the stiff hobby-horse of our ridiculous conventionality, and accuse him of having brought the dignity of the Throne into contempt. Yet nothing perhaps can be more contemptible than a monarch who is too surrounded by flunkeyism to be a Man,—and, on the other hand, nothing could be more beneficial than the feeling that perhaps a ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... when the Pre-raphaelite School came into being the art of other lands as well as that of England was in need of an awakening impulse, and the Pre-raphaelite revolt against conventionality and the machine-like art of the period roused such interest, criticism, and opposition as to stimulate English art to new effort, and much of its progress in the last half-century is doubtless due to the discussions of the theories of this movement ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... 83} conformity, conformance; observance; habituation. naturalization; conventionality &c (custom) 613; agreement &c 23. example, instance, specimen, sample, quotation; exemplification, illustration, case in point; object lesson; elucidation. standard, model, pattern &c (prototype) 22. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... proportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such prestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must spring only from living, figurative thought, otherwise the lyric falls into verbal conceits, frigidity, conventionality. Stanzaic law must follow emotional law, just as Kreisler's accompanist must keep time with Kreisler. All the rich devices of rhyme and tone-color must heighten and not cloy the singing quality. But why ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... pantomime, in the way of burning or boiling people, or throwing them out of window, or cutting them up; was often very droll; was always liberally got up, and cleverly presented. I noticed that the people who kept the shops, and who represented the passengers in the thoroughfares, and so forth, had no conventionality in them, but were unusually like the real thing- -from which I infer that you may take that audience in (if you wish to) concerning Knights and Ladies, Fairies, Angels, or such like, but they are not to be done as to anything in the streets. I noticed, also, that when two young men, dressed in ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... uses no material which has not been in use for hundreds of years; and to say that such material begins to lose its freshness is not putting the case too strongly. He has not been able to detach himself from the paralyzing background of English conventionality. The vein was rich, but it is worn out; and the half-dozen pioneers had all ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... further advance in culture this tabu may change into simple custom of a more or less rigorous character; but whatever be the theoretical basis of the distinction which is maintained, whether it be a tabu or a larger conventionality, the features of the conventional scheme of consumption do not change easily. When the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is reached, with its fundamental institution of chattel slavery, the general principle, more or less rigorously ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Dowbiggins never improved, and were at last given up in despair even by Speug, their tails being renewed day by day and their faces remaining in all circumstances quite unmoved; but within a month the average boy had laid aside the last remnant of conventionality, and was only outdone by Peter himself in studied negligence ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... mere animal desire. The poets wrote of it coldly and conventionally, as of a thing which existed only in name. The lover could only beg his mistress "to ease his pain." But the conventionality which extended through all thoughts and expressions relating to the higher emotions of the human soul, had no effect in diminishing the coarseness of thought and conversation. Men were conventional as regards the nobler sentiments of life, but they were not conventional in ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... popularity is appalling, musically at least. Converse has written many other hymn-tunes, which have taken their place among ecclesiastical soporifics. Besides, he has recently compiled a collection of the world's best hymns into the "Standard Hymnal." In this field Converse, though conventional,—and conventionality may be considered inevitable here,—is mellow of harmony and ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... they had standardized and conventionalized music. They had set it down in rules and men like Beckmesser could not imagine that there was any music permissible outside the regulations. Then came Walter von Stolzing. Music to him was not a conventionality but a passion—not a rule, but a life—and, when he sang, his melodies reached heights of beauty that Beckmesser's rules did not provide for. It was Walter von Stolzing who sang the Prize Song, and as the hearts of the people were stirred in ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Genius is the child of his century. We persist in relegating him to his family. He asks for materials and room to create. We answer him, "Go to—thou art idle. Put money in thy purse." We bind him with cords of conventionality, and deliver him into the hands of the Philistines. We declare him to be a rational animal who could pay his bills if he chose—and we County Court him if he does not. We build and maintain stately ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... doubt, in 'Frankenstein', composed when she had Shelley to fire her imagination; but her other novels are competent, and her letters are the work of a vigorous intellect. She had her limitations. She was not quite so free from conventionality as either he or she believed; but on the whole they were neither deceiving themselves nor one another when they plighted faith by Mary Wollstonecraft's grave. With their principles, it was nothing that marriage was impossible. Without the knowledge of ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... mind, I think him, even as it is, the prince of portrait painters. Titian paints nobler pictures, and Vandyke had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and temper; arid when you consider that, with a frightful conventionality of social habitude all around him, he yet conceived the simplest types of all feminine and childish loveliness;—that in a northern climate, and with gray, and white, and black, as the principal colours around him, he ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... merit Browne's work is most astonishingly unequal, though the general level of Britannia's Pastorals is distinctly higher than that of the Shepherd's Pipe. The author passes at times abruptly from careful and loving realism to the most stilted conventionality, and from passages of impassioned eloquence to others grotesquely banal. In some of his peculiarities, as in the perpetuai use of elaborate similes and in the indulgence in inflated paraphrases, he anticipates some of the worst ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... moment. For the first time in his life he was really learning woman, and so clear was Labiskwee's soul, so appalling in its innocence and ignorance, that he could not misread a line of it. All the pristine goodness of her sex was in her, uncultured by the conventionality of knowledge or the deceit of self-protection. In memory he reread his Schopenhauer and knew beyond all cavil that the sad philosopher was wrong. To know woman, as Smoke came to know Labiskwee, was to know that all ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... the truth of any historical theory at all. It was only because he hated the present that he idealized the past. His primitive Golden Age was an imaginary refuge from the actual world of the eighteenth century. What he detested and condemned in that world was in reality not civilization, but the conventionality of civilization—the restrictions upon the free play of the human spirit which seemed to be inherent in civilized life. The strange feeling of revolt that surged up within him when he contemplated the drawing-rooms of Paris, with their brilliance and their philosophy, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... debauchery resemble vertigo, for one feels a sort of terror mingled with sensuous delight, as if peering downward from some giddy—height. While shameful, secret dissipation ruins the noblest of men, in the frank and open defiance of conventionality there is something that compels respect even in the most depraved. He who goes at nightfall, muffled in his cloak, to sully his life in secret, and clandestinely to shake off the hypocrisy of the day, resembles an Italian who strikes his enemy from behind, not daring to provoke ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... everywhere. I could hear the ringing of some church bell; there was space, freedom for thought, a vague, uncertain prospect, out of which figures were looming curiously,—a delightful sense that I was sinning against conventionality ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... hastily. "She just fancies the life—thinks it offers me a good chance to prove my mettle. She hates conventionality." ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... polite society. As Miss Lafontaine's sole object in appropriating Skippy was the reflex action on the Triumphant Egghead, it was absolutely necessary that Skippy should at least give the appearance of appreciating the privilege. Miss Mimi, therefore, decided to jump the fence of strict conventionality if the expression ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... that he was laughing at the recollection of an old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who couldn't find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of the story seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her smile. He glanced at his watch, "Isn't ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... persons lose all the zest of living. The existing world seems to them brutal, its order, tyranny; its morality, organized selfishness; its accepted religion, a shallow conventionality. In such a world as this, the good man stands like a gladiator who has suddenly become a Christian. He is overwhelmed with horror at the bloody sports, yet he is forced into the arena and must fight. That is his business, and he cannot rise ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... of the last twenty years' 'singing birds' as a disorderly woman and freethinking poet! People have been so kind that, in the first place, I really come to modify my opinions somewhat upon their conventionality, to see the progress made in freedom of thought. Think of quite decent women taking the part of the book in a sort of effervescence which I hear of with astonishment. In fact, there has been an enormous quantity of extravagance talked and written on the subject, and I know ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... the little river Ashuelot, a New Hampshire affluent of the Connecticut, was a rude border-settlement which later years transformed into a town noted in rural New England for kindly hospitality, culture without pretence, and good-breeding without conventionality. [Footnote: Keene, originally called Upper Ashuelot. On the same stream, a few miles below, was a similar settlement, called Lower Ashuelot—the germ of the present Swanzey. This, too, suffered greatly from Indian ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... not her equal in energy and beneficence, and I was younger when you came. But I feel for her longing to be up and doing, and her puzzled chafing against constraint and conventionality, though it breaks ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for such salient symptoms as the temperature, the pulse and the rate of respiration, the learned pundit passes them over without a word. Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons would be a good one to write a sober and accurate treatise upon kissing. Her books upon "The Family" and "Fear and Conventionality" indicate her possession of the right sort of learning. Even better would be a work by Havelock Ellis, say, in three or four volumes. Ellis has devoted his whole life to illuminating the mysteries of sex, and his collection ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... uninhabited wilderness the hotel buildings loomed at last with startling conventionality. Even before their discreetly shuttered windows Barton winced back again with a sudden horrid new realization of ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... there again is another sign of wisdom. Your ponderous fool talks pompous sense always. He sees life in only one facet. Your lover sees its many sides, its infinite variety. He can laugh and weep; his imagination lights up dry facts with whimsical fancies; he dives through the crust of conventionality to the realities of life. 'Tis the lover keeps this old world young. The fire of youth, of eternal laughing youth, runs flaming through his blood. His days are radiant, ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... a good while before I could find the time, in a hard-worked life, to write them down and try to make them clear and true to others. It has been a slow task, because the right word has not always been easy to find, and I wanted to keep free from conventionality in the thought and close to nature in the picture. It is enough to cause a man no little shame to see how small is the fruit of ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... nearly, but of course not quite, passed into the hands of strangers when the last of the race came to poverty. Even the inevitable flight to London is not spared us or the heroine, and it is really only when the writer tires of his attempted conventionality that he comes more nearly to his own. The return of Violet to her old home, for instance, is most fortunate in its failure to follow the rules, that attractive young lady being quite content to be whisked back in the turning of a page ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... dark arched eyebrows, coming rather close together, give him a conscientiously sinister appearance. He wears the frock coat and cultivates the "bedside manner" of the fashionable physician with scrupulous conventionality. Not at all a happy or frank man, but not consciously unhappy nor intentionally insincere, and ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... the grass was thin and pale, and strong ferns grew about the roots of the trees. Sometimes Mr. Longworth would accompany me on my trips of exploration, and, happy in our youth and the gladness of summer, and forgetful of strict conventionality, we would spend long mornings together, writing and reading in an especially cosy spot at the edge of the woods back of the farm. Mr. Longworth was growing so strong that Wilson's position was almost entirely a sinecure, and he ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... She hates the "stuffy" life of a hausfrau, but marriage makes no appeal, since the breaking of her engagement with Alfred—who is also a man with punctual business habits. She despises conventional men, and is herself compact of conventionality. In her most rebellious moods the leaven of Philistia (or the British equivalent, Suburbia) comes to the surface. She dares, but doesn't dare enough. "It needs both force and earnestness to sin." As in the case of Hedda Gabler, it is her social conscience ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... tone assumed; this was not the girl to affect the brusquerie of unconventionality any more than the suavity of conventionality—it was rather that of one in deep anxiety, and unaccustomed ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... however, sang the praises of the poem lustily. Even Jeffrey—perhaps because it was purely Scottish (he had thought Marmion not Scottish enough), perhaps because its greater conventionality appealed to him, perhaps because he wished to make atonement—was extremely complimentary. And certainly no one need be at a loss for things to commend positively, whatever may be his comparative estimate. The fine Spenserian openings (which Byron ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... together at work and play and on the march. The renascence of poetry can be interpreted as a revulsion against the prevailing prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally a protest against the inanity and conventionality of the commercial stage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desire to escape a narrow professionalism in music. A similar situation has arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the form of an unorganized, but wide-spread reaction against the cheap and ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... by a white-faced girl and a big, apoplectic turfman, were forgetting dignity, decorum, and conventionality as hand in hand they stormed through the surging eruption of humanity fighting to get a chance at little ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... English family, some member of which would occasionally turn up in Florence and try to put in claims upon him—claims which infuriated him? He was the most wilful and incalculable of men; caring nothing, apparently, one day for position and conventionality, and boasting extravagantly of his family ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has been made to make it like a common statue; no attempt to carve the mane into curls, or to distinguish the monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises, shaking the world. The face of the lion has something of the bold conventionality of Assyrian art. The mane of the lion is left like a shapeless cloud of tempest, as if it might literally be said of him that God had clothed his neck with thunder. Even at this distance the thing looks vast, and in some sense prehistoric. Yet it was carved only a little while ago. It commemorates ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... on the ridge of a gable. And thus, as far as roofing is concerned, the gable is a far more essential feature of Northern architecture than the pointed vault, for the one is a thorough necessity, the other often a graceful conventionality: the gable occurs in the timber roof of every dwelling-house and every cottage, but not the vault; and the gable built on a polygonal or circular plan, is the origin of the turret and spire;[69] and all the so-called aspiration of Gothic architecture ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... seen how that early in life he conceived a decided antipathy to the prosaic and the commonplace, and his career up to this point furnishes abundant evidence that he hated with a genuine hatred to keep in the ruts of custom and conventionality, as if bound to do so because such was prescribed by custom and conventionality. His sentiments he never concealed, and his actions harmonised, almost without exception, strictly with his sentiments; for one of his most striking and instructive characteristics was the ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... paintings mentioned by Pliny were commonly believed to be earlier than the foundation of Rome. At the present day the tombs of Etruria afford examples of Etruscan painting in every stage of its development, from the rudeness and conventionality of early art in the tomb of Veii to the correctness and ease of design, and the more perfect development of the art exhibited in the painted scenes in the tombs of Tarquinii. In one of these tombs the pilasters ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... to tinge the fancy with a grave and sweet romance. The sculptor had the skill and mastery to express his slightest shade of thought with freedom, spirit, and precision. Yet his work showed no sign of conventionality, no adherence to prescribed rules. Every outline, every fold of drapery, every attitude was pregnant, to the artist's own mind at any rate, with meaning. In spite of its symbolism, what he wrought was never mechanically figurative, but gifted with the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Dennis felt too well acquainted with Dr. Everett, and was too young and ready for enjoyment to be disturbed about conventionality. She merrily declared her willingness to be taken to whatever entertainment the doctor had to propose. Mrs. Roberts was out with her husband on business connected with church matters, and she had only intended to walk a square or ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... after this do take my advice and live as others live. In a conventional world conventionality is the line of least resistance. Don't turn to the East unless the whole ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... to the girl who has no mother at hand thus to warn her; take it from us that as your own chaperone you must recognize the silly season as your period of special peril, as the time when it is insidiously easy to relax your vigilance, to let down the protecting bars of strict social conventionality and to give yourself a little latitude in the matter of ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... these, they dealt only with equals in rank. It became a matter of professional ambition, now, to obtain the greatest amount of information from these Confederates, without appearing to depart from any conventionality of the armistice. I got along very well till Chitty came up, and his interrogatives were so pert and pointed that he very nearly spoiled the entire labor. Young Johnston was a Baltimorean, and wished his people to know ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... keep from untwisting the morning-glory, only be willing to let the sunshine do it! Dickens said real children went out with powder and top-boots; and yet the children of Dickens's time were simple buds compared with the full-blown miracles of conventionality and ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... I, despite a thousand Churches, a thousand Creeds, a thousand Sacraments, will firmly maintain that a man who frankly repents his sins and is openly honest with the world before he leaves it, is a better Christian than he, who for the sake of mere appearances and conventionality, juggles with death and passes to his Maker's presence in a black cloud of lies! Better to be crucified with Christ, than live with the High Priests and Pharisees of the modern Jerusalem of our social conditions! Truth may seem to perish on the Cross of injustice—it may be buried in a sealed sepulchre, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the King was sure to astonish those around him by some breach of Court conventionality, little or great. He was liable to strong likings and dislikings, and he took no pains to conceal his sentiments in either case. He seems to have had an affectionate regard for his young niece, the Princess ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... life in the last three weeks, to be alone in the hills or by the sea. It seemed dreadful to be tied to her great house in the city, in her mourning, shut off suddenly from the world, and bound down by the chain of conventionality to a fixed method of existence. She would give anything to go away. Why not? She suddenly realised what was so hard to understand, that she was free to go where she pleased—if only, by accident, she could chance to meet ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... act of conventionality known as a bow, and she nodded her head—black hat and all. The real salutation was a divine ray which passed between their eyes—hers and his—over the commonplace mortals between. And after that, although the patient legislative clock in the corner which had marked the space of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pursued the lady, "has as little conventionality about it as had yours. The magnitude of the danger which prompted yours must also excuse mine; I am come to repay ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... by the ablest romancer. Fadaises, which are to be met with in philosophical works as elsewhere, are not to be frequently encountered in his writings. There is always the fresh breeze of original thought blowing here. He is by nature as well as by doctrine the sworn foe of conventionality. Though he may not give us all we would wish, in our haste to be all-wise, let us yet be grateful to him for this, that he has the purpose and also the power to shake us out of complacency, to compel us to recast our philosophical account. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... swiftly forward. The path soon afterward emerged on the public road. The breeze cooled her hot cheeks, kissed away her tears, and half an hour later they approached the hotel, chatting as quietly as the strictest conventionality would require. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... Half the people who go to the Haverstocks don't wear evening dress on principle. That's their way of showing their contempt for conventionality. I suppose you'll come with me?" John nodded his head. "Good! We'll start off immediately after we've had our dinner. You'll get a good dose of Truth to-night, my son. There was a couple went there once ... the rummest couple I ever saw in my life. They thought they must do something ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... and rather slender man, measuring almost exactly six feet, with sloping shoulders, and he stood so straight, as almost to be the personification of uprightness. No soldier was ever more erect, and this without the least stiffness or conventionality. His head was not large at the base, but high-crowned and finely arched. His eyes were magnificent, and can only be compared to Hawthorne's eyes, though not so clear. Marshal von Moltke had eyes like two brilliant lights; even the Emperor dared not look into them. Whittier's ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... room to press his forehead to the window-pane. Accustomed to bid for what he wanted, he offered his price. The Eppington family was poor and numerous. The girl, bred up to the false notions of duty inculcated by a narrow conventionality, and, feminine like, half in love with martyrdom for its own sake, let her father bargain for a higher price, and then ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... their part may be readily imagined; but it was invariably characterized by an element of refined restraint, and, whether from some implied understanding or individual sense of honour, it never passed the bounds of conventionality or a certain delicacy of respect. The delivery was consequently more or less protracted, but when each man had exchanged his three or four minutes' conversation with the fair postmistress,—a conversation ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... spontaneity, and inventiveness. Though he absorbed all that was excellent in the Peruginesque style, he avoided its affectations, and seemed to take departure for a higher flight from the most exquisite among his teacher's early paintings. Later on, while still a lad, he escaped from Umbrian conventionality by learning all that was valuable in the art of Masaccio and Fra Bartolommeo. To the latter master, himself educated by the influence of Lionardo, Raphael owed more, perhaps, than to any other of his teachers. The method of combining figures in masses, needful to the general ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... has within him a capacity for love, and an unselfishness, which almost atones for his dishonesty; and there is about him a strange dislike to conventionality and to law which is so interesting as to make up the balance. I have always regarded your father as a most excellent man, but thoroughly dishonest. He would rob any one,—but always to eke out ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... the corner, and in the hard-shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise, [267] these figures all smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies of the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be but a result of the mere conventionality of an art still somewhat immature, has just the pathetic effect of Homer's conventional epithet "tender," when he speaks of the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... as unreal as a dream that is past. Here was beauty, and the wide, free spaces of nature, where every law of man seemed puny, ineffectual and void. In this unbounded, uncharted freedom the shackles of conventionality fell from him. Here was life and here was love. He was a primitive man, and here, before him in visible form, stood the world's desire. Barriers there were none. A man and woman, both as vital as the morning, ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... sentimental sympathy may at first develop without a shadow of sensuality. This is nearly always the case when it exists from infancy. In modern society an enormous number of sexual unions, or marriages, are consummated without a trace of love, and are based on pure speculation, conventionality or fortune. Here it is tacitly assumed that the normal sexual appetite combined with custom will cement the marriage and render it durable. As the normal man has not, as a rule, extreme sentiments, such prevision is usually realized on the whole, the conjoints becoming ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Robinson Crusoe in his solitude. It crushes down the forests, beats out roads, strides across the rivers, kicks down native institutions, and generally tramples on the growths of nature, and the works of primitive man, reducing all things to that dead level of conventionality, which we call civilisation. Incidentally, it stamps out much of what is best in the customs and characteristics of the native races against which it brushes; and, though it relieves them of many things which hurt and ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... fact, we do find in his plays, year by year, a strengthening sense of the realities of human nature, despite their frequently idealistic method of portraiture, the verbalism and factitiousness of much of their wit, and their conventionality of plot. Above all things, the man who drew so many fancifully delightful types of womanhood must have been intensely appreciative of the charm of sex; and it is on that side that we are to look for his first contacts with ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises from one fundamental mistake—the idea that romance is in some way a plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life but absolutely in the centre of it. The centre ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... theories, theories which men trained as her father and Leigh and Cardington had been trained would weigh in the balance and find wanting. How rashly she had condemned this training, how effectually her experiment had cured her of radicalism, she herself now saw clearly. The problem of liberty within conventionality was still unsolved, and she had beaten her wings ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... and attractive; her pronounced originality lends her a peculiar charm. She has many admiring friends who are true to her, and I must say that when she is a friend she is a true one, and never fails you. Her originality frequently leads her beyond conventionality; for instance, the other day she took it into her head to dine out of doors. If she wanted to picnic al fresco, why did she not choose some pretty place in the park or in the woods? But no, she had the usual elaborate dinner served directly ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... effect is extraordinarily one of ingenuousness. Of course they are not in the least ingenuous, as a fact, but self-conscious and elaborate to the highest degree. The progress of every art is an apparent progress from conventionality to realism. The basis of convention remains, but as the art develops it finds more and more subtle methods fitting life to the convention or the convention to life—whichever you please. Tchehkoff's tales mark a definite ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... mechanically. The change from fierce earnestness to this subdued conventionality of tone bewildered ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... propriety and decency and conventionality and all the rest of it!" he vociferated as some of the ladies, quite warrantably hung back. "Get at the acid before it gets at you! Don't you—can't you understand? It'll burn into your skin in a ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... recognized, but tells with as much certainty, and enters more deeply into the character for life. The consideration of this is a great incentive to the acquirement of self-knowledge and self-discipline by those who have to do with children. The old codes of conventionality in education, which stood for a certain system in their time, are disappearing, and the worth of the individual becomes of greater importance. This is true of those who educate and of those whom they bring up. As the methods of modern warfare call for more ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... "Now, that's sheer conventionality," he insisted. "You would really like to come in and have a talk, but for the melancholy reason that ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... that self sacrificing attitude she was forced to admit the plea of Alec's own bewildering lack of conventionality. If half the stories in the newspapers were true, he was the most original minded monarch that ever reigned. She was quite sure that his answer to any evasive reply on her part would be a public announcement ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... brief, should any of my readers decide on coming to Queensland, the only difference that they will find as compared with the older countries is, that our climate is somewhat warmer in summer, but to compensate for this we have no severe cold in winter. There is more freedom and less conventionality, life to all who will work is much easier, and there is not the same necessity for expensive clothing or houses as exists in more rigorous climates. The people they will meet are of their own colour and race, no doubt fond of sport and pleasure, perhaps inclined to be a ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... rude harper of the North in order to shield himself from the charge of "attempting to set up a new school in poetry," and he never throughout his life violated the conventions, literary or social, if he could possibly avoid doing so. This bias toward conservatism and conventionality shows itself particularly in the language of his poems. He was compelled, of course, to use much more concrete and vivid terms than the eighteenth century poets had used, because he was dealing with much more concrete ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... with Eagle before we stopped shaking hands; but he had not been able to answer the call of conventionality so soon; and it was not till after we were seated at table that he could control himself to speak. On his other side was Prince Paul's elderly dinner companion. On my other side was the new military attache who ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... as much warmth as she ever permitted herself to show. She was a good and kind lady at heart, only she insisted upon covering the natural bloom and beauty of her nature with the artificial enamel of mannerism and conventionality. During the unwrapping process the young people stood in the background, but Lottie watched the emergence from overcoat and muffler of the predestined victim of her wiles with more ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... church, it is necessary to bear in mind the social conditions that prevailed. A population perfervido ingenio, of a temper peculiarly susceptible of intense excitement, transplanted into a wild country, under little control either of conventionality or law, deeply ingrained from many generations with the religious sentiment, but broken loose from the control of it and living consciously in reckless disregard of the law of God, is suddenly aroused to a sense of its apostasy and wickedness. The people do not hear ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... other words, the glyphs in general are conventions with established meanings—actual writing;[39-*] but we also have pictures of birds or animal forms, where the writer is not following convention, but nature. The freedom of style used in the latter case only serves to emphasize the conventionality of the former, and to separate the entire system from either picture or rebus writing. See ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... skill with the pistol; and he knew that Burr, here, was his superior. So he made his will, settled his affairs, and offered up his precious life; not to his country, not to a great cause, not for great ideas and interests, but to avoid the stigma of society,—a martyr to a feudal conventionality. Such a man ought not to have fought; he should have been above a wicked social law. But why expect perfection? Who has not infirmities, defects, and weaknesses? How few are beyond their age in its ideas; how few can ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... the first few hours, I was sublimely happy, and then a strange restlessness seized me. I was obsessed with a wish to see the flower-garden. For some minutes, stimulated by a dread of what my aunts would think of such a violation of conventionality on the part of a child, I combated furiously with the desire; but at length the longing was so great, so utterly and wholly irresistible, that I succumbed, and, getting quietly out of bed, made my way ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... went on the alarm had become more pronounced; but at this moment, when there shone forth the mother-instinct which had never come out or blossomed in her life, but had been overlaid completely with routine and conventionality, rendering it too indolent to put forth petals, Michael had no thought but for that which she had never given him yet, and which, now it began to expand before him, he knew he had missed all ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... stick to a prejudice as tenaciously as to a principle, and really suppose they are battling for right and truth, when they are only wreaking a private vengeance or aiming at a personal advantage. Patrick Calhoun was the most radical of Democrats; one of your despisers of conventionality; an enemy of lawyers, thinking the common sense of mankind competent to decide what is right without their aid; a particular opponent of the arrogant pretensions of the low-country aristocrats. When the up-country people began to claim a voice in the government, long since due ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... Bucher's insistence on a chaperone, which he had regarded a silly, outworn conventionality, appeared most wise. Germany was a poor place for an unguarded ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... I grew impatient of conventionality. How was it possible for these people to look so quietly, eye to eye, upon the most vitally perfect of living beings? How could they turn from me to orange ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... topsy-turveydom may be attained with comparative ease, it performs a lofty philosophical function. Everything rusts by use. Our moral ideals grow mouldy if preached too much; our stories stale if told too often. Conventionality is but a living death. The other side of everything must be shown, the reverse of the medal, the silver side of the shield as well as the golden. Convex things are equally concave, and concave things convex. The world was made round ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill |
