"Insincere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... followed the usual rigmarole about "his own family," and "hard times," and "diminished resources," and all those stereotype commonplaces which are for ever on the lips of stereotype insincere people. Mr. Clifford did not perceive the dry and somewhat scornful inuendo, which lay at the bottom of Mr. Edgerton's seemingly innocent assumption; and the latter took his leave, vexed with himself at having made the unsuccessful application—but still more angry ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... an accomplished epicurean. He hated the zealotry of his brother, the Count of Artois. He was more inclined to quiz the emigrants than to sacrifice anything on their behalf; and the whole bent of his mind made him but an insincere ally of the priesthood, who indeed could hardly expect to enjoy such an orgy in France as their brethren were celebrating in Spain. The King, however, was unable to impart his own indifference to the emigrants who returned with him, nor had he imagination enough to identify ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... are insincere, John; but you cannot deceive me. You never spoke in that way about your ancestors until you learned that I had none. I know you are proud of them, and that the memory of the governor and the judge and the Harvard professor and the Mayflower pilgrim makes you strive to excel, in order to prove yourself ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... least of all can scepticism stand such it test, of which you have just given a passing illustration. Of this system, or rather no-system, there has never been a consistent votary, if we except Pyrrho himself; and whether he were not an insincere sceptic, the world will always be most sincerely sceptical. But forgive me my passing gibe. In wishing you to be as inconsistent as nine tenths of Christians are, I did not mean to prejudice your arguments, such as ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... too, for the controversial needs of the moment, was the argument that if France were known, as Ministers pretended, to be insincere in soliciting peace, "Ministers would certainly treat with her, since they would again secure the support of the British people in the war, and expose the ambition of the enemy;" and that, therefore, the probability was that the British Government knew France to be ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... become a symbol for all treachery cloaked in the garb of affection. Its lessons and warnings are obvious, but this other may be added—that such audacity and nauseousness of hypocrisy is not reached at a leap, but presupposes long underground tunnels of insincere discipleship, through which a man has burrowed, unseen by others, and perhaps unsuspected by himself. Much hypocrisy of the unconscious sort precedes the deliberate ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... harmony with this conclusion. For the sublimity that is rooted in religion tolerates some faults and utterly refuses to tolerate others. The Agamemnon may be slow in getting to work; it may be stiff with antique conventions. It never approaches to being cheap or insincere or shallow or sentimental or showy. It never ceases to be genuinely a "criticism of life." The theme which it treats, for instance, is a great theme in its own right; it is not a ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... the results which have followed it. Who knows whether diplomacy may not ere long be again occupied in demanding promises of the Pope?—whether the Pope may not again think it wise to promise mountains and marvels?—whether these new promises may not be just as hollow and insincere as the old ones? This short paragraph deserves a long commentary, for ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... praise of this aristocrat nor the censure of Sallustius. What would Cicero's character be, if we had it from some one who belonged to the party of Catiline? and what is it as we know it from his own writings? Insincere, changing with the times, timid, revengeful, and, when he was under the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... time on, her career was a succession of brilliant coups in gaining the confidence and love, not to say the money, of men of all ages, and all walks of life. Her powers of fascination were as potent as her professions of reform were insincere. She never made an honest effort to be an honest woman, she never tried to do the square thing. Yet, like other women of her type, she found all sorts of excuses for her wrongdoing. She pretended that she was persecuted, a victim of circumstances, and was ever ready to explain away ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... the attitude which Cecily had always adopted about Blent, and she chose to maintain it now that she was at last to see Blent. Probably her father's family instinct had driven her into an insincere opposition; or she did not consider it dignified to show interest in relatives who had shown none in her. She had never been asked to Blent. If she was asked now it was as a duty; as a duty she would go. Harry did not monopolize the Tristram blood or the Tristram pride. But ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... intricate convolutions, was of the very essence of religion. No one, however, can read his account of his own feelings, even when he runs into the accustomed phraseology, without perceiving the ring of genuine feeling. He is morbid, it may be, but he is not insincere; and even his strained hyperboles are scarcely unintelligible when considered as the expression of the sentiment produced by the effort of a human being to live constantly in presence of the absolute and ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... quickening. But the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you, moral decay—rapid moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful, callously selfish and insincere. I am talking mere textbook, mere everyday common-places, to you when I ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... really thinks she'll die and won't tell me. Richard thought it. He was sorry and gentle, because he knew. You could see by his cleared, smoothed face and that dreadfully kind, dreadfully wise look. He gave into everything—with an air of insincere, provisional acquiescence, as if he knew it couldn't be for very long. Dr. Charles ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... graceful and willowy, her personality dainty and refined, her temperament under ordinary conditions essentially sweet and agreeable. In crises Louise developed considerable character, in strong contrast with her usual assumption of well-bred composure. That the girl was insincere in little things and cultivated a polished manner to conceal her real feelings, is undeniable; but in spite of this she might be relied upon to prove ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... makes more violent than ever the contrast between the political and religious relations of men, and gives a strong prima facie case to the charge against the Churches which I am considering. It is wholly artificial and insincere to say that men are brothers socially and religiously, yet are justified in marching out in millions, with the most murderous apparatus science can devise, to meet each other on the field of battle. We condemn crime for social reasons. ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... why he could not accept and be done with it, instead of persisting in a sequence of insincere and even lying hesitations. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... was secretly alarmed. She felt that her assumed boldness was insincere, and that any insincerity is weakness. She glanced up a long ladder of rods or poles which were hung with Potlatch masks—fearful and merciless visages, fit to cover the faces of crime. She had ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... military temper. H. G. Wells, as usual, sees the centre of the situation. "In many ways," he says, "military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When the contemporary man steps from the street, of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling and intermittent employment into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and cooperation and of infinitely more honorable emulations. Here at ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... joy. By what treachery had he been moved to all this, if he really loved another? That he was simply amusing himself with the sort of flirtation she herself could take up as a mere pastime was not to be believed. That the worshipper should be insincere in his worship was too dreadful to think of. And yet it was to this very man she had once turned to avenge herself on Walpole's treatment of her; she had even said, 'Could you not make a quarrel with him?' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... near Tyburn Turnpike, at this hour; and his memory is—Nay what matters what his memory is? His memory, at bottom, is or yet shall be as that of a god: a terror and horror to all quacks and cowards and insincere persons; an everlasting encouragement, new memento, battleword, and pledge of victory to all the brave. It is the natural course and history of the Godlike, in every place, in every time. What god ever carried it with the Tenpound Franchisers; in Open Vestry, or with any Sanhedrim of considerable ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... vicarious work for the dead which is a characteristic of "Mormon" faith. And who that has gazed upon these splendid shrines will say that the people who can do so much in poverty and tribulation are insincere? Bigoted they may seem to those who believe not as they do; fanatics they may be to multitudes who like the proud Pharisee of old thank God they are not as these; but insincere they cannot be, even in the judgment of their ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... enthusiasm which was in itself the highest expression of their principles. That they seemed often iconoclastic was in reality less the result of their hatred of authority than the prevalence of unreasoning, and therefore by their standards necessarily insincere, adherence to established formulae. Dogmas they hated, not because they were popularly received, but because although they had been vital realities to their originators, they had become in time mere lifeless forms, held in reverence ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... for the word serious is a double-meaning and double-dealing word, a traitor in the dictionary. It sometimes means solemn, and it sometimes means sincere. A very short experience of private and public life will be enough to prove that the most solemn people are generally the most insincere. A somewhat more delicate and detailed consideration will show also that the most sincere men are generally not solemn; and of these is Bernard Shaw. But if we use the word serious in the old and Latin sense of the word "grave," which means weighty or valid, full of ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... in 792, before which the bishop was summoned to explain and justify the new doctrine. Instead of this he renounced it, and confirmed his renunciation by a solemn oath to Pope Adrian, to whom the synod sent him. The recantation was probably insincere, for on returning to his diocese he taught adoptianism as before. Another synod was held at Frankfort in 794, by which the new doctrine was again formally condemned, though neither Felix nor any ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... creative than creation, and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational. My friend, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... Sanford. That man is a deceiver. Trust not his professions. They are certainly insincere, or he would not affect concealment; he would not induce you to a clandestine intercourse. Many have been the victims to his treachery. O Eliza, add not to the number. Banish him from your society if you wish to preserve your virtue unsullied, your character unsuspicious. It already begins to depreciate. ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... and characteristics at a high point of development; the impression left being that the intense sincerity of purpose in the Japanese, and the lack of it in the other, was the main point of difference. The Russian argument throughout was upon a perfectly insincere basis. The Russian envoy never once recognized that he represented a defeated nation, steadily maintaining the attitude of a generous foe willing to stop fighting to prevent the shedding of more blood. In striking contrast to this was Baron Komura's calm presentation of his twelve peace proposals, ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... emancipation. This proposition would be regarded as a confession of despair. If we are right in passing this measure, we are wrong in denying to the old government the right to interfere with slavery and to emancipate slaves. If we offer the slaves their freedom as a boon we confess that we are insincere and hypocritical in saying slavery was the best state for the negroes themselves. I believe that the arming and emancipating the slaves will be an abandonment of the contest. To arm the negroes is ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... a curtness to which his friend's particular manner of overlooking it only added significance. "They've become," she pursued, "superficial or insincere or frivolous, but at least they've become, with the way the drag's put on, quite as dull ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the growing body of reformers in all countries who would remedy the ills of democratic government with the knife of publicity. The wisdom of human experience and of sagacious tolerance informing ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... he now and again expressed for the millions of innocent men, women, and children, branded, roasted, mangled, ripped alive, by Spaniards, though as free by nature as any Christians. There is no just reason to think him insincere. The pity gave dignity and a tone of chivalry to his more local feeling, Protestant, political, commercial, of hatred and jealousy of Spain. Spain, he declared, was ever conspiring against us. She had bought the aid of Denmark, Norway, the French Parliament-towns, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Trachalus' style of oratory, fluent and sonorous, well adapted to tickle the ears of the crowd: and as he was a popular pleader his style was well known. The crowd's loud shouts of applause were in the best style of flattery, excessive and insincere. Men vied with each other in their enthusiasm and prayers for his success, much as though they were sending off the dictator Caesar or the emperor Augustus. Their motive was neither fear nor affection, but a sheer passion for servility. One can see the same in households of slaves, where ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... of religion which you are right in regarding as dull, for it is dull. When it is unreal and insincere it is deadly dull; when phrases are repeated, parrotwise, by people who have either never felt or have long lost their power and inspiration, then too it is deadly dull. When a sharp line, moreover, is made between all the ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... of feminine tactics, which are emphasized by insincere gestures, by looks of feigned ingenuousness, by artful intonations of the voice and even by the snare of cunning silence, are characteristic to some degree of their ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... social feelings, we believe, grow best in a practical medium. We cannot expand social feeling at will, or produce a democratic spirit by some simple process of education. When we try to extend social feeling too far we make the moral life insincere. To try to expand social feeling and moral interest so as to make it include the foreign, to try to love our enemies in advance of all aesthetic and practical relations with the foreign seems futile. Distance must first be eliminated by imagination. Social and moral codes must be founded upon intimate ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... a man always to be suspected; that young men were forbidden by their parents, in many instances, to associate with them, they considering their company and habits as tending to subvert their morals, and to render them frivolous and insincere. I added that in America as well as everywhere else there were bad men, men of no principles, whose consciences never stand in the way of their ambition or avarice; but that I firmly believed that, as a body, the American Congress was as pure from corruption and foreign influence as ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... shalt avoid and flee from insincere friendships! Thou shalt in everything refrain from excess. Thou shalt fear to be the cause of a ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... of friendly intercourse, that there was anything sour in his spirit, or harsh and narrow in his practice; when you discussed any of these things with him, the discussion was pretty sure to end, not indeed with any insincere concession of what he thought right and true, but in consideration for ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... fanatic's trust in God his Luther will go to Worms "though it rain devils"; and when in his own person Carlyle spoke of the small, honest minority desperately resolved to maintain their ideas though opposed by a huge hostile majority of fools and the insincere, he found one of the finest expressions for courage in all our literature. The vast host shall be to us, he cried, as "stubble is to fire." It may be objected that this is the voice of religious faith rather than of courage pure and simple, and the ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... face in the glass which now looked at her was too determined, too hard. It startled her. And she changed the expression on it. But then it looked insincere, meretricious, affected, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... a deceiver and insincere, The yellow one with two faces like a hypocrite! It shows forth with two qualities to the eye of him that looks on it, The adornment of the loved one, the colour of the lover. Affection for it, think they who judge truly, Tempts men to commit that which ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... from theological authority. But in Italy, at any rate, it left his conscience, his religion, his sociological ideas, the deeper problems which concern his relation to the universe, the subtler secrets of the world in which he lives, untouched."[2233] That means that it was a fad and was insincere. There were men who were great scholars within the standards of humanism, but the enthusiasm for art, the zeal for Latin and Greek literature, the cooperative struggle for exhumations and specimens, were features of a reigning fad. The Renaissance ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Traun, there might have been different news got. Friedrich (who was never stingy in such matters, except to his own Generals, where it might do hurt) is profuse in his eulogies, in his admirations of Saxe; amiable to see, and not insincere; but which, perhaps, practically do ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... him then was perhaps the common experience of such natures. Once upon the boat the illusion of the great world it contained for him utterly vanished. He found it noisy, formal, insincere, and—had he ever understood or used the word in his limited vocabulary—VULGAR. Rather, perhaps, it seemed to him that the prevailing sentiment and action of those who frequented it—and for whom ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... They were sitting on it now, up-stairs with Brodrick in his study. She knew infallibly what their judgment would be. Just as she had seemed to them so long a creature of uncertain health, she must seem now inconstant, insincere, the incarnation of heartlessness, egotism and caprice. She said to herself that it was all very well for Nina to talk. This insight was a curse. It was terrible to know what people were thinking, to feel what they were feeling. And they were seven to one, so ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... viewing with a compassion, most rare in those days, the impending fate of the heroic mountaineers, the powerful Count of Toggenborg tried to negotiate a peace with the Duke. Leopold's terms, however, were so humiliating and evidently so insincere that nothing came of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... then, was really alarmed at the Stuart scheme of toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical and therefore fanciful. It was in advance of its age or (to use a more intelligent language) too thin and ethereal for its atmosphere. And to this affection for the actual in the English moderates must be added (in what proportion we know not) ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... that seemed to Millard a little insincere about this rather stiff note was the reason assigned for writing to Agatha. Her persuasions, as Millard well knew, did not have less of authority about them than her mother's. But this polite insincerity on a minor point ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... Justify it? No. I only say this, strange as it may seem, that I believe his affection for Miss Trevanion was for herself,—so he says, from the depth of an anguish in which the most insincere of men would cease to feign. But no more of this; she is ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he is actually insincere. I have noticed that men who write or read much often appear ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... position would fetter his special work. He kept aloof from party politics, and was only roused when great principles were at stake. Few of the leading politicians satisfied him. Peel seemed too cautious, Gladstone too subtle, Disraeli too insincere. It was the simplicity and kindliness of his relative Palmerston that won his heart, rather than confidence in his policy at home or abroad. The House of Commons suited him better than the colder atmosphere of the House of Lords; but in neither ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... confronting the essentially aged and decrepit graces of his model with his own essentially youthful temper, he invigorated what he borrowed; and with him an aspiration towards the classical ideal, so often hollow and insincere, lost all its affectation. His doating grandfather, the reigning Grand-duke, afforded readily enough, from the great store of inherited wealth which would one day be the lad's, the funds necessary for the ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... puzzled him. Since that day in Devonshire, when Claude had endeavored to intervene, the latter had spoken scarcely a dozen words to him. He shook hands with Jim at the station and with Angela, but his congratulations sounded weak and insincere. ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... Christ as Truth demands truth in heart and life. The insincere man; the trifler; the flippant jester who takes nothing seriously; the superficial man who uses the deepest expressions, as counters for society talk; the inconsistent man who is daily doing violence to his convictions, by permitting things ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... combination he had succumbed to had an American accent, a transcendental aunt and an insolvent father; but all my old loyalty to him mustered to meet this unexpected hint that I could help him. I saw that I could from the insincere tone in which he pursued: "I've criticised her of course, I've contended with her, and it has been great fun." Yet it clearly couldn't have been such great fun as to make it improper for me presently to ask if Miss Anvoy had nothing at all settled on herself. To this he ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... enthusiastic advocates of freedom. By turns imperious and wavering, fanatical and moderate, they sought to curtail and humble the king, not to ruin him; to depress Episcopacy, but to establish another religion by the sword of the magistrate. Their leaders were timid, insincere, and disunited; few among them had definite views respecting the future government of the realm: and they gradually lost the confidence of the nation. But the Independents reposed fearlessly on the greatness and grandeur ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... subject. Wherefore we are asked two things—to contemn the Jew and accept the symphony as a manifestation of tremendous genius. Possibly Mendelssohn never clapped eyes on the symphony. Had he done so, one would have expected him to pay Wagner a superficial, insincere compliment about the score, and imply that something might be done, etc. We have Richard's written word for it that Mendelssohn never referred to Wagner's work. All the same, what I believe may have been the case, and what Wagner most certainly would not have ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... arrived, and our heroine was introduced to her father's principal patron, a vain and weak-minded man, who listened to his host's extravagant adulation with evident complacency, though to every one else it was palpably insincere. Beaufort insisted on his visiting his studio, to give his opinion of the grouping of a historical piece he had sketched out for Amy to fill up. The baronet, thus flattered, suggested some alterations which would have made it absolutely ridiculous; and the artist would actually ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... view, as a member of the aristocratical party and a fine old Conservative, is that these Sophists, as the professors of the new education had come to be called, and Socrates as their protagonist, were insincere and dangerous innovators, corrupting morals, persuading young men to despise the old-fashioned, home-grown virtues of the State and teaching a system of false and pernicious tricks of verbal fence whereby anything whatever could be proved, and the worse be made to seem the better—provided always ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... mother thinks she can't begin to guard him too early." Miss Ambient's head drooped a little to one side, and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then suddenly there was a strange alteration in her face; she gave a smile that was more joyless than her gravity—a conscious, insincere smile, and added, "When one has children, it's ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... are moments when I completely lose heart. For whom and for what do I write? For the public? But I don't see it, and believe in it less than I do in spooks: it is uneducated, badly brought up, and its best elements are unfair and insincere to us. I cannot make out whether this public wants me or not. Burenin says that it does not, and that I waste my time on trifles; the Academy has given me a prize. The devil himself could not make head or tail of it. Write for the sake of money? But I never have any money, and not ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... I only want to say that in our social relations we are constantly hiding from each other, under the smiles and courtesies of friendly interest, thoughts which, if expressed, would destroy all possible communion—and that, nevertheless, we are not insincere in our smiles and courtesies; and therefore there is nothing paradoxical in my having felt great admiration for Bourgonef, and great pleasure in his society, while all the time there was deep down in the recesses of my thoughts an uneasy sense of a dark mystery which possibly connected ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... shocked by the blood of the Cross, yet entertain no sense of their own abhorrent pollution in the sight of the infinitely holy One. It is not strange that the world assumes to have advanced beyond that which is repeatedly said to be the manifestation of the wisdom of God; branding as bigots, insincere, or ignorant, all who still hold to the whole testimony of God. It is not strange that the atonement by blood is omitted, for it is Satan's hour and the power of darkness, and the true child of God must patiently bear the ever-increasing ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... creature I ever saw, and nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner. He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many people who were not. He was often wilful and petulant, and I used to think him dreadfully insincere. It was due, I think, chiefly to his inordinate desire to please. Poor Cyril! I told him once that he was contented with very cheap triumphs, but he only laughed. He was horribly spoiled. All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... direct contrary to what is wrong must be right. Thus the dread of being only suspected of one fault makes them actually guilty of another. The desire of avoiding the imputation of envy, impels them to be insincere; and to establish a reputation for sweetness of temper and generosity, they affect sometimes to speak of very indifferent characters with the most extravagant applause. With such, the hyperbole is a favourite figure; and every degree of comparison but the superlative is rejected, ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... books in every department, and the enormous quantity of imperfect, insincere books, has been the lament of all times. The complaint being as old as Literature itself, we may dismiss without notice all the accusations which throw the burden on systems of education, conditions of society, cheap books, levity and superficialty of readers, and analogous causes. None of these ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Heracles, and yet went round asking other people to die for him; who, in particular, accepted his wife's monstrous sacrifice with satisfaction and gratitude? The play portrays him well. Generous, innocent, artistic, affectionate, eloquent, impulsive, a good deal spoilt, unconsciously insincere, and no doubt fundamentally selfish, he hates the thought of dying and he hates losing his wife almost as much. Why need she die? Why could it not have been some one less important to him? He feels with emotion what a beautiful act it would have been for his old father. "My boy, you have ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... confess that I can make nothing of him. I shall never be surprised to hear anything in connexion with him. I recommend you to avoid him like the plague. He can be no one's friend. As an acquaintance he is treacherous and insincere; as an enemy, I can well imagine that he would be as merciless ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... descendants. The officers of the army are also Europeans. The rank and file, amounting to about eight thousand men, are natives. The aboriginal inhabitants are called Tagals. They are somewhat idle, though a good-natured, pleasure-loving race; are nominally Roman Catholics, but very superstitious and insincere. Their houses are formed of bamboo raised on piles, the interior covered by mats, on which the whole family sleep, with a mosquito curtain over them. The ornaments in their houses are generally a figure of the Virgin Mary, a crucifix, and their favourite game-cock. The men wear a pair ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... protests were insincere, and that all my heart and brain were with him, but I could not admit this frankly. Ah! And I knew also that the sole avenue to peace and serenity, not to happiness, was the path of renunciation and of obedience to the conventions of society, and that ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... confute Johnson, to refer to the four hundred volumes of verse, which are published (so it is said in the newspapers of this trade) in every year. But he overlooked only one thing: namely the tendency of literary men to be insincere. It is the habit of writing in phrases, very much like building up a picture out of blocks that have on them already portions of a picture, which comes between the spirit of the writer and its true expression in a ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... For there are men who pride themselves on 'speaking out,' and take rudeness and want of regard for other people's sensitive feelings to be sincerity. And, on the other hand, it is possible that amiability may be sweeter than truth is, and that righteousness may be hypocritical and insincere. So Paul says, 'Let this white light be resolved in the prism of your characters into the threefold rays of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... of a deacon in a country church, whom I once knew. His word was proverbially truthful. As widely as he was known his reputation for piety and simple truthfulness, for honesty and purity of life were universal. I do not think that he was consciously insincere, but as a trustee in administering a fund devoted to public uses he seemed to have a clear eye for only those enterprises through which he or members of his family could indirectly secure incomes. Entrusted with a public service which involved the improvement ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... are insincere. All you want is the pie. You make me feel that the privileged classes are right in getting what they can out ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... glance away. She looked at her hostess instead, with an expression of candour so admirable that one might easily have mistaken it to be insincere. It was part of her that she could swim in any current, and it was pleasant enough, for the moment, to swim in Alicia's. Both the Moselle and the cutlets, moreover, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... the evil was, as always, a heart divided—that is, between God and Baal—or, perhaps, 'smooth'; that is, dissimulating and insincere. In reality, Baal alone possesses the heart which its owner would share between him and Jehovah. 'All in all, or not at all,' is the law. Whether Baals or calves were set beside God, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... soon as she entered it, seemed to be filled at once with the kind of fugitive flash which sunlit water sometimes casts on a ceiling. Acting, I suppose, on the principle of "Love me, love my dog," I had the temerity to express a commendation, entirely insincere, of hers; and this being received with a graciousness not perhaps unmixed with amusement, we were very soon in conversation. She talked of Nice, of Baden-Baden, and London; then she got to literature—I cannot remember how—and a moment later she was vouchsafing to me the intimate information ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... must elapse before a man can know the heart of his fellow-man, if, indeed, it can ever be known; and it was not until Edward had become addicted to habits of intemperance that he discovered the professed friendship of Mr. Treves to be insincere. Words of warning seldom came from his lips. What cared he if Edward did fall? Such being the case, the business would come into his own hands; and such "a consummation devoutly to be wished" it was very evident that if Edward did not soon ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... himself to be a benefactor of the human race; he would have been insincere if he had pretended otherwise; he finished his first paper with these words: "I shall endeavor still farther to prosecute this enquiry, an enquiry, I trust, not merely speculative, but of sufficient moment to inspire the pleasing ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... sense of responsibility for what Essie Scofield had become; he felt that an attitude of self-accusation, of profound regret for the way they had taken together, should rest upon him; but the thought, the effort, were perfunctory, obviously insincere. If now he had a different, perhaps deeper, sense of responsibility, he had known nothing of it in the first months of his contact with her.... A different man, he reiterated; and one as faithfully representative as he was to-day. But totally another; ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... I was much moved by the eloquent attack on Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought (and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere. But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... young man, "though I appear unthoughtful in your eyes, O, servile race of flatterers! yet know, to your confusion, that I have tried you all, and find you trifling and insincere. This man alone refuses my proffered love unless he can return it, and this man alone is worthy of ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... misleading speech. The fact that syphilis is a disease spread to a considerable extent by sexual relations too often forces us into an attitude of veiled insinuation about it, a mistaken delicacy which easily becomes prudish and insincere. It is a direct move in favor of vulgar thinking to misname anything which involves the intimacies of life, or to do other than look it squarely in the eye, when necessity demands, without shuffling or equivocation. On this principle it ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... actually wept at this point, and the maudlin tears were not altogether insincere. His own wife and children he heartily loved, and remembered them now with honest tenderness. At home he was not a drinker and a rough; only amid the hardships and perils ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... hand, it is said that this policy of the United States toward its dependencies is insincere; that it is a covert plan of exploitation; that, as it is practiced, it is a denial in act of a mere promise to the ear; and that if it were genuine the United States would bestow self-government upon its dependencies by ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... below. Where now the French habitant sits chattering with his confreres and smoking his pipe filled with home-grown tabac were once the shady walks and stiff parterres of the ancient garden. Here, under the summer moons, were doubtless stolen meetings as sweet, vows as insincere, and intrigues as foolish as those in the exquisite bowers of Le Petit Trianon at Versailles. On its paths have fallen the martial tread of "de Levis, de Beaujeu, and many a brave soldier and dainty courtier, official guests at the Governor's Chateau." Among them was one who ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... editorial page he riddled the interviews. By adroit quotations, by contrasting one with another, he showed, or rather made the so-called reformers themselves show, that where they were sincere they were in the main silly, and where they were plausible they were in the main insincere; that every man of them had his own pet scheme for the salvation of wicked New York; and that they could not possibly accomplish anything more valuable than leading the people on the familiar, aimless, demoralizing excursion through ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... there was a touch of artificiality about it, young as it was, which he did not admire. The soft, fair hair was thickly powdered, the cheeks rouged, and the whiteness of the chin and forehead enhanced by many patches. The eyes were intelligent, but restless and insincere, ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... fellowship to all merely passionate relationships. Upon this topic Capes was heavy and conscientious, but that seemed to her to be just exactly what he ought to be. He was also, had she known it, more than a little insincere. "We are only in the dawn of the Age of Friendship," he said, "when interest, I suppose, will take the place of passions. Either you have had to love people or hate them—which is a sort of love, too, in its way—to get anything out of them. Now, more and ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... says and the other person says about such and such a text, in order that you may escape from the real, practical meaning of the text! Such people are hypocrites at heart, whoever they are; or at least, insincere. They don't want to know God's will; they would much rather not know it. They want to get away from the plain, practical, common-sense meaning of the text, and then they say, "It doesn't mean exactly what it says," and "It should be interpreted so-and-so;" and they ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... people and himself. They were largely the results of his training. His father, Frederick, Prince of Wales, a fool, a fribble and worse, died when George was twelve years old. His mother, the Princess Augusta, was a woman of strong will, ambitious of power, unamiable in temper, thoroughly insincere, narrow-minded, and full of petty feelings. She was strict in all religious matters, had a high sense of duty, and was a careful mother. When her son became king, she acted as though she had a right to direct him in ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... she was always shamming love and friendship and benevolence and tenderness. She could tell you, with words most appropriate to the subject, how horrible were all shams, and in saying so would be not altogether insincere;—yet she knew that she herself was ever shamming, and she satisfied herself with shams. "What is he going to say to me?" she asked Augusta, with her hands clasped, when she went up to put her ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... called forth a vast deal of nonsense. Much of it is even insincere. The pulpits have spouted cataracts of sentimentality. Some of them have emitted quantities of sheer drivel. A stranger would think we had lost our only poet, and well-nigh our only teacher; whereas, if the truth must be told, we have lost one who was occasionally a great poet, but ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... half so bad as the laity. Now the laity are eaten up with covetousness and ambition; and the clergy are covetous and ambitious, but not half so bad as the laity. The laity, and you working men especially, are the dupes of frothy, insincere, official rant, as Mr. Carlyle would call it, in Parliament, on the hustings, at every debating society and Chartist meeting; and, therefore, the clergyman's sermons are apt to be just what people like elsewhere, and what, therefore, they ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... that noisy group was abusing Mr Rose. It had long been Brigson's cue to do so; he derided him on every opportunity, and delighted to represent him as hypocritical and insincere. Even his weak health was the subject of Brigson's coarse ridicule, and the bad boy paid in deep hatred the natural tribute which vice must ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... in your face that in this matter of my husband you have not let your acts belie your feelings. During these last four or six months you have been terribly indiscreet; but you have not been insincere, and that almost ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... rebel and a renegade, and his works, which I had read with passion, did not prevent my judging him with very great severity. And I blush to-day with anger and shame when I think of all my absurd prejudices, fomented by the imbecile or insincere little court which flattered me. I had a great desire, nevertheless, to play in Ruy Blas. The role of the Queen seemed so ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... Chapter. Hats and Bonnets. Injury to clothes. Mistakes which are not censurable. Tardiness; plan for punishing it. Helen's lesson. Firmness in measures united with mildness of manner. Insincere confession: scene in a class. Court. Trial of a case. Teacher's personal character. The way to elevate the character of the employment. Six hours only to be devoted to school. The Chestnut Burr. Scene in the wood. Dialogue in school. ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... "proper channel of communication" as a militia Captain would have done. The Union men who voted for the resolutions in which this language was embodied, would be justly liable to censure, if it were not positively certain that they were insincere; and that they were insincere is abundantly proven by their subsequent action, and the fact that many of them held commissions in the "armed forces" sent to invade the South. On the 11th of February the Legislature resolved, "That we protest against the use of force or ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... that of any man of his time. He made mistakes, but he made them bravely, grandly, and consistently. Where his convictions were enlisted, he had no reservations, and he used every means, every available weapon, as I have shown. But he was never self-seeking, never cheap, never insincere. A detester of all machine politicians, he was a statesman worthy to be called the William Pitt of the United States. The consistency of his career was a marvelous thing; because, though he changed ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... and theology; but his religion was so loose, and his inquiries for the reason of every thing which he was to believe, became so offensive to the rabbies, that he was thrust out of the synagogue. In consequence of this, he became a Christian, and was baptized; but his conversion was insincere, and though, during his life, he did not openly profess himself an atheist, his posthumous works plainly proved him such. He died, of a consumption, at the Hague, February, 1677, aged forty-five. He is the founder of a regular system of atheism, and by his hypothesis he wished to establish that ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Kate's attention, an unconvincing, insincere note in it. She fixed her eyes upon her face searchingly, then she crossed the room swiftly and dropped upon her knees beside her. Taking one of her thin hands between both ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... that, their little superficial ideas about themselves, and of their circumstances and tastes, and always there was something, something that was with them unspoken, unacknowledged, which made all these things unreal and insincere. ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... as they are contemptuously called in the East—assert that China is more civilised than the modern West, even the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganised, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... men of that time we think sometimes we feel the beating of a woman's heart; they have exquisite sentiments, delightful inspirations, with absurd terrors, fantastic angers, infernal cruelties. Weakness and fear often make them insincere; they have the idea of the grand, the beautiful, the ugly, but that of order is wanting; they fast or feast; the notion of the laws of nature, so deeply graven in our own minds, is to them entirely a stranger; the words possible and impossible ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... confederated under Pontiac's masterly leadership, then Dunmore's War permitted us to begin life as a republic without having the Alleghanies for our western boundary. Nor can I hold in these latter days that His Lordship was insincere in waging the war; for England was against it from ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... first opportunity, possessed herself of the newspaper which had been left on the divan. One of the first things that caught her eye was an article headed "Roux on Tuft Hunters; The Advanced American Woman as He Sees Her; Aggressive, Superficial, and Insincere." The entire interview was nothing more nor less than a satiric characterization of Flavia, aquiver with irritation and vitriolic malice. No one could mistake it; it was done with all his deftness of portraiture. Imogen had ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... moderation in the torrent of defiance which characterized the speeches of the extreme disunionists during the first ten days of the session of Congress, and indications were not lacking that even these were wholly insincere, and meant only to mislead their opponents and the public. Strong proof of this is found in the careful speech of Senator Jefferson Davis, in which he lays down the issue without reserve, at the same time dealing in such vague and intangible ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... is seldom to seek in lyric: we cannot give them too high praise as fashioners of instruments for other men to use. The cheerful bird-voice of the trouvere, the half artificial but not wholly insincere intensity of his brethren of the langue d'oc, will never miss their meed. But for real "cry," for the diviner elements of lyric, we somehow wait till we ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... gaieties, I felt that something was wanting to my heart. I grew sick of dissipation: I discovered, that the People among whom I lived, and whose exterior was so polished and seducing, were at bottom frivolous, unfeeling and insincere. I turned from the Inhabitants of Paris with disgust, and quitted that Theatre of Luxury without heaving ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... so. "Why?" I asked myself. She was very brilliant—very lovely; I had seen no one like her, yet the vague suspicion grew and grew. It was not the face of a woman who could be trusted; there was something insincere beneath its beauty. I should have liked her better if she had shown more sorrow for the awful event that had happened; as, it was, I could not help thinking that her chief emotion had been a kind of half fear as to what ...
— Coralie • Charlotte M. Braeme
... made public to enable my opponents to allege that I might have defeated Simmons, and that my action was insincere. As a result I had no further political intercourse with Butler, and when the contest came in 1877 his action aided Mr. Hoar in securing the seat in the Senate. I presume, however, that Butler preferred my election, but he had ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... the moment she was puzzled. To her, Hugo's speech sounded insincere. But the glance of the eye that she encountered was so caressing, the curves of his mouth were so sweetly infantine, that she accused herself of harsh judgment, and remembered Hugo's foreign blood and Continental training, which had given him the habit, she supposed, of saying ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... of courage and insincere opposition are always the refuge of a coward. Here was a nation demanding that which was necessary for its trade, desirous of reaching a solution through peaceful means if possible, but determined to acquire it at all hazards if necessary. ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... she tried to be more agreeable to Osborne; and though her attempt was a great failure when practised upon Roger, and he did not know what to say in reply to the delicate Batteries which he felt to be insincere, he saw that she intended him to consider himself henceforward free of the house; and he was too glad to avail himself of this privilege to examine over-closely into what might be her motives for her change ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... this introduction." Both Monsieur Lomaque's red-rimmed eyes were seized with a sudden fit of winking, as he made this polite speech. His enemies were accustomed to say that, whenever he was particularly insincere, or particularly deceitful, he always took refuge in the weakness of his eyes, and so evaded the trying ordeal of being obliged to look steadily at the person whom he was ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... small body, is tried by its failures. The whole is condemned in the person of a few; while a majority—the bulk of men—estimate themselves by their successes. One great man sheds glory on his race, while one villain is condemned alone. The popular judgment, that lawyers are insincere and dishonest, because they appear on both sides of a case, with equal zeal, when there can be but one right side, is not peculiar to the bar. It should be remembered that learned and pious divines take opposite sides of all doctrinal points of Scripture, and yet nobody ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle |
