"Pedantically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... already hurrying on. Oh, it was logical enough to have Martin playing Mrs. Macbeth in a production styled to Shakespeare's own times (though pedantically over-authentic, I'd have thought) and it really did answer all my questions, even why Miss Nefer could sink herself wholly in Elizabeth tonight if she wanted to. But it meant that I must be missing so much of what was going on right around me, in spite of spending ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... audience are now relieved by a change of scene to the royal court, in order that Hamlet may not have to take up the leavings of exhaustion. In the king's speech, observe the set and pedantically antithetic form of the sentences when touching that which galled the heels of conscience,—the strain of undignified rhetoric,—and yet in what follows concerning the public weal, a certain appropriate majesty. Indeed was he ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Parliament fairly early in the war, with that gross lack of discrimination and of military understanding habitual to politicians, insisted on the granting of leave every three months to all ranks in all theatres of war. The Italian Parliament pedantically laid down a uniform period of six months. The British Parliament, with the sure political instinct of our race, preferred to leave the whole matter in the hands of the War Office. The interference in purely military affairs of unpractical sentimentalists ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... dumb,' said Kendal, with a smile; 'otherwise I would pedantically ask you to consider what are the feelings to which the dramatic ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... language, and which he himself used in his writings, was the written Greek of the most cultivated persons of his time, purged of its foreign elements, and methodised by a constant reference to a classical model, which, however, it was not to imitate pedantically. The correctness of this theory has been proved by its complete success. The patois which, if it had been recognised as the language of the Greek kingdom, would now have made Herodotus and Plato foreign ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... warned me," returned the other with a touch of sullenness. "But I have been pedantically exact, as you call it. The fellow had a key; and what's more, he has it still. I saw him use it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pedantically delivered, probably seemed to Monsieur Roguin so fine that his hearer could not at once understand it. He paused, and looked at Bartolomeo with that peculiar expression of the mere business lawyer, a mixture of servility with familiarity. Accustomed to feign ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... private offices there is more jobbing, scheming, and corruption in a month than in all the public departments in seven years.' But whatever Lord Grey's mistakes in colonial policy, his long career shows him personally incorruptible, and in some ways almost pedantically high-minded. The charge must be put in another way. Grey was irritable, strong-willed, and inclined to self-righteousness. Nothing is easier than for a self-righteous man to confuse his wishes and ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... logician and economist, born in London, son of the preceding; was educated pedantically by his father; began to learn Greek at 3, could read it and Latin at 14, "never was a boy," he says, and was debarred from all imaginative literature, so that in after years the poetry of Wordsworth came to him as a revelation; entered the service of the East India Company in 1823, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... One of the few rational things I have met with, Eleanor, in the works of your very objectionable pet Mr. Carlyle—though indeed his style is too intolerable to have allowed me to read much—is the remark that 'speech is silver'—'silvern' he calls it, pedantically—'while silence is golden.'" ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... on errands. Not that she was read in this literature—she had no time for reading. But, even when clothed in rough tweeds, Lancelot had for Mary Ann an aristocratic halo; in his dressing-gown he savoured of the grand Turk. His hands were masterful: the fingers tapering, the nails pedantically polished. He had fair hair, with moustache to match; his brow was high and white, and his grey eyes could flash fire. When he drew himself up to his full height, he threatened the gas globes. Never had No. 5 Baker's ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... men were deceived. To put those who were seriously ill into wards, and to treat them according to the principles of science, was impossible, too, because though there were principles there was no science; if he were to put aside philosophy and pedantically follow the rules as other doctors did, the things above all necessary were cleanliness and ventilation instead of dirt, wholesome nourishment instead of broth made of stinking, sour cabbage, and ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... portion of knowledge superior to that of the rest of their sex, has often been over-bearing; but there have been instances of women who, attaining knowledge, have not discarded modesty, nor have they always pedantically appeared to despise the ignorance which they laboured to disperse in their own minds. The exclamations then which any advice respecting female learning, commonly produces, especially from pretty women, often ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Europe, they visit galleries, they survey cathedrals, they buy pictures, they collect old china, they learn to draw and paint, they go into ecstasies over statues and bronzes, they fill their houses with bric-a-brac, they assume a cynical criticism, or gossip pedantically, whether they know what they are talking about or not. In short, the contemplation of Art is a fashion, concerning which it is not well to be ignorant, and about which there is an amazing amount of cant, pretension, and borrowed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... language of Art, is mastered, while the standard of expression remains inadequate; the laws of disease are profoundly studied, while this knowledge bears no proportionate relation to the practical art of healing; the ancient rules of dramatic literature are pedantically followed, while the "pity and terror" they were made to illustrate are unawakened; the programme of republican government is lucidly announced, its watchwords adopted, its philosophy expounded, while its spirit and realization continue in abeyance: and thus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... venerable great-uncle, a quaint specimen of human infirmity, the singularity of the parish. Though eccentric at times, he was not destitute of good qualities. These, had they been properly applied, might have served to distinguish him among men in what is pedantically called the higher walks of life. But he had a fault, and one that is very unpopular even at this day: he would get vexed at the short-comings of his neighbors, at whom he would level truths exceedingly unpalatable. Indeed, he never failed to put very keen edges on his sayings. ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... the Turkish element sufficiently proclaims. It is only the question of expense which has hitherto prevented the transference of the capital to another site, viz. Nikzic. Cetinje was chosen as the capital some hundreds of years ago—1484, to be pedantically correct—when a defensible position was the most important factor, which even to-day is a point ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... the volume was, she explained that "It is a book which a poor man has written, and he's had it printed to see whether some one won't be kind enough to publish it." I ventured, perhaps pedantically, to point out that the poor man could not be so very poor, or he would not have made so costly an experiment on Dutch paper. But the lady said she did not know how that might be, and she went on toasting the experiment. In all this there is a fine contempt for everything but ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... but should assuredly be accounted less memorable, than its profound and impassioned fervor of grave and eloquent harmony. Strange, wayward and savage as is the all but impossible story, rude and crude and crabbed as is the pedantically exuberant language of these plays, there are touches in them of such terrible beauty and such terrible pathos as to convince any competent reader that they deserve the tribute of such praise and such dispraise. The youngest student of Lamb's "Specimens" can hardly ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... is the capital of the province. The divergence of opinion arising out of this demand for the district of Pancsova in the Banat of Temesvar raised a formidable obstacle to an understanding, for the claim runs counter to the principle of nationality somewhat pedantically laid down by the Allied Powers. Parenthetically, it is worth remembering that hard-and-fast principles which lead insensibly to dogmatism cannot be too sedulously avoided by a Government. Politics must assuredly have its ideals, but compromise ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the contrary, were professors, appointed instructors of youth by the State, their writings, recognized text-books, and their definite system of universal progress, the Hegelian, raised, as it were, to the rank of a royal Prussian philosophy of government. And behind these professors, behind their pedantically obscure utterances, in their heavy wearisome periods, was it possible that the revolution could conceal itself? Were not just the people who were looked upon at that time as the leaders of the revolution, the Liberals, the bitterest opponents ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintship based on merits. Any God who, on the one hand, can care to keep a pedantically minute account of individual shortcomings, and on the other can feel such partialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a God for our credence. When Luther, in his immense manly way, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... of the military training of the men, evolved in an age of patriarchal bureaucratic government, had remained pedantically the same, counting on an ever-present patriotism. Meanwhile, in place of the previous overwhelming preponderance of country recruits, a fresh element had now been introduced: the strong social-democratic tendencies ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein |
