"Sycophantical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... national; sometimes, perhaps, from a temper unfitted for worthy struggles in the head of the house; possibly from a haughty, possibly a dignified disdain of popular arts, hatred of petty rhetoric, petty sycophantic courtships, petty canvassing tricks; or again, in many cases, because accidents of ill-luck have intercepted the fair proportion of success due to the merits of the person; whence, oftentimes, a hasty self- surrender to impulses ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... sweet, simple child innocently beseeching that to-morrow might be fine for its holiday, or that Santa Claus would be generous; it was the cunning trader, fawning, flattering, propitiating, bribing with fulsome, sycophantic praise (an insult in itself), as well as burnt-offerings, working for his own success here and ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... within a magic glass, I seem to see a foul procession pass— Judges with ermine dragging in the mud And spotted here and there with guiltless blood; Gold-greedy legislators jingling bribes; Kept editors and sycophantic scribes; Liars in swarms and plunderers in tribes; They fade away before the night's advance, And fancy figures thee a devil's lance Gleaming portentous through the misty shade, While ghosts of murdered virtues shriek ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... Mrs. Bute never knew, or at least never acknowledged, how far her own tyrannous behaviour had tended to ruin her husband. All that woman could do, she vowed and protested she had done. Was it her fault if she did not possess those sycophantic arts which her hypocritical nephew, Pitt Crawley, practised? She wished him all the happiness which he merited out of his ill-gotten gains. "At least the money will remain in the family," she said charitably. "Pitt will never spend it, my dear, that is quite certain; for a greater miser does not ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... furnished acute satisfaction. It fell naturally enough that little Steve Wickes, the timid, shrinking, humpbacked son of the dead soldier, Stephen Wickes, afforded Sam many opportunities of rare pleasure. It was Sam that coined and, with the aid of his sycophantic following never wanting to a bully, fastened to the child the nickname of "Humpy Wicksy," working thereby writhing agony in the lad's highly sensitive soul. But Sam did not stay his hand at the infliction of merely mental ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... frequent visitor to the creek in his dragon-prowed barque. His palace, also the home of Earl Godwin and Harold, is supposed to have been on the northeast of the church, where a moat is still in existence. It is here that the incident recorded in every school reader, the historic rebuke to sycophantic courtiers, is said to ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... with the hare and run with the hounds. Adj. servile, obsequious; supple,supple as a glove; soapy, oily, pliant, cringing, abased, dough-faced, fawning, slavish, groveling, sniveling, mealy-mouthed; beggarly, sycophantic, parasitical; abject, prostrate, down on ones marrowbones; base, mean, sneaking; crouching &c. v. Adv. hat in ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... brother, and almost as much looked up to—perhaps, because he was much less ostentatious. He had very good taste, had the Rev. Charles Merton!—his table plentiful, but plain—his manners affable to the low, though agreeably sycophantic to the high; and there was nothing about him that ever wounded self-love. To add to the attractions of his house, his wife, simple and good-tempered, could talk with anybody, take off the bores, and leave people to be comfortable in their own way: while he had a large family ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... who had clothed them with the dignity of office. All things considered, this condition of things was to be looked for; but the inevitable result followed. The few upright members either died off in the course of time, and were succeeded by sycophantic placemen, or, finding themselves outnumbered, ceased to attend the sittings of the branch of the Legislature to which they belonged. In one way and another, those who really wished to preserve the public interests were weeded out, and nothing was left but a rump devoted to the Executive ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... stupendous, sublimity, suborn, subpoena, subsidiary, subsidy, substratum, subtend, subterfuge, subterranean, subvention, subvert, sudorific, supercilious, supernal, supervene, supine, supposititious, surreptitious, surrogate, surveillance, susceptible, sustenance, sycophantic, syllogism, sylvan, symmetrical, symposium, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... stretched and bleaching upon the snow; and insulted discipline is avenged. Great kings have long arms; and sycophants are ever at hand for the errand of the potent. What had frost and snow to do with the quarrel? Yet they made themselves sycophantic servants of the King of Spain; and they dogged his deserters up to the summit of the Cordilleras, more surely than any Spanish bloodhound, or any Spanish ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Jolly Jack William Makepeace Thackeray The King of Brentford William Makepeace Thackeray Kaiser & Co A. Macgregor Rose Nongtongpaw Charles Dibdin The Lion and the Cub John Gay The Hare with Many Friends John Gay The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven Guy Wetmore Carryl The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder George Canning Villon's Straight Tip to all Cross Coves William Ernest Henley Villon's Ballade Andrew Lang A Little Brother ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... Hitt, who had been brooding over the incident as he walked home with Father Waite. "That toadying, sycophantic, wealth-worshiping Miss West can see no farther than the epidermis! If we could have maintained Carmen's reputation as an Inca princess, this same girl would have fawned at her feet, and begged to kiss the edge of her robe! And she would have used ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... invaded France; the troops of King Murat had returned to Naples, and he had informed his brother-in-law that the welfare of his own country rendered it necessary for him to forsake France. The very princes of the Confederation of the Rhine, hitherto the most sycophantic flatterers of the emperor, had likewise turned away from him; all the allies, adulators, and friends of his days of prosperity had left him, as rats desert the sinking ship. No one was in the throne-hall except the dignitaries and officers ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... at once a Lutheran secretly married, a consecrated archbishop under the Roman pontiff whose power he detested, saying the mass in which he did not believe, and granting a power to say it! The divine vengeance burst on this sycophantic courtier, who had always prostituted his conscience ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli |
