"Flippant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the conversation, as well as I, smiled when he saw him go; but immediately afterwards cast a look of singular aversion on the flippant pair, who remained chattering in the door-way: the boy finding animation enough while discussing Hareton's faults and deficiencies, and relating anecdotes of his goings on; and the girl relishing his pert and spiteful sayings, without ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... But Buckingham was flippant and careless; Richelieu careful when there was need, and daring when there was need. Buckingham's heavy blows were foiled by Richelieu's keen thrusts, and then, in his confusion, Buckingham blundered so foolishly and Richelieu profited ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... history repeats itself. There came to me across the years Maud's announcement of their ejection from the Beacon, and dimly, confusedly the same explanation was in the air. This time however I had been on my guard; I had had my suspicion. "He has made it too flippant?" I found breath after an ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... that the Reverend Matthew and Mrs. Cotton were the incumbents of the parish church of Cluhir (and had been profanely described as "the incumbrance of Cluhir"); even to speak of them as, respectively, its curate and its rector, might, though more accurate, be, perhaps, considered flippant. It would also be open to the reproach of lack of originality. Yet, unoriginal though the dominant clergywoman of fiction may be, it cannot be denied that St. Paul's injunctions in connection with the subjection of wives did not commend themselves ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... all, and even saw that my own dramatic sense of Mrs. Weguelin's dignity had perversely moved me to be more flippant than I actually felt; and I promised myself that a more chastened tone should forthwith redeem me from the false position I had ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... is studious and quiet, people say He is grouchy, he is old before his time; If he's frivolous and flippant, if he treads the primrose way, Then they mark him for a wild ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... display your bitter and flippant humor?" said the Rev. George, indignantly. "I think the spectacle of a ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... walked away, still giggling; a deep color mantled Maggie's cheeks. She turned and began to talk desperately to Mr. Hammond. Her tone was flippant; her silvery laughter floated in the air. Priscilla turned and gazed at her friend. She was seeing Maggie in yet another ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... she led him on adroitly, talking of many things, in a way to make him wonder at her new and flippant humor. He had never dreamed she could be like this, so tantalizingly close to familiarity, and yet so maddeningly aloof and distant. He grew bolder in ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... said, that if you allow your habit of flippant talking to grow on you you'll lose all hold on the solemn realities of life and become a totally useless member ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... from the book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche"] A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience. The archetypal 'Real Programmer' likes to program on the {bare metal} and is very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... them. A robbery is got up between a young woman who seems to have been the confidential friend rather than the maid of Lady Eustace, and that other witness whom you have heard testifying against himself, and who is, of all the informers that ever came into my hands, the most flippant, the most hardened, the least conscientious, and the least credible. That they two were engaged in a conspiracy I cannot doubt. That Lady Eustace was engaged with them, I will not say. But I will ask you to consider whether such may not probably have been the case. ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... "Don't be flippant, Turkey. Listen to me. I've told you very often that no boys in the school have a greater influence for good or evil than you have. You know I don't talk about ethics and moral codes, because I don't believe ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... the realist. Its fidelity to life as we find it—to existing conditions and types of society,—is wonderful. Its dramatic strength is none the less marked. But aside from and above all this, for me it has a far greater merit—utility. I have no sympathy with the flippant, effeminate, and senile cry, "Art for art's sake"; that is the echo of a decaying civilization, the voice of Greece and Rome in their decline. It is the shibboleth of a people drunken with pleasure; of a popular conscience anaesthetized; ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... Eliot very striking. Jane Austen all ease and spontaneousness and simplicity, George Eliot wonderful in strength and passion, and fond of probing the depths of human anguish, but often ponderous in long-drawn philosophy and metaphysics, and with a tediously cynical and flippant tone underlying her portraits of human beings—and a wearisome lingering over uninteresting details. Her defects are, I think, far more prominent in this than ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... eyes. The Spaniard's voice was hard and flippant. Did he care for her, after all? And if he did, was it nevertheless hopeless? How her cheeks glowed! Everybody must see it! Anything to turn away their attention from her, and in that nervous haste which makes ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... flippant correspondents, "Polygamist" and "Illegal Brother-in-Law," any conception of the thousands (ay, tens of thousands) of hearts that are, languishing in misery because they cannot marry their deceased sisters' husbands? And all because of a text which is not to be found in ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... of betting, and all of the men handled the great rolls of bills they wagered with a flippant recklessness which could only be accounted for in Gallegher's mind by temporary mental derangement. Some one pulled a box out into the ring and the master of ceremonies mounted it, and pointed out in forcible language that as they were almost all already under ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... Felicity—whether by way of keeping his resolution or because he had discovered that it annoyed Felicity far more than angry retorts, deponent sayeth not. He invariably met her criticisms with a good-natured grin and a flippant remark with some tender epithet tagged on to it. Poor Felicity used to get hopelessly ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... creature so strenuous as the anti-aircraft gun come by the flippant name of Archie? Well, once upon a time the Boche A.-A. guns were very young and had all the impetuous inaccuracy incident to youth. British airmen scarcely knew they were fired at until they saw the pretty, ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... earnestness of their intention. Even Herrick, 'jocund' though his muse was, left behind him some 'Noble Numbers.' And though clerical satire, as furnished by men like John Bramston, Charles Churchill, Samuel Bishop, John Wolcot, and Francis Mahoney, has frequently been flippant both in form and phrase, it has at other times—and especially in the works of Bishop Hall, of Norwich—been very vivid and uncompromising. Hall, indeed, was the Juvenal of his century, filled with ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... but his house was a meeting-place where politicians cemented personal ties and plotted party moves. Milly in her brief appearances, had been of use to Lady Ireton, but Mildred proved socially invaluable. There were serious persons who suspected Mrs. Stewart of approaching politics in a flippant spirit; but on certain days she had revealed a grave and ardent belief in the dogmas of the party and a piety of attitude towards the person of its great apostle, which had convinced them that she was not ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... in fiction. It is good and clean and provides a vacation from the cares of the hour. It resembles a Chinese play, because it begins with the hero's boyhood, describes his long, busy life, and ends with his death. Its tone is often religious, never flippant, and one of its best assets is its glowing descriptions of the calm, serene beauties of nature. Its moral is that a magnate never did any real good with ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... detach the exponent as the patroness of a whole universe of inferior souls. This is what everybody would mean in objecting to these notes (supposing them to be published), that they are too smart and too flippant. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... and industry, a thriving man. So easy it is, in any degree of life (as the world very often finds it), to take those cheerful natures that never assert their merit, at their own modest valuation; and to conceive a flippant liking of people for their outward oddities and eccentricities, whose innate worth, if we would look so far, might make us blush in ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... of school literature to compare the following selection, which I have written myself with great care, and arranged with special reference to the matter of choice and difficult words, with the flippant and commonplace terms used in the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... "Andrew, you are very flippant," said the squire, displeased. "I apprehend that there is very little doubt as to my having the ...
— Andy Grant's Pluck • Horatio Alger
... reckoning with life, and no reckoning with the sea. The only way to get on with both is to be as near a vacuum as possible, and float,' he jested. It hurt her that he was flippant. She proceeded ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... liberty, an outpost of the revolutionary army, and none so well as he could tip the barb with biting sarcasm and satire. Heine's personality was full of seemingly inconsistent traits. He was both fanciful and rational, serious and flippant, tender and cynical, reverent and impious; and he could be at once a patriot and an alien. He was, to use his own phrase, an "unfrocked romanticist"—at once a brilliant representative of the poetry of self-expression and personal caprice, and an exemplar and prophet ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... symbolically that Americans have a taste for rocking-horses, as they certainly have a taste for rocking-chairs. A flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still. Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may still be found in ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... Hadria was incorrigibly flippant about the banishment of important local subjects. She said that the kitchen-boiler was out of order, and yet she had to take part in these highly-cultivated conversations and smile, as she complained, with that kitchen-boiler ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... total explosion, flies over once, in the dead of the night, to deal with Rutowsky and Brothers. Rutowsky himself seems partly persuadable, though dreadfully ill of rheumatism. They rouse Comte Maurice; and Valori, by this Comte's caprices, is driven out of patience. "He talked with a flippant sophistry, almost with an insolence" says Valori; "nay, at last, he made me a gesture in speaking,"—what gesture, thumb to nose, or what, the shuddering imagination dare not guess! But Valori, nettled to the quick, "repeated it," and otherwise ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... him as to what he had heard. His excuse for not personally communicating the story which he had allowed to drift to the governor's ears by chance, was that he thought that what he had heard must have come to King's knowledge also: a supine and almost flippant explanation of neglect in a matter which was serious if the allegations were true. He affirmed also that one of the French officers had pointed out to him on a chart the very place where they intended to settle. It was in what is now known as Frederick Henry Bay, ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... to the flippant claim of the French Ministers to settle the affairs of neighbouring States in accord with their own principles has often been ascribed to Pitt himself. This is doubtful. I can find no proof that he intervened ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... in a garb like this? Needs he the tragic fur, the smoke of lamps, The pent-up breath of an unsavoury throng To thaw him into feeling, or the smart And snappish dialogue that flippant wits Call comedy, to prompt him with a smile? The self-complacent actor, when he views (Stealing a sidelong glance at a full house) The slope of faces from the floor to the roof, As if one master-spring controlled them all, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... solemnly severe. Others evinced a similar disposition, but the result was not triumphant. Alexander Mackay, in 1846, returned to ridicule; and Alfred Bunn, a few years after, surpassed even Marryatt in his flippant falsehood. Mr. Arthur Cunynghame, a Canadian officer, entertained his friends, in 1850, with a dainty volume, in which the first personal pronoun averaged one hundred to a page, and the manner of which was as stiff as the ramrods of his regiment. Of our more recent judges, the best remembered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... other reason. But this is a wonderful idea of yours, that my only life—as I've regarded it—is just about five minutes anyhow, of a day that goes on from strength to strength. You've somehow put an atmosphere into it, and a reality. I believe you believe it. Excuse me—I'm not being flippant; I'm only being deadly real. I may shoot myself tonight; tomorrow morning I may be dead, whatever that means. Anyhow, I haven't a desire to talk etiquettically about things like this. And I won't, whatever ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... that he is given credit for a much more pronounced sense of humor than he actually possesses. I doubt that he is always conscious of the element of humor and I suspect that if he realized that his observations were to evoke laughter he would deliberately choose a less satirical or flippant method of expression. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... was not masculine, and therefore have either suppressed the feminine attributes altogether and drawn coarse caricatures, or they have made them completely artificial.[6] Women distinguished for wit may sometimes appear masculine and flippant, but the cause must be sought elsewhere than in nature, who disclaims all such. Hence the witty and intellectual ladies of our comedies and novels are all in the fashion of some particular time; they are like some old portraits ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... her reception, Malmesbury says, "I was far from satisfied with the Princess's behaviour. It was flippant, rattling, affecting raillery and wit, and throwing out coarse, vulgar hints about Lady——, who was present. The Prince was evidently disgusted, and this unfortunate dinner fixed his dislike, which, when left to herself, the Princess ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... Claire; I can't help believing that she thinks it is smart or funny. And you encourage her. If Claire had been different—no, don't interrupt me— this would never have happened. You may say what you like about her good breeding: she's been too flippant. I felt that last night. Claire doesn't accept her obligations seriously enough. She's kept herself lovely looking, but that isn't the ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... carelessly to begin with, then with deep attention. He reached the signature at the end, and then read it through again, aloud this time, punctuating his reading with flippant comments: "'In creating the part of the criminal in the tragedy to-night, you made yourself up into a most marvellous likeness of Gurn, the man who murdered Lord Beltham. Come to-night, at two o'clock, in your costume, to 22 rue Messier. Take care not to be seen, ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... senators in their full garniture, the sons of Servius Sylla, both beautiful almost as women, with soft and feminine features, and long curled hair, and lips of coral, from which in flippant and affected accents fell words, and breathed desires, that would have made the blood stop and turn stagnant at the heart of any one, not utterly polluted and devoid of ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... (a Flippant Person). Don't speak so loud. If they know you've come in here fresh, you'll ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... a flippant young fool—wise in your own conceit; I say it to my sorrow! 'Twas your dishonesty spoilt all. That lady would have been my wife by fair dealing—time was all I required. But base attacks on a man's character never deserve to win, and if I ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... The flippant tone of all this disheartened Thomas Jefferson's listener, and a silence succeeded which lasted until the train had stormed around the nose of Lebanon and the whistle was blowing for Gordonia. Then Tom said: "I didn't mean to hurt you; ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... serious tone, "you ought to make the effort to esteem and relish the society of those who have evidently some stability of character, and whose conversation has in it the evidence of mature observation, combined with sound and virtuous principles, more than you do the flippant nonsense of mere ladies' men, or selfish, ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... her arms and revealing, to the best advantage, their rounded whiteness. Into her eyes there came the flicker of a challenge, the sparkle of mischief which gave a new character to her face, a different expression to all he had hitherto seen. There was flippant raillery in her voice as she repeated ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... According to his account, he had been a prime favorite with all the high dignitaries of the war, and he attributed this to the fact that he was not afraid of them. In short, it was the same old flippant, boastful, R-rolling Archibald Archer who had won many a laugh from sober Tom Slade. And here he was again as ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... discourse, interrupted Benedick with saying: 'I wonder that you will still be talking, signior Benedick: nobody marks you.' Benedick was just such another rattle-brain as Beatrice, yet he was not pleased at this free salutation; he thought it did not become a well-bred lady to be so flippant with her tongue; and he remembered, when he was last at Messina, that Beatrice used to select him to make her merry jests upon. And as there is no one who so little likes to be made a jest of as those who are apt to take the same liberty themselves, so it was with ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... brown leather, and in use it is as willing and quiet as any tricycle could be, a most urbane and gentlemanly affair—if you will pardon the adjective. I am glad these things have not come too late for me. Frankly, the bicycle is altogether too flippant for a man of my age, and the tricycle hitherto, with its two larger wheels behind and a smaller one in front, has been so indecently suggestive of a perambulator that really, George, I could not bring myself to it. But a ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... were of an unpleasant description, still more so were the observations made aloud by the pages, flippant both by nature and usage, and the sarcastic and cool jests, given forth at his expense by the more ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... opponent, the last atom of his patience exhausted by the speaker's flippant criticism. "You cur, you deserve a good thrashing, and I'm going to give it ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... is to be trusted, spoke of him with great harshness.[354] Bowring was not a judicious reporter, indeed, and capable of taking hasty phrases too seriously. What Bentham's remarks upon these and other friends suggest is not malice or resentment, but the flippant utterance of a man whose feelings are wanting in depth rather than kindliness. It is noticeable that, after his early visit at Bowood, no woman seems to have counted for anything in Bentham's life. He was not only never in love, but ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... her husband's funeral than wear weeds which attract attention on account of their flaunting bad taste and flippancy. One may not, one must not, one can not wear the very last cry of exaggerated fashion in crepe, nor may one be boisterous or flippant or sloppy in manner, without giving the impression to all beholders that one's spirit is posturing, tripping, or dancing on ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... I asked with respectful interest, addressing the question to Mrs. Smith, who gave promise of being a more serious reviewer than the flippant Phoebe. Mrs. Smith took a ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... regret. But I must forewarn my readers by mentioning some of the refuted criticisms which have been applied to the cartoons. Reading the criticisms and their answers ought to render us modest and wary in 'picking holes' in great pictures, as forward and flippant critics, old and young, are tempted to pick them. With regard to the 'Miraculous Draught of Fishes,' a great outcry was once set up that Raphael had made the boat too little to hold the figures he has placed in it. But Raphael ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... handsome, florid lady, who had inherited a large fortune from the miner husband whose fortunes she had gallantly shared through some extraordinary adventures in Nome. Mrs. Gardiner idolized her son; she was not inclined to be generous to the little flippant actress who had broken his heart. Richie would not go to the healing desert, he would not go to any place out of sound of Miss Clay's voice, out of the light of Miss Clay's eyes. Mrs. Gardiner had no objection to Magsie's person, nor to her profession, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... works, no longer vain And worthless deem'd by me! Whate'er this steril genius has produc'd Expect, at last, the rage of Envy spent, An unmolested happy home, Gift of kind Hermes and my watchful friend, 80 Where never flippant tongue profane Shall entrance find, And whence the coarse unletter'd multitude Shall babble far remote. Perhaps some future distant age Less tinged with prejudice and better taught Shall furnish minds of pow'r To judge more equally. Then, malice ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... spots on the price of grain. Since the publication of Gulliver's voyage to Laputa, nothing so ridiculous has ever been offered to the world. We heartily wish the Doctor had suppressed it; or, if determined to publish it, that he had detailed it in language less confident and flippant." ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... has become almost proverbial; that the solution is simple if our citizens would approach the problem fairly is an observation made less often; but that there is no problem would seem to be either the flippant remark of one who dabbles in sociology or the profound utterance of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... flippant prediction of Jacson Gootes, Le ffacase returned to the Church into which he had been born. He went further and became a lay brother, taking upon himself the obligation of silence. Though an old man, he stayed close to the advancing Grass, giving what assistance and comfort he could to the refugees. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... diligently and faithfully laboured through original records, and contemporary writers, honestly endeavouring to compose the authentic history of an interesting period, and has carefully compared, in his progress, the flippant worse than inaccuracies of writers he has been taught to consider as masterly historians, can form an adequate estimate of the enormity and frequency of this tendency to romance. The immediate subject of these observations is slight and trivial; but the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... of keys; and, calling the steward to help me, went into the after cabin, where Garry O'Neil still remained, wetting the bandage round the head of the French captain, and doing it too with greater delicacy of touch than the most experienced and flippant ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... mystified LINCOLN B. SWEZEY not a little; he "allowed it was darned personal," but further than that his light did not penetrate. He went to a little Club, of which he was a temporary member; it was not fashionable, and did not seem to want to be, and SWEZEY thought it flippant. There he asked, "What are the Souls, anyhow?" "Societas omnium animarum," somebody answered, and SWEZEY exclaimed "Say!" "They are a congregation of ladies. Their statutes decree that they are to be bene natae, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... Tapster. How he had scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer—in a word, all those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had always been self-respecting and conscientious—not a prig, mind you, but inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and, so inclining, he had found contentment and great ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style. His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia describes her reception at the country-house ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... "You are too flippant, Betty," returned Aunt Priscilla severely. "And I doubt if her father's people had much experimental religion. Then, she has been living in a ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... was first called; and, when she came into the witness box, the anxious and hopeless looks of the prisoner were manifest to all. But the girl, whose name, she said, was Bessy Gillies, answered in so flippant and fearless a way that the auditors were much amused. After a number of routine questions, the depute-advocate asked her if she was at home on the morning of the fifth of September last, when her mistress's house ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... different subjects, heard not the flippant observations of his servant, when suddenly, as they were approaching the skirts of a wood, his reflections and the valet's impertinent loquacity were cut short by the unwelcome appearance of a party of the strolling rebels. They sprung eagerly from their ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... that though there does not seem to be much of it, you have done a good deal, as when you have eaten a cold hard-boiled egg." Still people keep on writing sonnets, because the sonnet is wholly serious. In an English sonnet you cannot easily be flippant of pen. A few great poets have written immortal sonnets—among them are Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats. Thus the sonnet is a thing which every poet thinks it worth while to try at; like Felix Arvers, he may be ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... guardian, the spur of mamma, and the frantic wails of my famished heart. I wish I could speak without bitterness, and mockery, and exaggeration, but it has grown to be a part of my nature, as features habituated to a mask insensibly assume to some extent its outlines. I will try to put aside my flippant hollow attempts at persiflage, which constitute my worldly mannerism, and tell you in a few simple words. When I was about your age, I think my nature must have resembled yours, for many of your ideas and views of duty in this life remind me in a mournfully vague, tender way of ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... sign. The other man, the tailor, had too many words for the board space. My advertisin' man wanted it to be, first, 'Higbee's Hams, That's All.' But, I don't know—for so big a space that seemed to me kind of—well—kind of flippant and undignified. Then I got it down to 'Eat Higbee's Hams.' That seemed short enough—but after studying it, I says, What's the use of saying 'eat'? No one would think, I says, that a ham is to paper the walls with or to stuff sofa-cushions with—so off comes ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... a freezing look on his flippant protege and then commenced a very grave discussion of future ways and means, which ended in an immediate departure for Paris, where the two men entered upon an unpretentious career in the commercial line as agents and ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... bowed, and his friend continued: "When I invited you, I was not aware Mr. Fitzgerald was in the city. I am but slightly acquainted with him, but I conjecture him to be what is called a high-blood. His manners, though elegant, seem to me flippant and audacious. He introduced himself into my domestic sanctum; and, as I partook of his father's hospitality years ago, I find it difficult to eject him. He came here a few months since, to transact some business connected with the settlement of his father's estate, and, unfortunately, ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... and flippant as I was, Leopold's talk filled me with hearty contempt for the "Coburger" long before we were introduced. And as to his ambassador, who was forever dancing attendance upon me, I hated him. Yet the Imperial "Fillons" kept up their clatter, and one fine ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... concern and apprehension, that pockets are gradually falling into disuse. To use the flippant idiom of the day, they are going out! This is an alarming, as well as a lamentable fact; and one, too, strikingly illustrative of the degeneracy of modern fashions. Whether we ascribe the change to a contemptuous neglect of ancestral institutions, or to an increasing difficulty in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... interested him as he watched him shuffling over the hewn plank floor in his straw sandals. A very different type, this swaggering Celestial, from the furtive-eyed Chinamen of the east. His tightly coiled cue was as smooth and shining as a king-snake, his loose blouse was immaculate, and the flippant voice in which he demanded in each person's ear, "Coffee? Milk?" was like a challenge. Whatever the individual's choice might be, he got it in a torrent in ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... A flippant reply to the secretary of a London club where Whistler's account was past due produced this retort—and ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... nevertheless, perfectly wide awake and your consciousness is alert. The same thing is true when you are reading a very interesting book—the world is shut out from your consciousness, and you are oblivious to the sights and sounds around you. At the risk of being considered flippant, I would remind you of the common spectacle of two lovers so wrapped up in each other's company that they forget that there is a smiling world of people around them—time and space are forgotten to the two lovers—to ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... questions about which Order he proposed to join; and Mark ashamed to go back on what he had said lest they should think him flippant answered that he thought of joining the Order ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... most welcome," replied Houseman, with that tone of coarse, yet flippant jocularity, which afforded to the mien and manner of Aram a still stronger contrast than ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... at starting to state, that, in regard to decency and propriety, the two nations are on a par; if there is any preponderance, one way or other, it certainly is not in favour of the Germans, whose derelictions in those respects are more solemn, and apparently sincere, than their flippant and superficial rivals. Many authors there are, of course, in both countries, whose works are unexceptionable in spirit and intention; but as to the assertion, that one literature is of a higher tone of morals than the other, it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... that last appeal. What my answer was you will not care to know; but if it was brief, it was at least not flippant; and before writing it, I, in my turn, appealed for help, only my appeal was made upon my knees to ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... were mild when thou wert by, The flippant put himself to school And heard thee, and the brazen fool Was soften'd, ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... If he had given the least sign of embarrassment she might have softened towards him. He showed no embarrassment whatever. He was very much at his ease. He was cheerful. He was even flippant. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... instalment on it, and when I asked him how on earth he ever expected to liquidate the indebtedness he smilingly replied that the deluge would take care of everything that stood in need of liquidation when the date of maturity came round. He was even flippant on ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... serious and solemn, because he approaches Beardsley as he would John Bunyan or Aquinas. Art, literature and life, are all to this engaging writer a scholiast's pilgrim's progress. Beside him, Walter Pater, from whom he derives, seems almost flippant—and to have dallied too long in ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... neither assail their adversary with uninterrupted argument nor can they endure prolonged talk from him. If by way of explaining himself he should begin to enlarge, they raise the cry: "To the point! To the point! Answer categorically!" Showing how restless and flippant their minds are who ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... to make a fuss about! But, as usual, we hide our real feelings behind this flippant mask. Reading between the lines we confess to strange apprehensions. Why has the Princess so gravely exceeded her dress allowance? Has she, on behalf of her beloved country, been collecting war-ships? Has she 50 or 60 Dreadnoughts up her sleeve to upset the balance ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... its echoes. Across a trackless sea, across the lands of France, up through the great White Ways of Paris it resounded. It knocked against the palace doors of the King of France. On through the flippant gibe, the careless laugh, the carousing and the din of the royal court, it reached and touched the spirit ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... occasion. I am speaking now to the more serious teachers of the American people; for it is a deplorable fact that even the best of those teachers when speaking of the House of Lords use language which is generally flippant, nearly always contemptuous, ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... that PUNCHINELLO is to be assailed with impunity by rival publications. It is well known that he never courted controversies or quarrels, and his best friends understand perfectly his love for a peaceable career. But when that flippant sheet, known as Rees's American Encyclopedia, comes out with a violent attack upon PUNCHINELLO'S past life and present course, the assault is such as would provoke a retort from any honest man. The vile insinuation that PUNCHINELLO is printed and published ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... nor courtesy. If no smile welcomed their remarks, at least her silence was not scornful, and the most shallow-headed prater that fluttered around her felt that he was received with dignity and not with disdain. Awed by her conduct, not one of them dared to be flippant, and every one of them soon became dull. The ornaments of the Court of Reisenburg, the arbiters of ton and the lords of taste, stared with astonishment at each other when they found, to their mutual surprise, that at one moment, in such a select party, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... adoption of a virtuous career;—all, in themselves, both unexceptionable and praiseworthy, but, nevertheless, having a strange sound in the ears of those who recognized them as the utterances of one whose conversation was always flippant and puerile, and whose daily life, in the enormity and uninterrupted persistency of its profligacy, rendered him the acknowledged leader of all that was most disreputable and contaminating in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... eye downwards past a somewhat flippant sub-title, the elderly gentleman came, with intense amazement, to understand that the date of this singular performance was 1993. Other persons at a similar juncture would have pinched themselves to see if they were awake, or have tossed the book into the street as an uncanny thing. But our elderly ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... much so, indeed, that it would have seemed like heresy to question their sincerity. But now—whether it was the slight hint dropped by Sir Francis Vesey on the previous night as to Mrs. Sorrel's match-making proclivities, or whether it was a scarcely perceptible suggestion of something more flippant and assertive than usual in the air and bearing of Lucy herself that had awakened his suspicions,—he was certainly disposed to doubt, for the first time in all his knowledge of her, the candid nature ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... to talk to her of her Western life. He wished to know more about the genesis and progress of a girl who seemed to him so strange, but he was not able to confine her to certain channels of narrative. She was flippant and vague, full of allusions to wild things like Indians or buffaloes or grizzly bears, but with no detailed statement, and Harley gathered that her childhood had been in complete touch with these primitive facts. Only ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... back is removed, by our near approach to Rome. Arrived there, he at once finds his way to the livery stables, and establishes himself permanently with the horses. Throughout the winter, we take with good humour the flippant comments of flaneurs and over-fastidious friends, touching the bestowal of our patronage upon such an ill-favoured cur, while we thought ourselves the objects of his gratitude and affection; but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... almost flippant, and Rose, in her turn, wondered at the woman and her marvellous self-control. At twenty-five, Madame Bernard married a young French soldier, who had chosen to serve his adopted country in the War of the Rebellion. In less than three months, her gallant Captain was brought ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... though dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks, if not with the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of the whole family to get Oliver to accept Peter Piper's invitation—Mrs. Crowe, who was understanding, knew at what cost—the cost ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... little more explicit in their Operation Orders, please?" murmured Vane. "Whom do you propose I should engage in mortal combat?" He saw the slight frown on her face and leant forward quickly. "My dear, don't misunderstand me. I don't want to be flippant and cynical. But I'm just a plain, ordinary man—and I'm rather tired. When this show is over I want peace and rest and comfort. And I rather feel that it's up to the damned fools who let us in for it to clear up the ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... some patients. She spoke quite freely and without constraint. But it was striking how little account of the condition she had gone through could be obtained from her. She either turned the questions off by flippant remarks, or said she did not know. The only information obtained was that she had been sick since Christmas, felt like a dummy, that she had lost track of time, and did not know how she had felt during ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... convince and they do not reflect a thorough knowledge of the spirit of outdoors. All one admires in the Barbizon men - the lyric feeling of a Corot or the more dramatic note of a Rousseau - is missing in the modern Italian landscape as seen in these pictures. They are flippant in their catchy technique and in the absence of ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... forgive Charles Reade's later flippant creations of women, in whom moral weakness is considered as great a charm as physical delicacy, when we remember the charming picture of health and vigor which he first gave us in ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... happiness above everything, and she meant to give him a wedding present worth having, if she beggared herself for years. The poor little woman showed a great deal of heart, and I was touched. I'm afraid she's not too happy, under her air of almost flippant gaiety and "smartness," for she rather hinted that she liked some man who didn't care for her—someone she met in the East. I suppose she can't be cherishing a hidden passion for you? Rather cruel of us, accusing her of being a flirt ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... minds which received me and of injuring Zaluski. Poor Zaluski, who was so foolishly, thoughtlessly happy! He little dreamed of the fate that awaited him! His whole world was bright and full of promise; each hour of love seemed to improve him, to deepen his whole character, to tone down his rather flippant manner, to awaken for him new ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... not be flippant when he is gravely told that the Greeks had no art-critics? I can understand it being said that the constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but not that the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not criticise. You will not ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... world-wide fame. In his 'prentice days when, in workshops or in the presence of well-known builders, he would make confident statements, inveigh against errors, or demand modifications, people thought him flippant and saucy. Once somebody called him a raw lad. The answer came with crushing rapidity: "When you blunder, raw lads like ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... as he remembered what a letter of praise he had dictated to his astonished stenographer and fired off at Luke Mellows; and at the flippant ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... boil when I think of it? Then, too, when I recall how often my addresses are ignored in the local press, ought not I to be aroused to fierce ire? When a hotel clerk fails to recognize my national importance and gives me a flippant answer when I ask for information should I not deem it time that the Secretary of State interfere and write a State ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... a sick-bed, my dearest Matlida, to communicate the strange and frightful scenes which have just passed. Alas! how little we ought to jest with futurity! I closed my letter to you in high spirits, with some flippant remarks on your taste for the romantic and extraordinary in fictitious narrative. How little I expected to have had such events to record in the course of a few days! and to witness scenes of terror, or to contemplate them in description, is as different, my dearest Matilda, as to bend over ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... full to the brim of a flippant, girlish humor that appealed to him monstrously. He felt that it was a man's place to think seriously, if serious thought were needed. And he intended when he married to do the thinking. His wife must be wholly delightful and feminine, in fact, just as Helen was. Pretty, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... with one of John Kane's huge worsted stockings pulled over one little hand, while she darned away at it with the other. At sight of Lucy her pride instantly waked up within her and rose in arms. Hetty stared in dismay at smart flippant Lucy, and felt the old bad feelings rush back on her. Tears started to her eyes as she saw all her lately acquired goodness flying away down the garden path, as it seemed to her, and out at ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... indifferent-looking young women—one, a thin little crooked creature, with sharp contracted features, which put him in mind of the head of a skinned rabbit—another with an immense flat unmeaning face; and the third, though better-looking than her two companions, was a silly little flippant miss in her teens, rejoicing in a crop of luxuriant curls which swept over her shoulders as she returned Frank's polite bow—when the squire introduced him to the assembled company—as much as to say, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... maintained that, under all the circumstances, government were fully justified in all they had done, and would have merited impeachment if they had remained inactive at such a critical juncture. Sheridan, in a flippant manner, endeavoured to show that the alarm was ridiculous, and had been created by ministers for their own selfish and wicked purposes. The republicans said to exist in England, were, he said, men of buckram; and should any French army attempt to invade England, with the idea ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... applications for these curiosities which I received from disappointed seekers. The finest of these black diamonds may generally be found in the inventive news columns of the London dailies and in the flippant paragraphs ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... style seems rather flippant, it is because I have been trained as an extemporaneous speaker and not as a writer. For fifteen years I traveled over the country lecturing on the Mooseheart School. My task was to interest men in the abstract problems ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... Clever flippant writers may do a trifling service here and there by ridiculing the pompous and deflating the prigs, but there is no permanence in such work, unless—which is seldom the case—it is totally devoid of ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... had said were interesting, but flippant. He had seen Bob at a college club and declared that he had met a witch of a country girl at the Merrills. He couldn't make her out, because she had refused to see him every time he called again. He had also repeated Cynthia's remark about ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... particle flippant this time," Brinnaria declared. "I know I am often flippant, but not now, not a bit. I am just as serious as life and death. I have thought of nothing but suicide since Trebellius conducted me back to my ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... writers think they best oppose the advancing spirit of the time—questioning as it does the "divinity" that hedges the throne—by adopting the worse than foolish adulation of a by-gone age. In a silly flippant book just published—a thing called Cecil—the author speaks of the first appearance of VICTORIA in the House ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... was the very flippant name by which Madge Burtwell's brother Ned had persisted in calling her from the time when, at the age of sixteen, she gained reluctant permission to become a student at ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... there," said Roger. "She says she's going to plant a dogwood tree there in the spring. We intend to put up a little stone for him, and I'm trying to think of an inscription, I thought of De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum, but that's a bit too flippant." ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... a Maui, the fish of Maui. He first taught tattooing and the art of catching fish with bait, and died in the endeavour to gain immortality for men. Death would have been done away with had Maui successfully accomplished the feat of creeping through the body of a certain gigantic goddess. But that flippant and restless little bird, the fan-tail, was so tickled at the sight of the hero crawling down the monster's throat that it tittered and burst into laughter. So the goblin awoke, and Maui ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... had far more grit than I anticipated; he was inquisitive and flippant-faced, and looked at the noose flaunting before him, and the people gathered below, and the haggard face of Atzerott, as if entirely conscious ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... Water, in love. I had been in love frequently; but not oftener than once a year had I encountered a woman who affected me so seriously as Kate Hickey. She was so shrewd, and yet so flippant! When I spoke of art she yawned. When I deplored the sordidness of the world she laughed, and called me "poor fellow!" When I told her what a treasure of beauty and freshness she had she ridiculed me. When I reproached her with her brutality ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... you think he got large chunks of enjoyment out of them?" Her best friend's earnestness made her flippant, and it was a curious fact that good old Sally, a predestinate spinster herself, settled on her moated grange of music teaching, always took a most militant part in other people's love affairs. In every lovers' quarrel in the village, in the rare divorces, she had stood fiercely, ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... Cole, the case is entirely altered. Mrs. Cole is scarcely more than a girl herself, and—I say this to you, Nan, simply because I must—she has never been, to my idea, a lady-like young woman. She has always been flippant and frivolous and boisterous; anything but a good companion for a number of ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... whose head offends them, and who cut it off. For him at least it was better that the blood should flow in Paris than that the wine should flow any longer in London. And if I say that even now the guillotine might be the best cure for many a London lawyer, I ask you to believe that I am not merely flippant. But you will not ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... cloak, and without knocking opened the door. The countess was still lost in thought. She still gazed at the blank wall, still heard the flippant voice which had poured out its profanity as though life had been a jest and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... became more and more piercing, as if some pressing danger menaced the utterer. Elfric, who, in spite of his flippant speech, was by no means destitute of keen sympathies and self devotion, hurried forward, fearless of danger, bounding through thicket and underwood, until, arriving upon a small clearing, the whole scene ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... am strolling in search of the cool air." She bowed and smiled at some passing friends. She seemed very careless, very flippant. She was not at all the impetuous, mischievous Chiquita he had met ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... the conclusion that in the Oodeypore archives (now hidden from public inspection), not to mention other sources, may be found a clue to the history of India in particular, and to universal ancient history in general. Colonel Tod advises the earnest seeker after this clue not to think, with some flippant archaeologists who are insufficiently acquainted with India, that the stories of Rama, the Mahabharata, Krishna, and the five brothers Pandu, are mere allegories. He affirms that he who seriously considers these legends will very ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... flippant in one who has devoted his life to this work to say, "Really I don't care what its future may be." I am content to leave the future with God. No true sportsman wants to linger on, a wretched handicap to the cause for which he once stood, like ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... about to make a remark, but checked himself. It was evidently not a seemly remark. It must have been more than ordinarily flippant to have caused Chunky to ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... we run our flippant rhymes A.D. 430 Right on to Anglo-Saxon times. Hengist and Horsa with their men Came from their Jutish pirate den, Jutes And paid us visits in their ships Bent on their ruthless looting trips. And Angles landing in the Humber Gave that district little slumber. They plundered morning, noon, ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... on the tip of her tongue to say "beetles," she substituted the more dignified phrase. Bower was very nice and kind; but she felt that "beetles" might sound somewhat flippant and lend a too ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... and the imagination with inspiring and ennobling apparitions. Surroundings that contribute a quality of awfulness embrace in such scenes the soul of the traveller, and hold him in their tremendous thrall. Mean or flippant ideas may not enter here; but the man puts off the smaller part of him, as the Asiatic puts off his sandals on entering the porches of his god. Of such is the Eternal Sphinx, as Eothen Kinglake beheld her. We cannot feel her aspect more grandly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Pecksniff, the two daughters of the "architect and land surveyor." Charity is thin, ill-natured, and a shrew, eventually jilted by a weak young man, who really loves her sister. Mercy Pecksniff, usually called "Merry," is pretty and true-hearted; though flippant and foolish as a girl, she becomes greatly toned down by the troubles of her married ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... three-and-twenty years old, a student by fits, and a young man given to be moody. He had powers of gaiety far eclipsing Algernon's, but he was not the same easy tripping sinner and flippant soul. He was in that yeasty condition of his years when action and reflection alternately usurp the mind; remorse succeeded dissipation, and indulgences offered the soporific to remorse. The friends of the two imagined that Algernon was, or would become, his evil genius. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... him with a saucy, unconcerned, flippant air; but her whole appearance is gentle, tender, I had almost said, supplicating: I am ashamed of the folly of my own sex: O, that I could to-day inspire her with a little of my spirit! she is a poor tame household dove, and there is no making any ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... of the church-members had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was their society and their standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, Christian Endeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had at home; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel scientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and by cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... how it feels to have a peculiar something in your face. Bertram, too, says she has it. He's trying to 'catch it,' he says. I wonder now—if he does catch it, does she lose it?" Flippant as were the words, the voice that uttered them shook ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... laughing. "In the first place, Mr. West, the newspaper press is by no means the only or, as we look at it, the best vehicle for serious criticism of public affairs. To us, the judgments of your newspapers on such themes seem generally to have been crude and flippant, as well as deeply tinctured with prejudice and bitterness. In so far as they may be taken as expressing public opinion, they give an unfavorable impression of the popular intelligence, while so far as they may have formed public opinion, the nation was not to be felicitated. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... even on the most grave occasions. Sometimes he sinned against good taste, and I once heard his sister Catherine say that "Henry rarely delivered a speech or a sermon which did not contain something that grated on her ear." His most frequent offenses were in the direction of flippant handling of sacred themes and Scripture language. This he ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... to advise him in the simplest matters. My ears were the first to which he confided his insane ambition on the subject of his daughter—his anxiety to see her marry above her station—his stupid resolution to give her the false, flippant, fashionable education which she subsequently received. I thwarted his plans in nothing, openly—counteracted them in everything, secretly. The more I strengthened my sources of influence over Margaret, the more pleased he was. He was ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... creating new forms of beauty and interest out of the ugly and uninteresting. A new name is really required for this thing. A name is required for it that conveys a more creative implication than the word "taste," a word which has an irresponsible, arbitrary, and even flippant sound, and a more passionate, religious, and ecstatic implication than the word "aesthetic," a word which suggests something calculated, cold, learned, and a little tame. I use the word "taste" at this particular moment because this word implies ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys |
