"Conventional" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... your call, Ivan Ivanitch," I said untruthfully. "Don't be hard on me; I'm a townsman, conventional; I do ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... not the inestimable advantage of a nineteenth-century education and the inheritance of the Darwinian philosophy—does nevertheless put the matter of the Genius of the Child in a way which (with the alteration of a few conventional terms) we scientific moderns are quite inclined to accept. We all admit now that the Child does not come into the world with a mental tabula rasa of entire forgetfulness but on the contrary as the possessor of vast stores of sub-conscious memory, derived from its ancestral inheritances; we all ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... thrust these ladies in his path, and no doubt he liked them the better because they did not live as other people lived. Their solitude, the close vicinity of the ocean, the feeling that in meeting them none of the ordinary conventional usages of society were needed, the wildness and the strangeness of the scene, all had charms which he admitted to himself. And he knew that the girl was very lovely. Of course he said so to himself and to others. To take ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... fact chiefly in the north and west of our own continent that the haunts of the diffident are to be found, for there alone are all the conditions necessary to their maintenance fulfilled—a society sufficiently leisured and wealthy to have elaborated conventional rules of intercourse, the assemblage of both sexes upon an equal footing, and a climate which exaggerates the antagonism between the quick mind and the unresponsive body. Here the cold humid airs have produced ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Asian salvationism. And though of course the conscious filiation to Greece and Rome is rare, the habit of mind which holds up its head in the world and feels no childish craving to cling to the skirts of a God, is not rare at all. Therefore I conceive that people who are shaken out of their conventional, unrealized Christianity by the earthquake of the war will not, as a rule, be in any hurry to rush into the arms of the "great brother" constructed for them by Mr. Wells. It is easier to picture them flocking to the banner of the Fabian Jesus—the Christ uncrucified, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... degenerated from century to century. The growing Christian religion, which forbade the picturing of any living beauty, gave the death-blow to such excellence as remained. A style of painting followed which received the name of Greek Byzantine. In it was no study of life; all was most strikingly conventional, and it grew steadily worse and worse. A comparison of the paintings and mosaics of the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries shows the rapid decline of all art qualities. Finally every figure produced was ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... up his turnip." Leonard was more hurt by the jeer at his old patron's gift than pleased by his uncle's. But Richard Avenel had no conception of sentiment. It was not for many days that Leonard could reconcile himself to his uncle's manner. Not that the peasant could pretend to judge of its mere conventional defects; but there is an ill breeding to which, whatever our rank and nurture, we are almost equally sensitive,—the ill breeding that comes from want of consideration for others. Now, the squire was as homely in his way as Richard Avenel, but the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... could not help thinking that there was much of the bizarre about every thing I saw—but then the world is made up of all kinds of persons, with all modes of thought, and all sorts of conventional customs. I had travelled, too, so much, as to be quite an adept at the nil admirari; so I took my seat very coolly at the right hand of my host, and, having an excellent appetite, did justice to the good ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... stayed away many minutes longer. She went back at once, entered by the garden window just as Margaret was finishing Rosina's song, and remained standing behind her till she had sung the last note. English people rarely applaud conventional drawing-room music, but this had been something more, and the Craythew guests clapped their hands loudly, and even the elderly wife of the scientific peer emitted distinctly audible sounds of satisfaction. Lady Maud bent her handsome ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... wore English riding breeches and leggins. Otherwise he was dressed as a Texas cowboy of the past generation. His sombrero was almost Mexican in its size and ornateness. But his rifle was of the latest American pattern, and in place of the conventional Colt's he carried an automatic pistol. As his horse patiently clambered with him up towards the top of the escarpment the man gazed indolently about between half-closed eyelids and inhaled the smoke from an unbroken "chain" ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... and ebony carried all before it. The Italian work of this kind is often most beautifully engraved, but less accurate than that produced in France. The later Italian marquetry does not lose decorative effect though the figure drawing becomes very conventional, and the curves of ornament are often cut with a mechanical sweep. A good deal of it is in only two colours, a return to the simplicity ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... are important, because none is necessary. Their different characters have fair play, and each is beautiful in its minute indications, for nothing is enforced or conventional; but everything, however slight, grows from the essential ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... savages receiving their enemy into their hospitable hut, sharing with him their miserable meal, and, their couch undisturbed by remorse, sleeping close to him the calm sleep of the innocent. These virtues are as much above the virtues of conventional life as the soul of tho man in his natural state is above that of the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... force to dominate mankind? Comfort, prosperity, luxury, a well-fed and securely sheltered existence, not without the embellishments and concentrations of art and literature, and perhaps some conventional type of religion—all these we can purchase at a price, but at what a price! At the sacrifice of what makes life, national or personal, alone worth living. My Lord Mayor and citizens of London, we are not going to make that sacrifice (loud and prolonged cheers, the audience rising and waving ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... nor tradition, nor caprice. She valued truth supremely, both for herself and others. The question with her was not what should be believed, or what ought to be true, but what is true. Her yes and no were never conventional; and she often amazed people by a cool and unexpected dissent from ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... good qualities are spontaneous. Such as natural sweetness of temper—natural delicacy of feeling—natural intrepidity; others are the result of habit, and end by being spontaneous—by being a second nature: justly are habits called so. Gentleness of tone and manner—attention to conventional proprieties—to people's little wants and feelings—are of these. This same politeness being a sort of summary of such, I will end this little didactic digression by advising all those who have the rearing of the young in their hands, carefully to form them ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... be the consequences of such a state of things? Attachments will be formed early. But, instead of making all kinds of calculations concerning money, social position, etc.; instead of concealing their thoughts in the form of conventional politeness; instead of avoiding an honest explanation of the knotty point, or, at the most passing over this explanation like a cat on hot cinders; instead of trying to dazzle by their charms the one they wish to capture, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... is a representation of a thoroughly typical conventional fetich of the black Eagle (K'iae[']-k'iae-li kwin-ne) of the Lower regions. It is of calcite, stained lustrous black. A cotton cord around the neck supplies the place of ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... ought to run such a race; they would also be the first to trip him up if he took them at their word, and then afterwards upbraid him for not having won. Achievement of any kind would be impossible for him unless he was free from those who would be for ever dragging him back into the conventional. The conventional had been tried already and had ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... stranger, going abroad in closed carriages or heavily veiled with hoods, and talking to men with their faces hid by a fan, a screen, or a sliding door, these degrees of intimacy being nicely adjusted to the rank and station of the person addressed. Love-making and wooing were governed by strict and conventional etiquette, and an interchange of letters of a very literary and artificial type and of poems usually took the place of personal meetings. Indeed, literary skill and appreciation of Chinese poetry and art were the main things ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... he has in hand. Everywhere his matter is close to his words, and governs, animates, informs his words. No one in England before had so much as he had the power to say what he wanted to say, and exactly as he wanted to say it. No one was so little at the mercy of conventional language or customary rhetoric, except when he persuaded himself that he had to submit to those necessities of flattery, which cost him ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... Bachya founded his ethical system on the Talmud and on the philosophical notions current in his day, but he evolved out of these elements an original view of life. The inner duties dictated by conscience were set above all conventional morality. Bachya probed the very heart of religion. His soul was filled with God, and this communion, despite the ascetic feelings to which it gave rise, was to Bachya an exceeding joy. His book thrills the reader with the author's own chastened ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... the counter but his spirit hand is unable to lift it. He suffers tortures of Tantalus until in time he realizes the impossibility of gratifying his base desire. Then he is free to go on so far as that vice is concerned. He has been purged from that evil without intervention of an angry deity or a conventional devil with hell's flames and pitchfork to administer punishment, but under the immutable law that as we sow so shall we reap, he has suffered exactly according to his vice. If his craving for drink was of a mild nature, he would scarcely miss the liquor which he cannot ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... the wife of G'mami, had seen her lord depart in the canoe for burial in the middle island and had wailed her conventional grief, she washed the dust from her body at the river's edge and went back to her hut. And all that was grief for the dead man was washed away with ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... dearly, and she wished her to come to live with her as her daughter after her own, daughter, Madeleine, had married, but Mrs. Curtis was determined that the little captain should learn to be less impetuous and more conventional. ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... members of the destitute class, and, having nothing to give them, are plunged into remorse; little boys creeping into the larder to steal jam, eat soft soap by mistake and never are greedy again; and so forth. All the conventional images and morals are employed. The whole book is one long and emphatic division of sheep from goats. 'The Journal' is not perhaps exciting, but it reflects the quieter family life of a century ago, and incidentally portrays the thorough ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... out of his house, out of his office, but not out of his life. She had come here with the deliberate intention of wrecking that, and she would succeed probably, for she would have the blind, hideous force of conventional morality on her side. She would destroy his life—that life till lately so valueless to him; that dreary stretch made barren so many years by her hateful influence, but which, in spite of it, at Saidie's touch, had now bloomed into a garden of flowers. The thought of Saidie strengthened ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... has adopted here a regularly rhythmic verse without the conventional capital letters at the beginnings of lines —perhaps to typify the ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... of the rashly assumed spencer, you would scarcely have thought, after a glance at the contours of the man's bony frame, that this was an artist—that conventional type which is privileged, in something of the same way as a Paris gamin, to represent riotous living to the bourgeois and philistine mind, the most mirific joviality, in short (to use the old Rabelaisian word newly taken into use). Yet this elderly person had once taken the ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... with rising up to establish marriage, in a revolt of purity against sexual licence, and moreover effecting the change by force of arms! Bachofen would seem to have been touched with the Puritan spirit. I am convinced also that he understood very little of the nature of woman. Conventional morality has always acted on the side of the man, not the woman. The clue is, indeed, given in the woman's closer connection with the home, and in the idea that "she raises herself by the recognition of her motherhood." ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... dissatisfied lately. Of course I don't understand all this Camp Fire idea seems to mean to her, I suppose I would have to be a girl again to understand thoroughly, but there may be possibilities in it. Even a conventional society woman longs sometimes to get away from her monotonous life, and surely you will find romance and adventure awaiting you in the woods. I have decided I shall not stand in Betty's way, I shall go away this summer ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... opening at the throat and arms, and also the hem of the garment, being richly ornamented with embroidery in heavy gold thread. This garment was confined at the waist by a massive belt of solid gold composed of square placques hinged together, and each elaborately sculptured with conventional representations of the sun. Over this was worn a long cloak, dyed blue, also woven of vicuna wool, but without ornament of any description. Their heads were bare, and the lobe of each ear was pierced and distended ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... together in murmurs, and the clicking of the knives on the plates became painful. Sewell kept himself from looking at Barker, whom he nevertheless knew to be changing his knife and fork from one hand to the other, as doubt after doubt took him as to their conventional use, and to be getting very little good of his dinner in the process of settling these questions. The door-bell rang, and the sound of a whispered conference between the visitor and the servant at the threshold penetrated to the dining-room. Some one softly entered, and then ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... Hannele, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama. Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from Clarissa Harlowe to The House with the Green Shutters; whereas in many plays the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest resides ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... never left her and she paid him a conventional little compliment on his reading, then asked him if he believed that people who could love like that had ever lived, or if such dramas were the peculiar prerogative of the ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... to say, thought it all jealousy. She wasn't the kind of girl who could stand disgrace. . . . She came to him one day and told him that she was going to have a baby. He laughed at her in the regular old conventional way . . . and that very afternoon, after he had seen her, he met me—there ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... wish to see callers, the maid or whoever answers the door should be so informed; the conventional "Not at home" being perfectly proper; it is merely a polite way of saying it is not convenient to receive anyone. But for the maid to say "I will see, if Mrs. A is at home," and return to say she is not at home or not receiving, is a grave discourtesy. Nor should one keep a visitor waiting while ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Mr. Chelm was the conventional idea of a successful lawyer,—withered, non-committal, and a little fusty; but technicalities had failed to harden his heart or obscure his good sense. He had a sunny smile, which refreshed my sad spirit when I called upon him shortly after the funeral to inform ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... also of a type not dissimilar. It was a conventional gathering of rich nobodies, each a big frog in his own little puddle, none known far beyond it and none with sufficient intellect or ability to create for himself any position in the world save that won by the accident of ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... the corpses,moreover, necessitated the employment of at least half a dozen workmen to wash it, cut it open, soak it, dry it, and apply the usual bandages before placing the amulets upon the canonically prescribed places, and using the conventional prayers. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Diard was now an accidental circumstance, not a participator in her life, and since he had ceased to be the father and the head of the family, Juana felt bound to him by no tie other than that imposed by conventional laws. Nevertheless, she brought up her children to the highest respect for paternal authority, however imaginary it was for them. In this she was greatly seconded by her husband's continual absence. If he had been much in the home Diard would have neutralized his wife's efforts. The boys ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... in Fairy deftly. "She isn't going to do the housework, or the managing, or anything. She's just our chaperon. It isn't proper for us to live without one, you know. We're too young. It isn't—conventional." ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... trusting nature, should have quietly won from the other side of the house a victory of almost equal importance? And further than this—what if the lord were to perish in some brawl or by the hired assassin of a rival house; and AEnone, released from her thraldom, and despising conventional scruples—as again was not uncommon among the Roman ladies of that day—were to exalt her favorite with legal honors, and thus make herself, Leta, his slave? This, to be sure, was an improbable chance; but a mind as active ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Professor Yamashita up here to wrestle with Grant. It was very interesting, but of course jiu jitsu and our wrestling are so far apart that it is difficult to make any comparison between them. Wrestling is simply a sport with rules almost as conventional as those of tennis, while jiu jitsu is really meant for practice in killing or disabling our adversary. In consequence, Grant did not know what to do except to put Yamashita on his back, and Yamashita ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... steps, hoping to be able to make them recover their senses, a force of purely conventional emotion impelling me. It was no business of mine; I didn't want to interfere, and I felt like a man hastening to separate half a dozen fighting dogs too large to ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... form of Wooda Bay); but there has been an outbreak of new houses and a new sanded road, which alarmed me, being in the mind for birds and solitude, and I kept the high white road which goes round the summit of the cliffs. Woody Bay is beginning to be popular in the summer months among those less conventional folk who like to live off the beaten track during their holidays, and are not frightened by long distances or difficulties of access, but it is still quite a tiny place and has not yet suffered that exploitation of the picturesque which has overtaken Ilfracombe and Torquay, and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... of London has done a useful service in causing the various decisions of the present Court of Appeal to be collected into a volume. There is such an obvious convenience about the plan that it hardly needed the conventional reason given for it, that "the knowledge generally possessed on the subject of the Court is vague, and the sources from which accurate information can be obtained are little understood; and that people who discuss it ought in the first place to know what the Court ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... clock or thereabout, as I sat here enjoying the refreshing solace of tea and basking in the mild spring air wafted to me through my opened windows, the telephone bell rang. Arising promptly, I went to where the instrument is affixed to the wall and responded to the call in the conventional manner by placing the receiver to my ear, applying my lips to the transmitter and uttering the word "Halloa!" twice, or possibly thrice repeated. Over the wire then a female voice spoke, enquiring if this ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... enclosed. For look you, sir, you and my father were right when you both agreed that the mere book-life was not meant for me. And yet what is not book-life, to a young man who would make his way through the ordinary and conventional paths to fortune? All the professions are so book-lined, book-hemmed, book- choked, that wherever these strong hands of mine stretch towards action, they find themselves met by octavo ramparts, flanked with quarto crenellations. For first, this college life, opening to scholarships, and ending, perchance, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the General was evidently anxious that Garnesk should make his examination as soon as possible, hospitality forced him to suggest dinner first, and I was surprised at the alacrity with which the visitor concurred, knowing, as I did, his intense interest in the case. But, after a few conventional remarks to the General and Myra, I was about to show him to his room when he ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... is unwieldy of thought, besides. He cannot send the conventional messages but he loses his way among the few pronouns: "I send them their love," "They sent me my love," "I kissed their hand to me." If he is stopped and told to get the words right, he has to make a long effort. His precedent might be cited to excuse every politician who cannot remember whether ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... proud and rather sad smile at this sudden change from the conventional to the passionate; and the direct and fiery charge of her kinswoman ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... according as he pleases. In fact, there is no other way of solving it. In my professorial mood, I should cite the cavern and the "downward leaping" waters against the hypothesis that the Bandusian Fount stood on either of these modern sites; in favour of it, one might argue that the conventional rhetoric of all Roman art may have added these embellishing touches, and cite, in confirmation thereof, the last two lines of the previous verse, mentioning animals that could hardly have slaked their thirst with any convenience at a cavernous spring such as he describes. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... way of describing the physical appearance of a man or woman, when he allowed himself to do it at all, which was seldom, was what one might call the ideal or conventional way. A good example is to be found in Hamlet's description of his father; he ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... salt-water impulses, begotten of a twelve or fifteen-months' voyage, have mostly vanished. Steam has greatly revolutionized Jack's sweet-hearting. He comes to port every fortnight, or so; he wears dry goods and jewelry of the latest mode; and he marries a wife, or divorces a wife, with the same conventional sangfroid of any mercantile "drummer" who travels by railroad. The conjugal history of that distinguished son of Neptune, Captain Oliver Perry Hazard, now to be related, haply has a delectable smack of mercantile jack's old-time methods, mingled with the shrewder utilitarianism ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... shown inline in [brackets]. The random use of asterisks is as in the original. The 1653 text used brackets to supplement marginal quotation marks. These have been replaced by conventional "quotation marks". A handful of superscripts (w^{th}) have been "unpacked" to the complete word; titles such as "M^r." are ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... form: Republic of Albania conventional short form: Albania local long form: Republika e Shqiperise local short form: Shqiperia former: People's Socialist Republic ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... pointed out that the law of England "never recognized any such office as that of Prime-minister. In the eyes of the law the ministers were all on an equality." And the position, such as it was, being a conventional one, was not necessarily connected with the office of First Lord of the Treasury. "In a recent instance his late right honorable friend, Mr. Canning, had determined to hold the office of Prime-minister with that of ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... keenly sharpened the publicity sense of the developing advertising director. One book could best be advertised by the conventional means of the display advertisement; another, like Triumphant Democracy, was best served by sending out to the newspapers a "broadside" of pungent extracts; public curiosity in a novel like The Lady, or the Tiger? was, of course, whetted by the publication of literary notes as to the real denouement ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... behind which he heard voices. A burly, good-natured looking man with a derby hat in his hand was talking to a dapper, quick-eyed personage whose carefully trimmed beard and immaculately white waistcoat gave him the conventional "professional" look. Near a window was a big chair, among the pillows of which reclined a young girl with a pale, sweet face and that appearance of fragility which comes of long-continued illness; beside her stood an anxious-looking young man whose haggard ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... svelte world-surface, the exquisite face of all the darkness. It was like a vision. Perhaps gnomes and subterranean workers, enslaved in the era of light, see with such eyes. Perhaps that is why they are absolutely blind to conventional ugliness. For truly nothing could be more hideous than Woodhouse, as the miners had built it and disposed it. And yet, the very cabbage-stumps and rotten fences of the gardens, the very back-yards were instinct with magic, molten as they seemed with the bubbling-up of the under-darkness, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... overpowered by the weight of numbers, who see nothing more in Christianity than a mild religiousness, and who demand nothing more in themselves or in their fellow-Christians than the participation in a conventional worship, the acceptance of traditional beliefs, and the living of an honest life. Yet nothing is more certain than that the enthusiasts are right. Any impartial survey—such as the unique analysis in "Ecce Homo"—of the claims of Christ ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... early Heralds would have applied a similar knowledge had they been able to have acquired it. Heraldic animals of every kind—lions, eagles, dolphins, and all others—must be so far subjected to a conventional treatment, that they will not exhibit a strictly natural appearance: and, on the other hand, being carefully preserved from all exaggerated conventionalisms, they must approach as near to Nature as a definite conventional rendering of natural truth will ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... representation but a thing. On it you fix your attention; with it you "unite." Yet, did you look at the wrong side, at the many short ends, the clumsy joins and patches, this simple philosophy might be disturbed. You would be forced to acknowledge the conventional character of the picture you have made so cleverly, the wholesale waste of material involved in the weaving of it: for only a few amongst the wealth of impressions we receive are seized and incorporated ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... me with my special knowledge of her past. It would be too much to say that I was deeply interested; but Mrs. Lascelles had inspired me with a certain sympathy and dispassionate regard. Cultivated she was not, in the conventional sense, but she knew more than can be imbibed from books. She knew life at first hand, had drained the cup for herself, and yet could savour the lees. Not that she enlarged any further on her own past. ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... monetary pounds were expressed as an italicized "l." after the number. For the text version, I am using the more conventional L100 form ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... institution of caste was not artificial or conventional, but that it began with the simple division of freemen and slaves, which we find among all ancient nations. This division, as he supposes, existed among the Hindus before they settled in India. It became positive law after their emigration from the northern mountains into India, and ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... were a few small tables. In the centre people walked to and fro. At the bottom, at the end opposite the door, was a long table furnished with benches, which occupied the whole width of the wall, behind which sat the "bureau." "Sitting" is merely the conventional term. The "bureau" did not "sit;" like the rest of the Assembly it was on its feet. The secretaries, M.M. Chapot, Moulin, and Grimault wrote standing. At certain moments the two Vice-Presidents mounted on the benches so as to be better seen from all points of the room. The table ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... by the other, and ruling both; ruling both by the same principle of action, and by the influence of the same quality which creates the arbitress of fashion in all countries, by courage to break through the conventional customs of an artificial class, and by talents to ridicule all those who dare follow her innovating example; attracting universal notice by her own singularity, and at the same time conciliating the support of those from whom she dares to differ, by employing ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... joking. You are a born queen and you oughtn't to be a slave; but you are one, all the same. You're a slave to the 'daily round, the common task,' which were never meant for such as you; you're a slave to the conventional idiocy of your neighbors. You daren't even take your hat off till I make you; and now you see how nice it is to ride with ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the four thousand pounds; but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... these events became known in France, the Conventional Assembly, which had then succeeded the Legislature, seeing no hope of reconciliation on either side, knew not what other course to take than to do justice, whatever the consequences might be. They resolved accordingly, in the month of April, that the decree of 1791, which had been first ...
— An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, • Joshua Coffin
... slightly troubled look, for she did not yet feel quite at home in her broken English, and feared that her husband might laugh at her mistakes, though nothing was further from the mind of the stout hunter than to laugh at his pretty bride. He did indeed sometimes indulge the propensity in that strange conventional region "his sleeve," but no owl of the desert was more solemn in countenance than Big Tim when Softswan perpetrated her ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... point of repaying her kindness with a conventional little compliment, but thought better of it, and expressed his meaning in ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... adds, "just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite 'the glass of fashion and the mould of form.' But full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success." Yet the correct and conventional Browning could also fire up for lawlessness—"frenetic to be free." He was hail-fellow well-met, we are told—but is this part of a Browning legend?—with tramps and gipsies, and he wandered gladly, whether through devout sympathy or curiosity of mood we know not, into Little Bethels and other ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... not mean Etiquette. This is only a conventional set of rules adopted by what is called "good society;" and many of the rules of etiquette are of the essence of rudeness. Etiquette does not permit genteel people to recognize in the streets a man with a shabby coat though he ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... of two parts wax, one part mastic, and one part asphaltum. There are countless formulae for such grounds, but virtually all are permutations of the same three ingredients, with only slight differences in the proportions.[19] The ground given as Rembrandt's is a thoroughly conventional one. ...
— Rembrandt's Etching Technique: An Example • Peter Morse
... commonplace but useful metaphor the meaning here is, first, that to catch the vulgar eye a quantity of,—so-called,—light and shade is added by Tenniel. It is effective to an ignorant eye, and is ingeniously disposed; but it is entirely conventional and false, unendurable by any person ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... music is at the mercy of many circumstances, the influence of which is felt, in some degree, even in those arts whose principles have long been fixed and ascertained, and whose rules are not merely conventional. The love of novelty, which the weariness caused by a constant repetition of the same musical phrase or idea renders more exigeant in this than in other arts, the want or impossibility of having any classic examples which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of Edward's house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of the body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work blindly but surely for the preservation of ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... devoted his life to the boy's training. All conventional education was wrong in principle. Schools and colleges and the study of the classics were drivelling folly, with next to nothing to do with life. Travel was the great teacher. "You shall travel as far as the sun," he said. So the boy ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... men were born equal, etc. Mr. Sumner was an idealist—neither a constitutionalist nor a practical statesman. He could pull down, but he could not construct—could declare what he considered humane, right, and proper, and act upon it regardless of constitutional compromises or conventional regulations which were the framework of the Government. No man connected with the Administration, or in either branch of Congress, was more thoroughly acquainted with our treaties, so familiar with the traditions of the Government, or ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... In the printed book, all references to plays give the Act in lower-case Roman numerals and the Scene in small capital Roman numerals; the two look identical except for the dots over the i's. For this plain-text version, the conventional "IV.iv" sequence was ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... admiration which is felt at the sight of unusual feminine charms. The incident simply goes to show that everywhere in Spain there is tacit recognition of the general inferiority of women. In the laboring and peasant classes, where the women work with the men, such lapses from the conventional standard of good manners would not cause so much comment; but under these circumstances the dangers and the annoyances are not so great, as these women of the people, with their practical experience in life, ignorant as they ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... transfigured. Our door was besieged with visitors, our evenings bespoken by innumerable invitations; social civilities and courtesies poured in upon us from every side in an incessant stream; I was sought and petted and caressed by persons of conventional and real distinction, and every night that I did not act I might, if my parents had thought it prudent to let me do so, have passed in all the gayety of the fashionable world and the great London season. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... out of the ordinary groove are not apt to be attractive to the average English mind. There are conventional charities in which they may indulge,—there are Sunday-schools, and rheumatic old women, and flannel night-caps, and Dorcas societies, and such things to which people are used and which are likely to alarm ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was bred," she replied in that plain manner of hers, so plain indeed that conventional people sometimes complained of it as rude. "That's good ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... see the others off at Idlewild. He knew they'd expect him to and, since it would be the last conventional gesture he'd have to make, he might as well conform to their notions of what was ...
— The Most Sentimental Man • Evelyn E. Smith
... is only a conventional imitation of the Doctor's style of talking. He wrote in grand balanced phrases, but his conversation was good, lusty, off-hand familiar talk. He used very often to have it all his own way. If he came back to us we must remember that to treat him fairly we must suppose him on a level with ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... allowances for conventional exaggerations, it is clear from the correspondence that there was deep love between Marcus and his preceptor. The letters cover several years in succession, but soon after the birth of Marcus's daughter, Faustina, there is a large gap. It does not follow that the letters ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... stern, after the fashion of our modern cup defenders, and in a day gave England the key to sea mastery in the shape of a new ship that would take sail and answer her rudder beyond anything the maritime world until then had known. Shreve, like Hawkins, flagrantly ignoring the conventional wisdom of his day and craft, built the Washington to sail on the water instead of in it, doing away altogether with a hold and supplying an ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... bottom of a mould with aspic to the depth of one-fourth an inch. Set the mould in ice water, and, when the aspic is set, arrange upon it a decoration of cooked vegetables cut in shapes with French cutter, or fashion a conventional design or some flower. Dogwood blossoms provide a simple pattern, and one easily carried out. Cut the four petals from a thin slice of cooked turnip and the centre of the blossom from carrot or lemon peel. Fasten each piece in place with liquid jelly, and, when set, cover with more jelly. ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... the most remarkable composition of Mozart's youthful age, and though he wrote it under Gluck's influence, there is many a spark of his own original genius, and often he breaks the bonds of conventional form and rises to heights hitherto unanticipated. The public in general does not estimate the opera very highly, in consequence Idomeneus was only represented in Dresden, after the long interval of 21 years, to find the house empty and the applause lukewarm. But the true ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... iconoclastic than any of the Christian or the Mohammedan denominations in the sense that it opposes the acceptance of the petrified idea of Deity, so conventional and formal that it carries no inner conviction of the believers. Faith dies out whenever one comes to stick to one's fixed and immutable idea of Deity, and to deceive oneself, taking bigotry for genuine faith. Faith must be living and growing, and the living and growing faith should ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... broached higher things. She spoke of God and religion. The untutored child of the forest rose with the occasion. There was nothing conventional in her mind or words on these topics—as how could there be under the wayward teaching of Batoche? But her intuitions were crystal clear. There were no breaks, no obscurations in her spiritual vision. It was evident that she had studied and communed direct ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... it were echoes of the romances which I had read on Victoria's recommendation; the reminiscence was particularly strong in this last exclamation. However, it is not safe to conclude that feelings are not sincere because they are expressed in conventional phrases. These formulas are moulds into which our words run easily; though the moulds be hollow, the stuff that fills them may be ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... more—is now demanded of him than formerly. But to those possessed of what is known as the Instinct of the Theatre, or Scenic Instinct, the gestures and attitudes of the operatic stage, being largely conventional, are soon acquired. Scenic accomplishments are undoubtedly necessary to the stage-singer, but his mimetic studies should not preclude him from making himself a thorough master of the vocal side of his ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... ill-educated men, holding together kingdoms, tongues and races, three hundred millions of them, in a restless fermenting peace? Again and again in India I would find myself in little circles of the official English,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out" people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me. And then in some man's work, in some ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... fervour girls of tender years re-unite some day after a separation of months need not, of course, be explained. Presently, she entered the apartments, paid her respects and inquired how they all were. But after this conventional interchange of salutations, old lady Chia pressed her to take off her outer garments as the weather was so close. Shih Hsiang-yuen lost no time in rising to her feet and loosening her clothes. "I don't see why," Madame ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the arrival of his parents that he could scarcely compose himself sufficiently to follow the seder and ask the conventional question concerning the significance of the Pesach festival. In reply, the head of the house recited from his Hagada how the Lord punished Pharaoh for his obduracy, how the children of Israel were eventually led from captivity, how ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... Budh-gaya, where under the bo tree Buddha attained to enlightenment, and S[a]rn[a]th, where he began his preaching. Yet the worship at neither place to-day is Buddhist. At the scene of Gautama's enlightenment, where he became Buddha or Enlightened, one of the conventional statues of Buddha is actually marked and worshipped as Vishnu, the Hindu deity, the Preserver in the Hindu triad. Even at that most holy shrine of Buddhism, Hinduism has supplanted it, for popular Hinduism ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... concede that the essence of the duel is an armed equality. I should not, therefore, apply the word barbaric, as I am using it, to the duels of German officers or even to the broadsword combats that are conventional among the German students. I do not see why a young Prussian should not have scars all over his face if he likes them; nay, they are often the redeeming points of interest on an otherwise somewhat ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... world; but, inchoate as they are, they remain faith, hope, love—these three. Are they not sufficient to be the beginnings of the religious life in the young? To theological learning, traditional creeds, and conventional worship they may seem primitive, slight in substance, meagre in apparel; but one who is seeking, not things to believe, but things to live, desires the elementary. In setting forth first principles, the elaboration of a more ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... way over to Mrs. Grant with the conventional smile, and then, once without the drawing-room, hurried down to the door and the night air. In the hall I recognised, standing waiting for his carriage, a familiar figure. It was a man I had known intimately in India: he was home now on furlough, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... there is enough on the face of this communication to show that the Duke of Wellington took a narrow, and, so to speak, technical, view of the relative positions of himself and Mr. Canning; that the latter expected a more conventional and generous construction of his position and proposal from one with whom he was ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... chief readers of fiction; and it is women whom one mainly desires to arouse to interest in profound problems by the aid of this vehicle. Especially should one arouse them to such living interest while they are still young and plastic, before they have crystallised and hardened into the conventional marionettes of polite society. Make them think while they are young: make them feel while they are sensitive: it is then alone that they will think and feel, if ever. I will venture, indeed, to enforce my views on ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... very different qualities of things in one unifying synthesis—a process having nearly the same theoretical value as a memoria technica, which, by substituting letters for figures, helps us to retain the latter in our minds. This does not mean that figures are, in fact, letters, but it is a conventional substitution which has a practical advantage. What memoria technica is to the ordinary memory, the theory of mechanics should ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... rode together, John lagging a good deal behind (that bay horse of John's never could walk with White Stockings), I could not help thinking how much I had misunderstood Captain Lovell's character. What a deal of feeling—almost of romance—there was under that conventional exterior which he wore before the world! I liked him so much more now I came to know him better. I was quite sorry when we had to wish him "good-night" and John and I rode thoughtfully home through the quiet streets. I thought my cousin's manner ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... the propounders of the code of revolutionary despotism. All societies, he said, are founded on contract for mutual protection. Good and evil are conventional terms, for the thunderbolts of heaven fall alike on the just and the unjust. The objection to wrongdoing is not the act, but in its consequences to the wrongdoer. Wise men contrive laws, not to bind, but to protect themselves; and when they prove ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... feelings of our common nature (for they are the same at bottom) expressed in the most naked and unqualified way, than see every feeling of our nature suppressed, stifled, hermetically sealed under the smooth, cold, glittering varnish of pretended refinement and conventional politeness. The one may be corrected by being better informed; the other is incorrigible, wilful, heartless depravity. I cannot describe the contempt and disgust I have felt at the tone of what would be thought good company, when I have ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... under which lie half-concealed,—not at all concealed from those who have often watched him at his work,—the glance, the tone, the spring, which are to tear that unfortunate witness into pieces, without infringing any one of those conventional rules which have been laid down for the guidance ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... extend beyond the details necessary to distinguish one species from another, or to describe the salient features of a plant in technical language; whose acquaintance with botanical science might almost be said to consist in the conventional application of a number of arbitrary terms, or in the recollection of a number of names, teratology was regarded as a chaos whose meaningless confusion it were vain to attempt to render intelligible,—as a barren field not ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... of curious phenomena. I don't know that there is anything more noticeable than what we may call CONVENTIONAL REPUTATIONS. There is a tacit understanding in every community of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity. There are various reasons for this forbearance: one ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of its having been made when it was, and being what it is. In his opinion it was made at the happy juncture when our language had attained adequate expansion and flexibility, and when at the same time its idiomatic strength was unimpaired by excess of technical distinctions and conventional refinements; and these circumstances, though of course infinitely subordinate to the spiritual influence of its subject-matter, he considered to be highly important in connection with a volume which naturally became a universally recognised standard of the language; for thus the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... and to our application of the notion of space, which is applicable to physical objects, to states of consciousness, to which it is really inapplicable. Objects occupying space are marked out as external to one another, but this cannot be said of conscious states. Yet, in our ordinary speech and conventional view of things, we think of conscious states as separated from one another and as spread out like "things," in a fictitious, homogeneous medium to which we give the name Time. Bergson says, "At any rate, we cannot finally admit two forms of the homogeneous, Time and Space, without first ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... charming than ever, since the conversation which had made her to some extent the possessor of a heart worthy to be the envy of every woman. They sang an Italian duet with so much expression that the audience applauded enthusiastically. Their adieux were in a conventional tone, which concealed their happiness. In short, this day had been to Emilie like a chain binding her more closely than ever to the Stranger's fate. The strength and dignity he had displayed in the scene when they had confessed their feelings had ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... count, then, so much with conventional people?" he demanded. "For me it has no significance in relation to feeling. If you would only look at me instead of down at those small hands, then you would not be able to tell ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... is this slight difference between the conventional Yankee and the average Home Ruler, that whilst the former swears "by Gum," the latter swears by ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... conscientious objector. They had been under the impression that his public career had been one long orgie of conscientious objection to everything that did not emanate from his own capacious brain. Even his hat and his waistcoat proclaim his defiance of conventional opinion. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... wore the cloth cap and conventional and unpicturesque, though shapeless and weather-stained, garment of the late nineteenth century. Neither horns nor goat's feet were visible; nor was the pipe of reed on which he played. Yet he played, in Paul's ear, the comforting melody ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the male have a very conspicuous value for the group when exercised for the benefit of the group, they become particularly harmful when directed against the safety or interests of the group or the members of the group, and we find that civil and criminal law, and contract, and also conventional morality, are closely connected with the motility of the male. The establishment of moral standards is mediated through the sense of strain—strain to the personal self, and strain to the social self. Whether a man is injured ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... a harbor which he called Porto Securo, and taking possession of the country for the crown of Portugal, dispatched a ship to Lisbon with the important tidings. [99] In this way did the Brazils come into the possession of Portugal, being to the eastward of the conventional line settled with Spain as the boundaries of their respective territories. Dr. Robertson, in recording this voyage of Cabral, concludes with one of his just ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... Oriental's fatalistic attitude towards disease and death. Perhaps only those who have had close dealings with the British officer in time of action or emergency realise, to the full, the effective qualities hidden under a careless or conventional exterior:—the vital force, the pluck, endurance, and irrepressible spirit of enterprise, which—it has been aptly said—make him, at his best, the most romantic figure of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... genuine sense of the word, "Cobbler" Horn was a Christian gentleman; and he would have sustained the character in any position in which he might have been placed. But he had a feeling akin to contempt for the punctilious and conventional squeamishness of polite society. ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... it all in accordance with your own judgment and do not allow yourself to be talked into the proper and conventional, everything will be quite right, and the way I want it to be; and I shall derive immense enjoyment from the beautiful property. Hitherto I have lived in a thoughtless way and without any feeling of ownership; I have tripped lightly over the earth and have never felt at home on ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of it, had come upon the stage, that the requisite impulse was given. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Merimee, Alfred de Vigny, and other young men of genius, were just opening the assault on the citadel of classicisme. Conventional rules were set at defiance; the authorities that had so long held sway were summoned to abdicate; nature, truth, above all passion, were invoked as the sources of inspiration, the law-givers of the imagination, the sole ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... above Cass Lake. We found his hut, but not himself, at the river's outlet. The lodge is neatly built of bark. It was surrounded by good patches of corn, potatoes, wheat, beans and wild raspberries. There is a stable for a horse and a cow, and all about were the conventional traps of a civilized biped who lives upon a blending of wit, woodcraft and industry. We greatly wished to see this hermit, whose nearest neighbors are thirty miles away. His dog welcomed us with all the passion of canine hunger and days of isolation, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... was exceedingly simple, and devoid of ornament of any kind, save an occasional pilaster or flying buttress. The streets were broad, and laid out to cut the city into lozenge-shaped sections, instead of the conventional squares. In the center of the city stood a great lozenge-shaped building with a smooth, arched roof. From every section of the city, great swarms of people were flocking in the direction of the spot toward which the Ertak was settling, on foot and in long, slim vehicles ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright |
