"Backbiting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tongues of her husband's aunts, the "jealousies and bitter backbiting of her own intimate circle of friends," the infamous accusations brought against her by her sisters-in-law, the attacks of the Comte de Provence, and the indifference of the king himself, all ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... "I can't understand the misanthrope. So far as my experience goes, either mankind is worthy one's best love, or else I have been lucky. Never has it been my lot to have been wronged, though but in the smallest degree. Cheating, backbiting, superciliousness, disdain, hard-heartedness, and all that brood, I know but by report. Cold regards tossed over the sinister shoulder of a former friend, ingratitude in a beneficiary, treachery in a confidant—such things may be; but ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... said Phellion. "The dinner hour summons us; I think that, little by little, we have allowed this conversation to drift toward the miry slough of backbiting." ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... the honour of the culprits. But you would be amazed to know how completely our orders were always obeyed. Only lately I had a most pleasing example. A maiden lady in South Kensington whom I had condemned to solitary confinement for being the means of breaking off an engagement through backbiting, absolutely refused to leave her prison, although some well-meaning persons had been inopportune enough ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... spoken to you on former occasions pretty strongly upon the evil of backbiting, slandering, and casting of blame without sufficient cause. I am not going to address this day those who speak evil, but those of whom evil ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... her in July, and they won't let me live at home unless I make a solemn promise to "perform my religious duties" and behave properly to the chapel people. And I never will, not if I starve for it—nasty, canting, crawling, backbiting things! Then father says I can live away, and he'll make me an allowance. And what do you think ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... these servants were foreigners, and Samuel was pained to discover that they were for the most part without any ennobling conception of their calling. They were much given to gluttony and drinking; and there was an unthinkable amount of scandal and backbiting and jealousy. But it was only by degrees that he realized this, for he had one great motive in common with them—they were all possessed with a sense of the greatness of the Lockmans, and none of them wanted ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... moral, and her principles were most sound. She would never oppose her husband, whose slightest wish she regarded as a command. She would appease his few stubborn foes of the French aristocracy, and put a stop to the last surviving backbiting of the Faubourg Saint Germain. As a bond of union between the past and the present, she brought not to France alone, but to all Europe, stability and repose, and rendered the foundations of the Imperial edifice firm and ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... artist, a man of even the slightest eminence who might arouse envy or a passionate desire to be imitated. They only eat, drink, sleep, and then they die... more people are born and also eat, drink, sleep, and so as not to go silly from boredom, they try to make life many-sided with their beastly backbiting, vodka, cards, and litigation. The wives deceive their husbands, and the husbands lie, and pretend they see nothing and hear nothing, and the evil influence irresistibly oppresses the children and the divine spark in them is extinguished, and they become ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... companions of her own gender. Any girl or woman that she did chance to meet always took a fancy to her, because she was so nice to them, which made the transitory nature of these friendships tantalizing. She was incapable of jealousies or backbiting. Let men beware of such—there is coiled in their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "which appeals above all to the senses, and lives on the emotions, and fosters jealousy and vanity and backbiting, and develops duplicity, and exists on lies, and does nothing to encourage self-sacrifice or to help suffering humanity, is a bad ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... Empire did not possess two kinder or braver men than Captains Darling and Warren. It is only when men go down into the valley of the shadow of death together that they learn to appreciate each other. In the trenches soldiers are true comrades, backbiting, lying and slandering is left to the slackers and "tin soldiers" who stay at home. Both these young men were in the flower of their youth, both left young wives, both were men of means, brought up amidst wealth and refinement. ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... on this aspect of my subject than I should have done had I been addressing any other audience than a Norwich one. But the fact is that all the gossip and backbiting and censoriousness that has gathered round Borrow for a hundred years has come out of this very city, commencing with the "bursts of laughter" that, according to Miss Martineau, greeted Borrow's travels in Spain for the Bible Society. Borrow was twenty-one ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... your naughty tongue! Are you going to begin backbiting again? You are playing a mean part, Trumeau. I have never hinted to Maitre Quennebert all the nasty little ways in which you have tried to put a spoke in his wheel, for if he knew he would ask you to prove your words, and then you ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere |
