"Conventionality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Now, that's sheer conventionality," he insisted. "You would really like to come in and have a talk, but for the melancholy reason that ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... the House of Pilate. The denomination is not so absurd as it at first seems; it brings us back to bygone times, when passion-plays were performed in Rome in a more effective way than they are now exhibited at Oberammergau. They took place, not on a wooden stage, so suggestive of conventionality, but in a quarter of the city most wonderfully adapted to represent the Via Dolorosa of Jerusalem, from the houses of Pilate and Caiaphas to the summit ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... the sets are so placed that they become what Professor Ross has called "radiant points of conventionality." [Footnote: Ross, Social Psychology, Ch. IX, X, XI.] Thus the social superior is likely to be imitated by the social inferior, the holder of power is imitated by subordinates, the more successful by the less successful, the rich by the poor, the city by the country. But imitation ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... to this request—at all events until it had been sanctioned by some higher authority than Colin—but then he remembered Mabel's anxiety on the night of the dinner; if he could only set this child's mind at ease, would not that excuse any breach of conventionality—would it not win a word of gratitude from her sister? He could surely take a little risk and trouble for such a reward as that; and so, with his usual easy confidence, he accepted a task which was to cost him dear enough. ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... great master's picture in the Dresden Gallery, and of which there is a replica in the Barberini Palace at Rome; but still the portrait had another memory for Lady Maude, who quickly recalled the girl she had once seen in a crowded assembly, passing through a murmur of admiration that no conventionality could repress, and whose marvellous beauty seemed to glow with the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... telling me some of them?' said Mrs. Fordyce rather anxiously. She was a very practical person—attentive to the laws of conventionality, and she did not feel at all sure of the views entertained by her ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... Grant, if you're really willing to see me through this," Dauntrey said, clinging to those bare rocks of conventionality which still rose above the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... spoke? And if it is not profanation to hear and see this in the pages of a biography, why is it a profanation to read and see it in the pages of a magazine? To object to it seems to me to be a species of prudish conventionality. ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... we should drop down to Luchon, and come around by Bagnerres-de-Bigorre or not, but since they were likely to be full of "five-o'-clockers" at this season we thought the better of it, and left them entirely out of our itinerary. When one wants it he can get the same sort of conventionality at Ermenonville, and need not go so far afield ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... of the North in order to shield himself from the charge of "attempting to set up a new school in poetry," and he never throughout his life violated the conventions, literary or social, if he could possibly avoid doing so. This bias toward conservatism and conventionality shows itself particularly in the language of his poems. He was compelled, of course, to use much more concrete and vivid terms than the eighteenth century poets had used, because he was dealing with much more concrete and vivid matter; but his language, nevertheless, has a prevailing ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... truth, but in its essence just as real and permanent as the artistic worth of romance. "Seen from afar," writes Mr. Moore, "all things in nature are of equal worth; and the meanest things, when viewed with the eyes of God, are raised to heights of tragic awe which conventionality would limit to the deaths of kings and patriots." On such a lofty theory they built their treatment and their style. It is a mistake to suppose that the realist school deliberately cultivates the sordid or shocking. Examine in this connection Mr. Moore's Mummer's ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... not make two of him, but we think there ought to be another, and we try to be he. The attempt is always a failure. The worst of it is that in our effort to be another we have ceased to be ourselves, and after such a loss what do we still possess? Perhaps the disaster comes in another way. Conventionality has certain curious notions about the pulpit, the fulfilment of which it paradoxically despises as it demands it. The preacher is expected to speak in a different voice and wear a different expression in the "sacred desk" from his voice and expression in other places. In some churches he ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... new sensations. This one woman of all the world beside his mother and sister that he had come to know somewhat was to him a strange, beautiful mystery. Edith was in many respects conventional, as all society girls are, but it was the conventionality of a sphere of life that Arden knew only through books, and she seemed to him utterly different from the ladies of Pushton as he understood them from his slight acquaintance. This difference was all in her favor, for he cherished a bitter ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... not beheld in the same cruel position as yourself! Artists who live only by and for the public, carry nothing home to their hearth but fatigue from glory, or the melancholy of their disappointments. An ill-regulated existence, without compass or rudder, subversive ideas contrary to all social conventionality, contempt of family life and its happiness, cerebral excitement sought for in the abuse of tobacco and strong drink, without mentioning anything else, this constitutes the terrible artistic element from which your dear Aunt is desirous of withdrawing you; but I must ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... that, not having wherewith to console him, he listened to those who are said to intoxicate him with such exaltation, verses, and rhymes, as they had never demonstrated to others; because this work shines more by its originality than by its conventionality. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... adjacent benefice, and he also became a prebendary of York. It was not until 1760 that the first two vols. of his famous novel, Tristram Shandy, appeared. Its peculiar and original style of humour, its whimsicality, and perhaps also its defiance of conventionality, and even its frequent lapses into indecorum, achieved for it an immediate and immense popularity. S. went up to London and became the lion of the day. The third and fourth vols. appeared in 1761, the fifth ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... succour was always at her elbow in the shape of her husband's loyal support. There was no condition involved which could not be explained to her credit; adequate compensation for the merry sacrifice was to be had in the brief detachment from rigid English conventionality, in the hazardous injection of quixotism into an otherwise overly healthful life of platitudes. Society had become the sepulchre of youthful inspirations; she welcomed the resurrection. The exquisite delicacy with which she analysed the cost and computed the interest won for her the warmest ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... allowed to rot on top of the grave. To me there is no more mournful sight than a visit to a great London cemetery, where one sees these rotting emblems, which quite palpably meant nothing save the practice of a conventionality. The Japanese, however poor his worldly circumstances may be, is not content with flowers, costly flowers on the day of the funeral; he places his vase alongside the grave of the departed, and by keeping that vase filled with fresh and beautiful flowers he sets forth as far as he possibly ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... had already given to a name once so respectable. He knew that his indifference and overbearing manner toward his sisters had alienated them from him; while in respect to Mrs. Haldane, her aristocratic conventionality, the most decided trait of her character, would always be in sharp contest with her strong mother-love, and thus he would ever be only a source of disquiet and wretchedness whether present or absent. In view of the discordant elements and relations ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... his impudence, and the words would not come. The greatness of the required sacrifice came over her and therewith the desire to temporise. The voice of many Knickerbocker ancestresses spoke in her, and between herself and a real emergency she interposed the impenetrable buckler of a conventionality. She wrote: ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... you can construct the whole story: you know that the "dependent cousin" and the girl with the "handsome brunette features" will be rivals for the affections of some "nice young man" of corresponding conventionality, and that the poor relation will finally win him—chiefly because it always happens so in stories and seldom in real life. And you know from these specimen paragraphs that there will be nothing in the handling ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... a failure, her calm assurance and self- certainty offended him vaguely. It seemed as if she were succeeding where he had failed, which rather jarred his sense of the fitness of things. Then, too, conventionality is a very agreeable social bond, the true value of which is not often recognized until it is found missing, and this girl was anything ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... was as far as she ventured in allusion to her widowed state; but, stirred as he was by her implied submission, it struck him as significant that she should so clearly recognize the restrictions conventionality imposed on her. ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... debauchery resemble vertigo, for one feels a sort of terror mingled with sensuous delight, as if peering downward from some giddy—height. While shameful, secret dissipation ruins the noblest of men, in the frank and open defiance of conventionality there is something that compels respect even in the most depraved. He who goes at nightfall, muffled in his cloak, to sully his life in secret, and clandestinely to shake off the hypocrisy of the day, resembles an Italian who strikes ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... wonderfully during those hours of companionship. The total absence of conventionality had destroyed all strangeness between them. They were as children on a holiday, enjoying the present to the full, and wholly ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... which are to be met with in philosophical works as elsewhere, are not to be frequently encountered in his writings. There is always the fresh breeze of original thought blowing here. He is by nature as well as by doctrine the sworn foe of conventionality. Though he may not give us all we would wish, in our haste to be all-wise, let us yet be grateful to him for this, that he has the purpose and also the power to shake us out of complacency, to compel us to recast our philosophical account. In this he is supremely serviceable ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... regard to minor matters, he does not, like some of his contemporaries, place in the mouth of a Huguenot leader, or a Guisarde countess, the tame and dainty phrase appropriate enough in that of an equerry, or lady of the bed-chamber at the court of the Citizen King. Eschewing conventionality, and following his own judgment, and the guidance of the old chroniclers, in whose quaint records he delights, he has written one of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... scene of all her troubles, of all the terrible emotions that had swept over her life in the last three weeks, to be alone in the hills or by the sea. It seemed dreadful to be tied to her great house in the city, in her mourning, shut off suddenly from the world, and bound down by the chain of conventionality to a fixed method of existence. She would give anything to go away. Why not? She suddenly realised what was so hard to understand, that she was free to go where she pleased—if only, by accident, she could chance to meet Giovanni Saracinesca before ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... of the best and noblest of our times makes for the strongest individualities. Every sensitive being abhors the idea of being treated as a mere machine or as a mere parrot of conventionality and respectability, the human being craves recognition of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... I am sure," she murmured; and the very conventionality of her tones and words, with the host of associations it aroused of the old life on the other side of the world, gave me a quick thrill—rich with remembrance ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Ayres—they say who have travelled far—could show such a procession of Dianaides, such a Greek festival of joy in the smooth, vigorous body and the things which feed and clothe it. With that absence of public conventionality which was another ear-mark of the old city, all sorts and conditions of men and women sat side by side at the tables. Harlots, or those who might well pass as such, beside the best morale there is in women; daughters of washerwomen beside daughters of such ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... a brave woman and help him," Thornton said, feeling the conventionality and silliness of any remark. "He mustn't be hounded out of here like a dog, but made to feel that he can make a decent future." She nodded. "It isn't the money," she said at last. "Though I can't see where it will come from. Nor the marriage, but the perpetual disgrace. ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... had come to Middelburg. I looked out again. Nell was on deck alone. Doubtless Alb had at last gone below to the motor-room, and was exchanging the blue overalls for something more decorous. Would he, even for the sake of conventionality, have left her at such a moment unless ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... distinctively emotional are nearly identical among men from physiological causes which do not affect with the same similarity the processes of thought. The large number of corporeal gestures expressing intellectual operations require and admit of more variety and conventionality. Thus the features and the body among all mankind act almost uniformly in exhibiting fear, grief, surprise, and shame, but all objective conceptions are varied and variously portrayed. Even such simple indications as those for "no" and "yes" appear in ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... subjects, for one of Browning's most eminent qualities is his care in harmonising treatment with subject. King Victor and King Charles is a modern play, dealing with human nature under all the restrictions of a pervading conventionality and an oppressive statecraft. It deals, moreover, with complex and weakened emotions, with the petty and prosaic details of a secondary Western government. The Return of the Druses, on the other hand, treats of human nature in its most romantic conditions, of the mystic East, of great and ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... reason seems to be that he uses no material which has not been in use for hundreds of years; and to say that such material begins to lose its freshness is not putting the case too strongly. He has not been able to detach himself from the paralyzing background of English conventionality. The vein was rich, but it is worn out; and the half-dozen pioneers had all ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... is not all a conventionality, for it is the best proof of their proper nature. The tribune stopped, because they fled from him—not with fear, be it said, but shame; nor yet, O reader, from shame alone! From the obscurity of their partial hiding he heard these words, the saddest, most dreadful, most utterly ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... is just a delightful expression of mutual love. It is a sort of prolonged and all-embracing kiss, in which the sex organs are included as well as the lips. They kiss each other, as the lips kiss each other. It is "courting," par excellence, without the hampering of clothes or conventionality of any kind. ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... persons lose all the zest of living. The existing world seems to them brutal, its order, tyranny; its morality, organized selfishness; its accepted religion, a shallow conventionality. In such a world as this, the good man stands like a gladiator who has suddenly become a Christian. He is overwhelmed with horror at the bloody sports, yet he is forced into the arena and must fight. That is his business, and he cannot rise ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... had spread from bourgeois to countess, from cure to Parisian boulevardier, till the entire side of the table was in a buzz of talk. These genial people of a genial land finding themselves all in search of the same adventure, on top of a hill, away from the petty world of conventionality, remembered that speech was given to man to communicate with his fellows. And though neighbors for a brief hour, how charming such an hour can be made when into it are crowded the effervescence of personal experience, the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... sure to astonish those around him by some breach of Court conventionality, little or great. He was liable to strong likings and dislikings, and he took no pains to conceal his sentiments in either case. He seems to have had an affectionate regard for his young niece, the Princess Victoria, and a strong dislike to her {119} mother. The Duchess ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... friend—you will allow me that word!—to what you condemn me if you take your stand upon the extreme dictates of conventionality. You cannot know what it would mean to me if you were to say, 'He is a married man, and we had better not meet so frequently in future.' To you, that would be no loss whatever. To me, it would be the loss of happiness, of consolation, of intellectual life. Listen and have pity upon me! ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... at last given up in despair even by Speug, their tails being renewed day by day and their faces remaining in all circumstances quite unmoved; but within a month the average boy had laid aside the last remnant of conventionality, and was only outdone by Peter himself in studied ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... 'amiable, kind, generous, and forgiving.' Further on he adds: 'He had smiled so often and so long, that at last his smile had the appearance of being set in enamel.' But then, Mr. Haydon prided himself on his coarseness, defiance, and hatred of conventionality, deeming these fitting attributes of ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... their parts in the drama of Royal Courts, but scarcely one, not even those Messalinas, Catherine II. of Russia and Christina of Sweden, conducted herself with such a shameless disregard of conventionality as Marie Louise Elizabeth d'Orleans, known to fame as the Duchesse de Berry, who probably crowded within the brief space of her years more wickedness than any woman who was ever cradled in ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... the ridge of a gable. And thus, as far as roofing is concerned, the gable is a far more essential feature of Northern architecture than the pointed vault, for the one is a thorough necessity, the other often a graceful conventionality: the gable occurs in the timber roof of every dwelling-house and every cottage, but not the vault; and the gable built on a polygonal or circular plan, is the origin of the turret and spire;[69] and all the so-called aspiration of Gothic architecture ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the confusion of controversies, the cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity of proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... as was absolutely necessary, and with as little meaning as conventionality required, Nekhludoff rose and went up to Meslennikoff. "Can you give me a ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... other great balls, the rocky shores of conventionality made it impossible to move without a thousand ceremonies, proprieties, dubiosities, formalities, and all the rest, which, taken together, make up a vast sum of difficulties. The great ball at Axelholm was not without pretension, and on that ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... not a small one. The careful study which he had given to the proper conditions of opera was not likely to exclude so important a question as that of the construction and diction of the libretto, and the poem of 'Orfeo' shows so marked an inclination to break away from the conventionality and sham sentiment of the time that we can confidently attribute much of its originality to the influence of the composer himself. The opening scene shows the tomb of Eurydice erected in a grassy valley. Orpheus stands beside it plunged in the deepest grief, while ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... and here and here alone, she and Susan ran an even race, it being a moot point each week which would gain the highest marks. Susan's essays were more thoughtful, and were written with an apt and dainty choice of words which was a delight to Miss Drake's literary taste, but a certain primness and conventionality still remained to be conquered, in contrast to which Dreda's dashing breeziness of style was a real refreshment. After reading through a dozen essays, all of which began in almost exactly the same words, ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hates conventionality and uses the old thrills only to show what dead batteries they come from. His really electrical effects are his own inventions. He needs no dungeon keeps and monkish cells to play about in—not he! He demands no rag nor bone nor clank of chain of his old ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... went on the alarm had become more pronounced; but at this moment, when there shone forth the mother-instinct which had never come out or blossomed in her life, but had been overlaid completely with routine and conventionality, rendering it too indolent to put forth petals, Michael had no thought but for that which she had never given him yet, and which, now it began to expand before him, he knew he had missed all ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... civilization, by the many false practices which it has introduced, by the facilities which its very complexity affords to the concealment of crime, and by the monstrous systems of corruption which fashion, caste, and conventionality are enabled to shelter, is the direct means of rendering many individuals miserable in the extreme; but these are the necessary incidents to its struggles to advance under the dominion ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... mother and sister, black-uniformed, looking very much a gentleman. 'I, of course, am not a gentleman,' he said to himself, gloomily. Was there any chance that he might some day take his ease in that orthodox fashion? Inasmuch as it was conventionality, he scorned it; but the privileges which it represented had strong control of his imagination. That lady and her daughter would follow the play with intelligence. To exchange comments with them would be a keen delight. As for him—he had a shop-boy on one hand and a grocer's ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the woman who is about to become a mother. Most of these questions are reasonable and natural, and should be frankly answered; but a false conventionality has—until recently, at least—forbidden any open discussion of facts connected with childbirth. The inevitable result has been that, without experience of their own to guide them, prospective mothers have sought ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... of idealism in the life of to-day which Mr. Street ignores. This is the tendency toward the apotheosis of the individual in antithesis to society. This is a sign of health, in so far as it is a revolt against the stifling pressure of outworn conventionality, and it has found worthy expression in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the poetry of Browning and ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... the famous recumbent figure on the extreme left, the lips just open at the corner, and in the hard-shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise, [267] these figures all smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies of the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be but a result of the mere conventionality of an art still somewhat immature, has just the pathetic effect of Homer's conventional epithet "tender," when he speaks of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... for education in the eternal truths of literary art, and for personal aid in the realisation of its members' literary potentialities. It is a university, stripped of every artificiality and conventionality, and thrown open to all without distinction. Here may every man shine according to his genius, and here may the small as well as the great writer know the bliss of appreciation and the glory of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... remember, however, that art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies. Our finite nature, the power of tradition and conventionality, as well as our hereditary instincts, restrict the scope of our capacity for artistic enjoyment. Our very individuality establishes in one sense a limit to our understanding; and our aesthetic personality seeks its own affinities in the creations of the past. It is true that with ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... fool talks pompous sense always. He sees life in only one facet. Your lover sees its many sides, its infinite variety. He can laugh and weep; his imagination lights up dry facts with whimsical fancies; he dives through the crust of conventionality to the realities of life. 'Tis the lover keeps this old world young. The fire of youth, of eternal laughing youth, runs flaming through his blood. His days are radiant, ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... day at the ranchhouse was the beginning of a new existence for Ruth. Bound for years by the narrow restrictions and conventionality of the Poughkeepsie countryside, she found the spaciousness and newness of this life inviting and satisfying. Here there seemed to be no limit, either to the space or to the flights that one's soul might take, and in the solemn grandeur of the open she felt the omnipotence ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... find out for himself what are the holiest and most permanent things in life, and worship them sincerely and steadfastly, allowing no conventionality, no sense of social duty, to come in between him and his pure apprehension. Thus, and thus only, can a man tread the path among the stars. Thus it is, I think, that religious persons, like artists, arrive at a certain detachment from human affections and human aims, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... feeling and the out-bursts of the mere natural man always strangely checked and diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird and horrible. There was the undoubted Celtic element in him underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in another—the reaction and the retreat from what had attracted and interested him, and then the return upon it, as with added zest because of the retreat. The confessed Hedonist, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... women, who conduct themselves with appropriate freedom from the restraints of conventionality. FERNANDE, who is too lachrymose to be a cheerful feature, is wisely placed on guard at the outer door. The company proceed to play at faro, the bank being the loser. There is a false alarm of police, and the game is suddenly stopped. The Banker, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... by heart a good while before I could find the time, in a hard-worked life, to write them down and try to make them clear and true to others. It has been a slow task, because the right word has not always been easy to find, and I wanted to keep free from conventionality in the thought and close to nature in the picture. It is enough to cause a man no little shame to see how small is the ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... of courts, and pompous crowning of kings and queens, grand and splendid as they are, have not such spiritual fragrance as these village queen-makings; soft glimmerings and shinings-through of the light of a better world—a world with which man, let conventionality disguise him as it may, always has ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... respectable in every way, should smoke cigarettes, seemed to Lesley to justify all that she had heard against her father's Bohemian household. She could not get over it. Sarah had got over this outrage on conventionality, but she was not yet prepared to forgive Lesley for having lived in ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... patent-leather shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy and home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that suit this region; and the frequenters of these paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or rubber boots, or bare-footed. The girdle of conventionality is laid aside, and the skirts rise ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... she had been to break through the conventionality which surrounded her—and it had required some nerve—so as to be able to come here alone, on this one of ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... She never would forget the look in that man's eyes. The look might have been in other men's eyes, but conventionality had always veiled it; she ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... noble, that anything she might say would be inane, tawdry, inconsequent; so she waited, patiently happy, taking no count of time, nor the sunshine, nor the lilt of the birds, nor even the dissolution of conventionality in the ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... it not very hard,' cried Sophy, 'that even you, who own all her excellences, should turn against him, and give in to all this miserable conventionality, that wants riches and station, and trumpery worldly things, and crushes down true love in ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... occasionally seditious, but always subtle intrigue, the constructive and progressive policy of the upper part of the town, near the railway bridge, being in direct opposition to the destructive statesmanship and constitutional conventionality of the lower residential quarter embracing the timber-yard, Elijah Square, and Aunt Martha's Soda Fountain. Naturally Jabez Puffwater, whose modest store stood figuratively and literally at the crossing of the ways, was always in a somewhat uncertain state of mind as to which side ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... the gods make mad those whom they would destroy has a significance not always considered. For when a man loses his intellectual equilibrium, a baseness of character which never broke through the crust of conventionality may be suddenly revealed; and when a wicked system goes mad, such depths of perfidy are disclosed as few imagined to exist. During the last two years, while our Southern sky has been aglow with the red light of the slave-masters' insurrection, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... personality, with a trait wholly foreign and out of place there. Now it is a soft voice and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing for a life of freedom and equality in a member of a royal family that has known nothing but sordid slavery for centuries. Or, in the petty conventionality of a prosperous middle- or upper-class community you come upon one who dreams—perhaps vaguely but still longingly—of an existence where love and ideas shall elevate and glorify life. In spite of her training, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... The change from fierce earnestness to this subdued conventionality of tone bewildered ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... symptoms as the temperature, the pulse and the rate of respiration, the learned pundit passes them over without a word. Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons would be a good one to write a sober and accurate treatise upon kissing. Her books upon "The Family" and "Fear and Conventionality" indicate her possession of the right sort of learning. Even better would be a work by Havelock Ellis, say, in three or four volumes. Ellis has devoted his whole life to illuminating the mysteries of sex, and his collection of materials is unsurpassed in the world. Surely there must ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... I discovered fairy glades in their depths, where the grass was thin and pale, and strong ferns grew about the roots of the trees. Sometimes Mr. Longworth would accompany me on my trips of exploration, and, happy in our youth and the gladness of summer, and forgetful of strict conventionality, we would spend long mornings together, writing and reading in an especially cosy spot at the edge of the woods back of the farm. Mr. Longworth was growing so strong that Wilson's position was almost entirely a sinecure, and he spent most of his ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... then resolved to give up her life to him, and to marry him as soon as might be. She believed in the autocracy of genius, and felt that she recognised her mission in the world—to follow and aid this maker of music. Separation from her husband was tame, but this was a horrifying breach of conventionality, such another as the Comtesse d'Agoult had smitten Paris with thirteen years before. But none the less, in April, 1848, she took her daughter and left Russia, after she had provided herself, by the sale of a portion of her dowry, with a sum, as La Mara says, of a million roubles—equal ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... home, and the WORLD dictates prudence; but I know your views on conventionality are those I too have learned to share, so will you come and see me before ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... a tall, and rather slender man, measuring almost exactly six feet, with sloping shoulders, and he stood so straight, as almost to be the personification of uprightness. No soldier was ever more erect, and this without the least stiffness or conventionality. His head was not large at the base, but high-crowned and finely arched. His eyes were magnificent, and can only be compared to Hawthorne's eyes, though not so clear. Marshal von Moltke had eyes like ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... island are before conventionality, and share some of the liberal features that are thought peculiar to the women of ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... "How be 'ee, my dear?" to any girl he chooses, and perhaps takes her arm for a few steps. Given half a chance, he snatches a playful kiss. They never seem to turn rusty with him. He has the primitive quality of knocking their conventionality to ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... given to the problems that will follow: thus, science as a whole is relative to the particular order in which the problems happen to have been put. It is in this meaning, and to this degree, that science must be regarded as conventional. But it is a conventionality of fact so to speak, and not of right. In principle, positive science bears on reality itself, provided it does not overstep the limits of its own ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Clarence, stepped from the train at the depot of the capital city of their State—which must, for obvious reason, be nameless—and were driven to the Young Ladies' Institute, where the girl was left, and as the adieus were being said it was explained to Cora that discretion and social conventionality dictated that her correspondence with young Rothsay should cease. Clarence stated that he would write to the youth and explain that the rules of the school, also, ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... charm of the fresh young voice that came down through the summer air from above, like a dove's note from a treetop, to apologize to Lawton's girl. The incongruity now was in forcing into this Arcadian incident anything savouring of conventionality at all. It had been so idyllic, this talk of the sun fairy and the cloud; so like a passage from an old book of legends, this dainty episode in the great, strong, Western breezes, under the great, strong, Western sky. Everything ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... 83} conformity, conformance; observance; habituation. naturalization; conventionality &c (custom) 613; agreement &c 23. example, instance, specimen, sample, quotation; exemplification, illustration, case in point; object lesson; elucidation. standard, model, pattern &c (prototype) 22. rule, nature, principle; law; order of things; normal state, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... spirits so irresistible, that Miss Hargrove found her own nerves tingling with pleasure. The episode was novel, unexpected, and promised so much for the future, that in her delightful excitement she cast conventionality to the winds, and yielded to his sportive mood. They had not gone a mile together before one would have thought they had been acquainted for years. Burt's frank face was like the open page of a book, and the experienced society girl saw nothing ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... gone, she reproached herself for having put such a question to him. At the pass things had reached, it was surely best for him to go through with his infatuation, and get over it. Whereas she, in a spasm of conventionality, had pointed him out the sure road to perdition; for the worst thing that could happen would be for him to bind himself to Louise, in any fashion. As if her reputation mattered! The more rapidly she got rid of what remained to her, the better it would be for every one, and particularly ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... sacrifice would probably be common. What the gods do and what their worshippers do in their service cannot according to Hindu opinion be judged by ordinary laws of right and wrong. The god is supra-moral: the worshipper when he enters the temple leaves conventionality outside. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the precise footprints in which every one else speaks, moves, walks, was the only evidence of honesty. What is a man's individuality worth, if it is to be trodden out in the treadmill tramp of senseless conventionality?" ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... autobiography Goethe has revealed to us that his works are fragments of a great confession. Moods of his pre-Weimar storm and stress vibrate in his Iphigenia—feverish unrest, defiance of conventionality, Titanic trust in his individual genius, self-reproach, and remorse for guilt toward those he loved,—Friederike and Lili. Thus feeling his inner conflicts to be like the sufferings of Orestes, he wrote in a letter, August, 1775, shortly after returning to Frankfurt from ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... take precedence of schooling," said Mrs. Sproul, as her mischievous old eyes snapped at Mrs. Cockrell's placid conventionality. "The correct order is for women to take husbands and then school children should be the inevitable outcome. They are not, however, in this day and generation, which is about to be ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... primitive raciness and produces none of the fine fruits of our civilization, a moral sense, honor and conscience. Danton has no respect for himself nor for others; the nice, delicate limitations that circumscribe human personality, seem to him as legal conventionality and mere drawing-room courtesy. Like a Clovis, he tramples on this, and like a Clovis, equal in faculties, in similar expedients, and with a worse horde at his back, he throws himself athwart society, to stagger ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... copied him.... His rules in art were: You shall see things as they are; and the least with the greatest, because God made them; and the greatest with the least, because God made you, and gave you eyes and a heart; he threw aside all glitter and conventionality, and the most significant thing in all his work is his choice of moments." Cimabue still painted the Holy Family in the old conventional style, "but Giotto came into the field, and saw with his simple eyes a lowlier worth; and he painted the Madonna, St. Joseph, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in her beauty, secure in her selfishness, strong over others' weaknesses, weighing accurately the deeds and words of men and women, recognizing all there was in position and tradition, seeing with her father's clear eyes the practical meaning of any divergence from that conventionality which as a woman of the world she valued, she returned again and again to the trembling joy of that intoxicating moment. She though of her mother and sisters, of Raymond and Garnier, of Aladdin—she ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... the fact that you belong to the royal family to interfere with your fun, Beatrice. If you want to wear a Mother Hubbard dress on the throne during hot weather, or mash a mosquito with your mother's sceptre, do so. Conventionality is a humbug and a nuisance, and I'd just as soon tell you right here that if I could have gone to your wedding and worn a linen coat and a perspiration, I would have gone; but to stand around there all ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... her cheeks with deathly pallor, and the smile, which occasionally played around her lips, seemed but a painful expression of mental suffering. Suddenly she raised her head, as if determined no longer to bear this constraint, or submit to the fetters of conventionality. ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... as it is, the prince of portrait painters. Titian paints nobler pictures, and Vandyke had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and temper; arid when you consider that, with a frightful conventionality of social habitude all around him, he yet conceived the simplest types of all feminine and childish loveliness;—that in a northern climate, and with gray, and white, and black, as the principal colours around him, he yet became a colourist ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the shrug-shoulder smile of critics at my sub-title—a Romance. There are canons and rubrics to be observed, it would seem, in the slightest action that a man attempts in this Great World's Fair of Conventionality, whose every sideshow is hedged around with the red-tape of the Law. Witness even that delusive proverb—there is honour amongst thieves. So is there an unwritten canon in literature and the making of books, that a Romance must end with a phrase ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... stomach, with a lofty forehead, with a smooth double chin resting pulpily on a white cravat. Everything in harmony about him except his eyes, and these were so sharp, bright and resolute that they seemed to contradict the bland conventionality which overspread all the rest of the man. Eyes with wonderful intelligence and self-dependence in them; perhaps, also, with something a little false in them, which I might have discovered immediately under ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... step. Orde followed at full speed. When the bottom was reached, he steadied her to a halt. She shook herself, straightened her hat, and wound the veil around it. Her whole aspect seemed to have changed with the descent into the conventionality of the village street. The old, gentle though capable and self-contained reserve had returned. She moved ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... group passages where the Gospels tell of Jesus surprising or shocking his disciples—startling them by some act or some opinion, for which they were not prepared, or which was contrary to common belief or practice—passages, too, where he blames or criticizes them for conventionality ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... friend, you shut up," said the dragon severely. "Believe me, St. George," he went on, "there's nobody in the world I'd sooner oblige than you and this young gentleman here. But the whole thing's nonsense, and conventionality, and popular thick-headedness. There's absolutely nothing to fight about, from beginning to end. And anyhow I'm not going to, ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... in our isolation upon those Yorkshire moors from the trammels of conventionality (one might almost say, civilization!), that I think we should have come to begrudge the ordinary interchange of the neighbourly courtesies of life, but for occasional lectures from Mrs. Arkwright, and for going out visiting from time ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Ei! ei! "The devil has long arms." He recalled this saying of the Siberian priests and the mad Cossack answer: "Therefore let us ride fast!" The swaying of the yacht was like the rhythmic motion of his Arab through the long grass beyond the Dnieper, in that wild land where conventionality and laws were ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... and commonplace, which, it must be confessed, makes it almost as hard to read a good many of his verses as to consume large quantities of suet pudding, and has probably destroyed his popularity with the present generation. Still, Crabbe's influence was powerful as against the old conventionality. He did not, like his predecessors, write upon the topics which interested 'persons of quality,' and never gives us the impression of having composed his rhymes in a full-bottomed wig or even in a Grub Street garret. He has gone out into country fields and village lanes, and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Mrs. ——'s disposition; or, at least, I would fain have her power of self- control and concealment; but I would not take her artificial habits and ideas along with her composure. After all I should prefer being as I am. . . You do right not to be annoyed at any maxims of conventionality you meet with. Regard all new ways in the light of fresh experience for you: if you see any honey gather it." . . . "I don't, after all, consider that we ought to despise everything we see in the world, merely because it is not what we are ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... here—in your house—hating. I'll make it so easy. It's done every day, only we don't happen to hear of it. That's what makes our kind the marrow of society. We're too immorally respectable to live honestly. We build a shell of conventionality over the surface of things and rot underneath. Nature doesn't care how she uses us. It's the next generation concerns her. She has to drug us or we couldn't endure. We're drugged on respectability. On a few of us the drug won't react. I'm one. Let me ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... able to see now that her pale composure was maintained only by an effort, that the strain of it was making her tremble. He answered in tones of careful conventionality. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... perform the greater service—that of presenting the fresh-coloured, discreetly-smiling vision called 'the typical English girl.' Miss Heriot fulfilled to a nicety the requirements of those who are sensibly reassured by the spectacle of careful conventionality allied to feminine charm—a pleasant conversability that may be trusted to soothe and counted on never to startle. Hermione would almost as soon have stood on her head in Piccadilly as have said anything original, though to her private consternation such perilous ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... was really learning woman, and so clear was Labiskwee's soul, so appalling in its innocence and ignorance, that he could not misread a line of it. All the pristine goodness of her sex was in her, uncultured by the conventionality of knowledge or the deceit of self-protection. In memory he reread his Schopenhauer and knew beyond all cavil that the sad philosopher was wrong. To know woman, as Smoke came to know Labiskwee, was to know that all ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... Senate. As the third person of the Jacobin brotherhood, Lyman Trumbull had always been out of place. He had gone wrong not from perversity of the soul but from a mental failing, from the lack of inherent light, from intellectual conventionality. But he was a good man. One might apply to him Mrs. Browning's line: "Just a good man made a great man." And in his case, as in so many others, sheer goodness had not been sufficient in the midst of a revolution to save his soul. To ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... shoots of everlastingness—this is what they looked like to him, afire with enthusiasm and the setting sun—in such a place of ink. If the plan, owing to the extreme youth of the Annas, were unconventional, conventionality could be secured by giving a big enough salary to a middle-aged lady to come and preside. He himself would hover beneficently in the ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... not in him alone that I find this fault, but in nearly all foreign actors. There seems to be a limit of passion within which they remain true in their rendering of nature; but beyond that limit they become transformed, and take on conventionality in their intonations, exaggeration in their gestures, and mannerism in their bearing. I left my box saying to myself: "I too can do Hamlet, and I will try it!" In some characters Irving is exceptionally fine. I am convinced that it would be difficult to interpret Shylock or Mephistopheles better ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... of parade uniform or the accurate and irreproachable evening dress of civilization. There is not a man in the group who is not quite at his ease in ball-room attire; most of them have held acquaintance time and again with the white tie and stiff "choker" of conventionality, but the average gallant of metropolitan circles would turn up his supercilious nostrils at the bare suggestion were he to see them now. The —th is in its element, however, for the order has come, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... movements were always picturesque, and in the presence of Englishmen he had a habit of accentuating those characteristics of speech and manner which are held by our countrymen to be native to the Peninsula. There is nothing so disarming as conventionality—and nothing less suspicious. Larralde seemed ever to be a typical Spaniard—indolently polite, gravely ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... her—even the friends of the robbed girl, for that presupposes some lack in her charm, and gives publicity to her loss. The wronged girl, because of her pride and conventionality and civilization, makes no outcry. A barbarian in her place would have fallen on the robber girl in a fury and scratched her eyes out. Sometimes I am sorry that our barbaric days ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... impossible to keep it down. And he was ashamed of it—ashamed of the thought that for an instant was in his mind. The soul of the wild, little mountain creature was in her eyes. Her lips made no concealment of its thoughts or its emotions, pure as the blue skies above them and as ungoverned by conventionality as the winds that shifted up and down the valleys. She was a new sort of being to him, a child-woman, a little wonder-nymph that had grown up with the flowers. And yet not so little after all. He had noticed that the top of her shining head came ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... lesson of Die Meistersinger. Down in Nuremberg they had standardized and conventionalized music. They had set it down in rules and men like Beckmesser could not imagine that there was any music permissible outside the regulations. Then came Walter von Stolzing. Music to him was not a conventionality but a passion—not a rule, but a life—and, when he sang, his melodies reached heights of beauty that Beckmesser's rules did not provide for. It was Walter von Stolzing who sang the Prize Song, and as the hearts of the people were stirred ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... very generally) was to reform the whole structure of opera, using the last or "Beethoven" development of instrumental music as a basis, and freeing it from the fetters which conventionality had imposed, in the shape of set forms, accepted arrangements, and traditional concessions to a style of singing now happily almost extinct. The one canon was to be dramatic fitness. In this "Art Work of the Future," as he called it, the interest of the drama is to depend not entirely ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... always well-shaved; as neat as a billiard-ball. In the daytime, when he is partly porter, he wears a black tie, a gray waistcoat broadly striped with scarlet, and, from waist to feet, a white apron like a skirt, and so competently encircling that his trousers are of mere conventionality and no real necessity; but after six o'clock (becoming altogether a maitre d'hotel) he is clad as any other formal gentleman. At all times he wears a fresh table-cloth over his arm, keeping an exaggerated pile of them ready at hand on a ledge in one of the little bowers of the courtyard, ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... came to the soul of the young musician we know not. But his genius thus directed knew no pause until it had won forever the freedom of the tonal art, until the last fetter of conventionality had been removed, until in all dignity and beauty music came forth, henceforth to comfort and solace the human heart. But of this anon. We trace the young boy to school; we see him a chorister in the choir of St. Michael's, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... farther from him, holding by the trunk of a dead tree, her face turned towards the water. The black sough of wind from it lifted her hair, and dampened her forehead. The man's brain grew clearer, stronger, somehow, as he looked at her; as thought does in the few electric moments of life when sham and conventionality crumble down like ashes, and souls stand bare, face to face. For the every-day, cheery, unselfish Grey of the coarse life in yonder he cared but little; it was but the husk that held the woman whose nature grappled with his own, that some day would take it with her to the Devil or to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... as having been carried on, on her part, according to her best knowledge of befitting dignity; but, unfortunately for her, the young American was of an outspoken disposition, and utterly untrammelled by those instincts of conventionality which Eliza had, not by training, but by inheritance from her law-abiding and custom-loving ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... morning of Fort Lamarie and Kit Carson, he had decided upon the career of a "scout," as being more accessible and requiring less water. Yet, out of compassion for Susy's possible ignorance, he said neither, and responded with the American boy's modest conventionality, "President." It was safe, required no embarrassing description, and had been approved by benevolent old gentlemen with ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... hard at first. Dr. Hubers did not rouse himself to more than the merest conventionality, and all the rest of it was left to his wife, who, however, rose to the situation with a superb graciousness. Finally they touched a topic which roused Karl. His mind reached out to it with his old ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... beings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend, bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, and no good point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair belong ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... discovered. He was in good circumstances, and always glad to receive us at his house, as this made him, virtually, the chief of our tribe, and the outlay for refreshments involved only the apples from his own orchard and water from his well. There was an entire absence of conventionality at our meetings, and this, compared with the somewhat stiff society of the village, was really an attraction. There was a mystic bond of union in our ideas: we discussed life, love, religion, and the future state, not only with the utmost candor, but with a warmth of feeling which, in ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor |
