"Gaucherie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... next see you, do not let me go on and on to my confusion about matters I am more or less ignorant of, but always ignorant. I tell you plainly I only trench on them, and intrench in them, from gaucherie, pure and respectable ... I should certainly grow instructive on the prospects of hay-crops and pasture-land, if deprived of this resource. And now here is a week to wait before I shall have any occasion to relapse ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... hero had passed a most gratifying remark on the subject of the local gendarmery; while in his conversation with the Vice-Governor and the President of the Local Council (neither of whom had, as yet, risen above the rank of State Councillor) he had twice been guilty of the gaucherie of addressing his interlocutors with the title of "Your Excellency"—a blunder which had not failed to delight them. In the result the Governor had invited him to a reception the same evening, and certain other officials had followed suit by inviting him, one ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... education and good breeding, but what particularly impressed his employer in his favor was a certain natural reserve which caused him to hold himself aloof from his associates in the offices of Mainwaring & Co., and an innate refinement and delicacy which kept him, under all circumstances, from any gaucherie on the one hand, or undue familiarity on the other; he was always respectful but never servile. He had been in the employ of Hugh Mainwaring for a little more than a year, and, having frequently accompanied him to Fair Oaks to remain for a day or ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... they are not: because it is only the Balance which can keep you on the right path; strength without the beauty sense,—yes, even fortitude, strength of will,—turns at the touch of quickening time and new and vaster conditions, into gaucherie, disproportion, brutality; ay, it is not strength:—the saving quality of strength, morale, dribbles out and away from it: only the Balance is true strength. The empires that were founded upon uncompassion, through they swept the world ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... La Gaucherie, one of the preceptors of Henry IV. having found that he had to do with a young prince of an impatient mind, and active genius, little suited to sedentary studies, instead of compelling his pupil to read, taught him by means of conversation: ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth |
