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More "Scoff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sumptuous furniture, equipage, and apparel, though without taste or discernment; they indulged their criminal passions to the most scandalous excess; their discourse was the language of pride, insolence, and the most ridiculous ostentation; they affected to scoff at religion and morality, and even to set heaven at defiance. The earl of Nottingham complained in the house of lords of the growth of atheism, profaneness, and immorality; and a bill was brought in for suppressing blasphemy and profaneness. It contained several articles seemingly calculated to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... know what scorn and obloquy and denunciation await that man who stands unawed before it, seeing in it but an ugly little idol. And I guess what will be dealt out to him who not only refuses to bow the head, but openly scoffs. And yet I am going to scoff and say ugly words about this fetish of ours. I am going to say that it represents ignorance, hides and causes hypocrisy, stands in the way of progress, drags low the standard of individual excellence, perpetuates ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... baffled, angry, selfish man, at whose mercy she would be, with only one word to speak in self-defense and justification; and it was much to be feared that he would, considering the circumstances, reject and scoff at even that. The one word was—she loved him! and, if there be any redeeming virtue in it, let her, in Heaven's name, have the benefit thereof. She ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... says he—to which I, who must prate, Answered, "Yes, Sir, but changeable rather, of late." He took it, I fear, for he lookt somewhat gruff, And handled his new pair of whiskers so rough, That before all the courtiers I feared they'd come off, And then, Lord, how Geramb[2] would triumphantly scoff! ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... from the millions which your steps have bowed? Think ye, ye hold in your ignoble thrall, Mind, soul, thought, taste, hope, feeling, valor, all? No; these unfettered scorn your nerveless hand, Sport at their will, and scoff at your command, Range through arcades of shadow-brooding palms, Snuff their free airs and breathe their floating balms, Or bolder still, on fancy's fiery wing—[22] Caught from their letters at the noon-day spring— With star-eyed science, and her seraph ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... it in the pages of a novel. In endeavouring to depict the characters of the persons of whom I write, I am to a certain extent forced to speak of sacred things. I trust, however, that I shall not be thought to scoff at the pulpit, though some may imagine that I do not feel all the reverence that is due to the cloth. I may question the infallibility of the teachers, but I hope that I shall not therefore be accused of doubt as to ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... jerk he flung the linen napkin on the floor, and, dropping the hand which had shaded his face, turned to La Mothe with what seemed a challenge in his eyes, almost a defiance: it was as if he said, Scoff if you dare! And yet in the little heap of interwoven, fine steel rings there was nothing to move either laughter or contempt, and if the quaint velvet mask which lay beside the coat of mail was effeminate in the tinsel of its gold embroidery, it was at least no child's toy to ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... kinds of knowledge in use: the knowledge of arms, and the knowledge of books. The first is the scoff if the wise, whilst the last ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... all! caps off! Old Blue-light's going to pray. Strangle the fool that dares to scoff! Attention! 'tis his way! Appealing from his native sod In forma pauperis to God; "Lay bare Thine arm—stretch forth Thy rod! Amen!" ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... religion to the stage. Mr. Martyn had lived in London and his love of music had taken him to the Continent, but he had been something of a Nationalist, whereas Mr. Moore had lost few opportunities to scoff at the country his father had striven so unselfishly to aid. What of Mr. Moore that was not French in 1899 ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Why how now, saucy Jade; Sure the Wench is tipsy! How can you see me made [To him. The Scoff of such a Gipsy? ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... castle of dreams, a fortress of holiness in the very center of wilderness barbarity and cruelty unspeakable. The multitudinous voices of traffic shriek where the crusaders' hymn rose that May night. A great city has risen on the foundations which these dreamers laid. Let us not scoff too loudly at their mystic visions and religious rhapsodies! Another generation may scoff at our too-much-worldliness, with our dreamless grind and visionless toil and harder creeds that reject everything which cannot be computed in the terms of traffic's ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... like me Win thee back again? With the joyous and the free Thou wilt scoff at pain. Spirit false! thou hast forgot All but ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... so——, but I cannot trust myself with such anticipations. I am well aware how little the world sympathises with the man whose fortunes are the sport of his temperament—that April-day frame of mind is ever the jest and scoff of those hardier and sterner natures, who, if never overjoyed by success, are never much depressed by failure. That I have been cast in the former mould, these Confessions have, alas! plainly proved; but that I regret it, I fear also, for my character ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... word. He was haunted by the morbid idea that decadence must inevitably succeed a certain degree of progress: and he trembled lest the lovely art, which made him love life, should stop short, and dry up, and disappear into the ground. Christophe would scoff at such pusillanimous ideas. In a spirit of contradiction he would pretend that nothing had been done before he appeared on the scene, and that everything remained to be done. Olivier would instance French music, which seemed to have reached a point of perfection and ultimate civilization ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Doctor Watson. We are wont to scoff in a patronizing manner at that humble follower of the great investigator; but as a matter of fact we should have been just as dull ourselves. We should not even have risen to the modest height of a ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... fancy, until at last it became something quite different from the original paradox, and full of truth and wisdom. But when such a paradox went off in a letter, there it remained unqualified; and they who, not having known him, scoff at his friends who claim for him the honours of a great critic, ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... was every so neglected and insulted, so generally ignored, as this very Deity to whom you ascribe unlimited power, and from whom you say you receive life and everything. An eastern despot would take off the heads of those who treated him in such a style; and a republican politician would scoff at the idea of giving office to such lukewarm followers. Why, here in Christian Chicago the will of God is no more heeded by the majority than that of the Emperor of China, and the Bible might as well be the Koran. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... and a [glass] [howl], and a [toast] [scoff], and a [cheer] [sneer], For all [the good wine, and we've some of it here] [strychnine and whiskey, and ratsbane and beer] In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall, [Long live the gay servant that laughs for us all!] ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... incisive philosophy. Perhaps, however, this influence led to lack of faith in his own work, to his loss of an ideal, which Zola thinks the real secret of his sudden change from novelist to journalist. Voltaire taught him to scoff and disbelieve, to demand "a quoi bon?" and that took the heart out of him. He was rather fond of exposing abuses, a habit that appears in those witty letters to the Gaulois which in 1878 obliged him to suspend that journal. His was a positive mind, interested ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of course they will. You surely cannot suppose I should, in cold blood, sit down to write a story in which nobody was to fall in love or be in love! Sir, scoff as you may, love is the one vital principle in all romance. Not only does your cheek flush and your eye sparkle, till "heart, brain, and soul are all on fire," over the burning words of some Brontean Pythoness, but when you open the last thrilling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... with Fortune an eternal war, Checked by the scoff of Pride, by Envy's frown, And ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... who can tell how hard it is to climb The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar? Ah! who can tell how many a soul sublime Has felt the influence of malignant star, And waged with Fortune an eternal war— Check'd by the scoff of Pride, by Envy's frown, And Poverty's unconquerable bar— In life's low vale remote has pined alone, Then dropp'd into the grave, unpitied ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... world-weary, you care for nothing. You have drained philosophy to the dregs, and scoff at everything." ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... to relieve the tedium of my two hours on the lee side of the poop. I found Welsh John sitting on the main-hatch and disposed to yarn. He had been the most intimate with Duncan, harkening to his queer tales of the fairies in Knoidart when we others would scoff, and naturally the talk came round ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... among the maidens, Gay with paint and decked with feathers, She would look on him with kindness That the others might not scoff him; She would smile upon his weakness, Though she did not wish ...
— The White Doe - The Fate of Virginia Dare • Sallie Southall Cotten
... not believe in the power of Siva or of his servants.. They call his messengers imposters, and scoff at them when they speak of the ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... Hoi! come kite! Hoi! come erne from off the fen! You followed us, and we fed you well, when Swend Forkbeard brought us over the sea. Follow us now, and we will feed you better still, with the mongrel Frenchers who scoff at the tongue of their forefathers, and would rob their nearest kinsman of land and lass. Hoi! Swend's men! Hoi! Canute's men! Vikings' sons, sea-cocks' sons, Berserkers' sons all! Split up the war-arrow, and send it round, and the curse ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... water off, Or folk be cutting weed, While he doth at misfortune scoff, From every trouble freed. Or else he waiteth for a rise, And ne'er a rise may see; For why, there are not any ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... ever without such cause from you, as I will not suppose possible, you find my affections veering but a point, may I become a proverbial scoff for ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... to turn aside this appeal which I now make to you with a laugh or a sneer. This is the Lord's word, and the word of the Lord is not to be put aside with a sneer. Do not scoff at this as a water of salvation. You certainly will not scoff at the word of ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... kept asking me if I was willing to do all the Prophet required. I said I was sure of it, thinking they meant to be good and worshipful. Then they would ask if I was ready to take counsel, and they said, 'Many things are revealed unto us in these last days that the world would scoff at,' but that it had been given to them to know all the mysteries of the Kingdom. Then they said, 'You will see Joseph and he will tell you what ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... rail against money, Spurn its beneficent power; Bears spurn impossible honey, Foxes the grapes that are sour. Men, who can never be funny, Scoff at the funny man's dower; Lands where it seldom is sunny Find little praise ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... men of letters were attracted by them; musicians seldom. Nor did Mr. Innes encourage their presence. Musicians were of no use to him. They were, he said, divided into two classes—those who came to scoff, and those who came to steal. He ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Gentiles, and among their mighty men; and it shall come to pass that Darsie Latimer shall be delivered, even if it were at the expense of half my substance." And I said, "Nay, my brother, go not, for they will but scoff at and revile thee; but hire with thy silver one of the scribes, who are eager as hunters in pursuing their prey, and he shall free Darsie Latimer from the men of violence by his cunning, and thy soul shall be guiltless of evil towards the lad." But he answered and said, "I will not be controlled ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... may mildly scoff, That hard, afflicting churchyard cough Gives pretty plain advice, "Be off, While yet you can." It is not time yet, John, to doff ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... baned tyngue! Myrriades of neders pre upponne thie spryte! Maiest thou fele al the peynes of age whylst yynge, 515 Unmanned, uneyned, exclooded aie the lyghte, Thie senses, lyche thieselfe, enwrapped yn nyghte, A scoff to foemen & to beastes a pheere; Maie furched levynne onne thie head alyghte, Maie on thee falle the fhuyr of the unweere; 520 Fen vaipoures blaste thie everiche manlie powere, Maie thie bante boddie quycke the wolfome ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... great arch spans the vista of the Avenue, lined here with red brick dwellings and the sunny white bulk of the old Brevoort House. Far off, the sky-scrapers begin to loom, whipping out flags and steam plumes. It is a treeless vista, yet it is hazed with spring! Imagination, you scoff—and dust. Yet you look again, and it is not imagination, and it is not dust. It is the veil of spring, cast with delicate hand over the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the green 'bus now going under the arch feel it, too. These children screaming ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... among the poorer classes is every day on the increase. Most of the men manage to get on with their 1fr. 50c. a day. In the morning they go to exercise, and afterwards loll about until night in cafes and pothouses, making up with liquids for the absence of solids. As for doing regular work, they scoff at the idea. Master tailors and others tell me that it is almost impossible to get hands to do the few orders which are now given. They are warmly clad in uniforms by the State, and except those belonging to the marching battalions really doing duty outside, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... result of considerable deliberation. He had argued with himself and had made up his mind to find out for himself just what these people did. He was finding out, certainly. His motives were good and he had come with no desire to scoff, but, for the life of him, he could not help feeling like a criminal. Incidentally, it provoked him to ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... short coat or jacket; and in the performance of the public services some standing up at the Creed, the Gloria Patri, and the reading of the Gospel; and others sitting, and perhaps laughing and winking upon their fellow schismatics, in scoff of those who practise the decent order of the Church.' Irreconcilable parties, he adds, and factions will be created. 'I will not hear this formalist, says one; and I will not hear that schismatic (with better reason), says another.... So that I dare avouch, that to bring in a comprehension ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... therefore she would kill them all if she could and if she dared. She never seeks the houses of the Busnees but for the purpose of prey; for the wild animals of the sierra do not more abhor the sight of man than she abhors the countenances of the Busnees. She now comes to prey upon you and to scoff at you. Will you believe her words? Fools! do you think that the being before ye has any sympathy for the like ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... The father and son, in the Clouds, are evidently representatives of the generations to which they respectively belonged. Nothing more clearly illustrates the nature of this moral revolution than the change which passed upon tragedy. The wild sublimity of Aeschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides. Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of casuistry, and the dazzling fence of rhetoric, were substituted for poetry. The language lost something of that infantine sweetness which ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to these latter reigns of the Ptolemies, when high feeling was sadly wanting in all classes of society, when literature and art were alike in a very low state, that we may place the rise of caricature in Egypt. We find drawings made on papyrus to scoff at what the nation used to hold sacred. The sculptures on the walls of the temples are copied in little; and cats, dogs, and monkeys are there placed in the attitudes of the gods and kings of old. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... of the New Art, not to scoff, but in earnest desire for enlightenment as to this thing which is so near to consciousness and yet so far. ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... the scoff," said he: "Those were days of sin. I deserve every humiliation that can be put upon me. But I have since found the grace of God. I found it at three o'clock in the afternoon on the eighth of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... just what, in an elementary way, they need concerning the nervous system, the essential musculatures, and the epithelia, whose manifold activities are in some certain mode concomitant to the succession of compound mental events. Surely, and widely, those who a few years ago "came to scoff" at the ever-rising scientific stream of mind-protoplasm relationship will "remain to pray" to the rising and satisfying goddess of the new philosophy. The body with its unimagined intricacies and beauties of still unguessed adaptation ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... persons as both know and love their business. No human being[10] ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear too much of it in literature. The weather is regarded as the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And yet the weather, the dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in language, and far more human both in import and suggestion than the stable features of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds, and the ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... work and whatever its worth, No matter how strong or clever, Some one will sneer if you pause to hear, And scoff at your best endeavour. For the target art has a broad expanse, And wherever you chance to hit it, Though close be your aim to the bull's-eye fame, There are those ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... When the wondrous tale was ended, Looking round upon his listeners, Solemnly Iagoo added: "There are great men, I have known such, Whom their people understand not, Whom they even make a jest of, Scoff and jeer at in derision. From the story of Osseo Let us learn the ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... resumed at last, with strange gentleness, "insult me, scoff at me, overwhelm me with scorn! but come, come. Let us make haste. It is to be to-morrow, I tell you. The gibbet on the Greve, you know it? it stands always ready. It is horrible! to see you ride in that tumbrel! Oh mercy! Until now I have never felt the power of my love for you.—Oh! follow ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... white with foam and slaver; and the whole mouth, of yore so musical, grinning ghastly like the fleshless face of fear-painted death! Is that Voltaire? He who, with wit, thought to shear the Son of God of all His beams?—with wit, to loosen the dreadful fastenings of the Cross?—with wit, to scoff at Him who hung thereon, while the blood and water came from the wound in His blessed side?—with wit, to drive away those Shadows of Angels, that were said to have rolled off the stone from the mouth of the sepulchre of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the same temper and attitude. We sometimes see students destined for the Christian ministry also with all their religion so without root in themselves that a session in an unsympathetic class, a sceptical book, sometimes just a sneer or a scoff, will wither all the promise of their coming service. And so on through the whole of human life. He that hath not the root of the matter in himself dureth for a while, but by and by, for one reason or another, he is sure to ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... There is, however, probably no cause to regret this, for the author assures us that his new work is "as far above the two former in beauty as the sun is above the stars." If any light-minded person be disposed to scoff at him for this, let it be added that he has the grace to abstract the whole in the Avis au Lecteur which contains the boast, and to give full chapter-headings, things too often wanting in the group. The hero is named ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... never to be realized. And perhaps all was for the best; for we are all creatures of circumstance. Not one in a thousand follows out his plans through life. Half of our existence is imaginary; and wise-acres may scoff as much as they please at what they term 'castle-building,' I believe all mankind indulge in it more or less; and it is an innocent, harmless pastime, which injures no one. I consider it the 'unwritten poetry,' the romance of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... He looked so great and high, So noble was his manly front, So calm his steadfast eye,— The rabble rout forbore to shout, And each man held his breath, For well they knew the hero's soul Was face to face with death. And then a mournful shudder Through all the people crept, And some that came to scoff at him Now ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... for? and that you'll attend to your duties, and stand watch and watch, and bear your proper share of the ship's work, instead of leaving it all on the shoulders of a landsman, and making yourself the butt and scoff of native seamen? Is that what you mean? If it is, be so good ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... no, ma'am, be not afraid;—my father! how shall I meet him? how go back to Lyons? the scoff of the whole city! Cruel, cruel, Claude [in great agitation]. Sir, you have acted ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... from some source, and might have continued to scoff at religion to the last but for the experience of his intimate friend, a youth named Almond, whose life was changed by witnessing one day the happy death of a Christian believer. Decided to be a Christian himself, it was some time before he mustered courage to face White's ridicule ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... beauty of Israel for ever is fled, And low lie the noble and strong: Ye daughters of music, encircle the dead And chant the funereal song. Oh, never let Gath know their sorrowful doom, Nor Askelon hear of their fate; Their daughters would scoff while we lay in the tomb, The relics of ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... boast of your strength and power. See, you follow the motion of my hand, as a dog would. See, you kneel before me, and prostrate yourself in the dust at my feet, at my bidding. Lie there, and think well whether you are able to scoff any more. You kneeled to the king of your own will; you kneel to me at mine, and though you had the strength of a hundred men, you must kneel there till ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... Iskender blurted out the truth at last. "I know not how my patron would regard it. On him I depend entirely for the present. I have heard him scoff at all who change the faith that they were born in. Wait a little, I beseech thee, ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... supercilious, unprincipled ascendancy, for whom the public exists only as a prey to be destroyed, who keep themselves close and mark men's steps that they may lay in wait for them; who forge chains for their country, who distrust and belie the people, who scoff at the complaints of the poor and needy, and who impudently call themselves Ireland. You have made the sick and the lame to go out of their way. You have eaten the good pastures and trodden down the residue with your feet. You care for Ireland, and you mean by ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... Temple of Nemesis has been opened again," answered Socrates. "Aristophanes has never been ingenuous hitherto; now he is so with a vengeance. Very well, Aristophanes, I sympathise with you that you can no more scoff at me. I pardon you, but I cannot help you to stage your comedies. That is asking too much. Now I ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... obtain suffrage; but I know that these efforts must be to them, and are to us, a source of pride and glory, because they show that there is no part of our people which has remained indifferent to the great movements of the century. There are persons who scoff at them and many shrug their shoulders; but this must not discourage our women, because neither scoffing nor shrugging the shoulders are very weighty arguments. The same persons who now laugh at them and shrug their shoulders, probably because they do not know that the world ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... it, and hast thou forgot? Is thy praise in thine ears as a scoff? Blood of men guiltless was shed, Children, and souls without spot, Shed, but in places far off; Let slaughter no more be, said ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... "Scoff at Founders of Systems. And cry with a glow of fine enthusiasm, 'Here are errors and misleading statements in abundance in our contemporary's work, and to what end? To depreciate a fine work, to deceive the public, and to arrive at this conclusion—"A book that sells, does not ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... Mammon upon the throne of the world, and scoff at the God of heaven, who seeks the poor and needy, and who would in love lift up every son and daughter of the ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... scales. A butcher does all that sort of think. We just kills it, and cooks it, and eats it—and goes by guess. What won't keep we salts down in the cask. I reckon it weighs about a ton by the weight of it if yer wanter know. Mother thought that if she sent any more it would go bad before you could scoff it. I ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... one rushes into an office of philosophical, higher-critical professors, and cries, "Fire!" You would see those hard-boiled skeptics, if they believed the cry, rush unceremoniously and indecorously out of that building with all speed. People may scoff at faith working with lightning speed; but every exhibition of it only ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... certain people always grow splenetic— Why, goodness knows—at everything pathetic, And scoff it down. We all know how, of late, An unfledged, upstart undergraduate Presumed, with brazen insolence, to declare That "William Russell"(1)was a ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... me! I am a bachelor; I have not a single wife! Is that right towards a man like me?" If a woman gives physical expression to her anger at a man, she is sentenced to carry him on her back from the court of the chieftain to her own house. While she is carrying him home, the other men scoff at and jeer her; the women, on the contrary, encourage her with all their might, calling out to her: "Treat him as he deserves; ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... adventurers. The whole country was smitten with the fever of travel, and possessed with the lust for wealth and conquest. Men and women believed strange things of the wonderful western world, and they listened eagerly and without question to things their great-grandchildren would scoff at. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... harden'd heart forget the gallant youth; That hour allotted canst thou not escape, That dreadful hour, when Contumely and Shame Shall sojourn in thy dungeon. Wretched Maid! Destined to drain the cup of bitterness, Even to its dregs! England's inhuman Chiefs Shall scoff thy sorrows, black thy spotless fame, Wit-wanton it with lewd barbarity, And force such burning blushes to the cheek Of Virgin modesty, that thou shalt wish The earth might cover thee! in that last hour, When thy bruis'd breast shall heave beneath the chains That link thee to ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... up at ten o'clock—encamped to our joy—so here we are with "piled arms," "saddles off," and "horses picketed." As we came into camp we heard once again the Mausers of the snipers afar off. We have rigged up a sun shelter and have just dined, our "scoff" (Kaffir for "grub") being ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... ever-wandering mind went back to a scene in undergraduate days. It was the Corn Exchange at Cambridge, where the most famous of all American evangelists was holding one of a series of revivalist meetings. The great bare hall was packed with youths, who came, some to scoff and others to pray. The coarse-figured, bald-headed, brown-bearded man in black on the platform, with his homely phrase and (to polite undergraduate ears) terrible Yankee twang, was talking vehemently of the trivial instruments the Almighty used to effect His purposes. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... fuel to the flame. You were to have presented Matilda to my arms, more beautiful, more tender, more kind, than she had ever appeared. From this moment then, let the name of trust be a by-word for the profligate to scoff at! Let the epithet of friend be a mildew to the chaste and uncorrupted ear! Let mutual confidence be banished from the earth, and men, more savage than ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... be overcome by a counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of these years he was the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. Since then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... expelled; they peer over the shoulder, and tug at the hand which fain would write; they turn images upside down, and distort the thoughts; and here and there, from ceiling and wall, they grin, and scoff, and oppose: and what was just gushing as an aspiration from the soul, is converted to a ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... though not all, are commissioned with the rest, Heaven blesses, and Fortune aids the struggle: but where you send out a general and an empty decree and hopes from the hustings, nothing that you desire is done; your enemies scoff, and your allies die for fear of such an armament. For it is impossible—ay, impossible, for one man to execute all your wishes: to promise, [Footnote: Chares is particularly alluded to. The "promises of ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... and ceased to scoff. Money is a great dignifier, and Jim and 'Lias were making money. There had been some sniffs when the latter had hinged the front gate and whitewashed his mother's cabin, but even that had been accepted now ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... errors. The clumsiest thing a dramatist can possibly do is to lay a long and elaborate train for the ignition of a squib. We take pleasure in an event which has been "prepared" in the sense that we have been led to desire it, and have wondered how it was to be brought about. But we scoff at an occurrence which nothing but our knowledge of the tricks of the stage could possibly lead us to expect, yet which, knowing these tricks, we have foreseen from ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... cannot hold his tongue; he does nothing but scoff at their credulity, and when they reach the house the first thing he does is to go straight to the dining-room and tell the whole story to ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... sought to twine— And bade her minions mocking bow, With sweeter vows at pleasure's shrine— Or if I mirrored to the thought, With glorious truth the charms of earth, While yet the trusting fool I taught, To scoff at Him who gave it birth— Or if I filled the soul with light, And bore its buoyant wing in air— To plunge it down in deeper night, And mock its maniac wanderings there— I did but wield the wand of power, That God intrusted to my clasp, And not, the tyrant of an ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... were not English, and hated England, and all connected therewith, had yet much to say in thy praise, when thou wast far inferior to what thou art now, why should true-born Englishmen, or those who call themselves so, turn up their noses at thee, and scoff thee at the present day, as I believe they do? But, let others do as they will, I, at least, who am not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman, will not turn up my nose at thee, but will praise and extol thee, calling ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... The doubter may scoff, and the pessimist may croak, but even they must take hope at the picture presented in the simple and touching incident of eight Grand Army veterans, with their silvery heads bowed in sympathy, escorting the lifeless body of the Daughter of the Confederacy from Narragansett to ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... physicians scoff at the ancient authorities who dominated medical thinking for so many centuries. The seventeenth-century physician striving to reduce the frightful inroads that disease made into the colony at Jamestown may have ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... to scoff at this apparition as a heretical innovation, there was still the story of Concepcion, the Demon Vaquero, whose terrible riata was fully as potent as the whaler's harpoon. Concepcion, when in the flesh, had been a ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... cheeks as she spoke, and Wilhelm was not sufficiently blase to scoff at the doting nonsense of a love-sick woman. Love has enormous power, and at its heat all firmness, all resistance, melts away. Pilar's affection filled Wilhelm with heartfelt emotion and gratitude. He denied himself the right of judging her, suspecting or doubting her, or of discovering dark ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... itself with sneering, carping, and fault-finding; and is ready to scoff at everything but impudent effrontery or successful vice. The greatest consolation of such persons are the defects of men of character. "If the wise erred not," says George Herbert, "it would go hard with fools." Yet, though wise men may learn of fools by avoiding their errors, fools rarely ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the Free Gold Mining Company, his objection was likely to be based on substantial grounds. But then, as Brooks had observed, or, rather, inferred, Bill was not exactly an expert on finance, and this new deal savored of pure finance—a term which she had heard Bill scoff at more than once. At any rate, she hoped nothing ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... What right have I to judge others severely, do you suppose, when I must ask for indulgency myself? Or have you forgotten that I am a laughing stock to everyone, who is not too indifferent even to scoff?... By the way," he added, "did ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... And on his neighbour's worth presume; But still let Nature's garb prevail— Esop has left this little tale: A Daw, ambitious and absurd, Pick'd up the quills of Juno's bird; And, with the gorgeous spoil adorn'd, All his own sable brethren scorn'd, And join'd the peacocks—who in scoff Stripp'd the bold thief, and drove him off. The Daw, thus roughly handled, went To his own kind in discontent: But they in turn contemn the spark, And brand with many a shameful mark. Then one he formerly disdain'd, "Had you," said he, "at home remain'd— Content with Nature's ways ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... allies the affair may appear a trifle, father; and such white planters as cannot refuse to hear the tidings may scoff at them; but Jean Francais, a negro and a slave—is it possible that ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... his feelings to escape from his controul or management; his word was esteemed in the council as the word of wisdom; his warning of danger was regarded as the cry of the owl. Never did he mock the wretched, or laugh, or scoff at the insane; he was always respectful to the aged; and he daily cried to the Master of Life, from the high grounds, with clay spread thick upon his hair, and at every successful hunt offered, to the same Great Judge and protecting guide of man, the best part of the animals he had caught. That ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... fact, without change, we could have no cognisance of our surroundings, we should have no consciousness of living. We have become so accustomed to certain sensations that we are apt to take them, as facts, and scoff at the suggestion that they are non-realities. I propose, however, to show that what we perceive are not Realities, and true conception of our surroundings depends upon the knowledge which we can bring to bear to interpret the meaning of these sensations. ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... strain, and a mistake. It must come to Goldsmith's "travelling over one's mind," with power to travel no farther. Browning, too, had been "found out by Society"; was the guest at noble houses, and I suppose became somewhat lofty in his views. No one could scoff so loudly and violently as could Forster, at what is called snobbishness, "toadying the great"; though it was a little weakness of his own, and is indeed of everybody. However, on some recent visit, I learned to my astonishment, that a complete breach ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... to the sticks of the beadles. Nevertheless, oh Muse, if it be right to esteem the most honest and illustrious of our comic writers at his proper value, permit our poet to say that he thinks he has deserved a glorious renown. First of all, 'tis he who has compelled his rivals no longer to scoff at rags or to war with lice; and as for those Heracles, always chewing and ever hungry, those poltroons and cheats who allow themselves to be beaten at will, he was the first to cover them with ridicule and to chase them from the stage;(1) he has also dismissed that slave, ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... early Victorianism. She had obviously just come from one of those elaborate finishing schools in which the daughters of rich people are turned into hothouse plants by sycophants and parasites and sent out into the world the most perfect specimens of superautocracy, to patronize their parents, scoff at discipline, ignore duty and demand the sort of luxury that brought Rome to its fall. With admiration and amusement she watched her say good-by to one woman after another as the various tables broke up. It really gave her quite a moment to see the way in which Joan gave as careless and unawed ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... gone over in the training quarters, innumerable times; and this continues so long that by the time the "group" is ready for the stage, behold! the cubs with which the patient and tireless trainer began have grown so large that to the audience they now seem like adult and savage animals. Those who scoff at the wild animal mind, and say that all this displays nothing but "machines in fur" need to be reminded that this very same line of effort in training and rehearsal is absolutely necessary in the production of every military ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... years changed the aspect of things. As they grew up, and entered upon the world for themselves, all the older apprentices fell into habits of dissipation, and finally sunk into the drunkard's grave. But the little boy, at whose abstinence they used to scoff, grew up a sober and respectable man, engaged in business for himself, and a few years ago, was worth a hundred thousand dollars, and had in his employ one hundred and ninety men, none of whom used ardent spirits. All this came from his having courage to ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... light and glow of life wax dim in thickly gathering gloom, Shall mortal scoff at sting of Death, shall scorn ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... is Christmas day, But every holiday presents Its special round of play, And looking back on boyhood now And all the charms it knew, One day, above the rest, somehow, Seems brightest in review. That day was finest, I believe; Though many grown-ups scoff, When mother said that we could leave Our ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... fairness in him, and a little gleam of reason and morality left. To Morgan's relief and hope this man went further as he put his view of the case, even so far as to question their right to hang the granger at all. They clamored against him and tried to scoff him down, moving with drunken, scuffing feet near the spot where Morgan lay, as if to put ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... it, of course they will. You surely cannot suppose I should, in cold blood, sit down to write a story in which nobody was to fall in love or be in love! Sir, scoff as you may, love is the one vital principle in all romance. Not only does your cheek flush and your eye sparkle, till "heart, brain, and soul are all on fire," over the burning words of some Brontean Pythoness, but when you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... called Jewish Letters, published at Newcastle in 1746. (The Dublin edition of 1753 I have not seen.) Though d'Argens's purpose in Letter 35 may have been to advertise his own novel, what he had to say is interesting. Like many others, he could scoff at the heroic romances and yet borrow and quietly modify the doctrines of Ibrahim and Clelie. He proposed a still more "advanced" vraisemblance and decorum—psychological analysis tinged with ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... the outcome of the preceding Act. To whom is Berowne's line (V, ii, 477)—"Speake for yourselves, my wit is at an end"—addressed? How is the King brought to confusion? Is the Princess too hard upon him? Why does Berowne scoff so fiercely at Boyet? ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... of my book, To what thoughts shall't in alien hearts give birth. But, as he who doth love, and, loving, hopes, Yet, hoping, fears, fears to put proof to proof, And in his mind for possible proofs gropes, Delaying the true proof, lest the real thing scoff, I daily live, i'th' fame I dream to see, But by my thought ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... discussed Anarchist principles as opposed to those of legal Socialism. Nekrovitch and others often joined in the discussion, and very animated we all grew in the course of debate. Nekrovitch smiled sympathetically at my whole-hearted and ingenuous enthusiasm. He never made any attempt to scoff at it or to discourage me, though he vainly attempted to persuade me that Anarchism was too distant and unpractical an ideal, and that my energies and enthusiasm might be more advantageously expended in other directions. "Anyway," he once said to me, "it is very agreeable to a Russian to see young ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... They must hear the curse pronounced, and then depart into the world which has begun to grow thorns for them. Yes, sufferings after death. What is history but the story of punishment? When men scoff at what is called eternal punishment they forget, or, perhaps, have never given it a thought, that the punishment of the first crime is going on at the present moment. Thorns and briars are but parables. They are real, it ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... sects and schism, but who at the same time, as Milton shrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of their pontifical sleeves than the rending of the Church? Who shall now sneer at Puritanism, with the "Defence of Unlicensed Printing" before him? Who scoff at Quakerism over the "Journal" of George Fox? Who shall join with debauched lordlings and fat-witted prelates in ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers, after rising from the perusal of "Pilgrim's Progress?" "There were giants in those days." And foremost amid that band of liberty-loving ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... blurted out the truth at last. "I know not how my patron would regard it. On him I depend entirely for the present. I have heard him scoff at all who change the faith that they were born in. Wait a little, I beseech thee, until he ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... we fear not scoff or smile At meek attire of blue and grey, For the proud wrath that thrills our isle Gives faith ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... Lucagus bent forward in readiness for the fight, the Trojan javelin whizzed through the rim of his shield, smote him in the groin, and hurled him, quivering in the pangs of death, out of the chariot. AEneas assailed his dying ears with a bitter scoff: "It is not, O Lucagus, the slowness of thy steeds in flight that hath lost thee thy chariot, but thou thyself, springing from thy seat, hast abandoned it." So saying, he seized the chariot; and now the miserable Liger, extending his hands in supplication, begged for his life. "It was not in ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... listening to the exhortations of the priests, and ready, as might be seen from their earnest gaze, to suffer martyrdom in the cause. More, however, stood indifferently round, or, after listening to a few words, walked on with a laugh or a scoff; indeed, preaching had already done all that lay in its power. All those who could be moved by exhortations of this kind were there, and upon the rest the discourses and ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... Farwell could not speak. Once an inward desire to laugh, to scoff, would have driven him to supernatural gravity; now he merely smiled with grave ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... of Nemesis has been opened again," answered Socrates. "Aristophanes has never been ingenuous hitherto; now he is so with a vengeance. Very well, Aristophanes, I sympathise with you that you can no more scoff at me. I pardon you, but I cannot help you to stage your comedies. That is asking too much. Now ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... landlord, to turn from sport and religion to the stage. Mr. Martyn had lived in London and his love of music had taken him to the Continent, but he had been something of a Nationalist, whereas Mr. Moore had lost few opportunities to scoff at the country his father had striven so unselfishly to aid. What of Mr. Moore that was not French in ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... that greatness. Once disunited, we are no longer great. The nations of the earth who have looked upon you as a formidable Power, and rising to untold and immeasurable greatness in the future, will scoff at you. Your flag, that now claims the respect of the world, that protects American property in every port and harbor of the world, that protects the rights of your citizens everywhere, what will become of it? What becomes ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... as the world has rarely seen, that the powers of darkness were very near, and that behind those blackened walls there lurked evil forms. Twilight was coming on as we turned back to our car, and a cold mist was slowly rising from the river. I am not superstitious, and in broad daylight I will scoff at ghosts with anyone, but I should not care to spend a night alone in Termonde. One could almost hear the Devil laughing at the handiwork of ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... violence upon you, that a man should be able to say you were slain. You boast of your strength and power. See, you follow the motion of my hand, as a dog would. See, you kneel before me, and prostrate yourself in the dust at my feet, at my bidding. Lie there, and think well whether you are able to scoff any more. You kneeled to the king of your own will; you kneel to me at mine, and though you had the strength of a hundred men, you must kneel there till I bid ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... ablaze, And through the garden came a rushing wind Thundering a paean as of victory. Then that dead man came forth . . . oh, Claudia, If thou couldst but have seen the face of him! Never was such a conqueror! Yet no pride Was in it . . . naught but love and tenderness, Such as we Romans scoff at, and his eyes Bespake him royal. Oh, my Claudia, Surely he was ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... in silent scoff, Lay, grim and threatening, under; And the tawny mound of the Malakoff No ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... show up. [i.p.] play upon, play tricks upon; fool to the top of one's bent; laugh at, grin at, smile at; poke fun at. satirize, parody, caricature, burlesque, travesty. turn into ridicule; make merry with; make fun of, make game of, make a fool of, make an April fool of[obs3]; rally; scoff &c. (disrespect) 929. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... which he adored, had said its last word. He was haunted by the morbid idea that decadence must inevitably succeed a certain degree of progress: and he trembled lest the lovely art, which made him love life, should stop short, and dry up, and disappear into the ground. Christophe would scoff at such pusillanimous ideas. In a spirit of contradiction he would pretend that nothing had been done before he appeared on the scene, and that everything remained to be done. Olivier would instance French music, which seemed to have reached a point of perfection and ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... many scoff at this, because there are heathen who take this on them for gain, that they may trade more openly, or find profit among Christian folk, never meaning or caring to seek further into the faith that lies ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... consolingly. "It looked good to you, because you never thought of the chances of another raid being made on your aunt's opals. But perhaps you might have your mother go over and see Miss Alicia. She could mention what you thought, and even if the old lady did pretend to scoff at the idea, it would put a flea in her ear, so perhaps she'd keep an ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... must go there, and call the people to repentance, for the day of the Lord was at hand; and this message was as a heavy yoke upon me, so that I wept bitterly at the thought of what I should have to pass through. While I wept, I heard a voice say, "weep not, some will laugh at thee, some will scoff at thee, and the dogs will bark at thee, but while thou doest my will, I will be with thee to ...
— Memoir of Old Elizabeth, A Coloured Woman • Anonymous
... brought to a stand. He again called and whistled after his dog; he was only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows, sporting high in air about a dry tree that overhung a sunny precipice; and who, secure in their elevation, seemed to look down and scoff at the poor man's perplexities. What was to be done? the morning was passing away, and Rip felt famished for want of his breakfast. He grieved to give up his dog and gun; he dreaded to meet his wife; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... against the gate of Elvira when issuing forth so vaingloriously with his army, which he now saw clearly had foreboded the destruction of that army on which he had so confidently relied. "Henceforth," said he, "let no man have the impiety to scoff at omens." ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... impost is the smallest evil. They smite the tax-gatherer, but fall prostrate at the feet of the contemptible prince for whom the tax-gatherer plies his craft; they will even revile the troublesome and importunate monk, or sometimes they will scoff at the sleek and arrogant priest, while such is their infatuation that they would risk their lives in defense of that cruel Church which has inflicted on them hideous calamities, but to which they still cling, as it it were the dearest object ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... that they take their own amusement seriously. They base on it their serious ideas of international instruction. It was said that the Englishman takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He comes to scoff and does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. Hence in international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely consists of laughter; a form of friendship between ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... her, came with better grace from those who had the power to enforce them; and, with a brutal scoff, the Croatian bade her merit their indulgence by frank discoveries and voluntary confessions. He insisted on knowing the nature of the connection which the imperial colonel of horse, Maximilian, had maintained with the students of Klosterheim; and upon other discoveries, with respect ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Norbert may give in, he may marry another woman, and I shall be left alone, with my reputation gone, and the scorn and scoff of all the neighborhood." ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... protection against the emptiness. Around the fence stood vehicles of all descriptions, saddle horses, and a few ponies on which cowboys sat lazily, looking on. Even those who had come only for adventure were silenced. They felt the challenge of the land and were no longer in a mood to scoff. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... administration of affairs. And when these giovinastri, other people's boys, the scum of the gay world, flung their unsavory jests in the face of the old man who had no son to come after him, the silly insults so lightly uttered, so little thought of, the natural scoff of youth at old age, stung him to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... have been telling you of my ambitions! Mean of them! They might have known you'd scoff. All boys do, but I fail to see why if a girl has brains she should not use them as ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... I instead of we. In a word, a journal, with two or three hundred thousand francs, good, at the back of it, has just been started, with a view to making an opposition paper to content the discontented, without prejudice to the national government of the citizen-king. We scoff at liberty as at despotism now, and at religion or incredulity quite impartially. And since, for us, 'our country' means a capital where ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line, a succulent dinner every day, and the play at frequent intervals, where profligate women swarm, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... neighbours and voiced strangely radical sentiments concerning Life and its obligations. They were often startling, particularly as she made no secret of the fact that she and her husband never "got on." Between puffs of cigarette smoke she would scoff at the laws of marriage and speak with much leniency of divorce. Her sympathies were invariably with offenders, and Joyce thought her rather too fond of the society of men. Meredith feared and disliked her. The ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... horribly world-weary, you care for nothing. You have drained philosophy to the dregs, and scoff at everything." ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... there were some to scoff at the spirit who through all time, from the days of the Sibyl to those of the Witch, had filled and troubled the woman. They maintained that he was neither God nor Devil, but only "the Prince of ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... must provide for themselves. Another Spanish statesman expressed his doubt to them whether they were able to do so: he really thought England would one day become an apple of discord between Spain and France, as Milan then was. It was almost a scoff, to compare the Island that had the power of the sea with an Italian duchy. But from this very moment she was to take a new upward flight. England was again to take her place as a third Power between ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... delicate that the hearer lives over again the finely shaded mood of the poet. Take the words of a lyric for what they say, and they say nothing most of the time. And that is true of philosophers. You must penetrate the ponderous vocabulary, the professional cant to the insight beneath or you scoff at the mountain ranges of words and phrases. It is this that Bergson means when he tells us that a philosopher's intuition always outlasts his system. Unless you get at that you remain forever foreign ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... stranger. She therefore considered herself as having fallen a victim to love; and could she only save her daughter from a similar error she might yet by her means retrieve her fallen fortune. To implant principles of religion and virtue in her mind was not within the compass of her own; but she could scoff at every pure and generous affection; she could ridicule every disinterested attachment; and she could expatiate on the never-fading joys that attend on wealth and titles, jewels and equipages; and all this she did in the belief that she was acting the part ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... every flap of England's flag Proclaim that all around are free, From 'farthest Ind' to each blue crag That beetles o'er the Western Sea? And shall we scoff at Europe's kings, When Freedom's fire is dim with us, And round our country's altar clings The damning ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... yore so musical, grinning ghastly like the fleshless face of fear-painted death! Is that Voltaire? He who, with wit, thought to shear the Son of God of all His beams?—with wit, to loosen the dreadful fastenings of the Cross?—with wit, to scoff at Him who hung thereon, while the blood and water came from the wound in His blessed side?—with wit, to drive away those Shadows of Angels, that were said to have rolled off the stone from the mouth of the sepulchre of the resurrection?—with wit, to deride the ineffable glory of transfigured ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... justice wickedly, had degraded the Judiciary, and had degraded the age." Mr. Wilson followed Mr. Sumner in a somewhat impassioned speech, denouncing the Dred Scott decision "as the greatest crime in the judicial annals of the Republic," and declaring it to be "the abhorrence, the scoff, the jeer, of the patriotic hearts of America." Mr. Reverdy Johnson answered Mr. Sumner with spirit, and pronounced an eloquent eulogium upon Judge Taney. He said, "the senator from Massachusetts will be happy if his name shall stand as high upon ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Bourbons. Those who remain pious in that country (or, rather, we should say, in the capital, for of that we speak,) are unaffectedly so, for they have no worldly benefit to hope for from their piety; the great majority have no religion at all, and do not scoff at the few, for scoffing is the minority's weapon, and is passed always to the weaker side, whatever that may be. Thus H. B. caricatures the Ministers: if by any accident that body of men should be ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... general sickness which attacked the crew while lying in Plymouth harbor. The brief narrative of his sickness and death is all that we know of his personality. The writer says: "He was a proud young man, and would often curse and scoff at the passengers," but being nursed when dying, by those of them who remained aboard, after his shipmates had deserted him in their craven fear of infection, "he bewailed his former conduct," saying, "Oh! you, I now see, show your love ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... elsewhere; a glass of beer and a pipe don't cost much. And Heloise is such a house-wife, so thrifty, scolds me if I buy her a ribbon, poor love! No wonder that I would pull down a society that dares to scoff at her—dares to say she is not my wife, and her children are base born. No, I have some savings left yet. War to society, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... them. For this failure to respond where the subject happens to be one in which she has repeatedly given brilliant proofs of what she really can do, is embarrassing and humiliating, for then those who are only too ready to scoff merely feel their case strengthened. Indeed, it needs some determination to keep one's temper on such occasions, yet to "let oneself go" even for one moment—would mean weeks of painful and laborious uphill work in order to regain the dog's confidence. One is often ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... [scowl], and a [glass] [howl], and a [toast] [scoff], and a [cheer] [sneer], For all [the good wine, and we've some of it here] [strychnine and whiskey, and ratsbane and beer] In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall, [Long live the gay servant that laughs for us all!] [Down, down, with the tyrant ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... but at her words there burst from the depths of my being the voice of instinct, that voice which I had tried to stifle, almost unconsciously, by force of habit and training.... Oh, that blatant, piercing voice! It seemed to me to rend the darkness, to scoff at my heart and my sweet reasonableness! It was as though I saw all my kindly dreams of tolerance and indulgence fly into a thousand splinters! Never had I so clearly realised their brittleness. My anger was all the greater because it was still trammelled ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... power which brought ye here Hath made you mine. Slaves! scoff not at my will; The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark, The lightning of my being is as bright, Pervading and far darting as your own, And shall not yield to yours though coop'd in clay. Answer, or I will ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... of quizzing, or of staring out of countenance some preacher of rather more than usual energy and zeal, have known one of this band pierced by 'a dart from the archer,' convinced that religion is 'the one thing needful,' and though he came 'to scoff, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... scoff at me; shield yourself from me, if you can," said Zoroaster. "Lift one hand, if you are able—make one step from me, if you have the strength. You cannot; you are altogether in my power. If I would, I could kill you as you stand, ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... his childhood, and along with the elements he also was exposed to the evils of the hexerei. The hexerei, or witchcraft, was something that was never doubted or scoffed at by his people. Then why should he, a good Pennsylvania Dutchman, doubt or scoff at ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson
... explosion in the subway; to a remarkable dog-fight; to a village church struck by lightning. It will be said, more or less causally, by everybody in America who has seen Prince Henry do anything, or try to. The man who was absent and didn't see him to anything, will scoff. It is his privilege; and he can make capital out of it, too; he will seem, even to himself, to be different from other Americans, and better. As his opinion of his superior Americanism grows, and swells, and ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... his antagonist's ear with a sinister smile, "rotten manners! for just that, my buck, I'll make you scoff 'muffin' 'till you're ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... bishop murmured, 'Atheist! How sinfully the wicked scoff!' And sent the old men on their way, And drove ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... ter de load en fergit de distress, En dem w'at stan's by ter scoff, For de harder de pullin', de longer de res', En de bigger de ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... from little Tom. She felt that to look at him would be more than she could bear. There was no deceit in him, no falsehood—as yet; but perhaps when he grew up he would cheat her too. He would pretend to love her and betray her trust; he would kiss her, and then go away and scoff at her; he would smile, and smile, and be a villain. Such words were not in Lucy's mind, and it was altogether out of nature that she should even receive the thought: which made it all the more terrible when it was poured ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... it! cannot bear it!" he repeated. "You must bear it, madam. Do you suppose your child is to be exempt from the penalties of his birth? Do you suppose that he alone is to be saved from the upbraiding scoff? Do you suppose that he is ever to rank with other boys, who are not stained and marked with sin from their birth? Every creature in Eccleston may know what he is; do you think they will spare him their scorn? 'Cannot bear it,' indeed! Before ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... do scholars or physicians scoff at the ancient authorities who dominated medical thinking for so many centuries. The seventeenth-century physician striving to reduce the frightful inroads that disease made into the colony at Jamestown may have been handicapped by the erroneous doctrines ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... she said dramatically. "Look at 'em. They're yours, Miss Rachel—and covered with mud and soaked to the tops. I tell you, you can scoff all you like; something has been wearing your shoes. As sure as you sit there, there's the smell of the graveyard on them. How do we know they weren't tramping through the Casanova churchyard last night, and ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... deem myself presumptuous, as a young man, in offering advice, were it not addressed to one still younger. Mr. Townsend has the greatest difficulties to encounter; but in conquering them he will find employment; in having conquered them, his reward. I know too well "the scribbler's scoff, the critic's contumely;" and I am afraid time will teach Mr. Townsend to know them better. Those who succeed, and those who do not, must bear this alike, and it is hard to say which have most of it. I trust that Mr. Townsend's share will be from 'envy'; he will soon know mankind well ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... there is no life after this life'? Mankind! why should I love mankind? Hideous and misshapen, mankind jeer at me as I pass the streets. What hast thou done to me? Thou hast taken away from me, who am the scoff of this world, the hopes of another! Is there no other life? Well, then, I want thy gold, that at least I may hasten to make the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... from the cities, in a lone place where none came to scoff or criticize. When it was finished, I took my place and sealed the port by which I had entered. The Adventurer spurned the Earth beneath its cradles, and in the middle of the Twenty-second century, as time is computed ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... speech many of the band shook their heads, and said to themselves, "Now the Sheriff will think that we are cowards, and folk will scoff throughout the countryside, saying that we fear to meet these men." But they said nothing aloud, swallowing their words and doing as Robin ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... frail and past his prime, would rest with Macdonald. The presidency of the Executive Council, which was offered him, unless joined to the office of prime minister, was of no real importance. Some party friends throughout the country {40} would misunderstand, and more would scoff. He had parted company with his loyal personal friends Dorion and Holton. If, as Disraeli said, England does not love coalitions, neither does Canada. For the time being, and, as events proved, for a considerable time, the Liberal party ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... young and bold Marsk Stig, So stately stepped the threshold o’er; The Danish Queen so sharp and keen She straight began to scoff ...
— Marsk Stig - a ballad - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... the time of his canonization (1189), but from that time forward ambition, avarice, and luxury made such inroads upon the solitude of Grammont that its monks became the byword and scoff of the Christian world.[8] ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... money, Spurn its beneficent power; Bears spurn impossible honey, Foxes the grapes that are sour. Men, who can never be funny, Scoff at the funny man's dower; Lands where it seldom is sunny Find ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... is a Doctor Watson. We are wont to scoff in a patronising manner at that humble follower of the great investigator, but, as a matter of fact, we should have been just as dull ourselves. We should not even have risen to the modest level of a Scotland Yard Bungler. We should simply ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... come to the old habitation again: we shall see their differing conduct presently. When the three came back, like furious creatures, flushed with the rage which the work they had been about put them into, they came up to the Spaniards, and told them what they had done, by way of scoff and bravado; and one of them stepping up to one of the Spaniards, as if they had been a couple of boys at play, takes hold of his hat, as it was upon his head, and giving it a twirl about, jeering in his face, says he to him, "And you, Seignior Jack Spaniard, shall have ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... shall come from far; they shall fly as an eagle that hasteth to eat; they shall come all for violence; their faces shall nip as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand. And they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them; they shall deride every stronghold; they shall heap dust and take it." The Chaldaeans, recent occupants of Lower Mesopotamia, and there only a dominant race, like the Normans in England or the Lombards in North Italy, were, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... his picturesque way, like so many garden plots—the rectangular oblongs in a garden in which pot-herbs are grown—on the green grass, below the blue sky, by the side of the quiet lake. Cannot you fancy how some of them seated themselves with a scoff, and some with a quiet smile of incredulity; and some half sheepishly and reluctantly; and some in mute expectancy; and some in foolish wonder; and yet all of them with a partial obedience? And says John in the true translation: 'So the men sat down, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... the spiritual. In a word, America has not attained, or nearly attained, perfection. But below and behind and beyond all its weaknesses and evils, there is the grand fact of a noble national theory, founded on reason and conscience. Those may scoff who will at the idea of anything so intangible being allowed to count seriously in the estimation of a nation's or an individual's happiness but the man of any imagination can surely conceive the stimulus of the constantly abiding sense of a fine national ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... feelings to escape from his controul or management; his word was esteemed in the council as the word of wisdom; his warning of danger was regarded as the cry of the owl. Never did he mock the wretched, or laugh, or scoff at the insane; he was always respectful to the aged; and he daily cried to the Master of Life, from the high grounds, with clay spread thick upon his hair, and at every successful hunt offered, to ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... our failure to unriddle the enigma In the "rags" of rival towns was made a byword and a scoff, Till each soul in the community felt branded with the stigma Of the unexplained suspicion of poor ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... honest belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most tolerantly, most tenderly. As often as he spoke of religion, and his talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him, far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that he could persuade mankind to live and die without religion. Suppose he had proved to the world's satisfaction that all religion is a hoax, and all men professing it are liars, how does that comfort me in my hour of sorrow? Scoffing will not sustain a man in his solitude, when he has nobody to scoff at; and disbelief is only a bottomless tub, which will not float me across the dark river. If Infidels intend to convert the world, they must give us some positive system of truth which we can believe, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... almost, had assembled in the square, despite the increasing rain. Many had come to scoff. What a farce it all would be! They did well, however, to wait two days! The rain was almost over. It would probably stop by the time they got the ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the good Father said. And he was so careless a man, was M. Baldwin. And then with tears in his eyes the priest told Brice how, from the olden times when Baldwin, pretending to scoff at the efforts of the missionaries, had yet ever been their best ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... partaker of the soot himself. For what will you do if a man speaks about gladiators, about horses, about athletes, or what is worse about men? Such a person is bad, such a person is good; this was well done, this was done badly. Further, if he scoff, or ridicule, or show an ill-natured disposition? Is any man among us prepared like a lute-player when he takes a lute, so that as soon as he has touched the strings, he discovers which are discordant, and tunes the ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... hid in my girdle's folds. The Duke shall hear me. Patience. Trust in me." Somewhat the authoritative voice abashed, Even hoarse and changed, the miscreants, who feared Some strong curse lurked in this mysterious tongue, Armed with this evil eye. But brief the spell. With gibe and scoff they dragged their victims forth, The abused old man, the proud, insulted youth, O'er the late path of his triumphal march, Befouled with mud, with raiment torn, wild hair And ragged beard, to Vladislaw. He sat Expectant in his cabinet. On one side His secular adviser, Narzerad, Quick-eyed, sharp-nosed, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... a perito is a perrito (little dog)!" exclaimed Father Damaso, with a scoff. "One would have to be more of a brute than the natives, who erect their own houses, if he did not know how to build four walls and put a covering over them. That's all that a school ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... though you may mildly scoff, That hard, afflicting churchyard cough Gives pretty plain advice, "Be off, While yet you can." It is not time yet, John, to ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... Compton, with a scoff. "Failing nothing! You're a pair of young idiots. I'm good for twenty years more of hard work, but, as I told Harold, I would like to quit and travel, and I shall do so just as soon as I am convinced that ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the judge to say that?" asked the doctor, trying to scoff, but not a little pleased. "I'm sure I can't tell you, Mrs. Graham, only the idea has grown of itself in my mind, as all right ideas do, and everything that I can see seems to favor it. You may think that it ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... against it as we used to do in the Fourth Reader Class, when we all with one accord turned against "Teacher's Pet." Teacher's Pet might be dowered with all the virtues, but we of the commonality would have none of them. We chose to scoff at ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... off, Or folk be cutting weed, While he doth at misfortune scoff, From every trouble freed. Or else he waiteth for a rise, And ne'er a rise may see; For why, there are not any flies ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... seeing that Fyodor Pavlovitch was by no means touched, but, as usual, was beginning to scoff. At that moment Smerdyakov, who was standing by the door, smiled. Smerdyakov often waited at table towards the end of dinner, and since Ivan's arrival in our town he had done so ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Let no man scoff; lest he drives away the means of real information.—And let all men watch, for the increase ...
— Remarks Concerning Stones Said to Have Fallen from the Clouds, Both in These Days, and in Antient Times • Edward King
... The name of the Prince of Peace has been profaned by all kinds of injustice toward the Gentile whom he said he came to save. But I need not speak of what has been done towards the Red Man, the Black Man. Those deeds are the scoff of the world; and they have been accompanied by such pious words that the gentlest would not dare to intercede with "Father, forgive them, for they ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... economic. They have built up thriving trades under the Union. They have the closest business connections with Great Britain, and a mutual fabric of credit. They cherish sincere and profound apprehensions that their business prosperity will suffer by any change in the form of government. To scoff at these apprehensions is absurd and impolitic in the last degree. But to reason against them is also an almost fruitless labour. Those who feel them vaguely picture an Irish Parliament composed of Home Rulers and Unionists, in the same proportion to population as at present, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... not feel it. Sometimes I have spoken of these things to my mother, but she does not see as I do. I dare not tell my father all I think, and Juste is so much a creature of moods that I am never sure whether he will be sensible and kind, or scoff. One can not bear to be laughed at. And as for my sister, she never thinks; she only lives; and she looks it—looks beautiful. But there, dear Lucie, I must not tire you with my childish philosophy, though I feel no longer a child. You would not know your friend. I can not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Infallibility, concerning which, however, the differences were scarcely less or fewer than those which it was to heal; an Infallibility which taken literally and unqualified, became the source of perplexity to the well-disposed, of unbelief to the wavering, and of scoff and triumph to the common enemy, and which was, therefore, to be qualified and limited, and then it meant so munch and so little that to men of plain understandings and single hearts it meant nothing at all. It resided here. No! there. No! but in a third subject. ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... jeopardize our own souls, to remain poor if we cannot make wealth honestly. Say what you will, the Christian government we are approaching will not recognize property, because it is gradually becoming clear that the holding of property delays the Kingdom at which you scoff, giving the man who owns it a power over the body of the man who does not. Property produces slavery, since it compels those who have none to work for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... expression of bitterness. "Are you satisfied with your pupil?" she added. "I am progressing.... I laugh—when I wish to weep.... But you yourself would not have laughed had you seen the fervor of charming Fanny. She was the picture of blissful faith. Do not scoff at her." ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... who endured such sufferings for our sakes, and again bestowed such blessings upon us, him dost thou reject and scoff at his Cross? And, thyself wholly riveted to carnal delights and deadly passions, dost thou proclaim the idols of shame and dishonour gods? Not only hast thou alienated thyself from the commonwealth of heavenly felicity but thou hast also severed from the same all others ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... are recognized as exceptional. The city draws the village and rural family to itself, and the contagion of its customs and ideals spreads through the villages and affects the forms of living there. Youths become city dwellers and do not cease to scoff at the village unless later years give them wisdom to appreciate its higher values. The standard of domestic organization is established by the city; that type of living is the ideal toward ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... persuade Margaret (who, being sore From the doubts she'd felt before, Was prepared for mistrust) To believe her reasons just; Quite destroy'd that comfort glad, Which in Mary late she had; Made her, in experience' spite, Think her friend a hypocrite, And resolve, with cruel scoff, To renounce and ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... unaffected grace, His looks adorn'd the venerable place; Truth from his lips prevail'd with double sway, And fools, who came to scoff, remain'd to pray. 180 The service pass'd, around the pious man, With steady zeal, each honest rustic ran; Even children follow'd with endearing wile, And pluck'd his gown, to share the good man's smile. His ready smile a parent's warmth express'd, 185 Their welfare pleas'd him, and their cares ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... House of Lima Street; but inasmuch as she never thought about her appearance it would have been a waste of time for anybody to try to romanticize her. The civilizing effect of her presence in the slum was quickly felt; and though Lidderdale continued to scoff at the advantages of civilization, he finally learnt to give a grudging welcome to her various schemes for making the bodies of the flock as comfortable as her husband tried ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... cadets): Here are the rebels! Ay, Sirs, on all sides I hear that in your ranks you scoff at me; That the Cadets, these loutish, mountain-bred, Poor country squires, and barons of Perigord, Scarce find for me—their Colonel—a disdain Sufficient! call me plotter, wily courtier! It does not please their mightiness to see A point-lace ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... writer of The present poem—of—I know not what— A tendency to under-rate and scoff At human power and virtue, and all that; And this they say in language rather rough. Good God! I wonder what they would be at! I say no more than hath been said in Dante's Verse, and ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... us are asking, "What is the way out?" As for myself, I confess to being only a student. I have no word of sneer or scoff for any mail's honest thinking, who is sincerely trying to uplift his brothers and sisters; and yet I must say that, as yet, I have not been able to become a disciple of any of the new systems that have been presented. I feel something like the man who says, "There are good things to be said in ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... You killed a boy! (His Wife sobs. Man softly strokes her hair with his trembling hand) Don't cry, my dear, don't cry. He will scoff at our tears, just as He scoffed at our prayers. And you—I don't know who you are—God, Devil, Fate, ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... winter days are passing fair! As if a breath of spring Had permeated all the air, And touched each living thing With thankfulness for such a boon— Discounting with a scoff The almanac's report that "June Is yet ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... who scoff at all things it may be a great amusement to detect the secret of a woman, to know that her chastity is a lie, that her calm face hides some anxious thought, that under that pure brow is a dreadful drama. But there are other souls to whom the sight is saddening; ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... wish? What would I have? Is it my intention or my desire to make her wretched? What! Sink her whom I adore in the estimation of the world; and render her the scoff of the foolish, the vain, and ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... hated England, and all connected therewith, had yet much to say in thy praise, when thou wast far inferior to what thou art now, why should true-born Englishmen, or those who call themselves so, turn up their noses at thee, and scoff thee at the present day, as I believe they do? But, let others do as they will, I, at least, who am not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman, will not turn up my nose at thee, but will praise and extol thee, calling thee mart of the world—a place of wonder and astonishment!—and, were ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... is not interested in sin, or even immorality, but it is vitally interested in the effects of them. A person may stay away from church, but he must not scoff at the Holy Scriptures. He may bathe in the nude, but not at a public beach or near where persons are passing. A human model may be posed for an artist, but must not be exhibited ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... psychical unity of the race is becoming matter not only of emotional intuition, but established scientific fact: and no modern sociologist, no psychologist who realizes how unknown in origin and how intimate in interpenetration are the forces that control our destiny, can afford to scoff at her. She had longed inexpressibly for outward martyrdom. This was not for her, yet none the less really did she lay down her life on the Altar of Sacrifice. The evils of the time, and above all of the Church, had generated a sense of unbearable sin in her pure spirit; her constant ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... is a bitterly indignant protest against those who would suppress the dialect, against the regents and the rectors whom "we must pay with our pennies to hear them scoff at the language that binds us to our fathers and our soil!" And the poet cries out, "No, no, we'll keep our rebellious langue d'oc, grumble who will. We'll speak it in the stables, at harvest-time, among the silkworms, among lovers, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... care about any more, but if you will let me talk to you about something— See here, Anna. Yes, I mean Anna. What nonsense for us to attempt to keep up the Miss Moore and Mr. Sanderson business. I used to scoff at love at first sight and say it was all the idle fancy of the poets. Then I met you and remained to pray. You've turned my world topsy-turvy. I can't think without you, and yet it would be folly to tell this to my Governor, and ask ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... with jocular scoff unto Joseph Carnaby, thus accosting him, whom his shirt, being made stiffer than usual for the occasion, ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... Vicentio been inclined to scoff at this apparition as a heretical innovation, there was still the story of Concepcion, the Demon Vaquero, whose terrible riata was fully as potent as the whaler's harpoon. Concepcion, when in the flesh, had been a celebrated herder of cattle and wild horses, and was reported to have chased the ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... glitter of the comparatively large salaries paid to a few of us—such unreasoning envy as this is another; and the want of sympathy of some writers with the art itself, who, unable to pray with Goethe and Voltaire, remain to scoff with Jeremy Collier, is a third. There are causes from without that will always keep alive a certain measure of hostility towards the player. As long as the public, in Hazlitt's words, feel more respect for John Kemble in a plain coat than the Lord Chancellor on the Woolsack, so long will this ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... the creation, subjected to vanity for their sakes, find its freedom in their freedom, its gladness in their sonship. The animals will glory to serve them, will joy to come to them for help. Let the heartless scoff, the unjust despise! the heart that cries Abba, Father, cries to the God of the sparrow and the oxen; nor can hope go too far in hoping what that God will do for the creation that now groaneth and travaileth in pain because ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... leisure to attempt the consolidation of his little empire and the fusion of the jealous tribes which composed it. The low moral condition of his Arabs, who were for the most part thieves and cowards, and the rude individuality of his Kabyles, who would respect his religious but scoff at his political claims, made the task of the leader a difficult one. To the Kabyles he confided the care of his saintly reputation, renouncing their contributions, and asking only for their prayers as a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... the date of the Battle of Salamis. So I returned to S. Alfio and asked whether he always answers all prayers; they said the people believe he does or they hope he will. One of them, thinking I was inclined to scoff, rebuked ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... the temple laid His desperate hands, and in its overthrow Destroyed himself, and with him those who made A cruel mockery of his sightless woe; The poor, blind Slave, the scoff and jest of all, Expired, and thousands ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... satisfaction and happiness. It behooves the musician, therefore, to study the underlying bases of the community music movement, and to use this new tool that has been thus providentially thrown into his hands for the advancement of art appreciation, rather than to stand aloof and scoff at certain imperfections and crudities which inevitably are only too evident in the ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... I," continued Monsieur Bernard paying no attention to the expression in Godefroid's eyes, "even I, a child of the eighteenth century, fed on Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius,—I, a son of the Revolution, who scoff at all that antiquity and the middle-ages tell us of demoniacal possession,—well, monsieur, I affirm that nothing but such possession can explain the condition of my child. As a somnambulist she has never been able to tell us the cause of her sufferings; ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... it is Leroy would never do?" The voice carried a scoff with it, the implication that his very presence had ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... sees the gyves that bind mankind And strives to strike them off Shall gain the hissing hate of fools, Thorns, and the ingrate's scoff. ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... every power of my soul, gasps to mock you—you Gracious Monster on High. I tell you, I would, if I could, breathe it into every human soul, every flower, every leaf, every dewdrop in the garden! I tell you, I would scoff you on the day of doom, and curse the teeth out of my mouth for the sake of your Deity's boundless miserableness! I tell you from this hour I renounce all thy works and all thy pomps! I will execrate my thought if it dwell on you again, and tear out my lips if they ever utter your name! I tell you, ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... are sacrilegious, they are excommunicated, who impeach the magic of the past and the poison of tradition. And the thousand million victims themselves scoff at and strike those who rebel, as soon as they are able. All cast stones at them, all, even those who suffer and while they are suffering—even the sacrificed, a ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... made the discovery that they do not subsist entirely upon frogs. He has encountered real Germans, at sufficiently close quarters to realize that the "German Menace" at which his party leaders encouraged him to scoff in a bygone age was no such phantom after all. Altogether he is a very different person from the complacent, parochial exponent of the tight-little-island theories of yester-year. He has encountered things ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... Henry and Elizabeth had spared was demolished. In 1643 Chichester was besieged by Waller and taken after ten days. His soldiers, we read, "pulled down the idolatrous images from the Market Cross; they brake down the organ in the Cathedral and dashed the pipes with their pole-axes, crying in scoff, "Harke! how the organs goe"; and after they ran up and down with their swords drawn, defacing the monuments of the dead and hacking the seats and stalls." Indeed, such was their malice that it is wonderful to see how ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... but I cannot trust myself with such anticipations. I am well aware how little the world sympathises with the man whose fortunes are the sport of his temperament—that April-day frame of mind is ever the jest and scoff of those hardier and sterner natures, who, if never overjoyed by success, are never much depressed by failure. That I have been cast in the former mould, these Confessions have, alas! plainly proved; but that I regret it, I fear ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... kneel all! caps off! Old Blue Light's going to pray; Strangle the fool that dares to scoff! Attention! it's his way! Appealing from his native sod In forma pauperis to God Lay bare thine arm—stretch forth thy rod, Amen! ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... first offences needs must come! Even now[115:1] (Black Hell laughs horrible—to hear the scoff!) 160 Thee to defend, meek Galilaean! Thee And thy mild laws of Love unutterable, Mistrust and Enmity have burst the bands Of social peace: and listening Treachery lurks With pious fraud to snare a brother's life; 165 And childless widows o'er the groaning ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... shore hears Jule's views of me as a beau! They're hot enough to fry meat! Moreover, Jule tells all Sni-a-bar an' I'm at once a scoff an' jeer from the Kaw to the Gasconade. Jule's old pap washes out his rifle an' signs a pledge to plug me if ever ag'in I puts my hand on his front gate. As I su'gests, it rooins my social c'reer ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... taking upon himself the command, had found a letter of Demades's, formerly written by him to Antigonus in Asia, recommending him to come and possess himself of the empire of Greece and Macedon, now hanging, he said, (a scoff at Antipater,) "by an old and rotten thread." So when Cassander saw him come, he seized him; and first brought out the son and killed him so close before his face, that the blood ran all over his clothes and person, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... advanced,—even so far as to have entered into the conventional valley of dry bones,—one whom the world is preparing, by its daily practical lessons, to enlighten with unbelief. If we see them together, perhaps we shall hear the senior scoff at his younger companion as a poetic dreamer, as a hunter after phantoms that never were, nor could be, in nature: then may follow a homily on the virtues of experience, as the only security against disappointment. But there are some hearts that never suffer the ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... neighbours scoff, and her menace, But saddened friends grieve at her sore disgrace, Love, through their heart, in fervour rills, Each one respects this plaintivest of girls; And many a pitying soul a prayer said, That some great miracle ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... cynical, he was a perfect type of the Georgian courtier to whom loyalty, patriotism, honesty, and honor were so many synonyms for folly. He was effeminate in habits and appearance, but notoriously licentious; he affected to scoff at learning but made some pretense to literature, and had written 'Four Epistles after the Manner of Ovid', and numerous political pamphlets. Pope, who had some slight personal acquaintance with him, disliked his political connections and probably despised ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... would atone to her for it by my unwearying love. But," his voice mastered by emotion, "how dare I say such words to you? In the sphere in which you live they would be considered a dastardly insult—one must not dare to move one step from the beaten track of custom. The world would scoff at the idea that my love for you is more sacred and reverent than that of a man who, inspired by a momentary passion for a woman and desiring her, obtains his end by a simple and speedy means, without reflection as to the possible misery ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... tournament, Forgetful of his glory and his name, Forgetful of his princedom and its cares. And this forgetfulness was hateful to her. And by and by the people, when they met In twos and threes, or fuller companies, Began to scoff and jeer and babble of him As of a prince whose manhood was all gone, And molten down in mere uxoriousness. And this she gather'd from the people's eyes: This too the women who attired her head, To please her, dwelling on his boundless love, Told Enid, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... summer when Mr. Stephen Brice began to make his appearance in public. The very first was rather encouraging than otherwise, although they were not all so. It was at a little town on the outskirts of the city where those who had come to scoff ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... drudgery of the fields; in it he must live his life, and fulfil his mission. The more he wrote the more he accustomed himself with the idea of being an author. He knew that the critic-folk, deep read in books, might scoff at the very suggestion of a ploughman turning poet, but he recognised also that they might be wrong. It was not by dint of Greek that Parnassus was to be climbed. 'Ae spark o' Nature's fire' was the one thing needful for poetry that was ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... at Angelo for marrying Rosalina but he began to hang about his discarded mistress again and scoff at her choice of a husband. But Rosalina gave him the cold shoulder, with the result that he became more and more insulting to Angelo. Finally one day our client made up his mind not to stand it any longer, secured a revolver, sought out Tomasso in his barber shop and put a ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... remaining, of course, incurably "bright." I think I detect a certain amount of the too-British attitude that contemns what is strange and is more than a little scornful of poverty, official and private. And I suppose the artist's wife will scoff if I tell her that I was shocked that she should have taken some shots at the Austrians with a Montenegrin machine gun, as if war was just a cock-shy for tourists. But I was. If Mr. JAN GORDON found a good deal more colour in his subjects than we other fellows would have been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... married, being well advanced in years, having spent his youth in good fellowship, a great talker and a great jeerer, calling to mind how much the subject of cuckoldry had given him occasion to talk and scoff at others. To prevent them from paying him in his own coin, he married a wife from a place where any one finds what he wants for his money: "Good morrow, strumpet"; "Good morrow, cuckold"; and there was not anything wherewith he more commonly and openly entertained ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... innumerable times; and this continues so long that by the time the "group" is ready for the stage, behold! the cubs with which the patient and tireless trainer began have grown so large that to the audience they now seem like adult and savage animals. Those who scoff at the wild animal mind, and say that all this displays nothing but "machines in fur" need to be reminded that this very same line of effort in training and rehearsal is absolutely necessary in the production of every military company, every ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... Mercury, nor Jupiter we beg For a devouring despot, lank of leg, Of prying eye, and frog-transfixing beak; Though singly we seem weak, United we are strong to smite or scoff. Off, would-be tyrant, off!!!" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... of it. By all I hold most sacred and most solemn- By all my wishes now—my fears hereafter- By all I scorn on earth and hope in heaven- There is no deed I would more glory in, Than in thy cause to scoff at this same glory And trample it under foot. What matters it- What matters it, my fairest, and my best, That we go down unhonored and forgotten Into the dust—so we descend together. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a mercurial and nervous temperament, and this fact perhaps may account for the anomaly of a mountain-boy who was a poor shot. Andy was the scoff of Persimmon Ridge. ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and best, and highest that ever lived. Hearken, Mary! and do not scoff at me—nor scorn me. No, you can never do that, I know. My knight is far above me—so far, it may be, that he will never stoop so low as to give me more than passing signs of his good-will. But I have had these. He has shone on me with his ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... will be finished, when our national literature shall be so purified as to reflect a faithful and a just light upon the character and social habits of our race, and the brush, and pencil, and chisel, and lyre of art, shall refuse to lend their aid to scoff at the afflictions of the poor, or to caricature, or ridicule a long-suffering people. When caste and prejudice in Christian churches shall be utterly destroyed, and shall be regarded as totally unworthy of Christians, and at variance with the principles of the gospel. When the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... better to have had a head and lost it," he cried, "than never to have had a head at all! Mark you, Dryden, my boy, it ill befits you to scoff at me for my misfortune, for dust thou art, and to dust thou hast returned, if word from t'other side about thy books and that which in and ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... hear'st Men scoff at Heaven and Fate, Because the Gods thou fear'st Fail to make blest thy state, Tremblest, and wilt not dare to ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... book, To what thoughts shall't in alien hearts give birth. But, as he who doth love, and, loving, hopes, Yet, hoping, fears, fears to put proof to proof, And in his mind for possible proofs gropes, Delaying the true proof, lest the real thing scoff, I daily live, i'th' fame I dream to see, But by my thought of ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... of such a Reform, that I came to a determination within myself, never to cease from my endeavours to obtain it; being perfectly satisfied that, without an effectual and Radical Reform in the House of Commons, the boasted Constitution of England would soon become a mere mockery, and the scoff instead of the envy and ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... joy—so here we are with "piled arms," "saddles off," and "horses picketed." As we came into camp we heard once again the Mausers of the snipers afar off. We have rigged up a sun shelter and have just dined, our "scoff" (Kaffir for "grub") being ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... "Don't be angry, Avery! I'm not scoffing. I don't know enough about God to scoff at Him. Tell me! Do you ever get an answer, or are you content to go jogging on like the rest of ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... I went along the Street, I carried my Hat in my Hand, And to every one that I did meet, I bravely Buss'd my Hand: Some did laugh, and some did scoff, And some did mock at me; And some did say I was a ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... feeling. Doubtless, he also, whose blood received a mingling tide from his proud mother—he, the acknowledged focus of the kingdom's wealth and nobility, had been taught to repeat my father's name with disdain, and to scoff at my just claims to protection. I strove to think that all this grandeur was but more glaring infamy, and that, by planting his gold-enwoven flag beside my tarnished and tattered banner, he proclaimed not his superiority, but his debasement. Yet I envied him. ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... gunner, who was apt to scoff, With jokes most aptly timed, Said Sam might any day go off, ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... afield, and each night trooped merrily in through the gates with hopes of homes and clearings rising in our hearts—until the motionless figure of the young Virginian met our eye. It was then that men began to scoff at him behind his back, though some spoke with sufficient backwoods bluntness to his face. And yet he gave no sign of anger or impatience. Not so the other leaders. No sooner did the danger seem past than bitter strife sprang up within the walls. Even the two captains were mortal enemies. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the skies. Yet o'er her bright and beauteous brow Shade after shade is passing now, Like clouds across the pale moon glancing, As thought on rapid thought advancing, Thrills through the maiden's trembling breast, Not doubting, and yet not at rest. Not doubting! Man may turn away And scoff at shrines, where yesterday He knelt, in earnest faith, to pray, And wealth may lose its charm for him, And fame's alluring star grow dim, Devotion, avarice, glory, all The pageantries of earth may pall; But love is of a higher birth Than these, the earth-born things of earth,— ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... and Cassander, taking upon himself the command, had found a letter of Demades's, formerly written by him to Antigonus in Asia, recommending him to come and possess himself of the empire of Greece and Macedon, now hanging, he said, (a scoff at Antipater,) "by an old and rotten thread." So when Cassander saw him come, he seized him; and first brought out the son and killed him so close before his face, that the blood ran all over his clothes and person, and then, after bitterly ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... will the heavens smile as formerly upon our country. Why are the altars thus forsaken? Why are the temples no longer thronged as once? Why do the great, and the rich, and the learned, silently withhold their aid, or openly scoff and jeer? Why are our sanctuaries crowded only by the scum and refuse of ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... at war I'll scoff, I think I'd best begone!" And when the foe's last gun went off The battle still ...
— The Animals' Rebellion • Clifton Bingham
... is no life after this life'? Mankind! why should I love mankind? Hideous and misshapen, mankind jeer at me as I pass the streets. What hast thou done to me? Thou hast taken away from me, who am the scoff of this world, the hopes of another! Is there no other life? Well, then, I want thy gold, that at least I may hasten to make the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... he might calm Ormond's anxiety, who stood waiting, with looks that showed his implicit faith in the oracle, and feeling that his own fate depended upon the next words that should be uttered. Let no one scoff at his easy faith: at this time Ormond was very young, not yet nineteen, and had no experience, either of the probability, or of the fallacy of medical predictions. After looking very grave and very wise, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... stand before the world this day divided by the fearful conflict, with malignant hate lighting the fires of either camp, and with hands reeking in fraternal blood—with both sections of our land more or less afflicted—with credit impaired, with the scoff and jeers of nations ringing in our ears—we stand losers of almost every thing but our individual self-respect, which has inspired both foes with the ardor and courage born within us as Americans. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... described in the Book of Wisdom who say: "Let unrighteousness be our law," 2, 11. Also in Psalms, 12, 4: "Who have said, With our tongue will we prevail; our lips are our own: who is lord over us?" Again in Psalm 73. "They scoff, and in wickedness utter oppression: they speak loftily," etc. Such were the giants who withstood the Holy Spirit to his face, who, through the mouth of Lamech, Noah and the sons of Noah, exhorted, ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... I have often had about women. The majority of you, at all events as you get into the world, have no kind of faith in anything but sordid motives. You are cynical beyond anything men can pretend to; you scoff at every suggestion of idealism. I suppose it is that which makes us feel the conversation of most women of refinement so intolerably full of hypocrisies. Having cast away all faith, you cannot dispense with the show of it; the traditions of your sex must be supported. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... me as always, my hand on the lock, The cap on the nipple, the hammer full cock; It is rusty, some tell me; I heed not the scoff; It is battered and bruised, but it always ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... depends on bringing the highest quantity of rational enjoyment within the reach of general society, England is wholly superior in civilization to the shivering splendours of the Continent. Foreigners are beginning to learn this; and those who are most disposed to scoff at our taste, are the readiest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... But the season of old age is the season of prophecy! Listen, Martin de Vaux," pointing towards me, "you shall taste the bitterest dregs of sorrow and remorse in the days to come, for this your evil deed. You may scoff, both of you,—you may say to yourselves that an old man's words are words of folly,—but the day will come! It is writ in the book of fate, and my eyes have seen it! Pile sin upon sin, and pleasure upon pleasure; say to yourselves, 'let us eat and be merry, ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... passing fair! As if a breath of spring Had permeated all the air, And touched each living thing With thankfulness for such a boon— Discounting with a scoff The almanac's report that "June Is yet a ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... is unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a secret ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... master, as he hasten'd off With his new purchases, the infant caught, And bid the mother, with a heartless scoff, Fling it away: said he, "'Tis good for nought; None of this lumber can we have, the road Is long enough to tread ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... with the tenacity and stiffness of infantry, or to take from the mounted arm the mobility and the cult of the offensive which are the breath of its life, we should ruin not only the cavalry, but the Army besides. Those who scoff at the spirit, whether of cavalry, of artillery, or of infantry, are people who have had no practical experience of the actual training of troops in peace, or of the personal leadership in war. Such men are blind ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... needs a perito is a perrito (little dog)!" exclaimed Father Damaso, with a scoff. "One would have to be more of a brute than the natives, who erect their own houses, if he did not know how to build four walls and put a covering over them. That's all that a school ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... walked among the maidens, Gay with paint and decked with feathers, She would look on him with kindness That the others might not scoff him; She would smile upon his weakness, Though she did ...
— The White Doe - The Fate of Virginia Dare • Sallie Southall Cotten
... before I take up my tale, I want to anticipate the doubting Thomases of psychology, who are prone to scoff, and who would otherwise surely say that the coherence of my dreams is due to overstudy and the subconscious projection of my knowledge of evolution into my dreams. In the first place, I have never been ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... I am afraid my son will flee. It would be a disgrace on my house to have him become a mendicant. The kings of Kosala, of Magadha, and all the others look with envy on our sturdy people; they dislike our free institutions and our warlike spirit. They would scoff at us if a Sakya prince had become a monk. But if Siddhattha does flee, I swear by Lord Indra that I shall disown him; I will no longer recognize him as my son. I will disinherit him and ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... load en fergit de distress, En dem w'at stan's by ter scoff, For de harder de pullin', de longer de res', En de bigger de ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... they are sacrilegious, they are excommunicated, who impeach the magic of the past and the poison of tradition. And the thousand million victims themselves scoff at and strike those who rebel, as soon as they are able. All cast stones at them, all, even those who suffer and while they are suffering—even the sacrificed, a ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... shall be a dwelling place for wild beasts, and the birds of night shall lurk therein. Behold, shall it be said, see that proud city, which was so stately, and so exalted; which said in her heart, I am the only city, and besides me there is no other. All they that pass by her shall scoff at her, and shall insult her ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... atone to her for it by my unwearying love. But," his voice mastered by emotion, "how dare I say such words to you? In the sphere in which you live they would be considered a dastardly insult—one must not dare to move one step from the beaten track of custom. The world would scoff at the idea that my love for you is more sacred and reverent than that of a man who, inspired by a momentary passion for a woman and desiring her, obtains his end by a simple and speedy means, without reflection as to the possible misery of both in ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... spirits cheer, Christmas time will soon be here, Then at thee we'll scoff and jeer, Smoke our pipes and drink our beer,— Sit until brave chanticleer Tells us ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... fallen a victim to love; and could she only save her daughter from a similar error she might yet by her means retrieve her fallen fortune. To implant principles of religion and virtue in her mind was not within the compass of her own; but she could scoff at every pure and generous affection; she could ridicule every disinterested attachment; and she could expatiate on the never-fading joys that attend on wealth and titles, jewels and equipages; and all this she did in the belief that she was acting the part of a most wise and tender ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... ter y yolk on'ly proc'u ra tor scoff mon'grel mi cros'co py nonce be troth' drom'e da ry cost proc'ess zo ol'o gy won't doc'ile al lop'a thy wont prov'ost au tom'a ton shone grov'e1 hy drop'a thy sloth fore'head La oc'o on forge joc'und pho tog'ra phy doth ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... Guly, firmly, drawing back; "I will not drink. However you may scoff, Mr. Clinton, at woman's influence, it is to that I impute my strength to withstand temptation here. My last promise to my mother, was never to become a wine-bibber, ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... back!" she announced. "I shall be ready when it's time—now anybody can say what anybody pleases. Scoff at me—do. I expect it! But I'm getting homesick to see a street-car and a—a policeman! It's lovely and peaceful here, but I've had my fill of it now—I want to go home and bump into crowds and hear big, stirry noises. It's different with you girls—you weren't born in the city; you didn't ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... humble, would have had neither the will nor the power to ride a-horseback; but he, against the advice of all his friends, listened only to the voice of courage, braved the fiery suns of June and August, which were the dread of the youngest knights, and made a scoff of those who could not bear the heat, although many a time, during the passage of narrow and difficult swampy places, he was constrained to get himself held on by those about him." After an obstinate struggle, and at the intervention of William VII., Duke of Aquitaine, the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... caught up in the tragic Serbian retreat; still remaining, of course, incurably "bright." I think I detect a certain amount of the too-British attitude that contemns what is strange and is more than a little scornful of poverty, official and private. And I suppose the artist's wife will scoff if I tell her that I was shocked that she should have taken some shots at the Austrians with a Montenegrin machine gun, as if war was just a cock-shy for tourists. But I was. If Mr. JAN GORDON found a good deal more colour in his subjects ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... on September 30, said: "I have never been a professed Christian. I have always considered the testimony of so-called Christians as the imagination of religious fanatics. But I saw Christ up there, and I shall never scoff again." A private standing near turned to me and said: "We all felt the same way about it. It was mighty real ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... empresses, Turenne, Buffon, Montaigne, La Boetie, Clemence Isaure, and the mere mention of the absurd list showed the extraordinary simplicity of the historian who had been befooled by the little dwarf. But at the thought that this disrespectful laugh was a scoff at his master and protector, Freydet felt an indignation not altogether free from selfishness. He felt that he was himself hit by the recoil, and his candidature damaged again. He broke away, mingling in the stir of the general exodus amid a confusion of ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... They may have made a mistake; but it was of the head, not of the heart. If a telegram was sent to them that you were down with smallpox, they would take the first train to come to you. They would willingly take the disease into their own bodies and die for you. If you scoff and sneer at your father and mother you will have a hard harvest; you will reap in agony. It is only a question of time. There is ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... with the faithful few Who wait their Chief—a melancholy crew: But some remained reluctant on the deck Of that proud vessel, now a moral wreck—And view'd their Captain's fate with piteous eyes; While others scoff'd his augur'd miseries, Sneer'd at the prospect of his pigmy sail, And the slight bark so ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... womanly position a woman can occupy is: with her head on her lover's heart. At this the strong-minded may scoff. They may. ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... was feeling too deeply to be conscious of the rudeness in the scoff. "So you figure it out like that—do you? And you get some satisfaction out of that way of looking at it? The scheme of things is very fine, but he must pay the penalty of his own oversight, weakness—carelessness—whatever ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... habitation again: we shall see their differing conduct presently. When the three came back, like furious creatures, flushed with the rage which the work they had been about put them into, they came up to the Spaniards, and told them what they had done, by way of scoff and bravado; and one of them stepping up to one of the Spaniards, as if they had been a couple of boys at play, takes hold of his hat, as it was upon his head, and giving it a twirl about, jeering in his face, says he to him, "And ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... crucified, 'is to them that perish foolishness' (1 Cor 1:18,23). What, saith the merit-monger, will you look for life by the obedience of another man? Will you trust to the blood that was shed upon the cross, that run down to the ground, and perished in the dust? Thus deridingly they scoff at, stumble upon, and are taken in the gin that attends the gospel; not to salvation, but to their condemnation, because they have condemned the Just, that they might justify their ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... authoritie hee must be compelled to pay unto the foresaid Iohn the said 114 nobles. Item by the inhabitants of Caleis (whose captaines were Michael Scot, Bishop, and William Horneby) 1900. nobles, which are due vnto the foresayde Eggard Scoff, because the saide soueraigne king hath giuen them in charge by the said Michael Scot and the rest concerning the payment of the summe aforesaid. Item by Iohn Bilis neere vnto Crowmer, 68. nobles, which are due vnto Nicholas Wolmersten of Elbing. Which summes of nobles must by the kings ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... flushed scarlet. "'Tis better to have had a head and lost it," he cried, "than never to have had a head at all! Mark you, Dryden, my boy, it ill befits you to scoff at me for my misfortune, for dust thou art, and to dust thou hast returned, if word from t'other side about thy books and that which in and on them ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... considerable deliberation. He had argued with himself and had made up his mind to find out for himself just what these people did. He was finding out, certainly. His motives were good and he had come with no desire to scoff, but, for the life of him, he could not help feeling like a criminal. Incidentally, it provoked ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... showed me how, by three-fold scoff, When cares of life perplex us, To smoke, or sleep, or fiddle them off, And scorn ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... "I do not scoff; I have never seen a man of your age so much in love; and, it must be acknowledged, that a young and handsome man would be incapable of such mad passion. An Adonis admires himself as much as he admires ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... here some years ago," or some kindred explanation wherein death has befallen some one by the wayside, whether by accident or punishment. There is much that is attractive and good about this religious sentiment—far be it from the philosophical observer to scoff thereat. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... in the Club to scoff; I'll take a walk. Hang me! Some English "fellah" Has left his rotten gamp, and carried off My ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... and unaffected grace, His looks adorned the venerable place; Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools who came to scoff remained to pray. The service past, around the pious man, With ready zeal, each honest rustic ran; E'en children followed, with endearing wile, And plucked his gown to share the ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... Scoff as much as you like. Have your joke before it turns on you. There'll be a quarter of a million people here before you're dead, if you play fair with the life ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... thus from the administration of affairs. And when these giovinastri, other people's boys, the scum of the gay world, flung their unsavory jests in the face of the old man who had no son to come after him, the silly insults so lightly uttered, so little thought of, the natural scoff of youth at old age, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... him all about Thorberg, he did not scoff, nor laugh, nor take it seriously either. He just considered it, with one large hand grasping his beard. "Well," he said, "some people have the gift, there's no doubt, and if your Thorberg had it not, all her mummeries would avail her nothing. You set them up for a deal, I fancy, ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... Behn in her own Epilogue when she speaks of 'fat Cardinals, Pope Joans, and Fryers'; and Lord Falkland's scoff in his Prologue to Otway's ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... have gone abroad that I am in correspondence with France; that I am a traitor to Holland; that I correspond with the Spanish at Antwerp. In vain have I tried to force an open accusation, in order that I might disperse it. The merchants, and others of my rank, scoff at these rumours, and have in full council denounced their authors as slanderers; but the lower class still hold to their belief. Men scowl as I walk along; the boys shout 'Traitor!' after me; and ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... disappointed ladies in the churchyard, who said it was a most beautiful church inside, but that they had not seen it because it was shut. We proved the fact by trying the door, and then we came away consoling ourselves with the scoff that it was probably closed for the races. At the bookseller's, where we stopped to buy some photographs of the interior of the church we had not seen, we lamented our disappointment, and the salesman said, "Perhaps it was closed for the races." So our joke seemed to turn earnest, ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... to have opinions of thine own!" laughed Henry, with the scoff of a senior unable to brook that his younger brother should think for himself. Yet this tone was so familiar to Richard's ears, that it absolutely encouraged him to a nearer step to intimacy. He said, "But how scapedst thou, Henry? I could have sworn ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... every class—young women, old women, mothers with married sons and daughters; women of society as it is exploited in the Sunday supplements; school girls, shop girls, factory girls—all had told her their troubles; and men of every condition had come to scoff and had remained to express, more or less offensively, their admiration. Some of the younger of these, after a first visit, returned the day following, and each begged the beautiful priestess of the occult to fly with him, to live ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... man with frozen feet Came to the marble halls of state, And told his mission but to meet The chill of scorn, the scoff of hate. "Is Oregon worth saving?" asked The treaty-makers from the coast; And him the Church with questions tasked, And said, "Why did you leave your post?" Was it for this that he had braved The warring ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... ye scoff, on every side Great hints of Him go by,—Souls that are hourly crucified On some ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... is your Indignation, high and noble, And the brave heat of a true Florentine. For Spaine Trumpets abroad her Interest In the Kings heart, and with a black cole drawes On every wall your scoff'd at injuries. As one that has the refuse of her sheets, And the sick Autumne of the weakned King, Where she drunke pleasures ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... to make out that she is growing older; but her courtiers will not believe it, and go so far as to scoff at and hide her spectacle case, declaring that her wearing ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... of Sulphide, however, declined to take him at his own valuation, greeting his frequent outbreaks of simulated ferocity with derisive jeers—even the small boys used to scoff at him—he was reduced to practising his arts upon strangers, which he always hastened to do when he thought it was not likely to be dangerous. Unluckily for him, though, he once tried one of his tricks upon an inoffensive newcomer, with a result so ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... to deprive the freemen of their guild qualification. Lord Palmerston had no relish for the subject. His predilections, in fact, leaned in quite the opposite direction. If his manner was genial, his temper was conservative, and he was inclined to smile, if not to scoff, at politicians who met such problems of government with other than a light heart. He was therefore inclined at this juncture to adopt Lord Melbourne's attitude, and to meet Lord John with that statesman's famous remark, 'Why ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... without religion. Suppose he had proved to the world's satisfaction that all religion is a hoax, and all men professing it are liars, how does that comfort me in my hour of sorrow? Scoffing will not sustain a man in his solitude, when he has nobody to scoff at; and disbelief is only a bottomless tub, which will not float me across the dark river. If Infidels intend to convert the world, they must give us some positive system of truth which we can ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... so common and so dangerous. This dry-as-dust philosopher who cut up animals and plants and wrote about public speeches and constitutions found time to give the world a book on Poetry. Modern scientists sometimes deny their belief in the existence of such a thing as poetry, or scoff at its value; no poetic treatise has yet appeared from them, for it seems difficult for modern science to keep alive in its devotees the weakest glimmerings of a sense of beauty. Herein their great founder and father shows himself to be more humane than his so-called progressive ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... am waiting. What it is Leroy would never do?" The voice carried a scoff with it, the implication that his very presence had stricken ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... gave the public works of merit, Written with vigour, fraught with spirit, Applause crowned all my labours; But thy delusive pages speak My palsied powers, exhausted, weak, The scoff ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... fusion of the jealous tribes which composed it. The low moral condition of his Arabs, who were for the most part thieves and cowards, and the rude individuality of his Kabyles, who would respect his religious but scoff at his political claims, made the task of the leader a difficult one. To the Kabyles he confided the care of his saintly reputation, renouncing their contributions, and asking only for their prayers as a Berber and as a khouan of the order of Ben-abd-er-Rhaman. For a few years his power increased, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... priests, and ready, as might be seen from their earnest gaze, to suffer martyrdom in the cause. More, however, stood indifferently round, or, after listening to a few words, walked on with a laugh or a scoff; indeed, preaching had already done all that lay in its power. All those who could be moved by exhortations of this kind were there, and upon the rest the discourses ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... while Mackay's prophesying voice ranged up and down through all the modulations of thunder, from the hurrying mutter to the reverberant shock and climax: and those who came to scoff remained to wonder. ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... will be as impossible for him to be indifferent to elevating the taste of the masses in matters of domestic detail, or be otherwise wanting in a whole-hearted devotion to the service of humanity, or to scoff at the theory of evolution, as it would be for him to accept the errors and superstitions of an obsolete theology, or the antiquated dogmas of the ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... volume there are some severe pieces, sharply ridiculing his critics. In the old days, when he wrote fine imaginative poetry, out of his heart and brain working together, he did not mind what the critics said, and only flashed a scoff or two at them in his creation of Naddo in Sordello. But now when he wrote a great deal of his poetry out of his brain alone, he became sensitive to criticism. For that sort of poetry does not rest on the sure foundation which is given by the consciousness the ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... office of philosophical, higher-critical professors, and cries, "Fire!" You would see those hard-boiled skeptics, if they believed the cry, rush unceremoniously and indecorously out of that building with all speed. People may scoff at faith working with lightning speed; but every exhibition of it ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... had been on the point of throwing her pride to the winds and apologizing to Grace, Miriam and Anne for her childish behavior. Then she would scoff at her own weakness and go doggedly on. Her new roommate, Emma Dean, was a cheery sort of girl who lived every day as it came and refused to borrow trouble. She never criticized other girls, nor did she gossip, and she was extremely thoughtful of ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... many people still living who doubt the existence of dragons; who go so far as to assert that such creatures never did exist upon the face of this earth, and never did torment and destroy the inhabitants thereof, and persecute forlorn maidens. They scoff at the records which have descended to our times, as fabulous legends, composed by idle monks; who were accustomed to write fictitious histories during the dark ages. They deny to historical ballads that authority which Mr. Macaulay attaches to them; and yet the principal ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... console myself under the present prospect with the consideration, that the same beneficent and wise Providence which has done so much for this country, will not eventually leave us to ruin our own happiness, to become the sport of chance, or the scoff of a once admiring world; but that great things are yet in store for this people, which time, and the wisdom of the Great Director will ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... took their tea alone, nor could they talk of any other subject than madame, and her most unexpected call for Doctor Moran's services." It was always the Dutch Doctor Gansvoort she had before," said Mrs. Moran; "and she was ever ready to scoff at all others, as pretenders.—I do wonder what keeps your father ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... thy progress to renown Thou canst endure the scoff and frown Of those who strive to pull ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... our father!" Iskender blurted out the truth at last. "I know not how my patron would regard it. On him I depend entirely for the present. I have heard him scoff at all who change the faith that they were born in. Wait a little, I beseech thee, ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... clinging, prattling child. They think of what they have done and suffered for his sake and how the cord of love has been silently woven through the years. My love to you is my greatest bond, and, though some may grow cold, some may scoff, and some repudiate, never let the lips of any say that your rector, your old grey-headed pastor, now in his fourth and last watch, ever ceased in his love ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... I no' say it?" demanded her visitor. "And as to speaking sense—. But I'll no' trouble you. It seems you have friends in such plenty that you can afford to scorn and scoff at them at your pleasure. Good-day to you," and ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... the meaning of America. And it is all our own. Doctrinaires and visionaries may shudder at it. The privilege of birth may jeer at it. The practical politician may scoff at it. But the people of the Nation respond to it, and march away to Mexico to the rescue of a colored trooper as they marched of old to the rescue of an emperor. The assertion of human rights is naught but a call to human sacrifice. This is ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... footing on shifting clouds, the human mind comes back to the positive by a violent reaction. Here is the secret of that haughty and derisive materialism of certain modern Germans, who jeer and scoff at the lofty pretensions of philosophy. So it was that Hegel brought upon the scene Doctor Buechner ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... great and high, So noble was his manly front, So calm his steadfast eye,— The rabble rout forbore to shout, And each man held his breath, For well they knew the hero's soul Was face to face with death. And then a mournful shudder Through all the people crept, And some that came to scoff at him Now turned ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... man is a Doctor Watson. We are wont to scoff in a patronising manner at that humble follower of the great investigator, but, as a matter of fact, we should have been just as dull ourselves. We should not even have risen to the modest level of a Scotland Yard Bungler. We should simply ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... than keep my secret. Mr. Lovelace, whose pride already so ill brooks my regrets for meeting him, (when he thinks, if I had not, I must have been Mr. Solmes's wife,) would perhaps treat me with indignity: and thus, deprived of all refuge and protection, I should become the scoff of men of intrigue; a disgrace to my sex—while that avowed loved, however indiscreetly shown, which is followed by marriage, will find more excuses made for it, than ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... meek and unaffected grace, His looks adorned the venerable place; Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray. 180 The service past, around the pious man, With steady zeal, each honest rustic ran, Even children followed with endearing wile, And plucked his gown to share the good man's smile. His ready smile ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... because you never thought of the chances of another raid being made on your aunt's opals. But perhaps you might have your mother go over and see Miss Alicia. She could mention what you thought, and even if the old lady did pretend to scoff at the idea, it would put a flea in her ear, so perhaps she'd keep an ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... assembled in the square, despite the increasing rain. Many had come to scoff. What a farce it all would be! They did well, however, to wait two days! The rain was almost over. It would probably stop by the time they got ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Paradise, and seek shelter in the lower world." But Carlyle held to the "banner with a strange device," and was either deaf or indignant. The visits passed, with satirical references from both host and hostess; for Mrs. Carlyle, who could herself abundantly scoff and scold, would allow the liberty to no one else. Jeffrey meanwhile was never weary of well-doing. Previous to his promotion as Lord Advocate and consequent transference to London, he tried to negotiate for ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... effrontery which has characterized Mormonism from the start has been most daring. Its founder, a lad of low birth, very limited education, and uncertain morals; its beginnings so near burlesque that they drew down upon its originators the scoff of their neighbors,—the organization increased its membership as it was driven from one state to another, building up at last in an untried wilderness a population that has steadily augmented its wealth and numbers; doggedly defending its right to practise its peculiar beliefs and obey only the ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... you that the Chancellor gave it to me, gave it to me with his own hands, willingly,—pressed it upon me. No, don't scoff!" he went on quickly. "Listen! This is a genuine thing. The Chancellor's mad. He was lying in a fit when I left the Palace. It will be in all the evening papers. You will hear the boys shouting it in the streets within a few minutes. Don't interrupt and ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... manner and language, replied with some asperity, "Sir Knight, we have in this land of Scotland an ancient saying, 'Scorn not the bush that bields you'—you are a guest of my father's house to shelter you from danger, if I am rightly informed by the domestics. Scoff not its homeliness, nor that of its inmates—ye might long have abidden at the court of England, ere we had sought your favour, or cumbered you with our society. Since your fate has sent you hither amongst us, be contented with such fare and such converse as we can afford you, and scorn us not for ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... active duties. All was done with religious gravity and decorum. If we went out, the make-believe continued even in the street; the two hermits would say the Rosary, using their fingers to count on, so as not to display their devotion before those who might scoff. One day, however, the hermit Therese forgot herself—before eating a cake, given her for lunch, she made a large Sign of the Cross, and some worldly folk did not repress ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... they will. You surely cannot suppose I should, in cold blood, sit down to write a story in which nobody was to fall in love or be in love! Sir, scoff as you may, love is the one vital principle in all romance. Not only does your cheek flush and your eye sparkle, till "heart, brain, and soul are all on fire," over the burning words of some Brontean Pythoness, but when you open the last thrilling work of Maggie Marigold, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and that the trained ear must be the only arbiter as to poetical and pseudo-poetical effects. Ask a lover of Walt Whitman whether "spaced prose" is the right label for "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," and he will scoff at you. He will maintain that following the example of the rich broken rhythms of the English Bible, the example of Ossian, Blake, and many another European experimenter during the Romantic epoch, Whitman really succeeded in elaborating a mode of poetical expression, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... of the beautiful lake, which other people thought so lovely, was, in that mind which affected to scoff at the unseen, a ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the study of dates because they are apt to be the storm center of discussions concerning education. It is fashionable to scoff at them in a superior manner. We all of us loathe them; yet they are as indispensable—a certain number of them—as the bones of a body. They make up the skeleton of history. They are the orderly pegs on which we can hang later acquired ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... had the repugnance of the healthy-minded man of affairs from any form of meddling with what he vaguely thought of as the occult; but in that remote, grim solitude he could not scoff at it. ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... Caersares, being as a pasquil or satire to deride all his predecessors, feigned that they were all invited to a banquet of the gods, and Silenus the jester sat at the nether end of the table and bestowed a scoff on everyone as they came in; but when Marcus Philosophus came in, Silenus was gravelled and out of countenance, not knowing where to carp at him, save at the last he gave a glance at his patience towards his wife. ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... as through the brazen, gross, and licentious wickedness of its enemies. Alas! what is it but a mutilated, feeble, discordant, and half-expiring instrument, at which Satan and his children, legally and illegally, scoff! Of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... possessors, we are all born so, and we cannot help it. We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter. Sometimes we get a good man and worth the price, but we are ready to take him anyway, whether ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... and his heart was sick and saddened when he heard their evil tongues. He could not imagine how anybody could speak ill of the beautiful flowers, or scoff at his beloved birds. He was waked out of a sweet dream, and the wood seemed to him lonely and desert, and he was ill at ease. He started up hastily, so that the Mouse and the Lizard shrank back alarmed, and did not look around them till they ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... we no tears to shed for Him, While soldiers scoff and Jews deride? Ah! Look how patiently He hangs; Jesus, our Love, ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... hardly had suspected you so deep. What time I have been wasting! Mr. Faust, At last I know you for a prince of men— A brilliant mind, a high intelligence, A spirit incorruptible. The trash, Baubles and claptrap which the foolish herd Snatch at, you scoff—and rightly. I will not With one more word of it insult your mind That admirably penetrates to deeps Where I, too, love to dwell. I put aside All trivialities, and frankly say That I can offer you one ultimate gift Fit even for you—a subtle paradise Such as ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... your underwear is the very best that your means will allow you, and that it is always sweet, fresh and dainty. It will help you to retain the affection of your husband. I know that some allegedly wise ones will scoff at this statement. They may say that an affection that may be influenced by the kind and condition of underwear is not worth having or retaining. But what do these wise ones know! What do they know of the numerous subtle influences which gradually ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Miss Betty Pink Was just an ordinary mink; Her skirt was short, her eye was glad, Her hats would almost drive you mad, She was, in fact, to many a boy A source of perturbation; At household duties she would scoff, She lived for tennis, bridge and golf, She motored, hunted, smoked and biked, Did just exactly what she liked, And took a quite delirious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... you may know it didn't pass off So quietly as was wont? That Galilee carpenter's son Who boasted he was king, incensed the rabble to scoff: I heard the noise from my garden. This piece is the one he was on . . . Yes, it blazes up well if lit with a few dry chips and shroff; And it's worthless for much else, what with cuts ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... and subtler perceptions of justice, the rank and file and the wooden spoons must needs apply the old ethics, even against the new teachers themselves. Every truth has to fight for recognition, to prove itself not a lie. The brilliant and impatient young men who scoff at conventions because the people who hold them are unreal—not persons, feeling and passing moral truths through their own soul, but parrots—forget that just because the people are unreal, their maxims ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... look'd so great and high,{C} So noble was his manly front, So calm his steadfast eye;— The rabble rout forbore to shout, And each man held his breath, For well they knew the hero's soul Was face to face with death. And then a mournful shudder Through all the people crept, And some that came to scoff at him, Now turn'd aside ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... therefore they do not understand, and not understanding, they wax merry, or cynical, or sarcastic, or wrathful, or envious; or they pass by unmoved. And I maintain that those who pass by unmoved are more righteous than they who scoff. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... looking, at the worth This verse may have and wonder, of my book, To what thoughts shall't in alien hearts give birth. But, as he who doth love, and, loving, hopes, Yet, hoping, fears, fears to put proof to proof, And in his mind for possible proofs gropes, Delaying the true proof, lest the real thing scoff, I daily live, i'th' fame I dream to see, But by my thought of others' ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... wholly misconceived my attitude; that I had the highest respect for Satan, and that my reverence for him equalled, and possibly even exceeded, that of any member of any church. I said it wounded me deeply to perceive by his words that he thought I would make fun of Satan, and deride him, laugh at him, scoff at him: whereas in truth I had never thought of such a thing, but had only a warm desire to make fun of those others and laugh at them. "What others?" "Why, the Supposers, the Perhapsers, the Might-Have-Beeners, the Could-Have-Beeners, ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... the maidens, Gay with paint and decked with feathers, She would look on him with kindness That the others might not scoff him; She would smile upon his weakness, Though she did ...
— The White Doe - The Fate of Virginia Dare • Sallie Southall Cotten
... Her neighbours scoff, and her menace, But saddened friends grieve at her sore disgrace, Love, through their heart, in fervour rills, Each one respects this plaintivest of girls; And many a pitying soul a prayer said, That some great miracle might yet be made In favour of this poor ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... meeting it was fit to use philosophical discourse, and how far it might be used? And Aristo presently cried out: What then, for heaven's sake, are there any that banish philosophy from company and wine? And I replied: Yes, sir, there are, and such as with a grave scoff tell us that philosophy, like the matron of the house, should never be heard at a merry entertainment; and commend the custom of the Persians, who never let their wives appear, but drink, dance, and wanton with their whores. This they propose for us to ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Waiter. He his finger had In the pie—or gravy. Did he? Well, 'tis sad. He must cry "Peccavi!" But whoever mixed, Or whoever boiled it, Our opinion's fixed, He, or they, quite spoiled it. 'Tis the general scoff, Butt of chaff and rudeness. Irish Stew is "Off", ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... upon, play tricks upon; fool to the top of one's bent; laugh at, grin at, smile at; poke fun at. satirize, parody, caricature, burlesque, travesty. turn into ridicule; make merry with; make fun of, make game of, make a fool of, make an April fool of^; rally; scoff &c (disrespect) 929. raise a laugh &c (amuse) 840; play the fool, make a fool of oneself. Adj. derisory, derisive; mock, mocking; sarcastic, ironic, ironical, quizzical, burlesque, Hudibrastic^; scurrilous &c (disrespectful) 929. Adv. in ridicule ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... is its own, and that its sin is no longer its own, but that of Christ; but, on account of its faith in Christ, all its sin must needs be swallowed up from before the face of the righteousness of Christ, as I have said above. It learns, too, with the Apostle, to scoff at death and sin, and to say, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. xv. 55-57). ...
— Concerning Christian Liberty - With Letter Of Martin Luther To Pope Leo X. • Martin Luther
... secret as yet,"—with a faint wan smile. "Let me keep it a little longer. Not even Mrs. Massereene knows of it. Indeed, it is too soon to proclaim my design. People might scoff it; though for all that I shall work it out. And something tells ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... wary ravens on their crag; the said families were always willing to accept invitations to dinners and dances; but as to admitting the strangers to their own houses, they were inexorable. Ready to scoff and disparage, jealous and niggardly, marrying only among themselves, the families formed a serried phalanx to keep out intruders. Of modern luxury they had no notion; and as for sending a boy to Paris, it was sending him, they thought to certain ruin. Such sagacity ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the depth and devotedness of woman's love? Could it be possible that there still lingered in her crushed heart a single atom of affection for that branded villain, who had so cruelly deceived her? Philosophy may condemn her—human reason itself may scoff at her—but from her pure heart could not utterly be obliterated the sincere and holy love which she had conceived for that unworthy object. To her might have been applied the beautiful words of the ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... had the patience to accompany me through these pages devoted to Miss Dickinson will surely own, whether in scoff or praise, the essentially American nature of her muse. Her defects are easily paralleled in the annals of English literature; but only in the liberal atmosphere of the New World, comparatively unshadowed by trammels ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... shield. The army of the Sultan is larger than yours; his cavalry are more skilled. Turn his flank—or, better still, bide here and await his attack, and victory will be to the soldiers of the Cross. Advance and the vision of that knight at whom you scoff will come true, and the cause of Christendom be lost in Syria. I have spoken, ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... scholars or physicians scoff at the ancient authorities who dominated medical thinking for so many centuries. The seventeenth-century physician striving to reduce the frightful inroads that disease made into the colony at Jamestown may have been handicapped by the erroneous doctrines of the gossamer-fine ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... rolled down her cheeks as she spoke, and Wilhelm was not sufficiently blase to scoff at the doting nonsense of a love-sick woman. Love has enormous power, and at its heat all firmness, all resistance, melts away. Pilar's affection filled Wilhelm with heartfelt emotion and gratitude. He denied himself the right of judging her, suspecting or doubting her, or of discovering dark ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... take up my tale, I want to anticipate the doubting Thomases of psychology, who are prone to scoff, and who would otherwise surely say that the coherence of my dreams is due to overstudy and the subconscious projection of my knowledge of evolution into my dreams. In the first place, I have never been a zealous student. I graduated last of my class. I cared more for ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... would not scoff, though man should set To feebler wings a mightier task. They know what wonders wait us yet. Not all things in an hour they ask; But in each noble failure ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... not approach the Sacrament, he dared not pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in riotous despair every fragment of a religious belief which seemed to live in his heart only to torture him. He had heard priests scoff over the wafer they consecrated,—he had known them to mingle poison for rivals in the sacramental wine,—and yet God had kept silence and not struck them dead; and like the Psalmist of old he said, "Verily, I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... should be able to say you were slain. You boast of your strength and power. See, you follow the motion of my hand, as a dog would. See, you kneel before me, and prostrate yourself in the dust at my feet, at my bidding. Lie there, and think well whether you are able to scoff any more. You kneeled to the king of your own will; you kneel to me at mine, and though you had the strength of a hundred men, you must kneel there till I bid ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... remembrances came crowding, like good ghostes, in that scent; There's the mother's call to dinner, there's the landlord's call—for rent! And the call of the rooks,—and another call, fur off, Like a whisper from a grave-yard, green and silent. Some may scoff At a Cockney's chat of laylocks. I could bury my old phiz In their crisp and nutty coolness, as I did when flirty Liz, My first sweetheart, sent me packing, one Spring mornin'—for a while— And them blossoms ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... against money, Spurn its beneficent power; Bears spurn impossible honey, Foxes the grapes that are sour. Men, who can never be funny, Scoff at the funny man's dower; Lands where it seldom is sunny Find little praise ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... civilization depends on bringing the highest quantity of rational enjoyment within the reach of general society, England is wholly superior in civilization to the shivering splendours of the Continent. Foreigners are beginning to learn this; and those who are most disposed to scoff at our taste, are the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... there you've nicked it. There's the devil upon devil. Oh, the pride and joy of heart 'twould be to me to have my son and heir resemble such a duke; to have a fleering coxcomb scoff and cry, 'Mr. your son's mighty like his Grace, has just his smile and air of's face.' Then replies another, 'Methinks he has more of the Marquess of such a place about his nose and eyes, though he has my Lord what-d'ye-call's mouth to a tittle.' Then I, to put it off as unconcerned, ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... therefore, to study the underlying bases of the community music movement, and to use this new tool that has been thus providentially thrown into his hands for the advancement of art appreciation, rather than to stand aloof and scoff at certain imperfections and crudities which inevitably are only too evident in the present phase ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... wretch to raise, And his last faltering accents whispered praise. At church, with meek and unaffected grace, His looks adorned the venerable place: Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools who came to scoff remained to pray. The service past, around the pious man, With steady zeal, each honest rustic ran; Even children followed with endearing wile, And plucked his gown to share the good man's smile. His ready ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... been the case with Mrs Winterfield. No woman ever lived, perhaps, with more conscientious ideas of her duty as a woman than Mrs Winterfield of Prospect Place, Perivale. And this, as I say it, is intended to convey no scoff against that excellent lady. She was an excellent lady unselfish, given to self-restraint, generous, pious, looking to find in her religion a safe path through life a path as safe as the facts of Adam's fall would allow her feet to find. She was a woman fearing much for ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... fear not scoff or smile At meek attire of blue and grey, For the proud wrath that thrills our isle Gives faith and force ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... festal gaiety of heart; and I quarrel only with your levity and that eternal worldliness that freezes too fiercely—that absolutely blisters with its frost—like the upper air of the Andes. You speak of Kate only as too readily you speak of all women; the instinct of a natural scepticism being to scoff at all hidden depths of truth. Else you are civil enough to Kate; and your 'homage' (such as it may happen to be) is always at the service of a woman on the shortest notice. But behind you, I see a worse fellow; a gloomy fanatic; a religious sycophant that seeks ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... across a first-class expert we begin to take a pride in his superiority. It cannot offend us, who have no right at all to be his match on his own ground. Besides, there is a very curious sense of satisfaction in getting a fair chance to sneer at ourselves and scoff at our own pretensions. The first person of our dual consciousness has been smirking and rubbing his hands and felicitating himself on his innumerable superiorities, until we have grown a little tired of him. Then, when the other fellow, the critic, the cynic, the Shimei, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... number of Our Magazine was ready on New Year's Day, and we read it that evening in the kitchen. All our staff had worked nobly and we were enormously proud of the result, although Dan still continued to scoff at a paper that wasn't printed. The Story Girl and I read it turnabout while the others, except Felix, ate apples. It ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Tisipherne the damsel turning right, "And what say you, my noble lord ?" quoth she. He taunting said, "I that am slow to fight Will follow far behind, the worth to see Of this your terrible and puissant knight," In scornful words this bitter scoff gave he. "Good reason," quoth the king, "thou come behind, Nor e'er compare thee with the ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... Then he tried to scoff these thoughts away and when they would not leave him, he called himself a simpleton, scolded himself for his fastidious taste, and resolved to ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... fought several tough fights with certain lads who had dared to scoff at his red hair. Sam Jefferson, who lived down on the quay, still bore the marks of one such battle in the absence of two front teeth. But he did not take affront from womenkind. He looked over their heads, and went his way ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... not, he, From answering to his face. A caitiff hound, A reptile fool, is he who fawns on men Before their faces, while his heart is black With malice, and, when they be gone, his tongue Backbites them. Openly Polydamas Flung back upon the prince his taunt and scoff: "O thou of living men most mischievous! Thy valour—quotha!—brings us misery! Thine heart endures, and will endure, that strife Should have no limit, save in utter ruin Of fatherland and people for thy sake! Ne'er may such ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a secret conspiracy ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... actors in his "dark speeches," Greene refers to London as Rome and to the Shoreditch Theatre as the "theatre in Rome." In his Penelope's Web he writes: "They which smiled at the theatre in Rome might as soon scoff at the rudeness of the scene as give a plaudite at the perfection of the acting." While it is Burbage's Theatre that is here referred to, it is evident that his quarrel was not now with the actors—whom both he and Nashe praise ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... seemed to take a savage delight in gazing on this sad pilgrimage. At the foot of the glacier, which stood out sheer and steep before me, I felt so depressed, and my nerves were so overwrought, that I said I wished to turn back. I was thereupon met by the coarse sarcasm of my guide, who seemed to scoff at my weakness. My consequent anger braced up my nerves, and I prepared myself at once to climb the steep walls of ice as quickly as possible, so that this time it was he who found difficulty in keeping up with me. We accomplished the walk over the back of the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... meaning of America. And it is all our own. Doctrinaires and visionaries may shudder at it. The privilege of birth may jeer at it. The practical politician may scoff at it. But the people of the Nation respond to it, and march away to Mexico to the rescue of a colored trooper as they marched of old to the rescue of an emperor. The assertion of human rights is naught but a call to human sacrifice. This is yet the spirit of the American ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... and glow of life wax dim in thickly gathering gloom, Shall mortal scoff at sting of Death, shall scorn the victory ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... see, at that day, even as before and since, a very intimate relation between good living and good reading. The practical person, the wary pedant, and the supercritical will scoff at ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... will tell you, with eyes full of scorn, Threadbare is my coat, and my hosen are torn: Scoff on, my rich Owen, for faint is thy glee When the maid of Llanwellyn ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a flower or a tree or a planet is not true; to scoff at them is to scoff at the law of the universe. In welding together into noble form, whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... man scoff; lest he drives away the means of real information.—And let all men watch, for ...
— Remarks Concerning Stones Said to Have Fallen from the Clouds, Both in These Days, and in Antient Times • Edward King
... told him all about Thorberg, he did not scoff, nor laugh, nor take it seriously either. He just considered it, with one large hand grasping his beard. "Well," he said, "some people have the gift, there's no doubt, and if your Thorberg had it not, all her mummeries ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... off To dress my corn-cob doll; And when de General saw de shirt, He jus' was mad enough To tink he got to hold review Widout his best Dutch ruff. Ma'am said she 'lowed it was de calf Dat had done chawed it off; But when de General heard dat ar, He answered with a scoff; He said de marks warn't don' of teef, But plainly dose ob shears; An' den he showed her to de do' And cuffed me on ye years. And when my ma'am arribed at home She stretched me 'cross her lap, Den took de lace away from me An' sewed it on her ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... "Do not scoff at Robak," he said; "I know him; he is a clever priest. That little worm130 has gnawed a larger nut than you; I have seen him but once, but as soon as I set eyes on him I noticed what sort of bird he was; the Monk turned away his eyes, fearing that I might summon him to confession. ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... "You scoff at Mr. King's portrait of me because he has not painted me as I am! What would you have said if he had painted me as I am? What would you say if Conrad Lagrange should write the truth about us and our kind, for his millions of readers? ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... again the finely shaded mood of the poet. Take the words of a lyric for what they say, and they say nothing most of the time. And that is true of philosophers. You must penetrate the ponderous vocabulary, the professional cant to the insight beneath or you scoff at the mountain ranges of words and phrases. It is this that Bergson means when he tells us that a philosopher's intuition always outlasts his system. Unless you get at that you remain forever foreign ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the explosion in the subway; to a remarkable dog-fight; to a village church struck by lightning. It will be said, more or less causally, by everybody in America who has seen Prince Henry do anything, or try to. The man who was absent and didn't see him to anything, will scoff. It is his privilege; and he can make capital out of it, too; he will seem, even to himself, to be different from other Americans, and better. As his opinion of his superior Americanism grows, and swells, and concentrates and coagulates, he will go further ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... holiday presents Its special round of play, And looking back on boyhood now And all the charms it knew, One day, above the rest, somehow, Seems brightest in review. That day was finest, I believe; Though many grown-ups scoff, When mother said that we could leave Our shoes and ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... so great and high, So noble was his manly front, So calm his steadfast eye,— The rabble rout forbore to shout, And each man held his breath, For well they knew the hero's soul Was face to face with death. And then a mournful shudder Through all the people crept, And some that came to scoff at him Now ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... mind occupies itself with sneering, carping, and fault-finding; and is ready to scoff at everything but impudent effrontery or successful vice. The greatest consolation of such persons are the defects of men of character. "If the wise erred not," says George Herbert, "it would go hard with fools." Yet, though wise men may learn of fools by avoiding their errors, fools rarely ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... Along the floor; though they were small enow, When shadows lengthened and the sun was low; But at the last these left her labouring, Not daring now to weep, lest some small thing Should 'scape her blinded eyes, and soon far off She heard the echoes of their careless scoff. Longer the shades grew, quicker sank the sun, Until at last the day was well-nigh done, And every minute did she think to hear The fair Queen's dreaded footsteps drawing near; But Love, that moves ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... sympathy and generous feeling. Doubtless, he also, whose blood received a mingling tide from his proud mother—he, the acknowledged focus of the kingdom's wealth and nobility, had been taught to repeat my father's name with disdain, and to scoff at my just claims to protection. I strove to think that all this grandeur was but more glaring infamy, and that, by planting his gold-enwoven flag beside my tarnished and tattered banner, he proclaimed not his superiority, but his debasement. Yet I envied ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... flap of England's flag Proclaim that all around are free, From 'farthest Ind' to each blue crag That beetles o'er the Western Sea? And shall we scoff at Europe's kings, When Freedom's fire is dim with us, And round our country's altar clings The damning ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... arms! Kneel all! Caps off! Old "Blue Light's" going to pray. Strangle the fool that dares to scoff! Attention! it's his way! Appealing from his native sod In forma pauperis to God, "Lay bare thine arm! Stretch forth thy ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... all well for you, Marquise, to scoff at the omens; you are too learned to believe in them; but it is in our blood, perhaps, and it's no use us fighting against presentiments, for they're stronger than we are. I had no heart to get ready for the journey—not ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... their lives, and who doubted the rumors current in the sporting world until actually in the room and listening to the faro-dealer's cold and impassive account of the men and the battle. And more often than not these curious souls, who came to scoff, ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... a mound for their ordnance, so harassed and occupied were they with these incessant alarms. But Rigby, on whom devolved the plan and conduct of the siege, seeing that their affairs were in no thriving condition, but that rather they were the scoff and jest of the garrison, who daily taunted them from the walls, determined at all hazards to raise his cannon. For this purpose a considerable number of the peasantry and poorer sort in the neighbourhood, and for miles round, were driven like beasts to their daily work, labouring ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... you are. I want you here—here where the pain is hardest," and she clasped her arms tightly over her heaving bosom. Then her pride returned again, and with it came thoughts of Arthur Carrollton. He would scoff at her as weak and sentimental; he would never take beyond the sea a bride of "Hagarish" birth; and duty demanded that she too should be firm, and sanction his decision. "But when he's gone," she whispered, "when he has left America behind, I'll find her, if my life ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... degeneracy. Its trend is downward; its centuries of history tell just this one story. The actual stage of to-day..is a moral abomination. In Chicago, at least, it is trampling on the Sabbath with defiant scoff. It is defiling our youth. It is making crowds familiar with the play of criminal passions. It is exhibiting women with such approaches to nakedness as can have no other design than to breed lust behind the onlooking eyes. It is furnishing ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... looked on and ceased to scoff. Money is a great dignifier, and Jim and 'Lias were making money. There had been some sniffs when the latter had hinged the front gate and whitewashed his mother's cabin, but even that had been accepted now as ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... be brought back to that level of ease and pleasure which he had once taken for granted, and which now seemed so hard to maintain. If that ease and pleasure were ultimately to fail him, what should he do? He shrank impatiently from the idea. Then he would scoff at himself. How often had he read and heard that the first year of marriage is the most difficult. Of course it must be so. Two individualities cannot fuse without turmoil, without heat. Let him only ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to hope that with the same natures, the same passions, the same understandings, no better proof against deception, we, like they, are not entangled in what, at the close of another era, shall seem again ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres (bread and wine) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant; and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed, the modern ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the rural mind in England; and if in one half it points to an infirmity not far off from legendary superstition, in the other half it wears the grace of chivalry and legendary romance. Any malignant scoff, therefore, against the peerage of England, such as calling the House of Lords a Hospital of Incurables, has always been a town-bred scurrility, not only never adopted by the simple rural laborer, but not even known to him, or distinctly ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... assembled far from the cities, in a lone place where none came to scoff or criticize. When it was finished, I took my place and sealed the port by which I had entered. The Adventurer spurned the Earth beneath its cradles, and in the middle of the Twenty-second century, as time is computed on Earth, man first found ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... which, however, the differences were scarcely less or fewer than those which it was to heal; an Infallibility which taken literally and unqualified, became the source of perplexity to the well-disposed, of unbelief to the wavering, and of scoff and triumph to the common enemy, and which was, therefore, to be qualified and limited, and then it meant so munch and so little that to men of plain understandings and single hearts it meant nothing at all. It resided here. ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... contents already are so antiquated that parents reject almost every sentence of it for themselves; true, the man of today understands its language only with difficulty—what of it, the children must gulp down the moldy, musty food. How we would scoff and jeer if a similar report were made about the school system of China! To this Lutheran Catechism, which I would best like to see in state libraries only, are added many antiquated hymns of mystical turgidity, which a simple youth, even with the best will does not ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... inclined to scoff at this apparition as a heretical innovation, there was still the story of Concepcion, the Demon Vaquero, whose terrible riata was fully as potent as the whaler's harpoon. Concepcion, when in the flesh, had been a celebrated herder of cattle and wild horses, ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... our allies the affair may appear a trifle, father; and such white planters as cannot refuse to hear the tidings may scoff at them; but Jean Francais, a negro and a slave—is it possible that he ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... had stirred up a number of enemies, for, when a man is successful in life, are there not always a hundred unsuccessful fellows who stand about and scoff? ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... Mrs. Behn in her own Epilogue when she speaks of 'fat Cardinals, Pope Joans, and Fryers'; and Lord Falkland's scoff in his Prologue to Otway's The Soldier's ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... hering of this, laughed much at it, and made but a scoff thereat. 'Tush!' saith he, 'it is but an ideot knave, and such an one as lacketh his right wittes.' But when this foolish prophet had so escaped the daunger of the kinge's displeasure, and that he ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... And if it should be answered, through and under Christianity, the fool in his heart would scoff and say: 'What woman thinks of religion in her youthful courtship?' No; but it is not what she thinks of, but what thinks of her; not what she contemplates in consciousness, but what contemplates her, and reaches her by a necessity of social (? ideal) action. Romance is the product ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... across the plaza, begging the landlord to make haste. He was eager to be gone, alarmed and fearful lest even this slight delay should cause him to miss the transport. The thought was intolerable. But he was also acutely conscious that he was very hungry, and he was too old a campaigner to scoff at hunger. With the hope that he could find something to carry with him and eat as he rode forward, ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... satire. It may be as little wonderful that the satire has no effect. Immense wealth and native obtuseness combine to disfigure us with this aspect of overripeness, not to say monstrosity. I fall in love with the poor, and think they have a cause to be pleaded, when I look at those people. We scoff at the vanity of the French, but it is a graceful vanity; pardonable ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had wrapped him in a vision world; but across the clearness of the vision now somehow obtruded the quiet cynicism, the genial scoff of the Senator's arguments, leaving fierce physical unrest and confused cross-currents of desire. A mist seemed to blurr all life. The hemlocks no longer chanted riotous gladness. There was a dirge to-night of futility, monotonous age-old eons of useless effort, the useless ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... in the bleak Mission House of Lima Street; but inasmuch as she never thought about her appearance it would have been a waste of time for anybody to try to romanticize her. The civilizing effect of her presence in the slum was quickly felt; and though Lidderdale continued to scoff at the advantages of civilization, he finally learnt to give a grudging welcome to her various schemes for making the bodies of the flock as comfortable as her husband tried to ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... with better grace from those who had the power to enforce them; and, with a brutal scoff, the Croatian bade her merit their indulgence by frank discoveries and voluntary confessions. He insisted on knowing the nature of the connection which the imperial colonel of horse, Maximilian, had maintained with the students of Klosterheim; and upon other discoveries, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... and Field we may find such abundant errata, reducing the text to nonsense or to blasphemy, making the Scriptures contemptible to the multitude, who came to pray, and not to scoff. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... "I admit that it was a very striking scene. It was very good," I added, religiously, referring to the corn. Mr. Rollin ought to know, I thought, that I had come to Wallencamp on a mission, and that if he wished to scoff at the ways of its defenceless inhabitants, he shouldn't look to find ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... fruit o' mony a merry dint, My funny toil is now a' tint, Sin' thou came to the warl' asklent, Which fools may scoff at; In my last plack thy part's be ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... conduct presently. When the three came back, like furious creatures, flushed with the rage which the work they had been about put them into, they came up to the Spaniards, and told them what they had done, by way of scoff and bravado; and one of them stepping up to one of the Spaniards, as if they had been a couple of boys at play, takes hold of his hat, as it was upon his head, and giving it a twirl about, jeering in his face, says he to him, "And you, Seignior Jack Spaniard, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... bear it!" he repeated. "You must bear it, madam. Do you suppose your child is to be exempt from the penalties of his birth? Do you suppose that he alone is to be saved from the upbraiding scoff? Do you suppose that he is ever to rank with other boys, who are not stained and marked with sin from their birth? Every creature in Eccleston may know what he is; do you think they will spare him their scorn? 'Cannot bear it,' indeed! Before you went into your ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... on the point of throwing her pride to the winds and apologizing to Grace, Miriam and Anne for her childish behavior. Then she would scoff at her own weakness and go doggedly on. Her new roommate, Emma Dean, was a cheery sort of girl who lived every day as it came and refused to borrow trouble. She never criticized other girls, nor did she gossip, and she was extremely thoughtful of the comfort of her roommate. ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... mothers with married sons and daughters; women of society as it is exploited in the Sunday supplements; school girls, shop girls, factory girls—all had told her their troubles; and men of every condition had come to scoff and had remained to express, more or less offensively, their admiration. Some of the younger of these, after a first visit, returned the day following, and each begged the beautiful priestess of the occult to fly with him, to live with him, to marry him. When this happened Vera would touch ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... What city-bred boy could "hold a candle" to the glaring halo about the head of two who could claim personal acquaintance with the great war chiefs Red Cloud and Spotted Tail?—who had actually been to ride and hunt with that then just dawning demigod of American boyhood,—Buffalo Bill? Sneer and scoff and cavil as did their little rivals for a time, calumny was crushed and scoffers blighted that wonderful March morning when, before the whole assembled school, there suddenly appeared that paragon of plainsmen, that idol of all well-bred young Westerners, he whom ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... nothing, and the moment we come across a first-class expert we begin to take a pride in his superiority. It cannot offend us, who have no right at all to be his match on his own ground. Besides, there is a very curious sense of satisfaction in getting a fair chance to sneer at ourselves and scoff at our own pretensions. The first person of our dual consciousness has been smirking and rubbing his hands and felicitating himself on his innumerable superiorities, until we have grown a little tired of him. Then, when the other fellow, the critic, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... man forlorn Hears Earth send up a foolish noise aloft.' 'And what'll he do? What'll he do?' scoff'd The Blackbird, standing, in an ancient thorn, Then spread his sooty wings and flitted to the croft With cackling laugh; Whom I, being half Enraged, called ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... ma'am, be not afraid;—my father! how shall I meet him? how go back to Lyons? the scoff of the whole city! Cruel, cruel, Claude [in great agitation]. Sir, you have acted ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... efforts with roars of laughter, and Jack himself was at first too overcome with merriment to do more than scoff. At last, however, he went for a rope, cast it over the giant's two heads, so, with the help of a team of horses, drew them shorewards, where two blows from the sword of strength ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... imbibed sceptical notions from some source, and might have continued to scoff at religion to the last but for the experience of his intimate friend, a youth named Almond, whose life was changed by witnessing one day the happy death of a Christian believer. Decided to be a Christian himself, it was some time before he mustered courage ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... its praises till we turn against it as we used to do in the Fourth Reader Class, when we all with one accord turned against "Teacher's Pet." Teacher's Pet might be dowered with all the virtues, but we of the commonality would have none of them. We chose to scoff at an excellence ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... repertoire: "How are you, White Hat?" "Put her through!" "Your head's level!" and "Bully for you!" Called him "Daddy,"—begged he'd disclose The name of the tailor who made his clothes, And what was the value he set on those; While Burns, unmindful of jeer and scoff, Stood there picking the rebels off,— With his long brown rifle and bell-crown hat, And the ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... objection was likely to be based on substantial grounds. But then, as Brooks had observed, or, rather, inferred, Bill was not exactly an expert on finance, and this new deal savored of pure finance—a term which she had heard Bill scoff at more than once. At any rate, she hoped nothing ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... you may mildly scoff, That hard, afflicting churchyard cough Gives pretty plain advice, "Be off, While yet you can." It is not time yet, John, to doff ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... at, grin at, smile at; poke fun at. satirize, parody, caricature, burlesque, travesty. turn into ridicule; make merry with; make fun of, make game of, make a fool of, make an April fool of[obs3]; rally; scoff &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Yorke in his antagonist's ear with a sinister smile, "rotten manners! for just that, my buck, I'll make you scoff 'muffin' ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... not, friend, with scoff unfeeling, The gentle tale of grief and wrong, Which, all the pain of life revealing, Yet ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... follow their conduct here, and witnessed their parents' deep concern, and earned cries to God in their behalf can forget them—they must, they do, at times, affect them. While any thing of this nature remains, there is hope. Some, who in early life, scoff at warning and counsel, are afterwards brought to repentance: And such often testify, that impressions made by parental faithfulness in their tender years, were the means of their awakening and amendment. This should encourage ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... fashionable pillagers; So that this bank house, by their nightly riot, Might rather seem a rake-frequented tavern; And ruin is their sport. Is not each servant A worn-out victim to those midnight revels, Without a sabbath's rest? (For in these times, All sanctity is scoff'd at by the great, And heaven's just wrath defy'd.) An honest master, Scarcely a month beyond his fiftieth year, (Heart-rent with trouble at these sad proceedings,) Wears to the eye a visage of fourscore: Nor to be ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... possible, that they must provide for themselves. Another Spanish statesman expressed his doubt to them whether they were able to do so: he really thought England would one day become an apple of discord between Spain and France, as Milan then was. It was almost a scoff, to compare the Island that had the power of the sea with an Italian duchy. But from this very moment she was to take a new upward flight. England was again to take her place as a third Power between the two great Powers; the opportunity presented itself to her to begin open war with one of them, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... spans the vista of the Avenue, lined here with red brick dwellings and the sunny white bulk of the old Brevoort House. Far off, the sky-scrapers begin to loom, whipping out flags and steam plumes. It is a treeless vista, yet it is hazed with spring! Imagination, you scoff—and dust. Yet you look again, and it is not imagination, and it is not dust. It is the veil of spring, cast with delicate hand over the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the green 'bus now going under the arch feel it, too. These children screaming round your feet, as they ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... this very Deity to whom you ascribe unlimited power, and from whom you say you receive life and everything. An eastern despot would take off the heads of those who treated him in such a style; and a republican politician would scoff at the idea of giving office to such lukewarm followers. Why, here in Christian Chicago the will of God is no more heeded by the majority than that of the Emperor of China, and the Bible might as well be the Koran. Looking at these facts from my impartial standpoint, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... that they could be going to get the worst of it. They seem to put the responsibility for the management of the whole campaign into the hands of the Deity. They are religious but practical. "God will protect us. Here is a pound of coffee," is about what they all come to. It is the fashion to scoff at the calm way in which our enemies have appropriated the services of the Almighty, but all the same it shows a dangerous temper. People who believe they have formed this alliance have always been difficult to ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... no drink? That's your motto, is it? Well, that's sense. Now, look here, ma'am, I ain't beautiful like you; but I'm good, and I'll give you warrant for it. Get me a noggin of rum, and suthin' to scoff, and a penny pipe, and a half-a-foot of baccy; and there's a guinea for the reckoning. There's plenty more in the locker; so bear a hand, and be smart. I don't like waiting; it ain't my way. (Exit MRS. DRAKE, R. PEW sits at the table, R. The settle conceals ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on and ceased to scoff. Money is a great dignifier, and Jim and 'Lias were making money. There had been some sniffs when the latter had hinged the front gate and whitewashed his mother's cabin, but even that had been accepted now as a ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... you?" she said dramatically. "Look at 'em. They're yours, Miss Rachel—and covered with mud and soaked to the tops. I tell you, you can scoff all you like; something has been wearing your shoes. As sure as you sit there, there's the smell of the graveyard on them. How do we know they weren't tramping through the Casanova churchyard last night, ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... powers of darkness were very near, and that behind those blackened walls there lurked evil forms. Twilight was coming on as we turned back to our car, and a cold mist was slowly rising from the river. I am not superstitious, and in broad daylight I will scoff at ghosts with anyone, but I should not care to spend a night alone in Termonde. One could almost hear the Devil laughing at the ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... is a perrito (little dog)!" exclaimed Father Damaso, with a scoff. "One would have to be more of a brute than the natives, who erect their own houses, if he did not know how to build four walls and put a covering over them. That's all that a school ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... I wasn't able to tell you that. You had begun by saying that you believed in palmistry, and then you proceeded to scoff at it. While you scoffed I saw myself as a man with a terribly good reason for NOT scoffing; and in a flash I saw the terribly good reason; I had the whole story—at least I had the broad outlines of it—clear ...
— A. V. Laider • Max Beerbohm
... colouring it by the lights of his wonderful fancy, until at last it became something quite different from the original paradox, and full of truth and wisdom. But when such a paradox went off in a letter, there it remained unqualified; and they who, not having known him, scoff at his friends who claim for him the honours of a great critic, ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... to the Royal Arms, And crush rebellion, in its infancy. Let's on, and from this siege, calamitous, Assert our liberty; nay, rather die, Transfix'd in battle, by their bayonets, Than thus remain, the scoff and ridicule Of gibing wits, and paltry gazetteers, On this, their madding continent, who cry, Where is the British valour: that renown Which spoke in thunder, to the Gallic shores? That spirit is evaporate, that fire; Which erst distinguish'd ...
— The Battle of Bunkers-Hill • Hugh Henry Brackenridge
... the patience to accompany me through these pages devoted to Miss Dickinson will surely own, whether in scoff or praise, the essentially American nature of her muse. Her defects are easily paralleled in the annals of English literature; but only in the liberal atmosphere of the New World, comparatively unshadowed by ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... of late." He took it, I fear, for he lookt somewhat gruff, And handled his new pair of whiskers so rough, That before all the courtiers I feared they'd come off, And then, Lord, how Geramb[2] would triumphantly scoff! ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... or physicians scoff at the ancient authorities who dominated medical thinking for so many centuries. The seventeenth-century physician striving to reduce the frightful inroads that disease made into the colony at Jamestown may have been handicapped ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... tell you, with eyes full of scorn, Threadbare is my coat, and my hosen are torn: Scoff on, my rich Owen, for faint is thy glee When the maid of Llanwellyn smiles sweetly ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the light and glow of life wax dim in thickly gath'ering gloom, Shall mortal scoff at sting of Death, shall scorn ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... mean to worship, mother mine. A great curiosity drew me—I desired to see with my own eyes, and hear with mine own ears, this adoration of the Christ, at which my teachers scoff. But I was caught up in a mighty wave of organ-music that surged from this low earth heavenwards to break against the footstool of God in the crystal firmament. And suddenly I knew what my soul was pining ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... wolves: and their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as an eagle that hasteth to eat; they shall come all for violence; their faces shall nip as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand. And they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them; they shall deride every stronghold; they shall heap dust and take it." The Chaldaeans, recent occupants of Lower Mesopotamia, and there only a dominant race, like the Normans in England or the Lombards in North Italy, were, on ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... scarce be proper now. But they are gone, I know not how, And woman's written on your brow. Time draws his finger o'er the scene; But I cannot forget between The Thing to me you once have been Each sportive sally, wild escape,— The scoff, the banter, and the jape,— And ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and unimportant in size." Now the private assassin you keep, for us, need not be hampered by mere connoisseurship in the perpetration of his duty—therefore, passe, for the execution—but he should not compromise his master's reputation for brilliancy, and print things that he who runs may scoff at. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... word, I hardly had suspected you so deep. What time I have been wasting! Mr. Faust, At last I know you for a prince of men— A brilliant mind, a high intelligence, A spirit incorruptible. The trash, Baubles and claptrap which the foolish herd Snatch at, you scoff—and rightly. I will not With one more word of it insult your mind That admirably penetrates to deeps Where I, too, love to dwell. I put aside All trivialities, and frankly say That I can offer you ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... Honorable Margaret promptly. "Saint Ruth's eats 'em alive. I came to scoff and remained to thread needles myself. Phyllis will be minding the babies in ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... ordinary doctrines of the day, and stand supported and encouraged by a few advanced minds; but I was called to place myself where the most earnest souls—unless a second birth could be granted them—would scoff with the ignorance ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... people always grow splenetic— Why, goodness knows—at everything pathetic, And scoff it down. We all know how, of late, An unfledged, upstart undergraduate Presumed, with brazen insolence, to declare That "William Russell"(1)was ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... accepted as a matter of course. But who, fifty years ago, could have imagined that to-day women would be steadily monopolizing learning, teaching, literature, the fine arts, music, the church and the theater? And yet that is the condition at which we have arrived. We may scoff at the way women are doing the work, and reject the product, but that does not alter the fact that step by step women are taking over the field of liberal culture as opposed to the ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... bosom of the Almighty Father, after alighting, for one painful moment, upon the confines of the lower world. As it was, custom ordained that there should be no mourning for what had never really been. Anguish, hope, and the patient love at which we do not scoff when the mother-bird broods over the eggs that may never hatch—these were to be no more named or remembered. In silence and without sympathy she must endure her disappointment. The tenderest woman about whose knees cluster living ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... The sinner was a scrupulous follower in the presence of the faithful; but when their backs were turned, I know few who relished a porker more lusciously, or avoided water with more scrupulous care. Yet why should I scoff at poor Ali? Joseph and I had done ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... nobility: which is all the more reason why I shouldn't take advantage of it. We may scoff at the social inequalities as much as we please, but we can't laugh them out of court. As between a young woman who is an heiress in her own right, and a briefless lawyer, there are differences which a decent man is bound to efface. ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... a glance. No words will need to pass between us to assure us that we are one in sentiment. It will be as impossible for him to be indifferent to elevating the taste of the masses in matters of domestic detail, or be otherwise wanting in a whole-hearted devotion to the service of humanity, or to scoff at the theory of evolution, as it would be for him to accept the errors and superstitions of an obsolete theology, or the antiquated dogmas of the Conservatives ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... to go back!" she announced. "I shall be ready when it's time—now anybody can say what anybody pleases. Scoff at me—do. I expect it! But I'm getting homesick to see a street-car and a—a policeman! It's lovely and peaceful here, but I've had my fill of it now—I want to go home and bump into crowds and hear big, stirry noises. It's different with you ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... amazing power of influencing other men. The members of the Scriblerus Club laughed at the Dean's project, but so powerful was his eloquence, that 'those who came to scoff remained to subscribe.' Moreover, with Sir Robert Walpole as Prime Minister, he actually obtained a grant from the State of L20,000 in order to carry out the project, the king gave a charter, and to crown ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... enthusiasms, for granted—there was an immense deal in every way that she took for granted. On the other hand, he had often put forward this brighter side of the care for the public weal in his discussions with Gabriel Nash, to the end, it is true, of making that worthy scoff aloud at what he was pleased to term his hypocrisy. Gabriel maintained precisely that there were more ideas, more of those that man lived by, in a single room of the National Gallery than in all the statutes ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... thoughts touched poison and immunity and murder, but inwardly he began to scoff at his own habits of suspicion. However, before he could reach for the glass, Pierce had given a short snort as though in recognition of his presumptuousness and ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... opposed to those of legal Socialism. Nekrovitch and others often joined in the discussion, and very animated we all grew in the course of debate. Nekrovitch smiled sympathetically at my whole-hearted and ingenuous enthusiasm. He never made any attempt to scoff at it or to discourage me, though he vainly attempted to persuade me that Anarchism was too distant and unpractical an ideal, and that my energies and enthusiasm might be more advantageously expended in other directions. "Anyway," he once said to me, "it is very agreeable to a Russian to see ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... other world into a world of men, women, and the children they rear to follow them. She scorned Mabilla for flinching so much, she scorned her for not flinching more. That Mabilla could be desirable to Andrew King made her scoff; that Andrew King should not know her dangerous kept her ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... the Street, I carried my Hat in my Hand, And to every one that I did meet, I bravely Buss'd my Hand: Some did laugh, and some did scoff, And some did mock at me; And some did say I was a ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... recognized as exceptional. The city draws the village and rural family to itself, and the contagion of its customs and ideals spreads through the villages and affects the forms of living there. Youths become city dwellers and do not cease to scoff at the village unless later years give them wisdom to appreciate its higher values. The standard of domestic organization is established by the city; that type of living is the ideal toward ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... you girls always scoff so at Harold Wilkins," said Fred, slightly aggrieved, "he is generally thought a lot of by girls. All ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... ruthless character; men who absolutely revel in wickedness of the vilest description, who take positive delight in inflicting the most horrible indignities upon those who unfortunately happen to fall into their power, who gloat over the unavailing tears and entreaties of their victims, and who scoff at the mere mention of the word 'mercy'. Picture to yourself the very worst that you have ever heard or read of piratical atrocities, and you will be able to arrive at a very accurate conception of the horrors of which that unfortunate ship was the theatre to-day. And I, my ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... the universe; and in all our voyages round the world, we are still accompanied by those old circumnavigators, the stars, who are shipmates and fellow-sailors of ours—sailing in heaven's blue, as we on the azure main. Let genteel generations scoff at our hardened hands, and finger-nails tipped with tar—did they ever clasp truer palms than ours? Let them feel of our sturdy hearts beating like sledge-hammers in those hot smithies, our bosoms; with their amber-headed canes, let them feel of our generous pulses, and swear ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... had reached the sticking point only a half hour before, was the result of considerable deliberation. He had argued with himself and had made up his mind to find out for himself just what these people did. He was finding out, certainly. His motives were good and he had come with no desire to scoff, but, for the life of him, he could not help feeling like a criminal. Incidentally, it provoked him to feel ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... know, Andrea," said she, "you do sometimes scoff at religion—well, I mean you talk rather lightly ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... to his face. A caitiff hound, A reptile fool, is he who fawns on men Before their faces, while his heart is black With malice, and, when they be gone, his tongue Backbites them. Openly Polydamas Flung back upon the prince his taunt and scoff: "O thou of living men most mischievous! Thy valour—quotha!—brings us misery! Thine heart endures, and will endure, that strife Should have no limit, save in utter ruin Of fatherland and people for thy sake! Ne'er may such wantwit valour craze my soul! Be mine to cherish wise discretion ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... without of death or sick folk. Others, inclining to the contrary opinion, maintained that to carouse and make merry and go about singing and frolicking and satisfy the appetite in everything possible and laugh and scoff at whatsoever befell was a very certain remedy for such an ill. That which they said they put in practice as best they might, going about day and night, now to this tavern, now to that, drinking without stint or measure; and on this wise they did yet more freely ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Dons' dominion Still subjugates us all, They scoff at our opinion, Our purposes miscall; Will no deliverer appear, And is it vainly, as we fear, We hold our meetings every year ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... a system of which the impost is the smallest evil. They smite the tax-gatherer, but fall prostrate at the feet of the contemptible prince for whom the tax-gatherer plies his craft; they will even revile the troublesome and importunate monk, or sometimes they will scoff at the sleek and arrogant priest, while such is their infatuation that they would risk their lives in defense of that cruel Church which has inflicted on them hideous calamities, but to which they still cling, as it it were the dearest object ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... sure thou dost not invite wild Lemminkainen.' At this the servant asked why she was not to ask Lemminkainen, and Louhi answered: 'Lemminkainen must not come, for he loves war and strife, and would bring disturbance and sorrow to our feast, and scoff ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... dwindled since To penny things—at our Black Prince Historic pens would scoff— The only one we moderns had Was nothing but a Sandwich lad, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... repentance; prayers and curses issuing from his lips in horrible confusion up to the last moment of his existence. His death was witnessed by several of his companions in crime; and, while some tried to laugh and scoff away the unwelcome impression which the scene produced upon their minds, there were others who went into the open air and wandered away by themselves to ponder upon this miserable ending of ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... vent her rage aloud, Let bold blasphemers scoff; The Lord our God shall judge the proud, And cut ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... which your steps have bowed? Think ye, ye hold in your ignoble thrall, Mind, soul, thought, taste, hope, feeling, valor, all? No; these unfettered scorn your nerveless hand, Sport at their will, and scoff at your command, Range through arcades of shadow-brooding palms, Snuff their free airs and breathe their floating balms, Or bolder still, on fancy's fiery wing—[22] Caught from their letters at the noon-day spring— With star-eyed science, and her seraph train Read the bright secrets of yon ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... Ships and their unhallowed mariners. She lives cannilie and quietly; no one knows how she is fed or supported; but her dress is aye whole, her cottage ever smokes, and her table lacks neither of wine, white and red, nor of fowl and fish, and white bread and brown. It was a dear scoff to Jock Matheson, when he called old Moll the uncannie carline of Blawhooly: his boat ran round and round in the centre of the Solway,—everybody said it was enchanted,—and down it went head foremost: and had nae Jock been a swimmer equal to a sheldrake, ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... legitimate pride, 'God gave us the sea, but we made the shore,' and no one who has seen the artificial barrier that guards the mainland from the Hook to the Texel will disparage their achievement or scoff at their pretensions. ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... was in this agony, the report was brought to him that the children of Israel in Goshen were careless and idle in their forced labor. The news aggravated his suffering, and he said: "Now that I am ill, they turn and scoff at me. Harness my chariot, and I will betake myself to Goshen, and see the derision wherewith the children of Israel deride me." And they took and put him upon a horse, for he was not able to mount it himself. When he and his ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... thou not said, 'Be virtuous, be good, be just, for the sake of mankind: but there is no life after this life'? Mankind! why should I love mankind? Hideous and misshapen, mankind jeer at me as I pass the streets. What hast thou done to me? Thou hast taken away from me, who am the scoff of this world, the hopes of another! Is there no other life? Well, then, I want thy gold, that at least I may hasten to make ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... acquaintance with him by laughing at him and trying to cover him with ridicule. But in his presence those who come to scoff remain to pray. Such men really overcome ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... trust you as I trust the stars; Nor cruel loss, nor scoff of pride, Nor beggary, nor dungeon bars, Can ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... profess to have made a discovery during the last few weeks; that I try to arrange all my actions with a view to the new revelations of life and duty which I have certainly had; in simple language you know that, whereas, I not long ago presumed to scoff at conversion, and at the idea of a life abiding in Christ, I believe now that I have been converted, and that the Lord Jesus is my Friend and Brother; I want to tell you that I have found rest and peace in him. Is it any wonder ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... nineteenth century, because it supplies a human and natural craving for excitement. It may not be the dominant type, but it will always exist, and will produce its thrill by ever-varying devices. Those who scoff may be taken unawares, like the company in Nightmare Abbey. The conversation turned on the subject of ghosts, and Mr. Larynx related his delightfully ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... will be amused." He presented a top-like triangular appearance for one staggering second. The Tinleys did not go 'so' at all, and consequently they lost the satirical man, and were called 'the ballet-dancers' by Adela which thorny scoff her sisters permitted to pass about for a single day, and no more. The Tinleys were their match at epithets, and any low contention of this kind obscured for them the social summit they hoped to attain; the dream whereof ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Knox and of —- Sinclair, his wife, {2a} unlike most Scotsmen, unlike even Mr. Carlyle, had not "an ell of pedigree." The common scoff was that each Scot styled himself "the King's poor cousin." But John Knox declared, "I am a man of base estate and condition." {2b} The genealogy of Mr. Carlyle has been traced to a date behind the Norman Conquest, but ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... addresses himself to SPEAKER, edging in a sentence amid comparative pauses in uproar. PRINCE ARTHUR protests he will not yield to force; Liberals opposite, cheered by news from Walsall, following fast on heels of triumph at Halifax, laugh and scoff. Mr. G. safely packed off to bed; the SQUIRE and his brother officers on Front Bench evidently ready to make a night of it. TIM HEALY, radiant with this rare and rosy reflection of the good old times, observes it is "an excellent hour of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... was apt to scoff, With jokes most aptly timed, Said Sam might any day go off, 'Cause ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... dared not approach the Sacrament, he dared not pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in riotous despair every fragment of a religious belief which seemed to live in his heart only to torture him. He had heard priests scoff over the wafer they consecrated,—he had known them to mingle poison for rivals in the sacramental wine,—and yet God had kept silence and not struck them dead; and like the Psalmist of old he said, "Verily, I have cleansed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Jupiter we beg For a devouring despot, lank of leg, Of prying eye, and frog-transfixing beak; Though singly we seem weak, United we are strong to smite or scoff. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... same goal; they want only perfect submission. The gospel now to be preached is not, "Away with me to the land where the fields are fair and the waters flow," but, "Here in your penury, while the rich go idly by and scoff, and the chariot wheels choke you with dust, ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... were better provided with munitions of war; yet the pirates, fighting with the bravery of desperate men, were victorious, and the city fell into their hands. Then followed days of murder, plunder, and debauchery. Morgan saw his followers, maddened by liquor, scoff at the idea of discipline and obedience. Fearing that while his men were helplessly drunk the Spaniards would rally and cut them to pieces, he set fire to the city, that the stores of rum might be destroyed. After sacking the town, the vandals packed their plunder ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... stealing my profits and drinking my champagne that I gave my honour for? and that you'll attend to your duties, and stand watch and watch, and bear your proper share of the ship's work, instead of leaving it all on the shoulders of a landsman, and making yourself the butt and scoff of native seamen? Is that what you mean? If it is, be so good as to ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... fair than any in the land, and, indeed, she is the apple of the King's eye.' Her voice was gruff with emotion, but, suddenly becoming very aware that she was talking to a strange young gentleman who might scoff, she seemed to choke and put her hand over ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... "And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray". Prior compares the opening lines of Dryden's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... not only exceeded the French, but all those who have made any attempts on that kind of poetry, the incomparable author of Hudibras excepted. Mr. Cotton likewise translated several of Lucian's Dialogues into burlesque verse, printed in 8vo. London 1675, under the title of the Scoffer Scoff'd. In 1689 a volume of poems, with Mr. Cotton's name prefixed, was published in London: on these poems colonel Lovelace, Sir Alton Cockaine, Robert Harrick, esq; and Mr. Alexander Brome, complimented the author by copies of verses prefixed; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... make myself friends with Mammon of Unrighteousness, among the magistrates of the Gentiles, and among their mighty men; and it shall come to pass that Darsie Latimer shall be delivered, even if it were at the expense of half my substance." And I said, "Nay, my brother, go not, for they will but scoff at and revile thee; but hire with thy silver one of the scribes, who are eager as hunters in pursuing their prey, and he shall free Darsie Latimer from the men of violence by his cunning, and thy soul shall be guiltless of evil ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... cried Ellen, and swoon'd in his arms, But the PAINT-KING, he scoff'd at her pain. "Prithee, love," said the monster, "what mean these alarms?" She hears not, she sees not the terrible charms, That work ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... of the singers—shall, in the journey of their life, at least pass through the zone of song: some of them recognise it as the region of truth, and continue to believe in it still when it seems to have vanished from around them; others scoff as it disappears, and curse themselves for dupes. Through this zone Richard was now passing. Hence the moon wore to him a sorrowful face, and he felt a vague sympathy in her regard, that of one who was herself in trouble, half the light of her lord's countenance ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... their work. Hitherto they had not been able to cast up a mound for their ordnance, so harassed and occupied were they with these incessant alarms. But Rigby, on whom devolved the plan and conduct of the siege, seeing that their affairs were in no thriving condition, but that rather they were the scoff and jest of the garrison, who daily taunted them from the walls, determined at all hazards to raise his cannon. For this purpose a considerable number of the peasantry and poorer sort in the neighbourhood, and for miles round, were driven like beasts to their daily ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... jus' was mad enough To tink he got to hold review Widout his best Dutch ruff. Ma'am said she 'lowed it was de calf Dat had done chawed it off; But when de General heard dat ar, He answered with a scoff; He said de marks warn't don' of teef, But plainly dose ob shears; An' den he showed her to de do' And cuffed me on ye years. And when my ma'am arribed at home She stretched me 'cross her lap, Den took de lace away from me An' sewed it on her cap. And when I dies I hope ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... wan, He looked so great and high, So noble was his manly front, So calm his steadfast eye,— The rabble rout forbore to shout, And each man held his breath, For well they knew the hero's soul Was face to face with death. And then a mournful shudder Through all the people crept, And some that came to scoff at him ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... by a counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of these years he was the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. Since then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... beauteous brow Shade after shade is passing now, Like clouds across the pale moon glancing, As thought on rapid thought advancing, Thrills through the maiden's trembling breast, Not doubting, and yet not at rest. Not doubting! Man may turn away And scoff at shrines, where yesterday He knelt, in earnest faith, to pray, And wealth may lose its charm for him, And fame's alluring star grow dim, Devotion, avarice, glory, all The pageantries of earth may pall; But love is of a higher birth ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... lord. The Romans of old were a very wise people, yet, certes, they placed their faith in such matters. So, too, did the Greeks, and divers other ancient peoples who were famed for their learning. Yet of the moderns there are many who scoff at ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... too deeply to be conscious of the rudeness in the scoff. "So you figure it out like that—do you? And you get some satisfaction out of that way of looking at it? The scheme of things is very fine, but he must pay the penalty of his own oversight, weakness—carelessness—whatever you choose to ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... constitution of human nature, make it impossible that the theater should exist, save under a law of degeneracy. Its trend is downward; its centuries of history tell just this one story. The actual stage of to-day..is a moral abomination. In Chicago, at least, it is trampling on the Sabbath with defiant scoff. It is defiling our youth. It is making crowds familiar with the play of criminal passions. It is exhibiting women with such approaches to nakedness as can have no other design than to breed lust behind the ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... it. They remember him as a babe in arms, as a little, clinging, prattling child. They think of what they have done and suffered for his sake and how the cord of love has been silently woven through the years. My love to you is my greatest bond, and, though some may grow cold, some may scoff, and some repudiate, never let the lips of any say that your rector, your old grey-headed pastor, now in his fourth and last watch, ever ceased in his love ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... his friendship with Countess Waldersee owes its origin to the motherly way in which she behaved to his wife, acting as her mentor, as her adviser and guide in the intricate maze of Berlin society, and of court life. Debarred from all intimacy with her sisters-in-law, who were ever ready to scoff at, and to make fun of her, Augusta-Victoria was wont to have recourse to the countess in all her difficulties, and inasmuch as Count Waldersee himself is the most brilliant soldier of the German army, and was designated at the time by the great Moltke as his successor and his principal ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... hand; and this message was as a heavy yoke upon me, so that I wept bitterly at the thought of what I should have to pass through. While I wept, I heard a voice say, "weep not, some will laugh at thee, some will scoff at thee, and the dogs will bark at thee, but while thou doest my will, I will be with thee to the ends ...
— Memoir of Old Elizabeth, A Coloured Woman • Anonymous
... in the power of Siva or of his servants.. They call his messengers imposters, and scoff at them when they speak of the ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... a touch of pity. 'Behold the man!' as he meant it, was as if he had said, 'Is this poor, bruised, spiritless sufferer worth hate or fear? Does He look like a King or a dangerous enemy?' Pilate for once drops the scoff of calling Him their King, and seeks to conciliate and move to pity. The profound meanings which later ages have delighted to find in his words, however warrantable, are no part of their design as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... are. I want you here—here where the pain is hardest," and she clasped her arms tightly over her heaving bosom. Then her pride returned again, and with it came thoughts of Arthur Carrollton. He would scoff at her as weak and sentimental; he would never take beyond the sea a bride of "Hagarish" birth; and duty demanded that she too should be firm, and sanction his decision. "But when he's gone," she ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... to take the risks, and remain chief of the guard yourself?" she said with an angry scoff. "Truly there did not seem to be many thrusting forward to strip you of the office. I shall have a fine sorting up of places in payment for this night's work. But for the present, ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... there was a tendency to scoff, or to laugh, at the eugenic movement. It was regarded as an attempt to breed men as men breed animals, and it was thought a sufficiently easy task to sweep away this new movement with the remark that love laughs at bolts and bars. It is now beginning to be better understood. None but fanatics dream ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in that scent; There's the mother's call to dinner, there's the landlord's call—for rent! And the call of the rooks,—and another call, fur off, Like a whisper from a grave-yard, green and silent. Some may scoff At a Cockney's chat of laylocks. I could bury my old phiz In their crisp and nutty coolness, as I did when flirty Liz, My first sweetheart, sent me packing, one Spring mornin'—for a while— And them blossoms cooled my anger—most ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... us begin, dear love, where we left off; Tie up the broken threads of that old dream, And go on happy as before, and seem Lovers again, though all the world may scoff. ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Few its end regret. Surely not the Waiter. He his finger had In the pie—or gravy. Did he? Well, 'tis sad. He must cry "Peccavi!" But whoever mixed, Or whoever boiled it, Our opinion's fixed, He, or they, quite spoiled it. 'Tis the general scoff, Butt of chaff and rudeness. Irish ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... to my making the acquaintance of her husband, the lame old man of whom I had caught a glimpse on the boulevard. She married him for the sake of her son. He is rich, and suffers from attacks of rheumatism. I did not allow myself even a single scoff at his expense. She respects him as a father, and will deceive him as a husband... A strange thing, the human heart in general, and ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... all if she could and if she dared. She never seeks the houses of the Busnees but for the purpose of prey; for the wild animals of the sierra do not more abhor the sight of man than she abhors the countenances of the Busnees. She now comes to prey upon you and to scoff at you. Will you believe her words? Fools! do you think that the being before ye has any sympathy for the like ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Northrup ceased to scoff at his fancy; he wooed it. He pictured the girl's hair loose from the rough cap—curly, rather wild hair with an uplift in every tendril. What colour was it? Gold-brown probably, like the eyes. For five minutes he tried to decide this but knew that he would have to see it again ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... to destruction, as is now plainly evident in the misfortunes of many. True, you have lessened our taxes to the public; but, too, you have increased those to ourselves;—prosecutions, protests, and failures are no blessing to a community. And you dare scoff at the man in his grave whom the whole parish blesses! You dare say he lies in our way,—yes, very likely he lies in your way. This is plainly to be seen; but over this grave you shall fall! The spirit which has reigned over you, and at the same time until now over us, was not born to rule, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... stood with his chin leaning on his clasped hands. 'What is there to laugh at?' he said, without looking at his companion, 'why should you scoff? Yes, you are right: love is a grand word, a grand feeling.... But what sort ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... behalf of this he offers overwhelming evidence." To this Zeno replies, admitting the fact, and adds: "These writings of mine were meant to protect the arguments of Parmenides against those who scoff at him, and show the many ridiculous and contradictory results which they suppose to follow from the affirmation of the One. My answer is an address to the partisans of the many, whose attack I return with ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... meek and unaffected grace, His looks adorn'd the venerable place; Truth from his lips prevail'd with double sway, And fools who came to scoff remain'd to pray. The service past, around the pious man, With steady zeal each honest rustic ran; E'en children follow'd with endearing wile, And pluck'd his gown to share the good man's smile. His ready smile a parent's warmth exprest, Their welfare pleased him, and their cares distrest; ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of a mercurial and nervous temperament, and this fact perhaps may account for the anomaly of a mountain-boy who was a poor shot. Andy was the scoff of Persimmon Ridge. ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... But again, I check this rising impatience, and console myself under the present prospect with the consideration, that the same beneficent and wise Providence which has done so much for this country, will not eventually leave us to ruin our own happiness, to become the sport of chance, or the scoff of a once admiring world; but that great things are yet in store for this people, which time, and the wisdom of the Great Director will produce in ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... obviously just come from one of those elaborate finishing schools in which the daughters of rich people are turned into hothouse plants by sycophants and parasites and sent out into the world the most perfect specimens of superautocracy, to patronize their parents, scoff at discipline, ignore duty and demand the sort of luxury that brought Rome to its fall. With admiration and amusement she watched her say good-by to one woman after another as the various tables broke up. It really gave her quite a moment to see the way in which Joan gave as careless ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... dereliction on the part of the prince's father, of all noble sympathy and generous feeling. Doubtless, he also, whose blood received a mingling tide from his proud mother—he, the acknowledged focus of the kingdom's wealth and nobility, had been taught to repeat my father's name with disdain, and to scoff at my just claims to protection. I strove to think that all this grandeur was but more glaring infamy, and that, by planting his gold-enwoven flag beside my tarnished and tattered banner, he proclaimed not his superiority, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... two whose love, first foolish, widening scope, Knows suddenly, with music high and soft, The Holy of holies; who because they scoff'd Are now amazed with shame, nor dare to cope With the whole truth aloud, lest heaven should ope; Yet, at their meetings, laugh not as they In speech; nor speak, at length; but sitting oft Together, within hopeless ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... need we more? Ha! glory!—now speak not of it. By all I hold most sacred and most solemn- By all my wishes now—my fears hereafter- By all I scorn on earth and hope in heaven- There is no deed I would more glory in, Than in thy cause to scoff at this same glory And trample it under foot. What matters it- What matters it, my fairest, and my best, That we go down unhonored and forgotten Into the dust—so we descend together. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... at last, with strange gentleness, "insult me, scoff at me, overwhelm me with scorn! but come, come. Let us make haste. It is to be to-morrow, I tell you. The gibbet on the Greve, you know it? it stands always ready. It is horrible! to see you ride in that tumbrel! Oh mercy! Until now I have never felt the power of my love for ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Bart had stirred up a number of enemies, for, when a man is successful in life, are there not always a hundred unsuccessful fellows who stand about and scoff? ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... there are some severe pieces, sharply ridiculing his critics. In the old days, when he wrote fine imaginative poetry, out of his heart and brain working together, he did not mind what the critics said, and only flashed a scoff or two at them in his creation of Naddo in Sordello. But now when he wrote a great deal of his poetry out of his brain alone, he became sensitive to criticism. For that sort of poetry does not rest on the sure foundation which is given by the consciousness the imagination has of its absolute ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Gav. My lord, I cannot brook these injuries. Q. Isab. Ay me, poor soul, when these begin to jar! [Aside. K. Edw. Return it to their throats; I'll be thy warrant. Gav. Base, leaden earls, that glory in your birth, Go sit at home, and eat your tenants' beef; And come not here to scoff at Gaveston, Whose mounting thoughts did never creep so low As to bestow a look on such as you. Lan. Yet I disdain not to do this for you. [Draws his sword, and offers to stab Gaveston. K. Edw. ...
— Edward II. - Marlowe's Plays • Christopher Marlowe
... in the Book of Wisdom who say: "Let unrighteousness be our law," 2, 11. Also in Psalms, 12, 4: "Who have said, With our tongue will we prevail; our lips are our own: who is lord over us?" Again in Psalm 73. "They scoff, and in wickedness utter oppression: they speak loftily," etc. Such were the giants who withstood the Holy Spirit to his face, who, through the mouth of Lamech, Noah and the sons of Noah, exhorted, implored, ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... which I have come across in the hospital, and which seem to me to bear the mark of the old army as distinct from the new, are: "bondook," a rifle; "sound scoff" (to the bugler, to sound Rations); "scran," victuals, rations; "weighing out," paying out; "chucking a dummy," being absent; "get the wind up," be afraid (and "put the wind up," make afraid); "the home farm," the married quarters; "chips," the pioneer sergeant (carpenter); "tank," wet ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... in a glow, And he thinks—with some "cuts"—it will be "a great go," At night, at night! But oh, what a difference In the morning! The critics call the thing "an awful warning," They "guy," and sneer, and scoff, And his bantling's taken off, "To make room for some old farce, Sir!" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... written in pencil on a porcelain card, with the formula in gilt and a coronet. Indeed, the very cans that came up to my bedroom with hot water were marked with coronet and cipher. I was inclined to scoff at this, at first, as ostentatious; but after all, as the things were to be marked, how could ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... virtue in another, especially if it be such a virtue whereunto himself pretendeth. Speech of touch towards others should be sparingly used; for discourse ought to be as a field, without coming home to any man. I knew two noblemen, of the west part of England, whereof the one was given to scoff, but kept ever royal cheer in his house; the other would ask of those that had been at the other's table, "Tell truly, was there never a flout or dry blow given?" To which the guest would answer, "Such and such a thing passed." ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... was here I have spoken in a great many cities, and to-morrow I am going to do some missionary work at Milwaukee. Many who have come to scoff have remained to pray, and I think that my labors are being greatly blessed, and all attacks on me so far have been overruled for good. I happened to come in contact with a revival of religion, and I believe what they call an "outpouring" at Detroit, under the leadership ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... and all connected therewith, had yet much to say in thy praise, when thou wast far inferior to what thou art now, why should true-born Englishmen, or those who call themselves so, turn up their noses at thee, and scoff thee at the present day, as I believe they do? But, let others do as they will, I, at least, who am not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman, will not turn up my nose at thee, but will praise and extol thee, calling thee mart of the world—a place of wonder and astonishment!—and, ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... lake, which other people thought so lovely, was, in that mind which affected to scoff at the unseen, a distinct ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... neighborhood, almost, had assembled in the square, despite the increasing rain. Many had come to scoff. What a farce it all would be! They did well, however, to wait two days! The rain was almost over. It would probably stop by the time they got the ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... was One who could make it strong. Suddenly she felt in her that consciousness which the weakest have at times felt, and which, however the rationalist may scoff, the Christian dare not disbelieve—that sense of not working, but being worked upon—by which truths come into one's heart, and words into one's mouth, involuntarily, as if some spirit, not our own, were at work within us. Such ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... gone abroad that I am in correspondence with France; that I am a traitor to Holland; that I correspond with the Spanish at Antwerp. In vain have I tried to force an open accusation, in order that I might disperse it. The merchants, and others of my rank, scoff at these rumours, and have in full council denounced their authors as slanderers; but the lower class still hold to their belief. Men scowl as I walk along; the boys shout 'Traitor!' after me; and I have ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... say it?" demanded her visitor. "And as to speaking sense—. But I'll no' trouble you. It seems you have friends in such plenty that you can afford to scorn and scoff at them at your pleasure. Good-day to you," and ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... quite unobtrusively, without blare of trumpets, skepticism would slip into society. It would be useless for Glanvill and More to call aloud, or for the people to rage. The classes who mingled in the worldly life of the capital would scoff; and the country gentry who took their cue from them ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... months in daily communion with the living creature of his imagination, cannot, if he work as artists must, but come into a state of great and secret love for his dream-images. The feeling is sacred, indeed; for what dweller in Philistia but would scoff at such a sentimentality as love for work, and unhappiness at its conclusion? Nevertheless it is true that, when the hour of triumph, the finishing of a long, successful creation is accomplished, and ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... prayer went up, and there were none to scoff, when the aged man bent his knee, and lifted his heart to God in prayer, beseeching him, for Jesus Christ's sake, to have mercy upon their souls. Many prayed in that hour of trial that never prayed before. It was an hour that closed ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... plain with you, I am sorry you are an Angler: for I have heard many grave, serious men pitie, and many pleasant men scoff at Anglers. ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... sentiments concerning Life and its obligations. They were often startling, particularly as she made no secret of the fact that she and her husband never "got on." Between puffs of cigarette smoke she would scoff at the laws of marriage and speak with much leniency of divorce. Her sympathies were invariably with offenders, and Joyce thought her rather too fond of the society of men. Meredith feared and disliked her. The fear was on his wife's account, lest she should be ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... disunion. Who of us is not proud of the greatness we have achieved? Disunion and separation destroy that greatness. Once disunited, we are no longer great. The nations of the earth who have looked upon you as a formidable Power, and rising to untold and immeasurable greatness in the future, will scoff at you. Your flag, that now claims the respect of the world, that protects American property in every port and harbor of the world, that protects the rights of your citizens everywhere, what will become of it? What ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... the training quarters, innumerable times; and this continues so long that by the time the "group" is ready for the stage, behold! the cubs with which the patient and tireless trainer began have grown so large that to the audience they now seem like adult and savage animals. Those who scoff at the wild animal mind, and say that all this displays nothing but "machines in fur" need to be reminded that this very same line of effort in training and rehearsal is absolutely necessary in the production of every ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... they should be mistaken in the exercise of their authority, God will reward your obedience. Besides obeying them, you must also help and support your parents if they need your assistance. You must not scoff at or despise them for their want of learning or refinement, because they perhaps have made many sacrifices to give you the advantages of which they in their youth were deprived. Do we not sometimes find persons of pretended culture ignorantly slighting ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
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