"Grandiose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he feels his heart opening to the truth, which he follows up with the determination of a real Gorkyan hero. The life of the people appears to him in its sublime simplicity. And it is in the midst of a dazzling apotheosis—which reminds one of the most grandiose pages of Zola's "Lourdes"—that he finally confesses the God of his ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... wings what I can only describe as the atmosphere of Infancy,—and a touching atmosphere it is too—is strengthened by keeping all the figures small and heightening this suggestion by contrast with a grandiose architecture. In both, too, the sacred scenes reveal themselves like visions unseen by the Oberriedt family, who face outward toward the altar and are supposed to be lighted by the actual lights of the church. The whole work must once have been a glorious ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... aid-post and battalion dispensary. The first stage in the journey is now over. Soon a couple of cars creep quietly up. One by one the casualties are lifted in or climb in stiffly. The doctor who has come up with them chats with the M.O., and the local gossip is exchanged for the wider knowledge (or more grandiose rumours) of the field ambulance. Our Jock, who has a bullet in his chest, is lifted in. Straps are fastened securely and tarpaulins tied. 'All aboard, sir!' 'Right! Well, so long, Hadley!' 'Cheero, Scott!' The ambulances start very cautiously, and crawl up ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... of Browning's writings, appear singularly appropriate that so cosmopolitan a poet was born in London. It would seem as though something of that mighty complex life, so confusedly petty to the narrow vision, so grandiose and even majestic to the larger ken, had blent with his being from the first. What fitter birthplace for the poet whom a comrade has called the "Subtlest Assertor of the Soul in Song," the poet whose writings are indeed a mirror ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... roseate home of Venetian counts, and was now crumbling to pieces and let in flats to the poor. Hilary and his wife were most suitably domiciled therein, environed by a splendid dinginess and squalor, pretentious, tawdry, grandiose, and superbly evading the common. Peggy wrote to Peter in her large sprawling hand, "You dear little brother, I wish you'd come and live with us. We have such fun...." That was the best of Peggy. Always and everywhere she had such fun. She added, "Give my sisterly regards to ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... platform or more commonly on a minor platform of its own in the middle of the steps. In most cases the chamber stands back behind a row, in some instances two rows, of columns, which support the characteristic entablature seen in the illustrations. In the case of the more grandiose temples a series of columns may run all round the building, carrying an extension of the roof, under which is thus formed a covered colonnade. More commonly the sides and back of the chamber have only what are ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Another grandiose idea, which is actually being carried into effect, is to connect all the seaside resorts on the coast of Flanders by a great boulevard, 40 yards wide, with a road for carriages and pedestrians, a track for motor-cars and bicycles, and an electric railway, all side by side. Large portions ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... grandeur in the books. For it is less the fortunes of the individual colliers than the Rights of Labour and their chances of recognition which form the true theme of Germinal; whilst in Ringan Gilhaize we are called to gaze upon nothing less than the grandiose spectacle of a nation in death-grips with a race of mansworn sovereigns. Hence, in either case, the individual characters, measured by the greatness of the issues at stake, sink into comparative insignificance. But this ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... most secure of popularity were soon consigned to oblivion. It is a significant fact that Donizetti's lighter works have stood the test of time more successfully than his more serious efforts. Though the grandiose airs and sham tragedy of 'Lucia' have long since ceased to impress us, we can still take pleasure in the unaffected gaiety of 'La Fille du Regiment' and 'Don Pasquale.' These and many similar works were ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... sculptural representation of which Chinese art has found its most grotesque expression. It is really an exaggerated lion; and the symbolical relation of the lion to Buddhism is well known. Statues of these mythical animals—sometimes of a grandiose and colossal execution—are placed in pairs before the entrances of temples, palaces, and tombs, as tokens of honor, and as emblems of ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... assimilation of a people of 70,000,000 of souls by an aristocratic, almost a feudal, directing class, a combination of plutocrats and militarists, is in reality a most curious phenomenon, more than curious, in a sense grandiose, and in any case full of suggestions ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... red dress amid that rather drab assembly as a leaping flame. She turned about, fronting the perplexed and agitated congregation, her head carried high, her face austere for all its youthful softness, an heroic quality, something, indeed, superlative and grandiose in her bearing and expression, causing a shrinking in those who saw her and a certain ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... proportions of the apartments— the marble pillars and niches of one; the remains of a richly-carved chimneypiece in another; the highly-wrought ceilings, to which ancient history and allegory have supplied grandiose figures—their deep colours unfaded, the ruddy burnish of their gilding as splendid as ever. Here and there great black-and-gold court-stools, raised at the sides, and finished off with bullet heads ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... the types and masters of the forest, their trunks, incomparably tall, and all their noble limbs, now thinly veiled by a departing leafage, drawn sharp, in black and silver, on the pale background of the chalk plain. Nothing so grandiose as these climbing beech woods of middle England!—by day, as it were, some vast procession marching joyously over hill and dale to the music of the birds and the wind; and at night, a brooding host, silent yet animate, waiting the signal of ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... North America have been flung up into a continental divide, the country in many of its aspects is still terrible. In extent alone this mountain empire is grandiose. The swiftest transcontinental trains approaching its boundaries at night find night falling again before they have fairly penetrated it. Geologically severe, this region in geological store is the ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... and white damask, formerly the curtains of the state-bed, was draped with ample portieres and window curtains lined with white silk. Pictures, evidently from old panels, plant-stands, various pretty articles of modern upholstery, handsome lamps, and a rare old cut-glass chandelier, gave a grandiose appearance to the room. The carpet was a Persian rug. The boudoir, wholly modern, and furnished entirely after Madame Moreau's own taste, was arranged in imitation of a tent, with ropes of blue silk on a gray background. The classic divan was there, of course, with its pillows and footstools. ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... of reading, and his lonely life with this old half-imbecile woman increased his own tendency to visionary dreamings. "He was predisposed to Utopian ideas by certain hereditary influences; his grandmother's nervous disorders became in him a chronic enthusiasm, striving after everything that was grandiose and impossible." His Uncle Antoine Macquart, who hoped through him to annoy the Rougons, encouraged him in his Republican views, and after the Coup d'Etat he joined the insurrection which then ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... his favourite corner of the domain—a kind of projecting spur or platform shaded by a few grandiose umbrella pines. Near at hand, on a slightly lower level, rose a group of flame—like cypresses whose shapely outlines stood out against the sea, shining far below like a lake of pearl. The milky ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Francis revives the Hebrew inspiration, the simple and grandiose view of the prophets of Israel. "Praise the Lord!" the royal Psalmist had sung, "praise the Lord, fire and frost, snow and mists, stormy winds that do his will, mountains and all hills, fruit-trees and all cedars, beasts and all cattle, creeping ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... path where Jane Allen should at least now be seen on her way. "Perhaps Jane feels we should forswear this moment of mirth; being juniors and stepping aside from all the others. They call it the Whisper you know; 'count of the whispering poplar above," with a grandiose wave at the innocent tree. "But I would much prefer a ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and sculpture, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... encumbered with trunks and parcels, leaving the scene of her struggles and her defeat, whither she had once come as slim as a wand, to return stout and heavy, and heavy-hearted, to her childhood; content to live with her grandiose sister until such time as she should be ready for burial! The grimy and impassive old house perhaps heard her heart saying: "Only yesterday they were little girls, ever so tiny, and now—" The driving-off of a waggonette ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... brush. His characters were large, but never quite free from weakness, except in portraiture, where he appeared at his best. Vasari (1511-1574)—the same Vasari who wrote the lives of the painters—had versatility and facility, but his superficial imitations of Michael Angelo were too grandiose in conception and too palpably false in modelling. Salviati (1510-1563) was a friend of Vasari, a painter of about the same cast of mind and hand as Vasari, and Federigo Zucchero (1543-1609) belongs with him in ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... lifted her eyebrows as though he puzzled her. She never had liked him, and by now all her instincts were hostile to him. His clumsy figure, and slovenly dress offended her, and the touch of something grandiose in his heavy brow, and reddish-gold hair, seemed to her merely theatrical. Her information was that he had been no use as a campaigner. Why on earth did ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Larrabee hurried out to Aunt Martha's to get the facts about his life for the paper. It was a bright October morning as she went up the walk to the old brick house, and she heard someone playing on the piano, rolling the chords after the grandiose manner of pianists fifty years ago. A voice seemed to be singing an old ballad. As the girl mounted the steps the voice came more distinctly to her. It was quavering and unsure, but with a moan of ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... further, and conceived of a final general judgment, a final winding-up of human history, and a permanent reconstruction of the world on a basis largely moral, though tinged with local religious elements—a grandiose idea that has maintained itself up to the present time, embodying the conviction that the outcome of life depends on character, and that ethical retribution is the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... year 1640. He wrote several theological tracts, edited sundry agricultural works, including, among others, those of Sir Richard Weston, and published his own observations upon the shortcomings of British husbandry. He also proposed a grandiose scheme for an agricultural college, in order to teach youths "the theorick and practick parts of this most ancient, noble, and honestly gainfull art, trade, or mystery." The work published under his name entitled "The Legacy," besides notices of the Brabant husbandry, embraces epistles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... Miserables," for Victor Hugo's avowed purpose, likewise, was the denunciation of social tyranny. But the characteristics that would have weakened the implied theorem, had such been the main object, are the very things that make the novel more powerful as drama of a grandiose, spiritual kind. The high and concentrated imagination that created such a being as Falkland, and the intensity of passion with which Caleb's fatal energy of mind is sustained through that long, despairing struggle, are of greater artistic value than the mechanical symmetry by which morals ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... to have her again—their own Lucy, as she still was, though somewhat of the grandiose style and self-consequence of her husband had overlaid the original nature. She was as good-natured and obliging as ever, and though beginning by conferring her favours as condescensions, she soon would forget that she was the great Mrs. Cavendish Dusautoy, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Chichikov was called upon to decide and to overcome even more difficult problems than the foregoing, and by what colossal forces the levers of his far-flung tale are moved, and how eventually the horizon will become extended until everything assumes a grandiose and a lyrical tendency. Yes, many a verst of road remains to be travelled by a party made up of an elderly gentleman, a britchka of the kind affected by bachelors, a valet named Petrushka, a coachman named Selifan, and three horses which, from the Assessor to the skewbald, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the mast. Andrew's biographer shows himself a shrewd observer when he insists on the unexpressed but inexorable scale by which Andrew and his following measured Lincoln. They had grown up in the faith that you could tell a statesman by certain external signs, chiefly by a grandiose and commanding aspect such as made overpowering the presence of Webster. And this idea was not confined to any one locality. Everywhere, more or less, the conservative portion in every party held this view. It was the view of Washington ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... critics. How excellent a standard of craftsmanship was maintained by the Venetian school is well exemplified by 1673, a portrait by an unknown artist. 1352, The Visitation, by Sebastiano del Piombo, although much injured by restorers, is a fair example of that master's grandiose style in his Roman period. We now reach the Titians. 1577 and 1580, are good average Sante Conversazioni, the latter is, however, assigned by Mr. Berenson to a pupil. 1581, The Supper at Emmaus, a mature and genuine work; and 1578, the much-admired Virgin and Child with the Rabbit, painted ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... to the mussel-bed. Meanwhile the prospect to be seen from this improvised seat was one made to be looked at. There is a certain innate compelling quality in all great beauty. When nature or woman presents a really grandiose appearance, they are singularly reposeful, if you notice; they have the calm which comes with a consciousness of splendor. It is only prettiness which is tormented with the itching for display; and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... faade, remains are still discernible of inlaid work in coloured stone, and within the gateway, on the smooth slabs of the pavement, the wheel-ruts are still visible. Connect them with those metal war-chariots in Homer, and you may see in fancy the whole grandiose character of the place, as it may really have been. Shut within the narrow enclosure of these shadowy citadels were the palaces of the kings, with all that intimacy which we may sometimes suppose to have been alien from the open-air Greek life, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... of Costecalde were limited to excursions among the Alpines. Why should not Tartarin, during the three months that still intervened before the elections, why should he not attempt some grandiose adventure? plant, for instance, the standard of the Club on the highest peak of Europe, the Jungfrau or ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... excelled in, "humour"— "In some places we have had somewhat more of Humour than the Original, to make it still more agreeable to our Age . . . ." (ibid., p. xxii). When speaking for himself alone in the Preface to the Plautus, Echard's claims were less grandiose. Here the translation seems much more specifically aimed at schoolboys, and Echard made firm claims for his literalness (sig. b1-2v). On the other hand, he went out of his way to praise Dryden's Amphitryon (1690) for ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... delight, therefore, that Elsa hailed the prospect of release, for the young man with his grandiose bearing and amorous sighs wearied her almost beyond endurance. Adrian was not equally pleased; indeed he had feigned symptoms which caused him to remain in bed an extra week, merely in order that he might keep her near him. But now the inevitable hour had come, and Adrian felt that it was ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... inhabitants. Through the spring and summer of 1836 the talk of internal improvements grew more general and more clamorous. The candidates for office spoke about little else, and the only point of emulation among the parties was which should be the more reckless and grandiose in its promises. When the time arrived for the assembling of the Legislature, the members were not left to their own zeal and the recollection of their campaign pledges, but meetings and conventions were everywhere held to spur them up to the fulfillment ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... hesitated, nobody having the courage to take upon themselves the responsibility of the decisive "Yes." Finally the Count seized the bull by the horns. Adopting his most grandiose air, he turned with a bow to the embarrassed young woman and said, "We accept your offer ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... quadrupled, and Gordon bought just enough to establish the price firmly. The money he paid was deposited again in his new bank, and he proceeded to use it over and over in maintaining exorbitant prices and in advancing his grandiose schemes. His business took him often to Seattle, where by his whirlwind methods he duplicated his success in a measure: his sensational attack upon the money powers got a wide hearing, and he finally secured an indorsement of his scheme by the ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... who, seven years before, had gained the first prize for painting. He had now just come back from Rome. His soul, full-fed with poetry; his eyes, satiated with Raphael and Michael Angelo, thirsted for real nature after long dwelling in the pompous land where art has everywhere left something grandiose. Right or wrong, this was his personal feeling. His heart, which had long been a prey to the fire of Italian passion, craved one of those modest and meditative maidens whom in Rome he had unfortunately seen only in painting. From the enthusiasm produced in his ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... placing it "on a still larger foundation than it has at the present," it also matures it and makes it ready for Socialism—ready, that is to say, as soon as the working people capture the government and turn the capitalists out, but not a day sooner.[92] Until that time even the most grandiose reform is merely "a Socialistically-fringed attempt to save the rule ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life; but though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches of his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... take place till full six months after the period to which our story has brought us. Baronets with twelve thousand a-year cannot be married off the hooks, as may be done with ordinary mortals. Settlements of a grandiose nature were required, and were duly concocted. Perhaps Mr. Die had something to say to them, so that the great maxim of the law was brought into play. Perhaps also, though of this Herbert heard no word, it was ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... Those readers desiring sheer exploration can get it in any library: those in search of sheer romantic adventure can purchase plenty of it at any book-stall. But the majority want something different from either of these. They want, first of all, to know what the country is like-not in vague and grandiose "word paintings," nor in strange and foreign sounding words and phrases, but in comparison with something they know. What is it nearest like-Arizona? Surrey? Upper New York? Canada? Mexico? Or is it totally different from anything, as is the Grand Canyon? When ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... madmen. I mean Jan Bockelson, the Anabaptist, known as Jan of Leyden, who, beginning as pure enthusiast, succumbed, as so many a leader of women has done, to the intoxication of authority, and became the slave of grandiose ambition and excesses. Every country has had its mock Messiahs: they rise periodically in England, not less at the present day than in the darker ages (hysteria being more powerful than light); yet the history of none of these spiritual monarchs can compare with that of ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... capture by Raleigh's factors is comfortably excused on the ground that these acts were only reprisals against the villainous Spaniard. It was well that these more or less commercial undertakings should be successful, for it became more and more plain to Raleigh that the most grandiose of all his enterprises, his determined effort to colonise Virginia, could but be a drain upon his fortune. After Captain White's final disastrous voyage, Raleigh suspended his efforts in this direction for a while. ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... Nebbi-Younas; but it was chiefly upon Nimroud that Esarhaddon left marks of his magnificence. The palace called the South-western Palace, in consequence of its position in the mound, was commenced by him. It was never finished, but in plan it was more grandiose than any other of the royal dwellings. Had it been complete it would have included the largest hall ever provided by an Assyrian architect for the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... to speak; and from the eyes of all outsiders she was sedulously screened. Paul could imagine her, in her great humiliation, solitary among the ruins of her high destiny, hiding her wounds; too sensitive to face the curiosity, too proud to brook the pity, of the world. She seemed to him a very grandiose and tragic figure, and he lost himself musing of her—her with whom he had played at being married, when they were children here, so long, so long ago. She was the daughter, the only child and heiress, of the last Duc de la Granjolaye de Ravanches,—the ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... says Trotsky, "that no wide industrial mobilization will succeed, if we do not capture all that is honorable, spiritual in the peasant working masses in explaining our plan." And the plan that he referred to was not the grandiose (but obviously sensible) plan for the eventual electrification of all Russia, but a programme of the struggle before them in actually getting their feet clear of the morass of industrial decay in which they are at present involved. Such a programme has actually been decided ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... Versailles as their means would permit, and generally beyond those limits, with fountains and avenues and dismally wide paths. Even in our own day a German monarch has left, fortunately unfinished, an accurate Versailles on a damp island in a Bavarian lake. In those grandiose structures they cherished a blighting etiquette, and led lives as dull as those of the aged and torpid carp in their own stew-ponds. Then, at the proper season, they would break away into the forest and kill game. Moreover, still in imitation of their model, they held, as a necessary feature ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the grandiose title we give to the grand total of a long column of accidents when we stop to tot up the figures. So we wait till that strange sum of accidents which we call a baby is added up into a living child of determined sex before we fasten a name ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... the components of the "struggle for existence," such as Fabre has described it, but with no other motive than to describe what he has observed and seen. Such are the ordinary themes of the grandiose battles which he has scattered through his narratives, and never did circus or arena offer more thrilling spectacles; no jungle ever hid more moving ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... suddenly landed in a place so different from that in which moved my old Breton priests, who, with their venerable heads all wood or granite, remind one of the Osirian colossi which in after life so struck my fancy when I saw them in Egypt, grandiose in their long lines of immemorial calm. My coming to Paris marked the passage from one religion to another. There was as much difference between Christianity as I left it in Brittany and that which I found current in Paris, as there is between a piece of old cloth, as ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Belleville, gayly; "such a grandiose and warlike conspiracy would amount to nothing. We must revenge ourselves in another way for the tedious ennui we are made to endure here, and my friends and myself are resolved to do so. We will no longer submit to the shackles of etiquette, which are laid upon us; we will be free from the ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... be visited without the same haunting conviction, the same oppressive thought: how terribly difficult it is to understand the City of the Dead which holds in so small a space the whole secret of the antique world! There are far more grandiose and impressive ruins to be seen in Rome; the city of Timgad in Northern Africa is more complete as a specimen of a Roman settlement than the half-excavated town near Vesuvius; yet here, and here only, can the men of the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... of the preceding; born in 1793; subordinate in the mayor's office at Alencon in charge of registry. A sort of poet, liberal in politics and filled with ambition; weary of poverty and overflowing with grandiose sentiments. In 1816 he loved, with a passion that his commonsense combated, Mme. du Bousquier, then Mlle. Cormon, his senior by more than seventeen years. In 1816 the marriage dreaded by him took place. He could not ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... obliterate all national boundaries, and to destroy all religions other than Judaism. This, it is alleged, is the concrete form in which the Jews visualize their destiny as the Chosen People. In order to attain this grandiose ideal, every means to weaken the non-Jewish elements and institutions in civilization is encouraged by the invisible Jewish government, the ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... Melbourne) made by the large upholsterers is, with few exceptions, more gorgeous than pretty; whence one may reasonably infer that the taste of their customers—when they have any—is better suited by the grandiose than the artistic. But most of the expensively furnished houses show plainly that the upholsterer has been given carte blanche to do what he will. Look at his shop-window, and you may make a shrewd guess ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... content, journeyed back to the scene of operations, and laid our stones round the base of the tub, more because we knew nowhere else to lay them than for any other reason, for the sergeant-major had apparently forgotten his grandiose designs in other schemes, and had disappeared. The fatigue party was thinning. The corporal said what may be freely translated as "disappear quietly," and we made off to our camp, where I found Henry, who had doctor's leave to be ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... of wild-cat schemes and fraudulent speculations, but they were voted cranks by the majority, and the Consolidated Provident Savings Company grew and flourished. It paid large dividends, and its stockholders were duly impressed with the magnificence of its buildings and the grandiose tone ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... was the State chamber, which had been occupied by kings and queens in days of yore. That grandiose four-poster, with the carved ebony columns, cut velvet curtains, and plumes of ostrich feathers, had been built for Elizabeth, when she deigned to include Rood Hall in one of her royal progresses. Charles the First had rested his weary head upon those ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... of a saloon in an old-fashioned country house (Florence Towers, the property of Count O'Dowda) has been curtained off to form a stage for a private theatrical performance. A footman in grandiose Spanish livery enters before the curtain, on ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... the gust of affectionate noise. Minutes elapsed before that great audience remembered that it was at the play, and that the Prince had come to see the play. It sat down reluctantly, saving itself for his departure, watching him as he entered into enjoyment of the brave and grandiose spectacular ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... the existence of that outer world of men and women, though by means of certain indefinite channels only. And the things he remembered were not what the world calls important. They were moments when he had known—beauty; beauty, however, not of the grandiose sort that holds the crowd, but of so simple and unadvertised a kind that most men ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... comprehend, in and through the reading of it, but a modicum of all the high and large fields of knowledge here intimated to them; but who that can now look on his school-days as in the past, does not remember how many grandiose sentences he was then called on to utter in cadence duly swelling or pathetic, but of the meaning of which he had not the most distant approach to a true comprehension? It was ours once to be of a class ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... was right. There was something about her husband that was grandiose and princely, whenever he escaped from his accursed Machiavel, and gave ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... clouds, sad-coloured and autumnal, and a lonely tower built of stone, which rose from the waste at about two hundred yards from the tents to the east. Although they could see so little, however, they were impressed with a sensation that they were on the edge of some vast vision, of some grandiose effect of Nature, that would bring to them a new and astonishing knowledge of the desert. Perhaps it was the sight of the distant tower pointing to the grey clouds that stirred in them this almost excited feeling ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... assistant, "we shall have to diminish the numbers of the Visiting Committee. My dear friend Hymen planned it, in years gone by, on a war footing; and even so I remember suggesting to him at the time that the scale was somewhat—er—grandiose. But it was characteristic of him, and we have clung to it for that reason, in a spirit perhaps too piously conservative. Forty-two ladies! My good fellow"—he turned to the patient—"I really think— if your leg is equal to it—a short stroll in the fresh air may be permitted. Pray ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the pieces of cardboard which had come in Cynthia's letter. He dared not look at Jethro, and his eye was fixed instead upon the somewhat grandiose signature of Isaac D. Worthington, which they bore. Jethro took them and tore them up, and slowly tossed the pieces into a cuspidor conveniently situated near the foot of the bed. He rose and thrust his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sits in a starry meadow suckling her baby from a very ample white breast. I think that this movement towards the Church tradition may be unconscious and instinctive, and would perhaps be deplored by many Communists, for whom grandiose bad Rodin statuary and the crudity of cubism better express what they mean by revolution. But this revolution is Russian and not French, and its art, if all goes well, should inevitably bear the popular Russian stamp. It is would-be primitive and popular art that is vulgar. Such at least is ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... edification of posterity. Among other sayings—I am quoting from memory—I remember this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic; and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of heroic truth have moved ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... want these! Men of all ranks, committed to the great venture, moved with a determined gaiety and elan. "This is the stage, we are the actors; the piece is a great piece, the world looks on!" The town of Edinburgh did present a grandiose setting. Suspense, the die yet covered, the greatness of the risk, gave, too, its glamour of height and stateliness. All these men might see, in some bad moment at night, not only possible battle death—that ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... of frivolity in Francesca's conduct. It was noble, large, and without any second thought. This magnanimity struck Rodolphe greatly, for in it he recognized the difference between the Italian and the Frenchwoman. The waters, the land, the sky, the woman, all were grandiose and suave, even their love in the midst of this picture, so vast in its expanse, so rich in detail, where the sternness of the snowy peaks and their hard folds standing clearly out against the blue sky, reminded Rodolphe of the circumstances which limited his happiness; ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... for creating that volume. It was sheer genius on their part to do so. I get charming sensations from it, but sensations not so charming as I should get from Mrs. Paget Toynbee's many-volumed and grandiose edition, even aside from Mrs. Toynbee's erudite notes and the extra letters which she has been able to print. The same letter in Mrs. Toynbee's edition would have a higher aesthetic and moral value for me than in the "editionlet" ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... chimeras might involve the most innocent accomplice. Then I thought of that dark-eyed, sweet-voiced, young girl, as she lay on the green grass under the beech-tree in the wood and out-argued me on every point. Very suddenly, and, perhaps, in a manner somewhat grandiose, I answered him: ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... the sense that it was her duty to be gracefully efficient in whatsoever she set her hand to. To the young lady of to-day, belike, she will seem accordingly ridiculous—seem poor-spirited, and a pettifogger. True, she set her hand to no grandiose tasks. She was not allowed to become a hospital nurse, for example, or an actress. The young lady of to-day, when she hears in herself a 'vocation' for tending the sick, would willingly, without an instant's preparation, assume responsibility ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... his multitudinous and often vast canvases are a surpassing record. Prolonged study of the human form had given to him, as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures. His mere output was marvellous, and much of it on a grandiose scale. He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times before; but each as he treated it was a new thing. Centuries of tradition ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... and age is a very favourite one. Bellini, in the same church, draws it between SS. Sebastian and Job, and Alvise Vivarini, in his last painting, balances a very youthful Sebastian with St. Jerome. This is the most grandiose, the least of a genre picture of all Carpaccio's creations, although he does make Simeon into a pontiff with attendant cardinals bearing his train. One of his last works is the S. Vitale over the high altar of the church of that name, where we forgive the wooden ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... subjugation without a plentiful spending fund. He had told her they would go North from Reno and travel eastward by the Canadian Pacific, stopping at points of interest along the road. He imagined his courtship progressing in grandiose suites of rooms wherein were served delicate meals, his generous largesse to obsequious hirelings adding to her dazzled approval. He had to have that money; he couldn't go without it; he had set it aside to deck with fitting ceremonial ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... careful not to give a false impression. Sutton is no palace in miniature, no grandiose expression of the spacious days of Elizabeth, no pompous outcome of Vanbrugh's magnificent mind, no piece of reticent elegance by Adams. Instead, it may well seem to the visiting stranger little more than a fortuitous ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... splendor of the celestial motions had never struck the author so impressively as during the observation of this grandiose phenomenon. With the absolute precision of astronomical calculations, our satellite, gravitating round the Earth, arrived upon the theoretical line drawn from the orb of day to our planet, and interposed itself gradually, slowly, and exactly, in front of ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... relations to London and to Staines, and all we have just mentioned, as also of the great importance of cavalry in the Middle Ages, no better example can be quoted than the connected episode of April-June 1215, which may be called—to give it a grandiose name—the Campaign of Magna Charta. It further illustrates points which should never be forgotten in the reading of early English history, though they are too particular for the general purpose of this book—to wit, ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... Any of a species of luser resembling a less amusing version of {BIFF} that infests many {BBS} systems. The typical weenie is a teenage boy with poor social skills travelling under a grandiose {handle} derived from fantasy or heavy-metal rock lyrics. Among sysops, 'the weenie problem' refers to the marginally literate and profanity-laden {flamage} weenies tend to spew all over a newly-discovered BBS. Compare {spod}, {computer geek}, {terminal junkie}. ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... an individuality of its very own, this now important prefecture has much to remind us of its past. History, archaeology, and "mere antiquarian lore" abound, and, in its grandiose Cathedral of St. Corentin, one finds a large subject ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... on the subject to his Government, as he had been informed of it in but a vague way by the late Cabinet. The French Minister stated that the subject had never been mentioned to him, and consequently he had not been in a position to make any communication to his Government.[6] Thus the grandiose Asiatic dominion of which M. Venizelos spoke so eloquently dwindled to "Smyrna and a substantial portion of ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... distance of 750 versts; but mainly, the fever of building which seized the whole town, all the banks and financial institutions, and all the houseowners. Factories for making brick sprang up on the outskirts of the town like mushrooms. A grandiose agricultural exposition opened. Two new steamer lines came into being, and they, together with the previously established ones, frenziedly competed with each other, transporting freight and pilgrims. In competition they reached such a state, that they lowered their passenger ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... notre epoque est le plus triste, le plus incommode et le plus disgracieux, que la mode ait jamais invente, c'est surtout au milieu des champs que tous ses inconvenients et toutes ses laideurs revoltent.... Au milieu de ce cadre austere et grandiose, qui transporte l'imagination au temps de la poesie primitive, apparaisse cette mouche parasite, le monsieur aux habits noirs, au menton rase, aux mains gantees, aux jambes maladroites, et ce roi de la societe n'est plus qu'un accident ridicule, une tache importune dans le tableau. Votre ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... Even as a boy he had learned to regard Anglemere as his future home; and he had been, in a childish way, proud of the fact. It was his now—and what little pride and pleasure could be found in its possession! If Nell——With something like an oath he dragged himself up the grandiose stairs of the hotel, ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... behind it had been added by nature merely as the handle to so fine a hatchet) drawn by six white horses through the streets, and followed by an eager multitude, nine tenths of whom thought the man belonging to it a traitor to the party which had chosen him. But then the effigy at least of a grandiose, if not a great man, sat beside him, and the display was saved from contempt by the massive shape of Webster, beneath which he showed like a swallow against a thunder-cloud. Even Mr. Fillmore, to whom the Fugitive Slave Law denies ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... syncopations and blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appeared to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art. American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might attain something like ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... drone-comb, broad and high-shouldered, showing to what marks the male grub was expected to grow; and two-inch deep honey-magazines, empty, but still magnificent, the whole gummed and glued into twisted scrap-work, awry on the wires; half-cells, beginnings abandoned, or grandiose, weak-walled, composite cells pieced out with rubbish ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... heart, and he does not look on at the movement of mankind as merely understanding it, and analysing it, and liking it,—and making allowances for it. He is tumultuous and urgent, daring and impetuous, eager to say a great word. His conceptions shake him. They are all grandiose and huge. The great passions are awake in them—avarice, lust, hate, love, god-like pity, supreme courage, base fear. The whole trend of his mind is towards the heroic. He struggles to be in touch with the actual, and he makes many incursions upon it, ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... from Mozart's 'Magic Flute,' Non Paventar, brought into play the salient diamonds of her highest voice, which arches like the tall shaft of a fountain sparkling in the sun. The introduction, a bold, exhorting strain, in grandiose style, full of large intervals, was given with a glorious fervor, and no lark ever carolled more blithely or more at ease than her voice as it soared to F in alt! Benedict's English ballad, 'Take this Lute,' she sang with a simplicity and pathos ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... of the grandiose. Even conversation reflected this characteristic. The myriad bootblacks had grand outfits and stands. The captain of a ship offered ten dollars to a negro to act as his cook. The negro replied, "If you will walk up to my restaurant, I'll set you to work at twenty-five dollars immediately." From men ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... answer to my questions, he came round to his grandiose plans again. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so eloquently of the possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more than half believed in him again. But now that I was beginning to understand something of his quality, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... vital union with its Creator, and its perfectibility of human institutions and social conditions in this life under the leavening influence of Christian principle, although Mr. Mill may stigmatize them as grandiose and enervating dreams, to his beggarly improved substitute, which appeals neither to our common sense nor to our moral intuitions. Taking his own criterion, utility, as the test of truth, his religion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... in their reveries to the same impersonal ecstasy. Amiel writes of a "night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched at full length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky Way. Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the Infinite!" The reverie of Senancour, on the bank of the Lake of Bienne, quoted by Matthew Arnold, reveals the same emotion: "Vast consciousness ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... which prized sumptuousness, and an exaggeration of dramatic effect, over every other quality. Nicolas Poussin's quiet refinement of style became in Le Brun what is called academic (conventionally learned), pompous, and grandiose, and men decidedly preferred the degeneration. But later critics, who have not the natural partiality of the French to the old master, return to their first loves, and condemn Le Brun's swelling violence, both in the ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... the hearts of the people of Villa Seca by the "formality" of his behaviour and language; for he tells us that in such remote places might still be found the gravity of deportment and the grandiose expressions which are scoffed at as exaggerations in the romances. He speaks of himself in one place as strolling about a town or neighbourhood, entering into conversation with several people whom he met, shopkeepers, professional ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... daring enough to risk his all in its acquisition. It was in accordance with human nature and the principles of political economy that this unknown extent of uninhabited transmontane land, widely renowned for beauty, richness, and fertility, should excite grandiose dreams in the minds of English and Colonials alike. England was said to be "New Land mad and everybody there has his eye fixed on this country." Groups of wealthy or well-to-do individuals organized themselves ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... absurd material is, you will say, merely stupid. Well, I'm sorry. I know no other way to make it save life's own, and I know that the tragedy of William's life hung upon a silly little ink-stained 'J' pen. I would pretend that it was made of much more grandiose material if I could. But the facts are as I shall tell you. And surely if you fulfil that definition of man which describes him as a reflective being, if you ever think on life at all, you must have noticed how even ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... form of the Valhalla theme repeated again and again, and the full effect of the device is only felt when, with the change of scene, we hear the passage in all its nobility and splendour. Wotan's greeting to his new castle is rather grandiose than really fine: one feels the theatrical baritone; one feels also that the quality of homeliness which makes Sachs a great character is sadly lacking. In the Valkyrie this unpretentiousness, so to speak, is always present, and the music gains proportionately in impressiveness. Wotan's ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Bitcula. A Gothic inscription gives her name, and that of the sculptor, "Maiste Nicolai de te dito cervo d Venecia fecit hoc opvs." Within are a picture of the Circumcision by Palma Giovane, with a pretty Virgin, the marble sarcophagus of the family Sobota, a grandiose Renaissance production, and six panels of saints on gold ground, rather like the Gubbio school in style, arranged in threes on the wall ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... original theme of her exhortation about the Bible, Edwin looked at her stealthily, and the doubt crossed his mind whether that majestic and vital woman was ever sincere about anything, even to herself—whether the whole of her daily existence, from her getting-up to her down-lying, was not a grandiose pretence. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... along the main street, Mr. Bernard had noticed a large house of some pretensions to architectural display, namely, unnecessarily projecting eaves, giving it a mushroomy aspect, wooden mouldings at various available points, and a grandiose arched portico. It looked a little swaggering by the side of one or two of the mansion-houses that were not far from it, was painted too bright for Mr. Bernard's taste, had rather too fanciful a fence before ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... left bank, forming an estuary of some four hundred feet across, in which it pours its blackish waters, coming from the west-northwest, after having watered the territories of the Cacena Indians. At this spot the Amazon appears under a truly grandiose aspect, but its course is more than ever encumbered with islands and islets. It required all the address of the pilot to steer through the archipelago, going from one bank to another, avoiding the shallows, shirking the eddies, ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... fifty-eight," he added quickly; "but I do not look my years, though my hair, still thick and full of vigour, is prematurely white—so often the case with men whose brains are continually on the stretch. The little home, far from grandiose, which forms the background to this most interesting personality is embowered in trees. Cats have made their mark on its lawns, and its owner's love of animals was sharply illustrated by the sheep-dog which lay on his feet clad in Turkish slippers. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... dragoman, who then went into one of his absurd babbling moods, in which he would have talked the head off any man who was not born in a country laved by the childish Mediterranean. Coleman could not understand what he said to the soldiers as they passed, but it was evidently all grandiose nonsense. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... the inward state of each soul and conscience. The angel with the book of life and death can announce no sentence which has not already been pronounced by the very being to which it refers. The execution of the whole is spoken of as sublime and grandiose. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Alexander's grandiose imagination was, however, more strongly attracted by the great questions of European politics than by attempts at domestic reform which, on the whole, wounded his pride by proving to him the narrow limits of absolute ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... around the hips, the legs and so on. The beginning of weakness in judgment that he was to exhibit soon in the invasion of Russia manifested itself at the same time. His keen calculating ability attained the peak of its curve at Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland. Thereafter, the descent begins. A rash, grandiose, speculative quality enters his projects, and divorces the elaborate coordination of means and end from his plans. That his thyroid energy capacity did not fail him is indicated by the fact that at ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... plain that stretches from Nanterre to Saint-Cloud, broken only by an occasional clump of trees or the smoke from some factory chimney. Perhaps, too, in a measure, to the disproportion between the humble hamlet of Judaea and that grandiose structure, that villa in the style of Louis XIII., built of small stones and mortar, and showing pink through the leafless branches of the park, where there were several large ponds with a coating of green slime. Certain it is that on passing the place one's ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... painting representing St. Francois, the patron of the house. Those were the only artistic decorations of the modest habitation. The nobleman often said: "I have freed myself from the tyranny of objects." But with that marvellous background of grandiose ruins and that sky, the simple spot was an incomparable retreat in which to end in meditation and renouncement a life already shaken by the tempests of the senses and of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... arranged at Mount Vernon, that he felt justified in accepting part of the salary which the President allotted to him. But the war did not come. As Washington prophesied, the French thought better of their truculence. The new genius who was ruling France had in mind something more grandiose than a war with ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... crowning excellence of Fontainebleau forest consists in its variety. France itself, the "splendid hexagon," with its mountains, rivers and plains, is hardly more varied than this vast area of rock and woodland. We can choose between sites, savage or idyllic, pastoral or grandiose, here finding a sunny glade, the very spot for a picnic, there break-neck declivities and gloomy chasms. The magnificent ruggedness of Alpine scenery is before our eyes, without the awfulness of snow-clad peaks or the blinding dazzle of glacier. In more than one place we could almost fancy that ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... besides, would have felt that they had not received in it their full due, their full money's worth. They often fell asleep and were fiercely awakened by the tithingman, and often they could not have understood the verbose and grandiose language of the preacher. They were in an icy-cold atmosphere in winter, and in glaring, unshaded heat in summer, and upon most uncomfortable, narrow, uncushioned seats at all seasons; but in every record and journal which I have read, throughout which ministers and laymen recorded all ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle |
