"Insincerity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and the gradual growth and change of human passion into it, we feel that there must be a lack of artistic sincerity somewhere. Italian opera may offer all these things, the things that the age wants in its opera, but it can never be sincere in offering them, and art is the one place where insincerity is intolerable. ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... she generally read the characters of artifice and insincerity with intuitive quickness, though it was often believed she was duped by those whom she saw through completely. Of this she was aware, but she was so exempt from all desire to prove her sagacity, that she never cared to correct the misconception; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... revenge, as we know, was afterward thoroughly wrought out in "The Scarlet Letter." Another form in which the thought of this pervading falsehood in earthly affairs comes to him is the frightful fancy of people being poisoned by communion-wine. Thus does the insincerity and corruption of man, the lie that is hidden in nearly every life and almost every act, rise and thrust itself before him, whichever way he turns, like a serpent in his path. He is in the position of the father confessor of whom he at one ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... America, but stated that the President had just written to him, requesting him to remain until April, although he was determined not to do so. He excused himself on the plea of old age, and Hawthorne seems to have had a suspicion of the insincerity of this, but concluded on reflection not to harbor it. Pierce knew already that Buchanan was his most dangerous rival for renomination, and desired that he should remain as far off as possible; while Buchanan was aware that, if he intended to be on the ground, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... That is the benefit of the system in a new country, and the ultra friend of humanity, who decries the condition of a tenant, should remember that if he had not been in this very condition, he might have been in a worse. It is, indeed, one of the proofs of the insincerity of those who are decrying leases, on account of their aristocratic tendencies, that their destruction will necessarily condemn a numerous class of agriculturists, either to fall back into the ranks of the peasant or day-labourer, or to migrate, as is the case with so many ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... he should have omitted from this letter all mention of Mlle. Binet, and I am disposed to account it at least a partial insincerity that he should have assigned entirely to his self-imposed mission, and not at all to his lacerated feelings in the matter of Climene, the action which he had taken ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... was he intruded? you ask. Why could not a modern Utopia be discussed without this impersonation—impersonally? It has confused the book, you say, made the argument hard to follow, and thrown a quality of insincerity over the whole. Are we but mocking at Utopias, you demand, using all these noble and generalised hopes as the backcloth against which two bickering personalities jar and squabble? Do I mean we are never to view ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... defects underlie the brightness and fascination of the external part of French character—namely, selfishness and insincerity. Perfect in manner, in dress, in grace, in suavity, in sweetness it may be, the French are utterly and wholly unreliable. They resemble the phantom woman in the story told by Leigh Hunt, that was only a suit of clothes, with no face beneath the hood and no body inside of the robes; or rather ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... soon fascinated me on its own account. To carry it duly and honestly out, moral qualities were incessantly invoked. There was no room allowed for insincerity—no room even for carelessness. The edifice of science had been raised by men who had unswervingly followed the truth as it is in nature; and in doing so had often sacrificed interests which are usually potent in this world. Among these rationalistic men of Germany I found conscientiousness ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... to be a sharer of their councils," said Wu Chi, with pointed insincerity. "But," he continued, in the same tone, "for whom can Weng Cho of the House of Wu mourn? His father is before him in his wonted health; in the inner chamber his mother plies an unfaltering needle; while ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... pathos in the fall of a collar, or the curl of a lock, than the shallow think for. Should we be so apt as we are now to compassionate the misfortunes, and to forgive the insincerity of Charles I., if his pictures had pourtrayed him in a bob wig and a pigtail? Vandyke was a greater sophist ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... just when he should have kept aloof: and that Court despised him, as the manly and resolute men who established the Elector in England had before done. He signed his own name to every accusation of insincerity his enemies made against him; and the King and the Pretender alike could show proofs of St. John's treachery under his ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... newspapers, and I have a clear view of Zola. The chief point is that he is sincere—that is, he bases his judgments simply on what he sees, and not on phantoms like the others. And sincere people can be mistaken, no doubt of it, but such mistakes do less harm than calculated insincerity, prejudgments, or political considerations. Let Dreyfus be guilty, and Zola is still right, since it is the duty of writers not to accuse, not to prosecute, but to champion even the guilty once they have ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... know you are extremely stupid, you are not quite so stupid as to have actually fancied that the great preacher said what you reported that he said: you were well aware that you were grossly misrepresenting him. And when I find malice and insincerity in one respect, I am ready to suspect them in another: and I venture to doubt whether you were disgusted. Possibly you were only ferocious at finding yourself so unspeakably excelled. But even if you had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... visibly affected. He tried hard to talk, but to no avail. He looked pleadingly at Lucy and at his brother as if for information, but without results. Lucy's pinched, tear-stained face added to his restlessness, and there was a note of insincerity in Uncle Gilbert's reassuring talk that his brother did not fail ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... by Miss Wardour withdrew, and Mrs. Aliston fulfilled her mission. Then I was more than ever convinced of the fellow's insincerity. I heard how he received the news of his sister's flight; and when Mrs. Aliston went, in a panic, to call her niece, I heard him, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... They were the wise ones, he said. They lived for art and love, and what else was there in life? A few sonatas, a few operas, a few pictures, a few books, and a love story; we had always to come back to that in the end. He spoke with conviction, his only insincerity being the alteration of a plural into a singular. But no, he did not think he had lied; he had spoken what seemed to him the truth at the present moment. Had he used the singular instead of the plural a fortnight ago, he would ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... adherents. The great principle that "love is the fulfilling of the law" is held with a fervour which makes any question as to what love is, and how much it involves, seem half-hearted and cold. Those who preach this doctrine remind us—and very justly—of the weakness and insincerity of the "orthodox" moral standard, whether it is enforced by law or by custom. They revolt against the proprietary and possessive view of marriage as giving a woman "a hold over her husband" when he has "grown tired ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... employed by every one at this time was of a kind which to us sounds intolerable. It seems as if nothing that ingenuity could devise was too extravagant for an honest man to use, and for a man who respected himself to accept. It must not, indeed, be forgotten that conventionalities, as well as insincerity, differ in their forms in different times; and that insincerity may lurk behind frank and clear words, when they are the fashion, as much as in what is like mere fulsome adulation. But words mean something, in spite of forms and fashions. When a man of great genius writes his private letters, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... end, a sterile sacrifice by which nobody profits. I came into the world to create my self, and what is to become of all our selves? Live for the True, the Good, the Beautiful! We shall see presently the supreme vanity and the supreme insincerity of this ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... and slow wooing, like the movement of a minuet; each postured to each, not from any insincerity, except perhaps a little now and then on Ralph's side, but because for both it was a natural mode of self-expression. It was an age of dignity abruptly broken here and there by violence. There were slow and gorgeous pageants followed by brutal and bestial ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... couplet is more happy; the value expressed for him, by different sorts of men, raises him to esteem; there is yet something of the common cant of superficial satirists, who suppose that the insincerity of a courtier destroys all his sensations, and that he is equally a dissembler to the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... his uncle usurped the crown. This second blow would be acutely felt, but it would rather rouse than prostrate his energies. There is no passion in Hamlet when there has been no love. And he had always held his uncle in slight esteem—foreboded something from his smiling insincerity. He never mentions him without an expression of contempt, hardly acknowledges him as king; he is a thing—of nothing—a farcical monarch—"a peacock"—and, in this particular act, no dread usurper, but a "cut-purse of the realm." Whether he designed to wait or was prepared to strike, his future was ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... his 'false heart,' it was easy to recognise the insincerity and treachery that somehow seem inseparable from the artistic nature, as in his love of praise that desire for immediate recognition that characterises all actors. And yet, more fortunate in this than other actors, Willie Hughes was to know something of immortality. Inseparably connected with ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... sincerity; with friendliness, much admiration, and an ingenuous vivacity, to M. de Voltaire. Voltaire, at his leisure in Brussels or the Old Palace and its spider-webs, writes much more expansively; not with insincerity, he either;—with endless airy graciosities, and ingenious twirls, and touches of flattering unction, which latter, he is aware, must not be laid on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... he exclaimed presently. "I believe he shook me up more than I realized. He charged me with insincerity; me, who have always made sincerity my special virtue.... Well, there may ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... emigres saved her from the passions of the old regime. Conde spoke of her as a democrat; and she would have been glad to exchange the institutions of 1791 for something like the British constitution as it existed in those Tory days. She perished through her insincerity more than through the traditional desire for power. When the king was beheaded, the Prince Bishop of Bamberg and Wuerzburg, reputed the most sagacious and enlightened among the prelates of the empire, was heard to say, "It ought to ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... always shut the piano if I happened to come into the room while she was practising. I remember saying to her when she was talking to me about one of Mozart's quartets she had just heard, that music was immoral, inasmuch as it provoked such enormous insincerity. It is strange that, although spite was painful to me, especially towards her, I could ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... Montagu, who himself occupied no humble station in intellectual society. His "evenings" were often rare mental treats. He presented the most refined picture of a gentleman, tall, slight, courteous, seemingly ever smiling, yet without an approach to insincerity. He had the esteem of his contemporaries, and the homage of the finer spirits of his time. They were earned and merited. Those who knew him knew also his wife. Mrs. Montagu was one of the most admirable women I have ever known: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... do much, but we must remember that home was God's first and holiest school. It is in the home that the child receives his first and most lasting lessons. Let us not misjudge the ability of the child to perceive the inconsistency, the insincerity, of father and mother. Even though the parent be a teacher in the Sunday school, her influence cannot be for the best if her everyday life is wasted in society and unworthy amusements. The father's praise of the Bible loses its gilt edge when the ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... of the Roman Empire. All the races of Europe were to meet as brothers under the one God of the new world and under the direction of his representatives on earth. It was this change in the features of the world which gave a certain air of insincerity to the Christian gospel. In the older days there had been political unity with a great diversity of religions; now there was religious unity spread over a great diversity of antagonistic political bodies. Men were brothers from ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... deliverance of all flesh from sorrow, coming, beheld upon the person of the reverend monk all the distinguishing marks of a great preacher, visible in an excellent degree; fixed and unmoved he sat in the possession of truth and wisdom, free from all evil impediments, with a heart cleansed from all insincerity or falsehood. Then with reverent and a joyful heart, great Brahma stood and with hands joined, thus made known his request:—"What happiness in all the world so great as when a loving master meets the unwise; the world with all its occupants, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... gracious permission Albinia was resolved to avail herself. She left all the insincerity to her husband, and would by no means allow grandmamma to abdicate the warm corner. She suspected that he wanted an introduction to Mrs. Nugent, and was resolved to defeat this object, unless he should condescend to make the request, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... almost anything else in the world. The crowning human virtue in a man is to let his wife poke the fire. I do not know how any virtue whatever is possible over an imitation gas-log. What a sense of insincerity the family must have, if they indulge in the hypocrisy of gathering about it. With this center of untruthfulness, what must the life in the family be? Perhaps the father will be living at the rate of ten thousand a year on a salary of four thousand; perhaps the mother, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... which have allied them with the Russians and the Japanese, and the Indians and the Zouaves, and the negroes and the French and the Belgians against Germany. Their Government, however, should have known that the presumption of insincerity exists when one charges against others a crime which one would have felt at liberty to commit one's self. Yet, more, the British Government knew better than anybody else that Germany had not even committed ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... there we stand, two spirits under the sky, two that believe in Truth and Freedom, parted by insincerity. The vile weed has crept up around us; we are parted by falsehood, even we. Goodnight. Perhaps I shall not write again. I shall send you a telegram before ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... the subject to myself. You told me that you were going to read my book, and I want to know what you think of it. If you were given to compliment and insincerity, I should be afraid of asking you; because, among other evident reasons, I might then appear to be asking for your praise instead of your opinion. As it is—I want to know what you think of my book. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... with the professed convictions of the Southern ministers as sincere convictions. We should be sorry to accuse any body of men professing to be teachers of the Christian religion of intentional insincerity, and although we can hardly conceive the possibility of men who base their religion upon the same Bible upon which we rest ours, attempting sincerely to justify slavery upon religious grounds, we would rather attribute the extraordinary ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... all-in-all—for in such trials in real life it is all-in-all, or we regard the existence of sin or sorrow with repugnance—shocks far deeper feelings within us than those of taste, and throws over the whole poem to which the tale of Margaret belongs, an unhappy suspicion of hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion, which at the best is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven. Above all, it flings, as indeed we have intimated, an air of absurdity over the orthodox Church-of-Englandism—for ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... plainly a refusal to accept the Whig shibboleths. In the Forest he was enthusiastic for the peace, and sneered at the Revolution. Pope afterwards declared that Addison had disavowed all party intentions at the time, and he accused him of insincerity for afterwards taking credit (in a poetical dedication of Cato) for the services rendered by his play to the cause of liberty. Pope's assertion is worthless in any case where he could exalt his own character for consistency ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... I do not mean that the clerical writer now before us (bishop or not bishop) is more hostile to religion than Voltaire, or is hostile at all. On the contrary, he is, perhaps, profoundly religious, and he writes with neither levity nor insincerity. But this conscientious spirit, and this piety, do but the more call into relief the audacity of his free-thinking—do but the more forcibly illustrate the prodigious changes wrought by time, and by the contagion from secular revolutions, in the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... after the convention. But the Democratic protectionists were forced into surly acquiescence so long as Cleveland was the candidate and William L. Wilson the chairman of the convention. The partial insincerity of the tariff debate aided the Populists, who were directing a discussion upon ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... of action. But Ferdinand has been credited with neither. Whithersoever he moves one looks in vain for the guiding light of large ideas. Deeper than conscious volition lies the stored-up instinct of barren pettifogging egotism to which a fine moral atmosphere is deadly. Insincerity is second nature to him. He once boasted in my presence that he was a born actor, and it is fair to say that he played his roles—repellent for the most part—as behoves a mummer. The astonishing thing is that he ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... not true that "The Corsair" is insincere. He who hears a note of insincerity in Conrad and Medora may have ears, but they must be those of the translated Bottom who was proud of having "a reasonable good ear in music." Byron's romance has been such a power exactly because men felt ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... to that transparent nature, with its simplicity as of the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity must have been a real loss. Goethe understands that Winckelmann had made this sacrifice. Yet at the bar of the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann may be absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was that, by desperate faithfulness to which ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... six weeks with respect to the Eastern Question. Regretted Count Nesselrode's Note,[29] which Baron Brunnow owned nobody would regret more than the Count himself, acknowledged the weakness of Austria, felt sure of Lord Stratford's insincerity towards him and the Government,... as he had to Lord Aberdeen's certain knowledge called "the conduct of the Government infamous" and declared "he would let the world know that his name was Canning." He acknowledged the disadvantage of the ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... mortified the Earl of Byerdale than to find, that, notwithstanding all his skill, there was still a something of insincerity penetrated through the veil he cast over his conduct, and made many persons, even the most easily deceived, doubtful ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Confucius did not treat.— That he was unreligious, unspiritual, and open to the charge of insincerity. ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is superficial and what is fundamental insincerity. Across these outer manoeuvrings and quackeries of his, which were many and most blameable, let us discern withal that the man had a certain instinctive ineradicable feeling for reality; and did base himself upon ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... sometimes be tempted to say what he knows he is expected from his position or character to say, rather than what he would have said if his personality were not concerned. As far as honesty goes, signature perhaps offers as many inducements to one kind of insincerity, as anonymity offers to another kind. And on the public it might perhaps be contended that there is an effect of a rather similar sort. They are in some cases tempted away from serious discussion ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Street on a Saturday afternoon. Henry went, and found the flat closed. He expected to receive a note of bewitching, cajoling, feminine apology, but he did not receive it. They met again, always at Kenilworth Mansions, and in an interview full of pain at the start and full of insincerity at the finish Henry learnt that Geraldine's invitation had been for Sunday, and not Saturday, that various people of much importance in her eyes had been asked to meet him, and that the company was ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... adjourned. I am not unmindful of the very difficult tasks with which you were called to deal, and no one can ignore the insistent conditions which, during recent years, have called for the continued and almost exclusive attention of your membership to public work. It would suggest insincerity if I expressed complete accord with every expression recorded in your roll calls, but we are all agreed about the difficulties and the inevitable divergence of opinion in seeking the reduction, amelioration and readjustment of the burdens of taxation. Later on, when other ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... told him plainly that he was not indifferent to her. This occurred so often, and was so frequently attended with evident confusion on her part, that he began to have a suspicion of the real truth, and to feel disgust at so marked an exhibition of insincerity. Besides, the thought of being experimented upon in this way, did not in the least tend to soften his feelings towards the fair one. He believed in frankness, honesty and reciprocal sincerity. He liked a truthful, ingenuous mind, and ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... character, I have no objection to prefer prodigality to avarice, in some few instances; but I appeal to your observation if you have not met, and often met, with the same disingenuousness, the same hollow-hearted insincerity, and disintegritive depravity of principle, in the hackneyed victims of profusion, as in the unfeeling children of parsimony. I have every possible reverence for the much talked-of world beyond the grave, and I wish that which piety believes, and virtue deserves, may be all matter ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... spirit by a brief confession. I have often enough spoken too harshly and vehemently of my antagonists. I have tried to fix upon them too unreservedly what seemed to me the logical consequences of their dogmas. I have condemned their attempts at a milder interpretation of their creed as proofs of insincerity, when I ought to have done more justice to the legitimate and lofty motives which prompted them. And I at least am bound by my own views to admit that even the antagonist from whose utterances I differ most widely may be an ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... bending in all indifferent matters to the whims and wishes of superiors, and of saying what they think Signori like. This habit, while it smoothes the surface of existence, raises up a barrier of compliment and partial insincerity, against which the more downright natures of us Northern folk break in vain efforts. Our advances are met with an imperceptible but impermeable resistance by the very people who are bent on making the world pleasant to us. It is the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... do is to love you with all my heart, as I have done for about fifty years," wrote Voltaire. "How could I fail to love you? Your soul seeks always the true; it is a quality as rare as truth itself." So far does she carry her hatred of insincerity that one is often tempted to believe she affects a freedom from affectation. "I am so fatigued with the vanity of others that I avoid the occasion of having any myself," she writes. Is there not here a trace of the quality ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... her to think you are too immaculate to be even tempted! stronger, purer even than our Saviour! for he knew temptation. You are above it,—are you? Come, Kate,—insincerity, pretension, and cowardice are not your failings, and I shall tell Mary of this incident, which has deeply moved me, and will, I know, really interest her. Here ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... all," comfortingly observed Mr. Strange as he executed a combination that netted him two balls and broke the bunch. After that he proved the insincerity of his statement by clearing the cloth for a second time. The succeeding frames went much the same, and finally Blaze put ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... generally supposed to avail themselves of the cloke of marriage, to conceal a mode of conduct, that would for ever have damned their fame, had they been innocent, seduced girls. These particularly stood aloof.—Had she remained with her husband, practising insincerity, and neglecting her child to manage an intrigue, she would still have been visited and respected. If, instead of openly living with her lover, she could have condescended to call into play a thousand arts, which, degrading her own mind, might have allowed the people who were ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... this insincerity, and feeling bitter against the person who had provoked it, when an unseen hand opened the door of a room on the Pincio side of the drawing-room, and the testy voice of her aunt called to her ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... tribunal he was addressing. The tricks of advocacy are not only no part of the advocate's duties, but they are more likely to repel than to attract the hearers. The function of the advocate in the court of justice, as thus defined and limited, is tainted by no insincerity or hypocrisy. It is as respectable, as lofty, and as indispensably necessary as ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... are the arts by which men become and remain legislators, can hardly fail to feel that democracy as it exists is not an absolutely perfect instrument of government. It is a painful fact that the ordinary voter, at any rate in England, is quite blind to insincerity. The man who does not care about any definite political measures can generally be won by corruption or flattery, open or concealed; the man who is set on securing reforms will generally prefer an ambitious windbag to a man who desires the public good without possessing a ready tongue. And ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... good an opportunity for training powers of will as of memory or reasoning. On the side of inhibition there is always the necessity for self-restraint and control so that the rights of others may not be infringed upon. Temptations to unfairness or insincerity in lessons and examinations are always to be met. The social relations of the school necessitate the development of personal poise ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... vanishing generation. Her daughters—ay! and perhaps her sons as well (though boys are not credited with so much tender divination)—knew the meaning of the little droop at the side of their mother's smiling lips. They detected the insincerity of ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... Without undervaluing the man's influence, he was instinctively repelled by his appearance and methods. The young physician's trained powers of observation not only saw an overwrought emotionalism in the speaker's eloquence, but detected the ring of insincerity in his more lucid speech and acts. Nevertheless, the hysteria of the preacher was communicated to the congregation, who wept and shouted with him. Tired and discontented housewives found their vague sorrows and vaguer longings were only the result of their "unregenerate" state; the lazy ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Alfred de Musset imagined to be reality was but the illusion of a feverish dream. In addition to George Sand's and Paul de Musset's versions, Louise Colet has furnished a third in her Lui, a publication which bears the stamp of insincerity on almost every page, and which has been described, I think by Maxime du Camp, as worse than a lying invention—namely, as a systematic perversion of the truth. A passage from George Sand's Elle et Lui, in which Therese and Laurent, both artists, are the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... father, that Julia Clifford pitied him, and, after thinking a little, said she would stop it for the present. She then sat down, and in five minutes the docile pen of a female letter-writer produced an ingratiating composition impossible to resist. She apologized for her apparent insincerity, but would be candid, and confide the whole truth to Mr. Bell. Then she told him that Colonel Clifford "had only just been saved from death by a miracle, and a relapse was expected in case of any great excitement or irritation, such as a doubtful lawsuit with a gentleman he ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... the opening of the play, her career was a succession of brilliant coups in gaining the confidence and love, not to say the money, of men of all ages and all walks in life. Her fascination was as undeniable as her insincerity of purpose. She had never made an honest effort to be an honest woman, although she imagined herself always persecuted, the victim of circumstances,—and was always ready to excuse any viciousness of character which led her ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... infinite insincerity was accompanied with a grace of manner which regained confidence as rapidly as it was forfeited. Desiring sincerely, so far as he could be sincere in anything, to please every one by turns, and reckless of truth to a degree in which he was ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... continued to retain his characteristic sincerity and good faith; but, once duped and tricked by the southern schemers, as if with a fierce scorn, he rejected troth with the truthless; he exulted in mastering them in their own wily statesmanship; and if reproached for insincerity, retorted with naive wonder, "Ye Italians, and complain of insincerity! How otherwise can one deal with ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... really found it. When he sat with his elbows on the dusty writing table in the deathlike stillness of the study, calm and significant memories of the last few days rose one after another in his imagination, particularly of the battle of Borodino and of that vague sense of his own insignificance and insincerity compared with the truth, simplicity, and strength of the class of men he mentally classed as they. When Gerasim roused him from his reverie the idea occurred to him of taking part in the popular defense of Moscow which he knew was projected. And with that object he had asked Gerasim to get ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... to all parties, of the protest which his life and all his words were against dangers which were threatening all parties, and not least the Liberal party—the danger of shallowness and superficial flippancy; the danger of showy sentiment and insincerity, of worldly indifference to high duties and calls. With the one great exception of Arnold—Keble's once sympathetic friend, though afterwards parted from him—the religious Liberals of our time have little reason to look back with satisfaction to the leaders, able and vigorous as some of them ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... these incongruous and misplaced elements, crowded together, leave a strong impression of picturesque force upon the mind. From certain points and angles, the effect of the whole, considered as a piece of deception and insincerity, is magnificent. It would be even finer than it is, were not the Florentine pietra serena of the stonework so repellent in its ashen dulness, the plaster so white, and the false architectural system so painfully defrauded of the plastic ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... principles; no one observed the natural and civil duties of life with a stricter regard, whether a son, a friend, or a member of society, and he had the happiness to fill every one of these parts, without even the suspicion either of undutifulness, insincerity, or disrespect. Thus he continued to the last, not owing his virtues to the happiness of his constitution, but the frame of his mind, insomuch, that during a long sickness, which is apt to ruffle the smoothest temper; he never betrayed any discontent or uneasiness, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... mission is to impede the progress of civilization. It denounces every institution established for human development as a fraud. It stigmatizes law as the machinery of injustice; it sneers at society as hollow-hearted corruption and insincerity; it brands politics as a reeking mass of rottenness, and scoffs at morality as the tinsel of sin. Its disciples are those who rail and snarl at everything that is noble and good, to whom a joke is an assault and battery, a laugh is an insult to outraged dignity, and the provocation ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... back a pace and looked at Calumet incredulously, his eyes searching for signs of insincerity. He saw no such signs, for if Calumet had emotion at this minute it was too deep to be uncovered with a glance. But he knew from Taggart's perturbation that the latter knew him to be the man he had shot at that day ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... object owing to its being fraught with unrighteousness, liveth happily, casting off all foes, like a snake that hath cast off its slough. A victory gained by an untruth, deceitful conduct towards the king, and insincerity of intentions expressed before the preceptor,—these three are each equal to the sin of slaying a Brahmana. Excessive envy, death, and boastfulness, are the causes of the destruction of prosperity. Carelessness ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the fact of this dinner point to reconciliation, and to a firm and liberal administration? I believe that any such Government would be the worst of all coalitions. I believe that it would be built upon insincerity, and I suspect it would be of no advantage to the country. Therefore I am not anxious to ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... blatant insincerity of the words, and still more from the tone. Why had it not all ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... conscientiously in pushing the investigations and prosecutions against those combinations which are really a menace to the country; but there are some who disagree with me, and flaunt the Consolidated Companies in my face as an evidence of insincerity on my part. I have asked you and Senator Kenmore to meet me here this afternoon, to talk over the question quite informally with the senator from New York and ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... man shook his head and surveyed Patty curiously but not discourteously. He had a kindly, humorous look, and she felt at once that she preferred his blunt frankness to Gershom's facetious insincerity. There was something in his face that suggested the black-eyed baby sucking placidly at the rubber nipple on the ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... papers were talking the plainest common sense when they specifically emphasized as Capitalist the falsehoods and suppressions of their great contemporaries. From the Socialist point of view the leading fact about the insincerity of the great official papers is that this insincerity is Capitalist; just as from a Catholic point of view the leading fact about it was, and ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... in their policy always went hand in hand with the Yugoslavs, saw all this, and consequently the only thing left for them to do is to insist on their attitude, constantly to reveal Austria's insincerity, to reject all pretty phrases without any meaning in them, and all compromises, which we know would never be kept. We also must reject a compromise peace which ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... for there was misery in her eyes and in her laugh and in the very touch of her hand. Misery and insincerity, and that terrible mental state when weakness is roped up between the two and knows, for once in its life, that it has no strength ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... the masculine insincerity of your gallantry," she said, "unworn, I see, by working with women. John Crondall ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... Lung, "never was there a truer proverb than that which says, 'It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops.' Do Mandarins or the friends of Mandarins travel in mean garments and unattended? Indeed, the person who is now before ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... me into a Disdain against all Libertine Women, under what Appearance soever they hid their Insincerity, and I resolved after that Time to converse with none but those who lived within the Rules of Decency and Honour. To this End I formed my self into a more regular Turn of Behaviour, and began to make Visits, frequent Assemblies, and lead out Ladies ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... admirable qualities were well appreciated by the translators—have been utterly sacrificed in the result. In none of the English versions that I have examined is more than a trace of the mocking spirit of insincerity pervading the whole prayer,—the cool effrontery of the suppliant in enumerating his demerits, his serenely illogical demands of salvation in spite, or rather because, of them, his meek submission to the punishment of others, and the many ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... might—the half of my work. Sometimes one has a glimpse of his ironic face and his swift fingers, busy with those darkening pages. Once I dreamed about him. It was while a certain Commission was sitting on the British Censorship, which still so admirably guards Insincerity, and he was giving evidence before them. This, I remember, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... the characters. Of the mental powers, the informing spirit, the genius, the feeling which he now discloses, and the rich promise they afford of future greatness—of these it is, we profess to speak: further we cannot go without insincerity, untruth, and ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... real praying! We are playing at praying, and caring, and coming; playing at doing—if doing costs—playing at everything but play. We are earnest enough about that. God open our eyes and convict us of our insincerity! burn out the superficial in us, make us intensely in earnest! And may God quicken our sympathy, and touch our heart, and nerve our arm for what will prove a desperate fight against "leagued fiends" in bad men's shapes, who do the devil's work to-day, ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... of that paragraph also has some bearing upon your position in the poetical world. The thoughts and images through both the poems, and the feelings also, are eminently such as become their several subjects; but it would be insincerity were I to omit adding, that there is here and there a want of that skill in workmanship, which I believe nothing but continued practice in the art can bestow. I have used the word art, from a conviction, which I am called upon almost daily to express, that poetry is infinitely ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... their natural want of veracity;' whereas England bases upon its truthfulness a well-founded claim to 'a moral pre-eminence among the nations.' Belgians, French, and Italians attract the inconsiderate by 'facile obsequiousness,' which, however, is a pendent of 'impudence and insincerity. Want of principle and want of moral sensibility compose the original fundus of southern manners.' Our faults of style, such as they are, proceed from our manliness. In France there are no unmarried women at the age which amongst us gives the insulting name of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... startled my ears, and set my heart struggling for liberty to give an honest response to this appeal. A few simple words would have been enough, but the recollection of all that I knew came back too quickly. The conviction of his insincerity and injustice suddenly bewildered me with anger, keen in proportion to ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... condemnation of the anti-machine Senators of course brought its protest. The people of Palo Alto met in mass meeting on March 21st, and adopted resolutions condemning the Call's course[50]. Senator Black from his sick bed wrote a letter showing the Call's insincerity and breach of faith with the pro-primary Senators[51]. The paper was bitterly denounced on the floor ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... or of the hard-hearted of the other; I pride myself, I say, to stand forth, and offer my fortune, and my life, at your devotion. With a selfish hope indeed: I should be too great an hypocrite not to own this! and I know how much you abhor insincerity. ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... 'It made me true to my God'-meaning, that it helped to form in her a character that loved truth, and hated a lie, and had saved her from the bitter pains and fears that are sure to follow in the wake of insincerity ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... noble simplicity which characterized his head, d'Arthez added a naive expression, the naturalness of a child, and a touching kindliness. He did not have that politeness tinged with insincerity with which, in society, the best-bred persons and the most amiable assume qualities in which they are often lacking, leaving those they have thus duped wounded and distressed. He might, indeed, fail to observe certain rules of social ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... sufficiently that the new motive could be so far adapted to the old form as to produce an artistic masterpiece. Sterne may illustrate a similar remark. He represents, no doubt, a kind of sham sentimentalism with an insincerity which has disgusted many able critics. He was resolved to attract notice at any price—by putting on cap and bells, and by the pruriency which stains his best work. Like many contemporaries he was reading old authors and turned them ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... esoteric levels, and realised more and more the general vulgarity and coarseness of the world about him, and his own detachment. The vulgarity and crudity of the things nearest him impressed him most; the dreadful insincerity of the Press, the meretriciousness of success, the loudness of the rich, the baseness of common people in his own land. The world overseas had by comparison a certain glamour. Except that when you said "United ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... wresting philosophy to the needs of his own sorrow. But in the light of this new fact, those pages, seemingly so cold, are seen to be alive with feeling. What appeared to be a lack of interest in the philosopher turns out to have been a touching insincerity of the man to his own heart; and that fine-spun airy theory of friendship, so devoid, as I complained, of any quality of flesh and blood, a mere anodyne to lull his pains. The most temperate of living critics once ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... congratulations. He preferred the piece, however, as it had been originally written, and suggested to Ford the advisability of returning to the first text. Then Ford went upstairs to take his paint off, and Hubert walked about the stage with Brown. Brown's insincerity was sufficiently transparent; but men in Hubert's position catch at straws, and he soon began to believe that the attitude of the public towards his play was not so ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... as before, but, since the joy of a temporary reprieve may outweigh even the annoyance of an anticlimax, they were pleased to see us and gave us another farewell only slightly less emotional than the last. But on the third of this series of week-ends a note of insincerity crept into the "Goodbye, old man," and the hand-pressure was ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... me is not that I showed so little self-command and so much insincerity, but the doubt whether Brett's flawless technique was the vehicle for an act of true good feeling or was used simply for the pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special memories of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control over himself—but did he really lose ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... patriotic record! To his ambition, selfishness, ignorance and innate insincerity he has sacrificed as much of the people's honor, of the people's interests, and of the people's blood as was feasible. History cannot be cheated. History will compare Mr. Seward's manifestoes and phrases with ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... Caesar, or Pompey, or Brutus, as we can into Cicero's; but it is not so certain that if we could, our estimate of their characters would be lowered. We might discover, in their cases as in his, many traces of what seems insincerity, timidity, a desire to sail with the stream; we might find that the views which they expressed in public were not always those which they entertained in private; but we might also find an inner current of kindness, and benevolence, and tenderness of heart, for which the world gives them little ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... appears so plain to them that they cannot imagine how any honest mind can come to any other conclusion. Hence, they are ready to doubt the piety of all who differ with them, if not to assume the office of judge, and charge them with insincerity or hypocrisy. Whereas, in truth, their strong confidence in their opinions arises from having examined the subject partially and superficially, and overlooked the objections and difficulties which readily occur to a well-balanced ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... Lest insincerity be charged let it be said here that there was some unfavorable comment. One New England paper was surprised that soldiers, sailors and marines were not clever enough to know that the American people would perceive their attempt, through this organization, ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... in a democracy, to say silently year by year at the polls, "I am the State"? Can it help but confuse and deteriorate the other sex, similarly trained to acquiescence year after year in a national misrepresentation and a personal no-representation? This fundamental insincerity of our so-called democracy is as insidious an influence upon the minds and morals of our franchised men, our unfranchised women and our young Americans of both sexes, as hypocrisy is to a church member or spurious currency to a bank. It is to be ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... how interesting, how thoroughly hearty and unconventional they were! How utterly presumption and ignorance were scouted in them, and how completely they were free from the least shadow of insincerity or ennui. If I could but transfer to my page a true and vivid picture of one such evening, spent in the society of Saint Werner's friends—if I could write down but one such conversation, and at all express its vivacity, its quick flashes of thought and logic, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the Prophet, with the heavy earnestness of absolute insincerity, "Mr. Sagittarius is the most single lived man I ever met, the very most. But why did Sir Tiglath, that ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... regards his official attitude, I have to this extent no cause of complaint—that beyond the degree of reserve imposed upon him by the anti-Prussian policy of his government, I have observed in him no tendency towards intrigue or insincerity. For the rest, he is a natural opponent of the Prussian policy in all cases where this does not go hand in hand with Austria and the Catholic Church; and the warmth with which he not infrequently supports his opinion ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... question. But you must feel how difficult it is to put away a political conviction, especially when it happens to be right and proved up to the hilt. However, I conform myself to the wishes of him from whom I cannot dissent with any dignity: and this I do not do, as perhaps some may think, from insincerity; for deliberate purpose and, by heaven! affection for Pompey are so powerful with me, that whatever is to his interest, and whatever he wishes, appears to me at once to be altogether right and reasonable. Nor, as I think, would even his opponents be wrong if, seeing that they cannot ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... me three times three? I can stand it very well." An author may sometimes think he is fulsomely praised and may even feel a sort of disgust for the slab adulation trowelled upon him, but his admirer need not fear being accused of insincerity. He may confidently count upon being regarded as a fine fellow who has at worst gone wrong in the right direction. It ought, therefore, to be a very simple matter to content a veteran author in the article of criticism, but somehow ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... who were simply commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties—to which we had vowed our heart's blood—and the profound insincerity of these declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties, the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the affair ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... effect of placing at Her Majesty's control the patronage of four hundred places; while the Regent was to possess no power whatever over any office, reversion, or pension. This appeared to the Prince and his allies a monstrous proposition, calculated to introduce "weakness, disorder, and insincerity into every branch of political business;" to "separate the Court from the State;" to "disconnect the authority to command service from the power of animating it by reward;" and to impose on the Regent "all the invidious duties of the kingly station, without the means of softening them to the public ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... that, being feeble echoes of one another, they could not venture to publish their own real maxims and private sentiments.'[22] One of the secrets of his own freedom from this ordinary insipidity of moralists was his freedom also from their pretentiousness and insincerity. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... witness the effects my posthumous opinions of them are likely to produce in their minds. What good fun this would be! . . . You don't seem to value this as you ought," said Byron with one of his sardonic smiles, seeing I looked, as I really felt, surprised at his avowed insincerity. "I feel the same pleasure in anticipating the rage and mortification of my soi-disant friends at the discovery of my real sentiments of them, that a miser may be supposed to feel while making a will that will disappoint all the expectants that have been toadying ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... on its handling of foreign affairs. The young politician had not the strength of character or convictions that keeps a man naturally in the forefront of affairs and gives his counsels a sterling value, and on the other hand his insincerity was not deep enough to allow him to pose artificially and successfully as a leader of men and shaper of movements. For the moment, however, his place in public life was sufficiently marked out to give him a secure footing in that world where people ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... in dignity of person far excelled his father. He had more skill and more courage; but he had the same theory of arbitrary government, and acted as if insincerity and the breaking of promises were excusable in defense of it. His strife with Parliament began at once. They would not grant supplies of money without a redress of grievances and the removal of Buckingham, the king's favorite. War had begun with Spain ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... latest days of ours that this searching after sincerity should seem to be leading us towards a similar revival; taking even very much the same forms. We went back, at the time of the Gothic revival, to the forgotten Gothic art of stained-glass; now tired, as it would seem, of the insincerity and mere spirit of imitation with which it and similar arts have been practised, a number of us appear to be ready to throw it aside, along with scholarly mouldings and traceries, and build our arts afresh out of the ground, as was done by the Byzantines, with ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... us what he sees and believes as he sees and believes it, the defective earnestness of his presentation will cause an imperfect sympathy in us. He must believe what he says, or we shall not believe it. Insincerity is always weakness; sincerity even in error is strength. This is not so obvious a principle as the first; at any rate it is one more profoundly disregarded ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... considerable dramatic power, and every one of them contains some memorable line or passage; but they are spoiled by the author's insincerity in trying to satisfy the depraved taste of the Restoration stage. He wrote one play, All for Love, to please himself, he said, and it is noticeable that this play is written in blank verse and shows the influence of Shakespeare, who was then ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... sees the pathos of the picture. But this is as another generation may see it. To-day we are too close, so close that the meaner details, the blots and flaws, are all most plainly visible: the corruption, the insincerity, the injustice, the barbarity—all the unlovely touches that will by-and-by be forgotten, sponged away by the gentle hand of Time, when only the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... choose the one which should best express her meaning. Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's meanings, on the other hand, told best when half concealed. Another difficulty was, too, that Evadne's clear, decided speech had the effect of exposing innuendo and insincerity, and making both "bad form," which, socially speaking, is a much more terrible stigma to bear than an accusation of dishonesty, however well authenticated. And even their very manner of expressing legitimate mirth was ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Bartram, but I am quite certain you are something more than you wish to tell. I mean a bigger factor in the Crane affair than you admit. I ask no questions, I agree to your terms, and I will do exactly as you direct, relying on your promise that if I do so, you will not tell of any—any insincerity you may notice." ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... hands in a long, lingering clasp. Beside the warmth and magnetism that was a component part of Dr. Maverick's nature when he chose to use it, which was not nearly always, there was a steadfast kindliness, the vigor of a true and pure manhood, that made a clear atmosphere about him, in which insincerity, weakness, and selfishness seemed to flicker into pale shadows, and shrink away from the intense mental light ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... insincerity does not hinder the effect of Baptism. For the Apostle says (Gal. 3:27): "As many of you as have been baptized in Christ Jesus, have put on Christ." But all that receive the Baptism of Christ, are baptized in Christ. Therefore they all put on Christ: ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... he deserved to be hung, he at the same time, with almost idiotic fatuity, sent the same Count Neuperg back to the Turkish camp to settle some items which yet required adjustment. This proved, to every mind, the insincerity of Charles. The Russians, thus forsaken by Austria, also made peace with the Turks. They consented to demolish their fortress of Azof, to relinquish all pretensions to the right of navigating the Black sea, and to allow a vast extent of territory upon its ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... temptation to write to her, probably because in his inmost heart he knew too well that if she wanted him she would write—on some other excuse. He had been in a curious way clear-sighted about her from the first; he had always acknowledged that strain of insincerity, but he had fallen into the error of believing that underneath all those shifting sands there was at last bedrock and that it was his hand which was to discover it. He now knew that it was nothing but sands, and ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... tones. Now, I am perfectly willing to say that I think it is wise to judge of party loyalty by the cloakroom, and not by the vote and the cloakroom was not satisfactory. I am not meaning to imply that there was any kind of blameworthy insincerity in this. I am not assessing individuals. That is not fair. But in assessing the cause of our defeat we ought to be perfectly frank and admit that the country was not any more sure of us than it ought to be. So that we have got to convince it that the ranks ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... you add it deliberately as adornment of your speech, it will strike a false note; if you laboriously invent it the effort will show. Unless your thought and your eagerness for your subject flow naturally and inevitably into an image, it is better to stick to plain speech, for any suggestion of insincerity is fatal to ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... sense of insincerity in the light tone, but a swift glance into the wide eyes of the smiling ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... in the Rue des Saladiers, and the newspapers of Paris might have chronicled yet another crime passionnel and the appearance of Blanquette before a weeping jury. But the days of tragedy were over. Paragot thundered invectives against insincerity in Art (we were discussing my famous mythological picture still on the easel at Menilmontant) and Blanquette beamed approval. She remarked, referring to my picture, that she didn't like so many unclad ladies. It was not decent. Besides, if they lay in the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... and take place rightly, in the individual; particularly in the life of a man of great and intense intellectual powers, who cannot avoid seeing through human beings and observing the vanity of their thoughts and of their avocations, their dishonesty and self-deceptions, the insincerity of their emotions, their cowardice, the pettiness of their real ambitions. Actually, considering that Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine, one must be amazed at the balance and justice of his observations; much greater maturity is required for ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... she said; but there was no longer any earnestness in her voice. It had again become a demure insincerity. ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... were handsome or would have been handsome were it not for the crafty and shifty expression of his eyes and the otherwise insincerity that was manifest in his face. Among his companions of the underworld he was known far and ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... an effort to smile, and answered in the insincerity of my pain, that it must have been a pleasant task to instruct so ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... the expenses of his household. One thing I can positively assert in regard to his Majesty, the King of Etruria, is that he did not sincerely feel either all the enthusiasm or all the gratitude which he expressed towards the First Consul, and the latter had more than one proof of this insincerity. As to the king's talent for governing and reigning, the First Consul said to Cambaceres at his levee, in the same conversation from which I have already quoted, that the Spanish Ambassador had complained of the haughtiness of this prince towards him, of his extreme ignorance, and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... looked a trifle dashed when only Harriet responded, although she immediately assured Miss Field cordially with bright insincerity that she had known of her return, ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... to think me false belongs to you. Yet still I deem that Josabet, the foe Implacable of falsehood, would resign Her own life even, were it requisite, Rather than life of insincerity Be purchased by the slightest word untrue. Then of that child's descent there is no trace? Darkness profound surrounds his origin! You know not of what parents he was born? From whose hands Joad received him to his arms? Pray speak, I listen ready to believe. Princess, ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... with nervousness. Had her voice and manner declared insincerity, posing, anything of that kind, he would have found the situation much more endurable; but Olga had tears in her eyes, and not the tears of an actress; her tones had recovered something of their old quality, and reminded ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... a better life, and induced to embrace it, they bring with them their characteristic sincerity. How great, then, is the need of missionaries who will not, by the deplorable example set by their own unfaithfulness and insincerity, lower the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... herself, she was morbidly careful of the feelings of others, and committed sins of insincerity without compunction in her efforts to spare them. She and Mildred were waiting ready dressed one day to go and pay a call with mamma. Beth had her big bonnet on, and was happy; and Mildred also was in a high ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... son," the canon said, very nearly losing his temper over what he considered Napoleon's insincerity. "You cannot deceive me. See! look at yourself in the glass. Your face betrays you. It is ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... leaving. I was going back now to the vast tumult of the roaring towns, to the lip of mockery, the eye of insincerity, the hand of hypocrisy, where none may trust a neighbor. And moreover, I was going back without one look, face to face, into the eyes and the heart of the woman I had loved, and who, by force of these extraordinary ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... Roman appealed to him with hope. Surely one so young and laughing, so ready to stop an army to argue with a child, could not be beyond reach of persuasion. With the simple frankness so innocent of guile as to make charming that which upon other lips would have been the broadest insincerity, he put that moment's thought ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... my work I heard papa tell him Alfred is blackening his character in the town with some impossible story about fourteen thousand pounds. Mr. Osmond very kind and sympathising; set it all down to illusion; assured papa there was neither malice nor insincerity in it. 'But what the better am I for that?' said poor papa; 'if I am slandered, I am slandered.' And they went ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... language, to indicate some constantly recurring viciousness, in the treatment of one's own and of other minds, which is always at variance with such habits of thought as are really worth while. There is an every-day "sophistry," of course, against which we have all of us to be on our guard—that insincerity of reasoning on behalf of sincere convictions, true or false in themselves as the case may be, to which, if we are unwise enough to argue at all with each other, we must all be tempted at times. Such insincerity ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Ridge Country where conditions are ideal for a renewed emphasis on living a simple and natural life ... to preserve the past and present expressions of isolated peoples in the Southern Appalachians which are untainted by any form of insincerity or make-believe. There is growing interest among city-bred people in the folk-ways, and through research and actual experiences, they are learning to appreciate the simple folk-life that ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... Memoirs, above all those in which he blames the Emperor, have pained me, I must confess; but on this occasion he does not hesitate to admit the insincerity of the allies, which opinion is of much weight ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... be said, notwithstanding what I have advanced, that if Mr. Pitt had exerted himself as the minister of the country in behalf of the abolition, he could have carried it. This brings the matter to an issue; for unquestionably the charge of insincerity, as it related to this great question, arose from the mistaken notion, that, as his measures in parliament were supported by great majorities, he could do as he pleased there. But, they who hold this opinion, must be informed, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... gaining great advantages over his rival, by forming an alliance with the Counts of Flanders, Toulouse, Boulogne, Champagne, and other considerable vassals of the crown of France [d]. But he soon experienced the insincerity of those princes, and was not able to make any impression on that kingdom, while governed by a monarch of so much vigour and activity as Philip. The most remarkable incident of this war was the taking ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... against the document. The Interim had been prepared by the papal bishops Julius Pflug and Michael Helding and the court-preacher of Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, John Agricola, a man with whom Luther had, already since 1540, refused to have any further intercourse owing to his insincerity and duplicity. "I go forth as the Reformer of all Germany," Agricola boasted when he left Berlin to attend the Diet at Augsburg, which was to open September 1, 1547. After the Diet he bragged that in Augsburg he had flung the windows wide open for the Gospel; that he had reformed the ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... new party that is wanted." But he thinks—and he is unquestionably right in thinking—"that the number of men profoundly interested in public affairs, and anxious to discharge their full duty of citizens who are in revolt against the rigidity and insincerity of our present party system, is very considerable and steadily increasing." He wishes people in this category to be organised with a view to encouraging a national as opposed to a party spirit, and he holds that "with a little organisation they could play the umpire between the two ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... when a sudden emancipation of mind sweeps the old landmarks and restraints out of sight, and nothing has been foreseen which can serve as a guide. Then is the time when weak places in education show themselves, when the least insincerity in the presentment of truth brings its own punishment, and a faith not pillared and grounded in all honesty is in danger of failing. The best security is to have nothing to unlearn, to know that ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... of art. He practised diligently, and gained, as he himself states, his high rank by constantly drilling himself in the art of writing. This imitation of form to the point of perfection, rather than an expression of a great and moving idea, gives an air of insincerity to some of Stevenson's works. Yet, although seemingly artificial, he never chose words for the sake of mere sounds, but for their accuracy in truth and fitness. He was as an ephemeral shadow with an optimistic and real spirit. He infused ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... There was nothing remarkable about his appearance. He was an ordinary brown-haired, blue-eyed young man,—not, perhaps, ordinary, for that combination is rather rare,—and there were some people who said that something in his eye betrayed what they called insincerity; indeed there was generally about him an agreeableness, a ready self-adaptation to everybody's way of thinking, a desire to recommend himself, which is always open to censure. Mrs. Wilberforce was one of the people who shook her head and declared him to be insincere. And as he went so far ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... what to make of it," he answered. "I don't know." But while they were speculating at the bank as to the sincerity or insincerity of Mrs. Eustace, she was driving her own troubles from her mind by the constant and unremitting care of a taciturn ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... or believed, smothered him with the dryness of dust. Going quickly over to the sofa, he laid his hand on the man's shoulder, and spoke in a high ringing voice which he tried to make cheerful. "It will pass, old fellow," he said, and could have laughed aloud at the insincerity of his tone. "I know because I've been there." And he added cynically, as a kind of sacrifice on the altar of truth: "Everything will pass if ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... hold no conference with the Court till the Queen had performed her promise made to the First President. I thought it a very proper time to let the Court see that the Parliament had not lost all its vigour, and made a motion, by Broussel, that, considering the insincerity of the Court, the levies might be continued and new commissions given out. The proposition was received with applause, and the Prince de Conti was desired to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... half-moon, the convex outline being preserved by a retreating forehead, an aquiline nose, and a chin sloping inward, combined to give him a cold, repulsive countenance, fraught with expressions denoting selfishness and insincerity. The other occupant of the same seat was, on the contrary, a young man of an unassuming demeanor, shapely features, and a mild, pleasing countenance. The remaining two gentlemen of the party were much older, but scarcely ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... to bewilder or terrify the plain country gentlemen, or the youths from Eton, Oxford, or Cambridge, who constitute a majority of that House. His success in exciting the passions of such senators in favour of discord and war, his lavish expenditure of the public money in corrupting others, and his insincerity in whatever he professed for the public benefit, rendered him through life the subject of my aversion: but, in this chamber, reduced to the level of ordinary men, and sinking under the common infirmities of humanity, his person, character, and premature decease became objects ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... was your peculiar good fortune which led you to address yourself to me rather than to anyone else. You are secure in my house, where I advise you to continue, if you think fit; and, provided you do not stray from hence, I dare assure you, you will have no just cause to complain of my insincerity." ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... world; and therefore I could not help wondering, while the play was acting, that people would throw away so much of their time upon sights that can do them no good, and send their children and their relations to learn fraud and insincerity." Mr Merton smiled at the honest bluntness of Harry; but several of the ladies, who had just been expressing an extravagant admiration of this piece, seemed to be not a little mortified; however, as they could not contradict the charges ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... made a good appearance. Oscar Wilde suggested to the Victorians that they shouldn't arrange chairs; they should let them occur. Against the false setting manners were bound to become false—good manners becoming almost synonymous with perfect insincerity. Perhaps the only thing that ever really came to life in a drawing-room was the aesthetic movement! At its worst it was what we have described it; at its best it was a sort of blind protest against the patterns of chair-covers that the eye ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood |
