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More "Irreverent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... three or four of the most exalted divines, but you may look into it freely enough through a couple of gilded lattices. It is very sombre and splendid, and conveys the impression of a very holy place. And yet somehow it suggested irreverent thoughts; it had to my fancy—perhaps on account of the lattice—an Oriental, a Mahometan note. I expected every moment to see a sultana appear in a silver veil and silken trousers and sit down on the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... "My good Sheffield," he said, "the thing is irreverent, not the manner. It is irreverent to liken your holy ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... fairly within the old hemlocks, and in one of the most primitive, undisturbed nooks. In the deep moss I tread as with muffled feet, and the pupils of my eyes dilate in the dim, almost religious light. The irreverent red squirrels, however, run and snicker at my approach, or mock the solitude with ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... during the last forty years as the type of social commonplace in all its manifold manifestations. With the exception of Astier-Rehu and Baron Huchenard, who were summoned as witnesses, he was the only Academician bold enough to face the irreverent remarks that might be expected in the speech of Fage's counsel, Margery, the dreaded wit, who convulses the whole assembly and the bench with the mere sound of his nasal 'Well.' Some fun was to be expected; the whole atmosphere of the place announced it, the erratic ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... "Born irreverent," scrawled Mark Twain on a scratch pad, "—like all other people I have ever known or heard of—I am hoping to remain so while there are any reverent irreverences left to make fun of." —[Holograph manuscript of Samuel L. Clemens, in the collection ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... Master, when my useful strength is gone, do not turn me out to starve or freeze, or sell me to some human brute, to be slowly tortured and starved to death; but do Thou, My Master, take my life in the kindest way, and your God will reward you Here and Hereafter. You will not consider me irreverent if I ask this in the name of Him who was born ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... metaphysical labyrinths, and dwell in a grand constitutional edifice, rich in picturesque memories, and blending into one complex harmony elements contributed by a long series of centuries. And you, wretched French revolutionists, with your love of petty precision, and irreverent radicals and utilitarians, with your grovelling material notions, propose to level, and destroy, and break in upon my delicious reveries. No old Hebrew prophet could be more indignant with the enemy who threatened to break down the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... and marsh-fog, (both of which they made uncommonly strong,) openly avowed it as their opinion, that he was a great deal too good for her, and that, if the truth must be told, the princess was an impertinent, saucy and irreverent creature, who hadn't the slightest respect for her superiors. "As to her beauty," said one of these crones, whose little face was very much of the size and complexion of a dried camomile-flower, and who was shrewdly suspected of qualifying her marsh-fog with pale pink-brandy—"As for ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... previously bared his feet, for he had come in canvas shoes, which tortured him) joined me within the magic circle, hollowed out the top of the gravel-heap, built his fire in the bottom, and applied a match: it was one of Bryant and May's. The flame was slow to catch, and the irreverent sorcerer filled in the time with talk of foreign places—of London, and "companies," and how much money they had; of San Francisco, and the nefarious fogs, "all the same smoke," which had been so nearly the occasion of his death. I tried vainly to lead him to the matter ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... population of this Seat of Empire, and she is as much subject to the cosmic laws and as much a member of the human family as the tallest and most swaggering Lifeguards-man who ever had "Cook's Son!" shouted at him by irreverent urchin. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... fond du caractere Anglais, 'the basis of the English character,' is nothing more nor less than le manque de bonheur—'a want of anything like happiness.' An English thinker, on the other hand, finds in the very language of France the evidence of superficial emotion and unaspiring, irreverent intelligence. 'How exactly,' writes Julius Ham, 'do esprit and spirituel express what the French deem the highest glory of the human mind! A large part of their literature is mousseux; and whatever is so, soon grows flat. Our national quality is sense, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hearin' my mind. He owned up that he had dreaded tellin' me about it, for fear I would upbraid him. But, good land! I would have been a hard hearted creeter if I could upbraid a man for goin' through such a time as that. He said he thought mebby I would think it wuz irreverent or sunthin', the dog's ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... not teach so irreverent a doctrine here! Mr. Ray went gladly, and was far more devout and reverential in church ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... because he did not take life tragically, as he did. Humanity would be too poor and too gray in color if it were to be uniformly clad in the moral seriousness, and the heroic restraint with which Christophe was armed. Humanity needed joy, carelessness, irreverent audacity in face of its idols, all its idols, even the most holy. Long live "the Gallic salt which revives the world"! Skepticism and faith are no less necessary. Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepares the way for the faith of to-morrow.... ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... naturally spread throughout all the surrounding towns. It was said that in one of these a party of roguish boys loaded an old cannon with molasses and fired it in the direction of Colchester. How they did this has not been stated, and some irreverent disbelievers in the more uncommon of our grandfathers' stories have profanely declared ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... irreverent laughter, in which, I am sorry to say, the bishop joined. At least, I saw his Lordship taking out a silk ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... explain the fact of his being counted by Professor Fortescue as a friend. Even then it was a puzzling friendship. Could it be that to Professor Fortescue, he shewed only his best side? His manner was more respectful towards his colleague than towards other men, but even with him he was irreverent in his heart, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... d——d I only meant deuced." But one would as soon think of dropping out Shakspeare's adjective, and saying (as a very prim lady we once knew did in reading Lady Macbeth's soliloquy), "Out, spot!" as to drop out any of Lamb's qualifying words. He was sometimes accused of being irreverent, as in his article upon "Saying Graces," where he affirms that he is more disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day than before his dinner, and inquires why not say ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... points of doctrine, and perhaps of discipline I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that church which you have so worthily historified, yet may the ill time never come to me, when with a chilled heart, or a portion of irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-hallowed Edifices. Judge then of my mortification when, after attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... perhaps an unusually dirty one; and drank more brandy than was good for him. The "Age of Reason" is a shallow deistical essay, in which the author's opinions are set forth, it is true, in a most offensive and irreverent style. As Dr. Hopkins wrote of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... right to inquire into the source of this fortune, how exposed to the risks of disclosure would become the secret Graham sought to conceal. Such a secret affecting the memory of the sacred dead, affixing a shame on the scutcheon of the living, in the irreverent hands of a Gustave Rameau,—it was too dreadful to contemplate such a hazard. And yet, if Isaura were the missing heiress, could Graham Vane admit any excuse for basely withholding from her, for coolly retaining to himself the wealth for which he was responsible? Yet, torturing ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... question, as to the past, ruled the present. What had parted them, and how did they to-day envisage one another? She could not make out. Had never, indeed, attempted seriously to make out, shying from such investigation as disloyal and, in a way, irreverent. Now investigation was forced on her. Her mind worked independent of her will, so that she could neither prevent or arrest it. Sir Charles showed himself scrupulously attentive and courteous to General Frayling. He offered no ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... you had the choice, my lord," said Mrs. Courthope, her temper yielding somewhat, though in truth his speech was not half so irreverent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... architecture were always soft and beautiful. Unfortunately, one is greatly pestered outside by a voracious band of touts, miscalled guides, some of them mere uneducated-looking, parrot-like roughs, and whom it is laughable to suppose could have any pretensions to refined knowledge and art history—irreverent monsters who have no sympathy with, or appreciation of, anything, except what you ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... as if for some anniversary observance. Clearly, these people, concurring in this with the special sympathies of Marius himself, had adopted the practice of burial from some peculiar feeling of hope they entertained concerning the body; a feeling which, in no irreverent curiosity, he would fain have penetrated. The complete and irreparable disappearance of the dead in the funeral fire, so crushing to the spirits, as he for one had found it, had long since induced in him a preference for that other mode of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... protest—many protests, indeed—followed. Mme. Wagner's was accompanied with a threat of legal proceedings. The ground of her appeal to Mr. Conried was that to perform the drama which had been specifically reserved for performance in Bayreuth by the composer would be irreverent and illegal. To this Mr. Conried made answer that inasmuch as "Parsifal" was not protected by law in the United States his performance would not be illegal, and that it was more irreverent to Wagner to prevent the many Americans who could not go to Bayreuth ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... or that he gives any consistent account of his greatest contemporaries, would be too much. He is full of whims, and moreover, full of spite. He cannot be decently fair to anyone who deserted his father, or stood in Conway's light. He reflects at all times the irreverent gossip current behind the scenes. To know the best and the worst that can be said of any great man, the best plan is to read the leading article of his party newspaper, and then to converse in private with its writer. The eulogy and the sarcasm may both be sincere enough; ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... are much ruffled by the irreverent manner in which Guicciardini notices the origin of the cognomen of the Great Captain; which even his subsequent panegyric cannot atone for. "Era capitano Gonsalvo Ernandes, di casa d'Aghilar, di patria Cordovese, uomo di molto valore, ed esercitato ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... gentlemen, let us goe to supper & for the night leave this discourse", but their resentment was too great to be smoothed over, and with one accord rejecting his invitation, "they departed from the Governour in a very irreverent manner".[283] ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... sentiment upon the under-world of spectators with a most sovran and becoming contempt. There was excellent pathos delivered out to them: an they would receive it, so; an they would not receive it, so. There was no offence against decorum in all this; nothing to condemn, to damn. Not an irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would come of it, when, towards the winding-up of the latter, Antonio, with an irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself,—for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... him, turn and turn about," continued Mrs. Benton, ignorant of Marty's irreverent remark. "He's to be put into Mr. Ma'sh's room at the quarters, and I'll take this first night's job. I shall begin it with a dose of picra, and the first page of the Westminster catechism; and if that don't put him in good ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... and eschew the irreverent empty phrases and contradictions of a mis-called 'Science,' professing which some have missed their true aim in ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... "Unknowable" is a pure abstraction, having no organic connection with the Synthetic Philosophy, or indeed with any philosophy of value. Mr. Spencer's warning to his readers seems to quite justify Mr. Bradley's rather caustic comment, "I do not wish to be irreverent, but Mr. Spencer's attitude towards his Unknowable strikes me as a pleasantry, the point of which lies in its unconsciousness. It seems a proposal to take something for God simply and solely because we do not know what the devil it can be." (Note to p. 128 ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... success among grand old ladies. When she stood before them there was a delicate submission in her air which was suggestive of obedience to the dignity of their years and state. Strongly conservative and rather feudal old persons were much pleased by this. In the present irreverent iconoclasm of modern times, it was most agreeable to talk to a handsome creature who was as beautifully attentive as if she had been ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... not trained them in the way they should go? Do I fear for them?" A grave silence, and McAlpin glared at Hornby, while an irreverent youth, with a fish dangling from his hands, laughed ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... knowledge goes, the planet Neptune. Of course, when it was expanded to that immense distance, it must have been very thin indeed, thinner than our clumsy human senses can even conceive of. An American would say, too thin; but I put Americans out of court at once as mere irreverent scoffers. From the orbit of Neptune, or something outside it, the faint and cloud-like mass which bore within it Caesar and his fortunes, not to mention the remainder of the earth and the solar ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... taken completely off her guard; but the exclamation was far more of a prayer than an irreverent mention of her ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... representation. This Mystery is the most ancient dramatic work of modern Europe, and gives the whole Gospel narrative from the birth of our Saviour until His death. Being too long for a play of one act, it was continued from day to day. What would seem irreverent on a modern stage was regarded as perfectly simple and natural in the Middle Ages, and it was a potent factor in teaching the masses the ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... built himself a palace, with a city attached to it; and in short, made himself, generally, at home. We are also fortunate in having some genealogical particulars as to his wife's antecedents; and it is to be regretted that modern historians, of the skeptical, the irreverent, and the startling schools, could not imitate the gravity, the good faith, and the respect for things established, by which the elder chroniclers were inspired. The apothecaries of the Middle Ages never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the conditions under which funerals should be conducted, without hurting some one's feelings. The Duke of Sutherland's attempt in England to do away with the dreadful shape which causes a shudder to all who have lost a friend—that of the coffin—was called irreverent, because he suggested that the dead should be buried in wicker-work baskets, with fern-leaves for shrouds, so that the poor clay might the more easily return to mother earth. Those who favor cremation suffer again a still more frantic disesteem; ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... faith as it grew irritated by discipline, a thing antipathetic to her constitution. When her father took her from school, no one was sorry to see her go. The Lady Superior even thought that she had latterly been somewhat irreverent to the community. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... no good by giving way in this manner. Death is a very beautiful and solemn thing, and it is irreverent to show unseemly passion in such a great Presence. You loved your friend—let it be a comfort to you that she died painlessly. Control yourself, in order to assist in rendering her the last few gentle services necessary; and try to console the desolate brother, who looks ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... him, might possibly strike Moggy as irreverent, and the worthy father paused, and, with upturned eyes, murmured a Latin ejaculation, crossing himself; and having thus reasserted his clerical character, he proceeded to demonstrate ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... board on the front of the building, and was as follows, "Rights of Women Institute; Established for the Relief of the Disabilities of Females." By friendly tongues to friendly ears "The College" or "the Institute" was the pleasant name used; but the irreverent public was apt to speak of the building generally as the "Female Disabilities." And the title was made even shorter. Omnibuses were desired to stop at the "Disabilities;" and it had become notorious that it was just a mile from King's Cross ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... of July. On the same day he began Cain, a Mystery. Cain was an attempt to dramatize the Old Testament; Lucifer's apology for himself and his arraignment of the Creator startled and shocked the orthodox. Theologically the offence lay in its detachment. Cain was not irreverent or blasphemous, but it treated accepted dogmas as open questions. Cain was published in the same volume with the Two Foscari and Sardanapalus, December 19, 1821. The "Blues," a skit upon literary coteries and their patronesses, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... never touched with the down or dust of human attributes, descend and ascend on their missions to the earth. Who can have the heart to handle harshly these beautiful faiths? To say, this hope may go up, but this must go down to the darkness of annihilation! Was it irreverent in the pious singing-master of a New England village, when he said, that often, while returning home late on bright winter nights, he had dropped the reins upon his horse's neck, and sung Old Hundred from the stars, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... you we tumbled upon you as we did. But Captain Suckling's orders were—and I heard him give 'em, with my own ears—to fetch you off to-morrow morning. From the Blue Posts, eh? Well, just you run back, or Blue Billy,"—by this irreverent name, as I learned later, the executive officers of his Majesty's Navy had agreed to know Mr. Benjamin Sheppard, proprietor of the Blue Posts: a solid man, who died worth sixty thousand pounds—"or Blue Billy will be ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and loved his mother duly. She returned his affection, but could not stand his poetical effusions, which she thought showed an irreverent spirit. We are not quite ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... did she then offer. If she was cool, she was not irreverent before the thought of the awful ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... Christian scholasticism formulated by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. The weapons of this interminable and many-sided controversy were as rude as the age which forged them: on the one side, coarse invective and irreverent paradox; on the other, scandalous imputations, spiritual censures, the sword, the prison, and the stake. For the medieval attitude towards heterodoxy was unflinching and uncompromising. To remain sceptical when the Church ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... if the year were kneeling to pray in a vast cathedral full of mellow stained light, isn't it?" said Anne dreamily. "It doesn't seem right to hurry through it, does it? It seems irreverent, like ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... were fed on earthly luxuries, drunk with false wisdom, and loathing all that pertained to religion. Among the latter, the sight of whom grieved me especially, because Jesus so loved children, I saw many irreverent, ill-behaved acolytes, who did not honour our Lord in the holy ceremonies in which they took a part. I beheld with terror that many priests, some of whom even fancied themselves full of faith and piety, also outraged Jesus in ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... blue marble, were 666 feet long; and it took an hour to finish the pilgrimage. Later the labyrinths lost their religious meaning, and became a pastime for idlers and children. The one in the church at Saint-Omer has been destroyed, because the celebration of the office was often disturbed by irreverent visitors trying ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... earnest about that girl," said Poppins. Poppins had an offhand, irreverent way of speaking, especially on subjects which from their nature demanded delicacy, that was frequently ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... understand, and were greatly inclined to resent, the appearance of this bright, playful, unconventional spirit, happy and brilliant himself, and loving the happiness and brilliancy of the world; with not an ounce of pomposity in his own nature, and with the most irreverent demeanour towards pomposity in other people. "Our social Polyphemes," as Lord Beaconsfield said, "have only one eye"; and they could not the least perceive that Arnold's genius was like the genius of poetry as he ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... is meant by infamous conduct and indecent talk; but the allusion is probably to irreverent utterances touching the Governor in which the officers from France were apt to indulge, not always without the knowledge of their chief. Vaudreuil complained of this to Montcalm, adding, "I am greatly above it, and I despise it."[674] To which the General replied: "You are right to despise gossip, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... the old man, horror-stricken, "you ain't a-gettin' irreverent, you ain't a-beginnin' to doubt, air you? Don't do it. I know jest what you 've had to bear all along, an' I know what you 're a-bearin' now, but you ain't the only one that has their crosses. I 'm a-bearin' my own, an' it ain't light neither. You don't know what it is, my boy, when you feel ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... circumstances; some of them may have dwelt in the old time on this very spot of ground now covered by the Museum. Like other people who grow too rich and comfortable, the citizens of Tarentum loved mirth and mockery; their Greek theatre was remarkable for irreverent farce, for parodies of the great drama of Athens. And here is testimony to the fact: all manner of comic masks, of grotesque visages; mouths distorted into impossible grins, eyes leering and goggling, noses extravagant. ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... that blistered, a melody that enchanted Northern ears; but then we have lost the story of his life, and from his poems, with their wonderful contrasts, the delicacy and spring-like flush of feeling, the piety, the freedom of speech, the irreverent use of the sacredest names, the "Flyting" and the "Lament for the Makars," there is difficulty in making one's ideas of him cohere. He is present to the imagination, and yet remote. Like Tantallon, he is a portion of the past. We are separated from him ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... that this animal, by the respect it manifested during the celebration of the Sacred Mysteries, taught the Christians the deep reverence with which they ought to assist at Mass, and at the same time passed a deserved censure on those who are irreverent ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... with a gold border, a black paletot lined with red, red trousers, and white kid gloves. 'The look in his light gray eyes was somewhat soft and dreamy, like that of people who have lived hard. His whole appearance,' says the irreverent Busch, 'was a little unsoldierlike. The man looked too soft, I might say too shabby, for the uniform he wore.' While one scene in the stupendous drama was performed at the weaver's cottage, another was acted or endured in Sedan, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... sure it will be all right. You'll not be irreverent, and maybe it will reawaken your ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... which we have yet heard, that have been honored with the appellation of vox humana, no one in the treble part has ever reminded us of anything human, so much as the cracked voice of an old woman of ninety, or, in the lower parts, of Punch singing through a comb." Let us hope that this most irreverent description will not apply to the vox humana of our instrument, after all the science and skill that have been expended upon it. Should it prove a success like that of the Freyburg organ, there will be pilgrimages from the shores of the Pacific ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... intention, and had perhaps exaggerated a little Mrs. Dixon's respectful manner. He knew such incidents cheered his father, who could never look at these subjects from a proper point of view, and, as people said, sometimes made the strangest remarks for a clergyman. This irreverent way of treating serious things was one of the great bonds between father and son, but it tended to increase their isolation. People said they would often have liked to asked Mr. Taylor to garden-parties, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... into the hollowed side of her right instep, at the same moment deftly caught her flying skirt, whipped it around her ankles, and, slightly raising it behind, permitted the chaste display of an inch or two of frilled white petticoat. The most irreverent critic of the sex will, I think, admit that it has ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... hidden from his intemperate, insistent gaze must surely be inconsequent. Once and for all, the legend of the crystal might be disposed of at the cost of two or three hours' climbing. I would bring it back to prove to Wylo that no irreverent "debil-debil" would ever again blink at the sun from that particular spot. As for the skeletons, they were, without doubt, as mythical as the evil spirit, and in any case a few old bones were not to scare me from venturing to the boldly obvious ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... hat! along the street His Lordship's carriage rolls; Respect to greatness—when it shines To cheer our darkened souls. Get off the step, you ragged boys! Policeman, where's your staff? This is a sight to check with awe The most irreverent laugh. Chapeau bas! Chapeau bas! Gloire au ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... the National Board of Education in Uncle Matthew's behalf. He remembered that Uncle Matthew, during an election, had interrupted him in a recital of his services to the Queen, by a reminder that he was only a militia man, and that rough, irreverent lads, who treated an election as an opportunity for skylarking instead of improving their minds, had followed him about his constituency, jeering at him for "a mileeshy man." Uncle Matthew, too, had publicly declared that Parnell was the greatest man that had ever lived ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... said the irreverent youth. "I thought it was part of the play. Stand out of the way, though, while ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... the two sexes to our system of Government should be proposed as an "experiment," and that it should be gravely recommended that a newly organized Territory under act of Congress should be set aside for this "experiment," which is in direct, grossly irreverent disregard of all that we have known as a rule, our great fundamental rule, in organizing a government of laws, whether colonial, State, or Federal, in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... your irreverent way if you weren't a good deal hardened and degraded," persisted Susannah affectionately, "and, as for me, I know that I am. Is there any instance in history of a people emerging from prolonged persecution with high ideals of love toward their ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... was a composer of such innate spirituality that to analyze and classify him in a formal manner seems well-nigh irreverent. His music once heard is never forgotten, and when thoroughly known is loved for all time. Nor is an elaborate biographical account necessary; for Franck, more than any other modern composer, has been fortunate in that ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... place lent itself to irony: parties of Americans and English parsons, the former agape for any rubbishy old things, the latter learned in the lore of obsolete Church-furniture, had thronged Torcello; and now they were all gone, and the sun had set behind the Alps, while an irreverent stranger drank his wine in Attila's chair, and nature's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... as if he had allowed his interest in a stranger to carry him too far, and Mr. Torkingham was horrified at the irreverent and easy familiarity of Louis Glanville's talk in the presence of a consecrated bishop. As for Viviette, her tongue lost all its volubility. She felt quite faint at heart, and hardly knew how to ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... Ann retired to the kitchen, and the former said hi his irreverent way, "Blamed ef Abigail ha'nt got more devils into her'n Mary Magdalene had the purtiest day she ever seed! I should think, arter a life with her fer a mother, the bad place would be a healthy and delightful clime. The devil a'n't a patchin' ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... with their lean sides and their festoons of brown, dusty cobwebs; dull, comfortable creatures they appear to imaginative eyes, waiting hungrily for their yearly meal. The eave-swallows are teasing their sleepy shapes, like the birds which flit about great beasts; gay, movable, irreverent, almost derisive, those barn swallows fly to and fro in the still, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... nervous young man with the celluloid collar sat a stout individual with a bald head. This was Abijah Thompson, known by the irreverent as "Barking" Thompson, a nickname bestowed because of his peculiar habit of gradually puffing up, like a frog, under religious excitement, and then bursting forth in an inarticulate shout, disconcerting to the uninitiated. During Baxter's speech and the singing of the ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... underneath the thin flooring, as though roused by her irreverent merriment, the big car shook itself awake with a roar and splutter of indignation. But the sliding doors were thrown open, and its rage died down at the prospect of release. It ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... 'Thou shall not——.' But our ordinary means of making the personal appeal is, 'you, sir,' 'you, madam,' 'my Lord, you——,' etc.; we reserve 'thou' for the special case of addressing the Deity. The application of the motive of courtesy is here reversed; it would be irreverent to merge this vast ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... joy of asking reasons where you have hitherto answered school queries; of extemporizing replies, magnificent, irresponsible, instead of laboriously remembering mere solutions; of describing, analyzing, and generally laying bold mental eyes, irreverent intellectual hands, on personalities whose real presence would merely make you stumble over a chair or drop a tea-cup! For talking is the great equalizer of positions, turning the humble, the painfully ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... of the church was still slender and flexile, virginal. Doctor Crosson mopped his brow at the atrocity of his thoughts this morning. The springtime air was to blame. The windows were open for the first time. The breeze that lolled through the church had no right there. It was irreverent and frivolous. It was amused at the people. It rippled with laughter at the preacher's heavy effort to start a jealousy between the pangs of the flesh and the pangs ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... vigor with which Japanese Buddhism began to absorb everything in heaven, earth and sea, which it could make a worshipable object or cause to stand as a Kami or deity to the mind, will be seen as we proceed. The native proverb, instead of being an irreverent joke, stands for an actual truth—"Even a sardine's head may ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... age is iconoclastic. It seeks to destroy sacred memorials, hallowed associations, holy shrines, everything that tells of the faith and the worship of a God-fearing past. The spirit of the age is irreverent, destructive, faithless. Against this and all despoiling forces we as patriots are called to arms. For what does America stand? What are the truths that have gone into her blood and made her strong and beautiful and dominant? The divineness of human rights, the claims ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... clergy of England have nobly shown their good will and hearty sympathy with the Americans, and their sincere desire for the settlement of our difficulties. 'If praying would do you Americans any good,' said an irreverent acquaintance last Sunday, 'you will be gratified to learn that a force of a thousand-clergymen-power is constantly at work ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... that the starry word is worth the pains of discovery. Stevenson, indeed, is commonly dismissed as a pretty-pretty writer, a word-taster without intellect or passion, a juggler rather than an artist. Pater's bust also is mutilated by irreverent schoolboys: it is hinted that he may have done well enough for the days of Victoria, but that he will not do at all for the world of George. It is all part of the reaction against style which took place when everybody found out ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... The Man Who Was Thursday "an extraordinary book, written as if the publisher had commissioned him to write something rather like the Pilgrim's Progress in the style of the Pickwick Papers"—which explains perhaps why some reviewers called it irreverent. The very wildness of it conveys a sense of thoughts seething and straining in an effort to express the inexpressible. Later in his more definitely philosophical books G.K. could say calmly much that here he splashes "on a ten leagued canvas with brushes of comet's hair"—with all the violent ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... us to make a friend of.' And far more than that. And He did it. Yes, He did it. O His immense bounty and goodness! He regards not the words but the affection with which the words are uttered. That must be so, when He endures with such an impertinent and over-familiar and irreverent wretch as I am; endures and answers. May He be ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... gathered closely round him, as if they thought he had some power to save them. There was a naval officer on board, whose frenzied state of feeling vented itself in blasphemous language. Friend Hopper, who was always disturbed by irreverent use of the name of Deity, was peculiarly shocked by it under these solemn circumstances. He walked up to the officer, put his hand on his shoulder, and looking him in the face, said, "From what I have heard of thy military exploits, I supposed thou wert ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... govern himself. In a time of reckless living, he illustrated the power which flows from subordination of pleasure to duty. In a day when wit was identified with malice, he brought out its power to entertain, surprise, and delight, without taking on the irreverent levity of Voltaire, the bitterness of Swift, or ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... without resorting to them. She was short in stature, but made up in spirit for her lack of inches, and would fix her dark eyes on offenders against discipline with the personal magnetism of a circus trainer or a leopard-tamer. Schoolgirls are irreverent beings, and though to her face her pupils showed her all respect, behind her back they spoke of her familiarly as "The Bantam," in allusion to her small size but plucky disposition, or sometimes, in reference to her sarcastic powers, as "The Sark," which by general custom became "The Snark." ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... inevitably die soon, that he was half dead already. Everyone wished for nothing but that he should die as soon as possible, and everyone, concealing this, gave him medicines, tried to find remedies and doctors, and deceived him and themselves and each other. All this was falsehood, disgusting, irreverent deceit. And owing to the bent of his character, and because he loved the dying man more than anyone else did, Levin was most painfully ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the hostess afforded him, Dummie, by the expiring ray of the candle that burned in the death-chamber, hastily opened a huge box (which was generally concealed under the bed, and contained the wardrobe of the deceased), and turned with irreverent hand over the linens and the silks, until quite at the bottom of the trunk he discovered some packets of letters; these he seized, and buried in the conveniences of his dress. He then, rising and replacing the box, cast a longing eye ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the anthropologist who puts no bridle on his hobby-horse is pleased to claim descent. Near the base is one of those symmetrically scooped-out hollows which are such a striking peculiarity of the formation here, and which suggest to the irreverent that a cheese-taster of prehistoric dimensions must have been brought to bear upon the rocks when their consistency was about the same as that of fresh gruyere. According to one theory, they were washed out by the sea, that retired from the interior of Aquitaine long ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... said, blinking at me like an owl, "it is my duty to reprove your irreverent language even at this festive board, for a word must be spoken both in and out of season, and without respect of persons. Vrouw Botmar, I fear that you do not remember the Third Commandment, therefore I will repeat it to ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... glance at his empty loom. At this moment he sat silent—a rock against which the noisy waves of a combative Bible-reader were breaking in rude foam. His silence and apparent impassiveness angered the irreverent little worthy. To Falconer's humour he looked a vulgar bull-terrier barking at a noble, sad-faced staghound. His foolish arguments against infidelity, drawn from Paley's Natural Theology, and tracts about the inspiration ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... "Don't be irreverent, my son," said Mrs. Ketchum, who, like some other Protestants, believed in an infallible steeple, if not an infallible Pope. "I don't expect my wishes to be considered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... you say was the name of this place, and where away does it lay from 'Frisco?" In very choice Castilian, as Lanky declared, the priest rejoined that he did not understand the language in which Booden was speaking. "Then bring on somebody that does," rejoined that irreverent mariner, when due interpretation had been made. The padre protested that no one in the village understood the English tongue. The skipper gave a long low whistle of suppressed astonishment, and wondered if we had drifted down to ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... the hall door ready to greet the incomer, before she was halfway up the stairs. The cat never got down for the wrong person, and she never neglected to meet any and every member of our family who might be entering. The irreverent scoffer may call it "instinct," or talk about the "sense of smell." I ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... show me, villain? What! I warrant me, you thought it would be an easy matter, and no sin, to rob and murder a parson on his way home from dinner. You said to yourself, doubtless, "We'll waylay the fat parson (you irreverent knave), as he waddles home (you disparaging ruffian), half-seas-over, (you calumnious vagabond)." And with every dyslogistic term, which he supposed had been applied to himself, he inflicted a new bruise on his rolling and roaring antagonist. "Ah, ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... year, and I haven't talked nor thought about any other journey.' Well, I enlightened her as to her expectations, and what do you think she said? You wouldn't be able to guess, so I'll tell you. She said I was irreverent, and that no one who respected religion would ask such questions as that, and she actually went off in a huff over my wickedness. So, naturally, I have been chary of trying to get information on ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... said papa, taking her irreverent hand into his own, and keeping it there. "At least you will think so," he added, looking ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... to irony: parties of Americans and English parsons, the former agape for any rubbishy old things, the latter learned in the lore of obsolete Church-furniture, had thronged Torcello; and now they were all gone, and the sun had set behind the Alps, while an irreverent stranger drank his wine in Attila's chair, and nature's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... you did not call me that," she told him coldly, "It sounds irreverent." And she dropped her eyes, which had filled again miserably, to the film of white in her lap. Then, with a pitiful attempt to hurt him in return: "Of course you realize that I really don't know much about you. I don't want you to think that I distrusted you exactly—" she marvelled at herself ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... forged his work for him, the shocking old doubt will raise its snaky head once more—whether this forger, who rests in so much darkness, might not, after all, be of English blood. Tom, it may be feared, is known to modern English literature chiefly by an irreverent mention of his name in a line of Peter Pindar's (Dr Wolcot) fifty years back, where he is ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... not understand what it means. It may mean one of two things. If it mean the first, it is a term somewhat unnecessary, if not somewhat irreverent. If it mean the second, it means something ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... Jorden asked me why I had not attended. I answered I had been sliding in Christ-Church meadow[176]. And this I said with as much nonchalance as I am now[177] talking to you. I had no notion that I was wrong or irreverent to my tutor[178]. BOSWELL: 'That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... instrument of tyranny, Pliny the younger thus speaks: "The conversation turned upon Catullus Messalinus, whose loss of sight added the evils of blindness to a cruel disposition. He was irreverent, unblushing, unpitying, Like a weapon, of itself blind and unconscious, he was frequently hurled by Domitian against every man of worth." (iv. 22.) Juvenal launches the thunder of invective against ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... highest religiousness,—reverence towards the powers of Nature superior to man; a reverence the possession of which he himself would perhaps have been the first to deny, since consciously he was an irreverent agnostic. But his soul was wiser than his logic; and however dead his head might declare the universe to be, his hand painted it as if alive. This, for instance, is how he ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... 'Christ bears this grief with me,' to those petty molehills that you sometimes magnify into mountains, think to yourselves that then it is a shame for you to be stumbling over them. But on the other hand, never fear to be irreverent or too familiar in the thought that Christ is willing to bear, and help you to bear, the pettiest, the minutest, and most insignificant of the daily annoyances that may come to ruffle you. Whether it be a poison from one serpent sting, or whether it be poison from a million ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... squirrels,—two gray ones and a black one,—I cross an ancient brush fence and am fairly within the old hemlocks, and in one of the most primitive, undisturbed nooks. In the deep moss I tread as with muffled feet, and the pupils of my eyes dilate in the dim, almost religious light. The irreverent red squirrels, however, run and snicker at my approach, or mock the solitude with their ridiculous ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... wilderness. However, there is one proverb which is so Manx in spirit that I could almost take oath on its paternity, so exactly does it fit the religious temper of our people, though it contains a word that must strike an English ear as irreverent: "When one poor man helps another poor man, ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... 'Mysterious Mother'—the players and dramatists, finally, who crowded round Hogarth's sketch of his 'Beggars' Opera,' with portraits, and gazed on Davison's likeness of Mrs. Clive:—how could poor Horace have tolerated the sound of their irreverent remarks, the dust of their shoes, the degradation of their fancying that they might doubt his spurious-looking antiquities, or condemn his improper-looking ladies on their canvas? How, indeed, could he? For those parlours, that library, were peopled in his days with all those who could enhance ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... universe. He loved Georges the more because he did not take life tragically, as he did. Humanity would be too poor and too gray in color if it were to be uniformly clad in the moral seriousness, and the heroic restraint with which Christophe was armed. Humanity needed joy, carelessness, irreverent audacity in face of its idols, all its idols, even the most holy. Long live "the Gallic salt which revives the world"! Skepticism and faith are no less necessary. Skepticism, riddling the faith of yesterday, prepares the way for the faith ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... established facts were inconsistent with it. Nevertheless the idea caught hold of the popular mind, and it has acquired an amazing vogue. Non-astronomical writers have asserted that Alcyone, the brightest Pleiad, is the centre of the entire universe; some have even been sufficiently irreverent to declare that it is the seat of heaven, the throne of God. A popular London divine, having noticed a bright ring round Alcyone on a photograph of the group, took that halo, which every photographer would at ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... possessed the skill. The author maintains that in his ridicule of the Church of Rome and of Protestant dissenters, he is only displaying the abuses which deform the Christian Church; but no defence can be urged for his wild and irreverent method of turning subjects into ridicule which by a vast number of people are regarded as sacred. In judging of Swift's satire from a moral standing-point, one test, as Mr. Leslie Stephen observes, may be supposed to guide our ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... leg, and "Saki," a cup- bearer. The going round (Tawaf) and the running (Sa'i) allude to the circumambulation of the Ka'abah, and the running between Mount Safa and Marwah (Pilgrimage ii. 58, and iii. 343). A religious Moslem would hold the allusion highly irreverent. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... England, and though his sympathies were with the Nonjurors, he took the oaths and retained his mastership after the flight of King James. He had been for less than six months Master of Jesus before becoming Master of St. John's. Abraham de la Pryme, a member of St. John's, has handed down an irreverent jest on his appointment. "Our master, they say, is a mighty, high, proud man.... He came from Jesus College to be master here, and he was so sevear that he was commonly called the divel of Jesus; and when he was made master here some unlucky scholars broke this jest upon him—that now the divel ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... now the bustle of the day,—the confused whirl of white gloves, kisses, bridemaids, and bridecakes, the losing of trunk-keys and breaking of lacings, the tears of mamma—God bless her!—and the jokes of irreverent Christopher, who could, for the life of him, see nothing so very dismal in the whole phantasmagoria, and only wished he were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... just used, are not Martian, they don't belong to these rarefied beings here. They have a human or earthly taint, and they frighten me. I seem so lonely sometimes. My stray fun which I once enjoyed on earth must somehow be forgotten here. I feel so irreverent at times, so full of horse play, but I must keep up the high key and act like the rest. Indeed for the most of the time I feel as they do, I suppose, but sometimes that sort of ribaldry and feelings of the ludicrous that made us joke, and prank, and cut up in genial companionships come ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Further, in the justification of the ungodly one sin is not remitted without another, for "it is irreverent to expect half a pardon from God" [*Cap., Sunt. plures: Dist. iii, De Poenit.]. Hence, in the justification of the ungodly, if man's free-will must move against sin, he ought to think of all his sins. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... his interview with the professor came back to college through the realistic if somewhat irreverent medium of the professor's son, Tom, presently pursuing a somewhat leisurely course toward a medical degree. As Tom appeared in the college hall he was immediately surrounded by an eager crowd, the most eager of whom was Robert Duff, the sworn ally ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... and chapters of the Bible in which elder sisters were exhorted to keep their juniors under discipline, and younger sisters were commanded to give implicit submission and obedience. Some parts of the Imitation lent themselves to this sort of parody, which never struck me as in any way irreverent. I used to give her arbitrary orders to 'exercise her in obedience,' as I told her, and I used to punish her if she disobeyed me. In all this I was, though only half consciously, guided through my own feelings as to what I should have liked in her place. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was almost too late, wasn't I?" was his irreverent greeting to the cashier. "Time to cash this before closing up?" he demanded breathlessly, but with unabated cheerfulness. He flopped the check over. "Mendenhall's indorsement. Hi! Mr. President! Just a minute! I'm a stranger here, but if you'll let us slip in at a side door I'll ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... source of this species of caricature. The ridiculous Calidorus, always wearing his heart on his sleeve, rolls his eyes, brushes away a tear and says (Ps. 38 ff.): "But for a short space have I been e'en as a lily of the field. Suddenly sprang I up, as suddenly I withered." The irreverent Pseudolus replies: "Oh, shut up while I read the letter over." Calidorus finds his counterpart in Phaedromus of the Cur., who, accompanied by his slave, approaches milady's ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... Providence That gave us our Cohan; Irreverent, Resourceful, prolific, steady-advancing George M. Nothing in life Better becomes him Than his earliest choice Of Jerry and Helen For father and mother; Bred in the wings and the dressing room, The theatre alley ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... difficulties of his social life lay in the fact that all women of forty were exactly alike, and it was impossible to recall their individual label, to which archdeacon, or canon, or form of spinster good works, they belonged. It would be dangerous, irreverent, to pry further into the recesses of the episcopal, or even of the suffragan, mind. There are snowy peaks where we lay helpers should fear to tread. But it may be stated, without laying ourselves open to a suspicion of wishing to undermine ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... remark did she then offer. If she was cool, she was not irreverent before the thought of the awful thing that ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... village life, she was also a success among grand old ladies. When she stood before them there was a delicate submission in her air which was suggestive of obedience to the dignity of their years and state. Strongly conservative and rather feudal old persons were much pleased by this. In the present irreverent iconoclasm of modern times, it was most agreeable to talk to a handsome creature who was as beautifully attentive as if she had been ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... boys. Having reached the door he turned round, as if to watch what the head master would do. Dr Freeman on this called up A'Dale and Ernst, and spoke in a loud voice with great severity to them, threatening them with condign punishment for their irreverent behaviour. As, however, he did not proceed further than words, they had reason to hope that he did not consider them guilty of any very atrocious crime. As soon as the priest had taken his departure, they were allowed to return to their seats, with an admonition, that in ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... glorification in view the hagiographer is prepared to swallow everything and record anything. He has, in fact, no critical sense and possibly he would regard possession of such a sense as rather an evil thing and use of it as irreverent. He does not, as a consequence, succeed in presenting us with a very life-like or convincing portrait of either the man or the saint. Indeed the saint, as drawn in the Lives, is, as already hinted, a very unsaintlike individual—almost as ready to curse as to pray and certainly very much more ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda
... spoke. As his hand had fitted naturally a weapon, so his mind turned naturally to larger things than those offered in these long-tilled fields of life. He came back from the war disillusionized, irreverent, impatient, and full of that surging fretfulness which fell upon all the land. Thousands of young men, accustomed for years to energy, activity, and a certain freedom from all small responsibility, were thrust ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... powers as the viceroy of Divinity on earth might be, did he so choose, it were irreverent to inquire. But as he condescends to use that power only for the good of mankind, he condescends, like Divinity, to be bound by the very laws which he has promulgated for the benefit of his subjects; and to make himself only a life-giving sun, when ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... corner of her forehead, with a look so sly and comical, that I think I should have laughed, if the sentiment had not been so awfully irreverent. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Highlands, in the battered Hebrides. So long as sweet Gaelic was spoken and men's hearts surged with feeling, there would be a song of his father's to translate the effervescence into words of cadenced beauty.... He had an irreverent vision of God smiling and talking comfortably to his father while the bald-headed bankers cooled their fat heels and glared at one another outside the picket-gates of heaven.... The world had gained something with the last ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... spirit in which this and similar complaints originated has turned the prayers of Dissenting ministers into irreverent preachments, forgetting that tautology in words and thoughts implies no tautology in the music of the heart to which the words are, as it were, set, and that it is the heart that lifts itself up to God. Our words and thoughts are but parts of the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... over. In crossing the dry bed of an arroyo a wheel gave way and the coach overturned, fortunately for me on the side of the padre! Had it been otherwise the weight of the good priest might have caused me much inconvenience; but as it was I fell upon him. It was in no irreverent spirit that I afterwards cogitated that, at least on one occasion of my life, the Romish Church had interposed between me and injury! And as the priest was not hurt, I could afford to impart this ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... plain "Doc" to all. By every mouth that opened he found Juno's name blessed, and many were the tales of what she had done. She had saved wild Jay Dawn's little girl and Lum Chapman's firstborn. She had brought old Aunt Sis Stidham back from the shadow of the grave, and had turned that tart, irreverent old person's erring feet back into the way of ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... end to princes and pomatum," said this irascible republican, with a laugh of triumph, as he ground the remnants of the vial under his irreverent heel. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... not tell him that the madman, as men called him, lay wrestling in prayer with the Father of lights. The old highlander was not irreverent, but the thing would have been unintelligible to him. He could readily have believed that the supposed lunatic might be favoured beyond ordinary mortals; that at that very moment, lost in his fit, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Scotchmen, however, who have been touched to the quick by this irreverent and thoughtless proposal. The whole literary profession is up in arms. A memorial is being prepared to be presented to the PRIME MINISTER, under the heading, "Hands off ROB ROY!" Mr. Punch himself has not been idle in the matter. He has spent the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... written out a speech and learned it by heart; but though he was being continually called upon to deliver it, he never got beyond the opening "Ahem! Gentlemen," before a sudden movement of the platform precipitated him into the arms of his irreverent hearers, or a shout of "Play up at the cocoa-nuts!" followed by a shower of acorns, bits of stick, and pieces of turf, caused him to jump down and hastily seek shelter behind ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... Middle Ages; it diminishes at the Renaissance, and Rabelais, drawing up a list of some remarkable books in St. Victor's library, inscribes on it, between the "Maschefaim des Advocats" and the "Ratepenade des Cardinaux," the works of the subtle doctor under the irreverent ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... represent the distance of the wind and the rise and fall of the intensity. A few days later Mr. MacDowell played a recital in Chicago, and among the other selections was this same "March Wind," which he played fortissimo throughout. When I saw him the next day I began, in that irreverent manner which critics and composers have with one another (for Mr. MacDowell was not yet a professor): "You're a fine fellow! To mark your own 'March Wind' pianissimo and then play it fortissimo. ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... cause, by Claverhouse or Dalyell. There is the churchyard by the bleak sea-shore, where coffins have been laid bare by the encroaching waves; and the niche in cathedral crypt, or the vault under the church's floor. I cannot conceive anything more irreverent than the American fashion of burying in unconsecrated earth, each family having its own place of interment in the corner of its own garden: unless it be the crotchet of the silly old peer, who spent the last years of his life ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... murder, a robbery, or whatever might come in the way of duty, and I have never heard that my reports were any the worse for it. I know they were better. Perhaps the notion of a police reporter praying that he may write a good murder story may seem ludicrous, even irreverent, to some people. But that is only because they fail to make out in it the human element which dignifies anything and rescues it from reproach. Unless I could go to my story that way I would not go to it at all. I am very sure that there is no ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... breeding of your animals." From what I formerly saw of breeders, I have no doubt that the man thus rebuked would have smiled and said not a word. If he had afterwards told the story to other breeders, I greatly fear that they would have used emphatic but irreverent language about naturalists. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... man like him for laying on himself burdens greater than he can bear, voluntarily incurring needless responsibilities. Besides, he harbours a romantic idea about some pale-faced Marie Justine— personnage assez niaise a ce que je pense" (such was Madame's irreverent remark), "who has been an angel in heaven, or elsewhere, this score of years, and to whom he means to go, free from all earthly ties, pure comme un lis, a ce qu'il dit. Oh, you would laugh could you but know half M. Emanuel's crotchets and eccentricities! But I hinder you from taking refreshment, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... ordinances of the Church have been familiar from infancy, treat them in the same fashion? Many a hand is laid on the ark, sometimes to keep it from falling, with more criminal carelessness of its sacredness than Uzzah showed. Note, too, how swiftly an irreverent habit of treating holy things grows. The first error was in breaking the commanded order for removal of the ark by the Levites. Once in the cart, the rest follows. The smallest breach in the feeling ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... some points of doctrine, and perhaps of discipline I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that church which you have so worthily historified, yet may the ill time never come to me, when with a chilled heart, or a portion of irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-hallowed Edifices. Judge then of my mortification when, after attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... that he hardly realized the truths of his present situation. The man-of-war, in which everything was His Majesty's, sustained this feeling, and it was too sudden a change to expect such a man to abandon all his most cherished notions at a moment's warning. The irreverent exclamation of Captain Truck shocked him, and he did not fail to show as much by the disgust pictured ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... confusing things as dates: made Moses and Mahomet contemporaneous, incidentally referred to King Solomon's visits to Cleopatra, and with sad irreverence spoke of the Exodus and the destruction of Pharaoh's horses and chariots as "the big handicap." He did not mean to be irreverent or unhistorical. He merely wished to enlighten Mrs. Callendar, who said he was very original, and quite clever at history. His really startling points, however, were his remarks upon the colours of the mountains of Egypt and the sunset tints ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... said Vavasor to himself. "There's a bee in every bonnet of them! An odd, irreverent way the old fellow has with him—for an old fellow pretending ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... and involved in the serpents' coils. He struggles to tear them away, but they overpower all his efforts and strangle him and the children in their poisonous folds. This event was regarded as a clear indication of the displeasure of the gods at Laocoon's irreverent treatment of the wooden horse, which they no longer hesitated to regard as a sacred object, and prepared to introduce with due solemnity into the city. This was done with songs and triumphal acclamations, and the day closed with festivity. In the night the armed ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... about half-grown and half-colored, which means that they displayed an elegance of texture and hue most pleasing to see. And the flowers—there they were, hanging under the twigs in long clusters of what I might describe as ends of chenille, if it were not irreverent to compare these delicate greenish ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... Seat of Empire, and she is as much subject to the cosmic laws and as much a member of the human family as the tallest and most swaggering Lifeguards-man who ever had "Cook's Son!" shouted at him by irreverent urchin. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... have dinner," said Munger to some of his admirers, "as long as we get it after all? Now if old Punch (this was an irreverent corruption of the head-master's name current in certain sets at Grandcourt)—if old Punch had stopped our grub ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... Fiorini's and look down into a basement. You do not have to go to the country to see wine making. Here is one of the primitive wine presses of Italy, and if you want to know why some irreverent people call the red wine of the Italians "Chateau la Feet," you have but to watch the process of its making in these Telegraph Hill wine houses. The grapes are poured into a big tub and a burly man takes off his shoes and socks and emulates the oxen of Biblical ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... church, in Basinghall-street, he perceived, to his great surprise, that it was lighted up, and at first supposed some service was going on within it, but on approaching he heard strains of lively and most irreverent music issuing from within. Pushing open the door, he entered the sacred edifice, and found it occupied by a party of twenty young men, accompanied by a like number of females, some of whom were playing at dice and cards, some drinking, others singing Bacchanalian melodies, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... thing may be said of an irreverent floriculturist, and with equal truth—perhaps indeed with greater. For the astronomer, in some cases, may be hard and cold, from indulging in habits of thought too exclusively mathematical. But the true lover of flowers has ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... did not hear this irreverent speech, for he continued to gaze with pity and dismay upon the ragamuffin before him. He was a handsome boy, too, notwithstanding the deplorable state of his wardrobe. Thick, clustering curls of jet-black hair fell in tangled disorder around a forehead broad, ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... rejected of men," she said to Miss Salmon, holding forth in their bedroom on her subject. "That's what I call them. Despised and rejected of men. Oh, don't hum louder than ever. It's not irreverent to say that. It describes a condition, that's all, and I'm using it because it describes this condition, their condition, exactly. It does. You can hum; but it does. They've never done anything, they've never meant to do anything, they've never tried to do anything ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... good Sheffield," he said, "the thing is irreverent, not the manner. It is irreverent to liken your holy mother ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... drank the intoxicating joys of power. Meanwhile he continued, with that sort of massive archness that so ill became him, "She has but one fault; there is but one danger in the great career that I foresee for her. May I name it? may I be so irreverent? It is in herself—her heart ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Erskine! Who ever heard of such an irreverent nickname applied to that good and great man? "The laddies couldna be his sons," thought the woman. She made no further inquiry, and the boys escaped scot free. The culprit afterwards entered the service of the East India Company. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... Christ was again really sacrificed; but that it was and might be called an altar, in that sense in which the primitive church called it an altar, and in no other. And because experience had shewn how irreverent the behaviour of many people was in many places, (some leaning, others casting their hats, and some sitting upon, some standing, and others sitting under the communion table, in time of divine service,) for the avoiding of which and like abuses it was thought meet and convenient ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... musicians, and strong-winded men—they that blowed. For that reason they were very much in demand Christmas week for little reels and dancing parties; for they could turn a jig or a hornpipe out of hand as well as ever they could turn out a psalm, and perhaps better, not to speak irreverent. In short, one half-hour they could be playing a Christmas carol in the squire's hall to the ladies and gentlemen, and drinking tay and coffee with 'em as modest as saints; and the next, at The Tinker's Arms, ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... people dared to heap upon the gods, For him their hero slain, as these few words From Cato's noble breast instinct with truth: "Gone is a citizen who though no peer (6) Of those who disciplined the state of yore In due submission to the bounds of right, Yet in this age irreverent of law Has played a noble part. Great was his power, But freedom safe: when all the plebs was prone To be his slaves, he chose the private gown; So that the Senate ruled the Roman state, The Senate's ruler: nought by right of arms He e'er demanded: willing took ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... make some irreverent speech of this sort: 'O inhabitants of Athens, and Sparta, and Cnosus,' they will reply, 'in that you speak truly; for some of us deny the very existence of the Gods, while others, as you say, are of opinion that they do not care about us; and others that they are ...
— Laws • Plato
... Ventriloquist withdraws, and Monsieur the Face-Maker bursts in, as if his retiring-room were a mile long instead of a yard. A corpulent little man in a large white waistcoat, with a comic countenance, and with a wig in his hand. Irreverent disposition to laugh, instantly checked by the tremendous gravity of the Face- Maker, who intimates in his bow that if we expect that sort of thing we are mistaken. A very little shaving-glass with a leg behind it is handed in, and placed on the table before the Face- ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... and nave; also, the apse shows its height better, as it opens to you when you advance from the transept into the mid-nave, than when it is seen at once from the west end of the nave; where it is just possible for an irreverent person rather to think the nave narrow, than the apse high. Therefore, if you let me guide you, go in at this south transept door, (and put a sou into every beggar's box who asks it there,—it is none of your business ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... relation as that borne by the two sexes to our system of Government should be proposed as an "experiment," and that it should be gravely recommended that a newly organized Territory under act of Congress should be set aside for this "experiment," which is in direct, grossly irreverent disregard of all that we have known as a rule, our great fundamental rule, in organizing a government of laws, whether colonial, State, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's? Or, must she receive those intimations—so obscure, yet so distinct—as truth? In all her miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful and so loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid action. Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Irreverent opponents of the PRIME MINISTER have sometimes compared him to Micawber, on the ground that he was always waiting for something to turn up. I found another link to-day between these celebrated characters. As Mr. ASQUITH unfolded the details of the two ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... 40; Acts xx. 36, xxi. 5. Our blessed Lord Himself "kneeled down" when He prayed, Luke xxii. 14. How the example of David and Solomon, Ezra and Daniel, St. Stephen, St. Peter and St. Paul, nay, of our Saviour Himself, condemns the lolling, irreverent posture assumed by too many Christians of the present day in the public worship ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... would clearly be irreverent to mention a nowadays-devil, close at hand, in the same breath as the remoter Gadarenes. She said nothing about Galilee being there still, with perhaps the identical breed of swine, and even madmen. The Granny's inner vision of Scripture history was unsullied by realisms—a ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... from the enclosed that I am in full force, and going to finish my readings, please God, after Christmas. I am in the hope of receiving your promised notes in due course, and continue in the irreverent condition in which I last reported myself on the subject of speech-making. Now that men not only make the nights of the session hideous by what the Americans call "orating" in Parliament, but trouble the peace of the vacation by saying over again ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... 1675, Rochester contrived to give such offence as even the excellent temper of his royal master was unable to digest. This was by writing a lampoon called "The Insipids," in which the person and character of Charles are treated with most merciless and irreverent ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... Pamphlet." As any reader of the Reflections will observe for himself, the pamphlet opens on a violent political note and sustains it throughout. Although Oldmixon is more concerned to level charges against Swift—a lewd, irreverent cleric, a turncoat, a party scribbler, etc.—than to deny the validity of Swift's views concerning the language, he does directly challenge certain points. And he arrives at a conclusion which may well have been the result of honest conviction rather than mere party opposition: that it is neither ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... slightly audacious and irreverent in expression, but it was remarkably popular in New England at that time. The writer is now one of the editors of a popular Boston periodical, and would be one of the last, I have no doubt, to induce a Northern ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... much at home, with the little rake in her hand be Sylvia Bailey, the quiet young widow whose perfect propriety of conduct had always earned the praise of those matrons of Market Dalling, whom Chester's own giddier sisters called by the irreverent name of "old cats"? It was fortunate that none of these respectable ladies could ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... saying the wrong thing," said the girl, in a repentant voice; "but, truly, I didn't mean to be irreverent—I only wanted you to know how pat the doctor reels off the scientific phrases; and"—assuming an important air—"I guess I know that Christian Science is the 'new tongue' spoken of in the Bible. I've been to the service all ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... against the rest of the suburb by being all built in one wide row, shut in at either end by ornamental gates, and called a "park." The unspeakable desolation of aspect common to the whole suburb, was in a high state of perfection in this part of it. Irreverent street noises fainted dead away on the threshold of the ornamental gates, at the sight of the hermit lodge-keeper. The cry of the costermonger and the screech of the vagabond London boy were banished out of hearing. Even the regular tradesman's time-honored business noises at customers' doors, ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... as a charcoal-burner's, when he again heard the most irreverent oath ever proposed to mortal king. The question presently attracted his attention, and he turned over the Baital's words in his head, confusing the ties of filiality, brotherhood, and relationship, and connection ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... still more offensively in those old religious plays, is the irreverent and shocking familiarity everywhere used with the sacredest persons and things of the Christian Faith. The awfullest and most moving scenes and incidents of the Gospel history, such as the Last Supper and the Crucifixion, were treated with what cannot but seem to us the most shameless ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... see only one's own front fence and a scant ten feet of sidewalk. And then to learn afterwards of a dozen most exciting events, each distinctly out of the ordinary, which might have been used as excuses for two dozen calls and as many sensations! As Captain Zeb Mayo, the irreverent ex-whaler, put it, "That fog shook Didama's faith in the judgment of Providence. 'Tain't the 'all wise,' but the 'all seein'' kind she talks ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Master, has sent it down from Paris to greet me in this house which has been given up for my occupation also through her generosity to the Royal Cause. Unfortunately she, too, is touched by the infection of this irreverent and unfaithful age. But she is young ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... intimidated from proceeding, this demonstration only made Sir Roger the more determined. To have so desperate and irreverent a population coming about his house and woods now presented itself in a much more formidable aspect than ever. So, next day, not only were the placards once more hoisted, but rewards offered for the discovery of the offenders, attended with all the maledictions ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... with lamentable frequency, when Weymouth ceased to be naughty she also ceased to be interesting. After poring over the dull pages of the town history, one is sometimes tempted to wonder if, perhaps, the irreverent Morton did not, for all his sins, divine a deeper meaning in this spot than the respectable ones who came after him. One cannot read the "New English Canaan" without regretting a little that this happy-natured fellow was so unceremoniously bustled out of the country. ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... power in the battle of life than a two-edged sword? Laugh and be merry—enjoy the sunshine of your youth; it is a sin to see a young thing sad; but never, never, as you value your womanhood, speak a slighting or irreverent word against God's great laws of righteousness, nor allow such a word to pass unreproved in your presence. Remember in the midst of your merry-making to preserve your dignity as women, knowing that by so doing you will not lose, but trebly strengthen your hold ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... o'erleaning flowers, Sweet human faces, white clouds of the noon, Slant starlight glimpses through the dewy leaves, And tenderest moonrise. 'T was, in truth, a study, To mark his spirit, alternating between A decent and professional gravity And an irreverent mirthfulness, which often Laughed in the face of his divinity, Plucked off the sacred ephod, quite unshrined The oracle, and for the pattern priest Left us the man. A shrewd, sagacious merchant, To whom the soiled sheet found in Crawford's inn, Giving the latest news of city stocks And sales ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Something was coming, and everyone wanted to be sure and get it. Sometimes it was humorous, and a ripple of laughter would go over the audience. Those who heard about it were apt to be shocked and to consider it irreverent. It is doubtful whether anyone who was present ever had that feeling. Sometimes it was pathetic, and there was suspicious fumbling in pockets. Sometimes it was soul-stirring, and one could see the forms quiver and grow tense. Most ...
— Sixty years with Plymouth Church • Stephen M. Griswold
... fixed smile. The marquis said that among light operas his favorite was the Gazza Ladra. The marquise then began a series of inquiries about the duke and the cardinal, the old countess and Lady Barbara, after listening to which, and to Lord Deepmere's somewhat irreverent responses, for a quarter of an hour, Newman rose to take his leave. The marquis went with him three ...
— The American • Henry James
... was from a young lady, who is an Irishwoman, and I hope that its excellence will excuse the personality. It must be premised that Lord Erne is a gentleman who abounds in anecdote, and that Lady Erne is an extremely handsome woman. Their irreverent compatriot has nicknamed them ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... when there, to make some irreverent remarks about that tomb. I had walked out to see it on a hot afternoon, and I found it inconveniently far. One is accustomed to have these places "grouped," and I was displeased with Juliet for not being buried nearer home—it was an oversight—but perhaps ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... attached to it; and in short, made himself, generally, at home. We are also fortunate in having some genealogical particulars as to his wife's antecedents; and it is to be regretted that modern historians, of the skeptical, the irreverent, and the startling schools, could not imitate the gravity, the good faith, and the respect for things established, by which the elder chroniclers were inspired. The apothecaries of the Middle Ages never dealt so unkindly with the Pharaohs of Egypt, as the historical excavators of more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... beat there," Jeff laughed goodnaturedly. He had not in his make-up a grain of envy. Even his laughter was generally genial, though often irreverent to ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps, in some respects, both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.... What good would a proclamation of emancipation ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... the "Anbiy" (prophets, or rather announcers of Allah's judgments) were not sinless. But this dogma is branded as most irreverent and sinful by the Shi'ahs or Persian "followers of Ali," who make capital out of this blasphemy and declare that if any prophet sinned he ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... And underneath the thin flooring, as though roused by her irreverent merriment, the big car shook itself awake with a roar and splutter of indignation. But the sliding doors were thrown open, and its rage died down at the prospect of release. It began to ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... illustrated the power which flows from subordination of pleasure to duty. In a day when wit was identified with malice, he brought out its power to entertain, surprise, and delight, without taking on the irreverent levity of Voltaire, the bitterness of Swift, or the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... under His Majesty's protection. The Cossack even donned his uniform cap with the gold double eagle in order to impress the natives with a sense of our official importance. But although the head-dress was at once removed by irreverent hands and passed round with some amusement, I regret to say that its effect (from an awe-inspiring point of view) was a ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... to learn that Patty had been so restless and so irreverent, and called her into the bedroom to talk ...
— Little Grandmother • Sophie May
... following parents and teachers filled with the love of the world and forgetfulness of God, who were fed on earthly luxuries, drunk with false wisdom, and loathing all that pertained to religion. Among the latter, the sight of whom grieved me especially, because Jesus so loved children, I saw many irreverent, ill-behaved acolytes, who did not honour our Lord in the holy ceremonies in which they took a part. I beheld with terror that many priests, some of whom even fancied themselves full of faith and piety, also outraged Jesus in the Adorable Sacrament. I saw many who believed and taught ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... saying it in the shortest, the simplest, the calmest, the most finished words. Saying it—rather taught to say it. For if that "divine inspiration of poets," of which the poetasters make such rash and irreverent boastings, have, indeed, as all ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will rather be bestowed on such works as these, appeals from an unrighteous man to a righteous God, than on men whose only claim to celestial help seems to ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... communion; I had not thought of it.' This seemed to imply that he did not choose to approach the altar without a previous preparation, as to which good men entertain different opinions, some holding that it is irreverent to partake of that ordinance without considerable premeditation; others, that whoever is a sincere Christian, and in a proper frame of mind to discharge any other ritual duty of our religion, may, without scruple, discharge this most solemn one. A middle notion I believe to be the just one, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... therefore, for one man to teach another. He that doeth so joyfully, upon him shall much be bestowed by God."[14] These last words, like the last phrases of my former quotation from him, may stand perhaps in the way of some, as nowadays they may easily sound glib or irreverent. But are we less convinced that only tasks done joyfully, as labours of love, deserve the reward of fuller and finer powers, and obtain it? When Duerer thought of God, he did not only think of a mythological personage resembling an old king; ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... of the congregation—especially those behind the unconscious Neale—found amusement enough in the exhibition. The pastor discovered it harder than ever that morning to hold the attention of certain irreverent ones, and being a near-sighted man, he was at fault as to the reason for the bustle that increased as ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... denying that this is Dickens's dark moment. It adds enormously to the value of his general view of life that such a dark moment came. He did what all the heroes and all the really happy men have done; he descended into Hell. Nor is it irreverent to continue the quotation from the Creed, for in the next book he was to write he was to break out of all these dreams of fate and failure, and with his highest voice to speak of the triumph of the weak of this world. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... are intelligent, vivacious, courteous, obliging, generous and humane; eager to enjoy, but willing that all the world should enjoy with them; while at the same time they are impulsive, fickle, sensual and irreverent. Paris is the Paradise of the Senses; a focus of Enjoyment, not of Happiness. Nowhere are Youth and its capacities more prodigally lavished; nowhere is Old Age less happy or less respected. Paris has tens of thousands who would eagerly pour out their hearts' blood for Liberty ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... came a breathing-space of quiet; Messer Folco looked hard at his daughter; and she, for her part, looking, as before, away from him, because, as I guess, she judged that there would be something irreverent in outfacing her father while she denied his wishes and defied so strangely his parental authority. Messer Simone stood at his ease a little apart with the mocking smile of conquest on his face, and the guests, kinsfolk, and friends, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to the side galleries, where the boys of lower degree were at their mischief, and where fits of giggling and horse-play rose and spread from time to time until the tithing-man, old Conrad to wit, burst in and laid his hickory gad over their irreverent heads. ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... Church had withdrawn the light of its countenance from Moscow, the nest of irreverent vipers who had bombarded the Kremlin. Dark and silent and cold were the churches; the priests had disappeared. There were no popes to officiate at the Red Burial, there had been no sacrament for the dead, nor were any prayers to be said over the grave of the ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... this irreverent remark. He looked around the place and saw that they were alone. Then he said, very earnestly, "Mr. Finnegan, may I have a few minutes' ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... educational circles in which collegiate influences prevail, I did not deem it prudent to introduce some of the noblest thoughts that belong to the great theme. The book was sent forth limited and incomplete, hoping that, heretical as it was, and quite irreverent toward the ignorance descended from antiquity, it might still receive sufficient approbation and appreciation to justify later introduction of matter that would ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... the opinion of those maintaining that at such a crisis the office of attention ceases to be filled she stared with surprise and then broke out: "Ah the poor idiots!" She eventually became, in her judgements, in impatience and the expression of contempt, very free and absolutely irreverent. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... had some special service to perform. A careful explanation of all the circumstances was to be expected from our man, only, as I've said, some of his pages (good tough paper too) were missing: gone in covers for jampots or in wadding for the fowling-pieces of his irreverent posterity. But it is to be seen clearly that communication with the shore and even the sending of messengers inland was part of her service, either to obtain intelligence from or to transmit orders or advice to patriotic Spaniards, ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... vast multitude, and like a court, combed, starched, rustling around him, Gaston and his fellows "served" Monseigneur—they, zealous, ubiquitous, more prominent than ever, though for the most part profoundly irreverent, and, notwithstanding that, one and all, with what disdain of the ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... that the population of the Pigs, Instead of hog-wash, has been fed on straw And water, is a fact which is—you know— That is—it is a state-necessity— Temporary, of course. Those impious Pigs, 25 Who, by frequent squeaks, have dared impugn The settled Swellfoot system, or to make Irreverent mockery of the genuflexions Inculcated by the arch-priest, have been whipped Into a loyal and an orthodox whine. 30 Things being in this ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... this pleasantry, Frances thanked the irreverent speaker, made devoutly the sign of the cross, advanced some steps into the church, and knelt down upon the stones to repeat the prayer, which she always offered up before approaching the tribunal of penance. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... neatly-fitting left boot closely into the hollowed side of her right instep, at the same moment deftly caught her flying skirt, whipped it around her ankles, and, slightly raising it behind, permitted the chaste display of an inch or two of frilled white petticoat. The most irreverent critic of the sex will, I think, admit that it has some movements that ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea. Si Jeunesse savait, si Vieillesse pouvait, is a very pretty sentiment, but not necessarily right. In five cases out of ten, it is not so much that the young people do not know, as that they do not choose. There is something irreverent in the speculation, but perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise resolutions of age than we are always willing to admit. It would be an instructive experiment to make an old man young again and leave him all his savoir. I scarcely think he would put his money in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fascinating a father as mine for a boy anything under eight or ten years old. He could guess on Saturday whether I should name William Pitt on the Sunday; for, on those occasions, 'Slender Billy,' as I hope I am not irreverent in calling him, made up for the dulness of his high career with a raspberry-jam tart, for which, my father told me solemnly, the illustrious Minister had in his day a passion. If I named him, my father would say, 'W. P., otherwise S. B., was born ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the least, I admitted him only as a Visitant, but at present I must be more particular with him; he's of late grown a little irreverent towards our Sex, and I must check an insolent Humour he has got of despising Matrimony; he'll be with me instantly, I'll dispose you, that you may over-hear all, how I'll turn and wind him, cross him, humour him, and confound him; when you think it proper make your ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... he could finish his irreverent exclamation. "If your conjecture be true, I know the craft—a heavy vessel of her class, and you may depend on hard knocks, and small profit if you do take her; while if she ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... intoxicating joys of power. Meanwhile he continued, with that sort of massive archness that so ill became him, 'She has but one fault; there is but one danger in the great career that I foresee for her. May I name it? may I be so irreverent? It is in herself - her heart ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of their Thanksgiving, naturally spread throughout all the surrounding towns. It was said that in one of these a party of roguish boys loaded an old cannon with molasses and fired it in the direction of Colchester. How they did this has not been stated, and some irreverent disbelievers in the more uncommon of our grandfathers' stories have profanely declared it ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... raised both his hands at such an irreverent remark, and the old gentleman laughed himself into a fit of asthmatics; what he didn't get over till he came to the next change of horses. The Hoosier had played the mischief with the gravity of the whole party; even the old maid had to put her handkerchief to her face, and the young ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... occasion an extraordinary deafness, so that the questions to which he could give a clear answer were never such as to commit any one. In exchange for this the smugglers would go aboard the Tabernacle and allow Israel to preach to them. And woe betide the irreverent on these occasions! Black Rob o' Garlies or Roaring Imrie from Douglas-ha' thought nothing of taking such a one by convenient parts of his clothing and ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... Yes, Sir. Odes, Odes, a Man may be oblig'd to write those you know." These concluding lines plainly refer to the elder Cibber's appointment as Laureate in 1730, and to those "annual Birth-day Strains," with which he so long delighted the irreverent; while the alteration of Shakespeare and the cobbling of plays generally, satirised again in a later scene, are strictly in accordance with contemporary accounts of the manners and customs of the two dictators of Drury Lane. The piece indicated ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... pulpits, senators and clergymen, have vied with each other in the vehemence with which they declare absolution un-Christian, un-English. All that is most abominable in the confessional has been with unsparing and irreverent indelicacy forced before the public mind. Still, men and women, whose holiness and purity are beyond slander's reach, come and crave assurance of forgiveness. How shall we reply to such men? Shall we say, "Who is this ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... entertaining to the novices and younger brethren, and so unedifying in the opinion of the seniors of the fraternity, that, in more cases than one, it required all the authority, supported by threats, which Quentin could exert over him, to restrain his irreverent and untimeous jocularity, and all the interest he could make with the Superiors, to prevent the heathen hound from being thrust out of the doors. He succeeded, however, by the adroit manner in which ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... men who read the foregoing remarks, and in which there is not the least exaggeration or departure from the truth, will imagine, doubtless, that the modern ecclesiastical authorities of the peninsula have, at least, attempted to rectify all that is absurd and irreverent in those practices, and to strip a ceremony so august and imposing as that of the mass of all that a want of true devotion, and that ignorance and neglect on the part of the clergy, has introduced to ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... requires a considerable amount of classical education to see seriously the meaning, that ancient artists desired in all gravity to express, in works which now excite a smile by their inherent comicality. Hence the antiquary may be occasionally ruffled by the remarks of some irreverent spectator, on a work which the former gravely contemplates, because he feels the design of its maker, and is familiar with the antique mode of expression. Thus the early Greek figures of Minerva, ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... minutes ahead of the appointed time. As he walked towards the great organ he heard a child's voice, high-pitched and clear, talking behind the traceries of the choir screen. He supposed it the voice of some irreverent chorister, and stepping aside to rebuke it, discovered Corona and Brother Copas together gazing up at ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in their exclamations against this irreverent conduct of Sir Francis Bernard. But Grandfather defended him as well as he could. He observed that it was then thirty years since the chair had been beautified by Governor Belcher. Most of the gilding was worn off by the frequent ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... emphatically by those cases which we do not clearly understand; I take for example the strangest, as is fitting. Some irreverent zealots have hailed the Phaloenopsis as Queen of Flowers, dethroning our venerable rose. I have not to consider the question of allegiance, but decidedly this is, upon the whole, the most interesting of all orchids in the cultivator's point of view. For there ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... hearing once of an irreverent choir boy. At a Christmas party, a sort of feast of an Abbot of Unreason held in the less sacred parts of the cathedral precincts, the brat decorated the statue of an Archbishop with a pink and blue paper cap taken ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... edict calls you to court, your part will be cast for you, and you will have nothing to do but say the lines. If you break bounds again and stray from your proper posture before the throne, or put in any more of your irreverent gags, I am done ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... out. Now, let's look at it straight in the face." Lute let go of the rake altogether and used both hands to illustrate his point. "That finger there, we'll say, is me, rakin' and rakin' hard as ever I can. And that fist there is the Almighty, not meanin' anything irreverent. I rake, same as I'm doin' this mornin'. The yard's all cleaned up. Then—zing!" Lute's clenched fist swept across and knocked the offending finger out of the way. "Zing! here comes one of the Almighty's no'theasters, same as we're likely ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the wounded soldier leaning on Endicott's arm, and their words seemed grave and earnest, while Endicott's face seemed for a time to lose its cynical sneers. And then Dorris had relented, only to harden again at some irreverent words of this incorrigible Keith. A sharp retort was on her lip now, but she restrained it as L'Estrange once more joined the group, and the talk drifted into quieter channels, the young soldiers a little graver than usual. At last L'Estrange spoke with tender regret of the peaceful scenes he ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... not. That's no reason why it should not be true and orthodox. You will soon hear a good many more things, which are true enough—though whether they are orthodox or not, the court cooks must settle. Of course, I am a disappointed, irreverent old grumbler. Of course, and of course, too, young men must needs buy their own experience, instead of taking old folks' at a gift. There—use your own eyes, and judge for yourself. There you may see what sort of saints are bred ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... it was! It was during the opening prayer that they arrived, and they had to stand by the door and be peeped at by irreverent children; then they had to invite themselves to a vacant seat near the door. The superintendent came ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
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