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More "Overweening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was to utilise Afghanistan as a 'buffer' state between the northwestern frontier of British India and Russian advances from the direction of Central Asia. Shere Ali was never a very comfortable ally; he was of a saturnine and suspicious nature, and he seems also to have had an overweening sense of the value of the position of Afghanistan, interposed between two great powers profoundly jealous one of the other. He did not succeed with Lord Northbrook in an attempt to work on that Viceroy by playing off the ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... thee hence at once," cried Helge. "Sail to the Orkney Islands and there let us see if thy boldness will avail to secure from Earl Angantyr the long-due tribute money. If thou succeed, return; but if thou fail, let shame for thy empty boasts and overweening pride keep thee from ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the world are not found here. They are found in the decline of spiritual understanding, the decay of moral standards, the growth of the vindictive and unforgiving spirit, the lapse from charity, the overweening pride of the human heart. With these matters the church must chiefly deal; to their spiritual infidelity she must bring a spiritual message; to their poor thinking she must bring the wisdom of ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... The overweening love of money is a seed, a soil, and a sun that generates a certain crop: the aim of my poor husbandry is only to reap this; but my sickle does not wish to wound the growers: let them stand aside; or, better far, let them help me cut those rank and clogging tares, and bind them up in bundles to be ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... sinning against the truth and her own conscience. A fearful dread fell upon her, and deprived her of the power to lift her soul in prayer. She could not, she dared not, do what was required of her, and yet the overweening love of life which exists in every mortal led her feet to the base of the idol ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that he may be almost considered an autobiographer; and the writer who substitutes his own cold and lifeless sketch for the glowing and animated portrait which these memorials of genius afford, must either be deficient in skill, or be under the dominion of overweening vanity. ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... Restoration only achieved a succes d'estime. He was glad to accept an appointment to Berlin as court composer for Frederick William III. There he brought out "Lalla Rookh," "Alcidor," and "Agnes Hohenstauffen," none of which found currency in other cities. His overweening conduct gradually made his position at Berlin untenable. He was finally driven out by the hostile demonstrations of his audiences, and retired, in 1841, a broken man. After a few years spent in Paris he returned to Italy, where the Pope created him a count. Spontini returned to his birthplace ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... from Waterloo in a frame of mind that baffles description. He was a modest man; he had never conceived an overweening notion of his own powers; he knew himself unfit to write a book, turn a table napkin-ring, entertain a Christmas party with legerdemain—grapple (in short) any of those conspicuous accomplishments that are usually classed under the head of genius. He ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whom your mothers' milk Made milky-hearted! lo, our city stands, Saved from the yoke of servitude: the vaunts Of overweening men are silent now, And the State sails beneath a sky serene, Nor in the manifold and battering waves Hath shipped a single surge, and solid stands The rampart, and the gates are made secure, Each with a single champion's trusty guard. So in the main and at six gates we hold A victory ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... together, and perhaps even the baldness should be taken as a figure of his destitution. A sinister dog, in all likelihood, but with a look in his eye, and the loose flexile mouth that goes with wit and an overweening sensual temperament. Certainly the sorriest figure on the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... joy or woe For good or evil done below, The Judge of all the earth will order rightly! Flee winding error through the flowery way, To daily follow truth! to ponder nightly On time, and death, and judgment, nearer day by day! Bewail thy bane, deluded France, Vain-glory, overweening pride, And harrying earth with eagle glance, Ambition, frantic homicide! Lament, of all that armed throng How few may reach their native land! By war and tempest to be borne along, To strew, like leaves, the Scythian strand? Before Jehovah who can stand? His path in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... over in a trice. Within an hour staid old Simiti lay in the grip of martial law, with its once overweening Alcalde, now a meek and frightened prisoner, arraigned before Captain Morales, holding court in the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Italian tour, and her book upon Turkey and Syria, with which latter, English readers have recently been made acquainted through an admirable translation, by the accomplished author of Caleb Stukely. She has her little conceits, and her little fancies; rather an overweening pride of caste, and contempt for the plebeian multitude, and an addiction to filling too many pages of her books with small personal and egotistical details about herself, and her sensations, and what dresses ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... her powers by taking great liberties, which culminated in her drawing his attention to the fact that my poor stepmother displayed 'an overweening love of dress'. The accusation was perfectly false; my stepmother was, if rather richly, always, plainly dressed, in the sober Quaker mode; almost her only ornament was a large carnelian brooch, set in flowered flat gold. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... know, that had I disdained to toil, But sate in my loathsome cave the while, And ne'er to these hateful sons of Heaven, GOLD, MONARCHY, and MURDER, given; Hadst thou with all thine art essayed One of thy games then to have played, With all thine overweening boast, Falsehood! I tell thee thou hadst lost!— Yet wherefore this dispute?—we tend, Fraternal, to one common end; In this cold grave beneath my feet, Will our hopes, our fears, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the remarkable story of that year of war, insurrection, and devastation, the whole due to the overweening ambition of one man, Louis Napoleon, who wished to shine as a great conqueror. The destiny of France lay in his hand alone. He blindly decided upon war. The result was the humiliation of France, the death of thousands of her sons, the overthrow of her government, the frightful saturnalia ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... prudent to neglect. Franklin quotes with approval the advice of a wise man to choose a wife 'out of a bunch,' as girls brought up together improve each other by emulation, learn mutual self-sacrifice and forbearance, rub off their angularities, and are not suffered to develop overweening self-conceit. A family where the ruling taste is vulgar, where the standard of honour is low, where extravagance and self-indulgence and want of order habitually prevail, creates an atmosphere which it needs a strong ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... medium of silken cloaks and ponderous shoe-buckles;—designing to conquer not a few of the fair dames with whom he associated. But, alas! the perversity of woman had hitherto rendered his efforts unavailing; still an overweening opinion of his own pretensions to their favour prevented him from giving up the pursuit, every succeeding mishap in no wise hindering him from following the allurements of the next fair object that fluttered across his path. He had heard ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... him so eager upon pleasure when he had it in his power; nor is he the first lad that has been spoiled by the over-careful fondness of women. No training is so useful for children, great or small, as the company of their betters in rank or natural parts; in whose society they lose the overweening sense of their own importance, which stay-at-home people ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... either upon England's sea power and honor. While England's policy thus steadily aimed at widening and strengthening the bases of her sway upon the ocean, the other governments of Europe seemed blind to the dangers to be feared from her sea growth. The miseries resulting from the overweening power of Spain in days long gone by seemed to be forgotten; forgotten also the more recent lesson of the bloody and costly wars provoked by the ambition and exaggerated power of Louis XIV. Under the eyes of the statesmen of Europe there was ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... cases thoroughly, and never to use the knife unless his judgment was satisfied that an operation was necessary. "That he decided in favor of operating when some of his associates hesitated, was due rather to his large experience than to an overweening fondness for the use of the knife." In his operations he was firm and decided. Gifted with an unusual steadiness of nerve and strength of muscle, he never allowed his sympathy for the patient to cause ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... which he felt for the fallen idol. James had outraged the moral sense of the community; his name could not be mentioned without indignation; everything he did was wrong, even his very real modesty was explained as overweening conceit. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... who sets his battle wisely, conquers the unwary foe; As the Owl, awaiting night-time, slew the overweening Crow.' ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... pretended To hellish falshood, snare them. But for thee I had persisted happie, had not thy pride And wandring vanitie, when lest was safe, Rejected my forewarning, and disdain'd Not to be trusted, longing to be seen Though by the Devil himself, him overweening To over-reach, but with the Serpent meeting Fool'd and beguil'd, by him thou, I by thee, 880 To trust thee from my side, imagin'd wise, Constant, mature, proof against all assaults, And understood not all was but a shew Rather then solid vertu, all but a Rib Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... almost time for Tom Ryfe's return journey to Ecclesfield, and a coat ordered for the express purpose of captivating Miss Bruce had actually come home, when the post brought him a little note from that lady, which afforded him, as such notes often do, an absurd and overweening joy. It was bordered with the deepest black, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... then, there is no conceivable iniquity which he has not perpetrated. His hapless fellow-citizens have been subjected to every form of cruelty and insult. Virgins have been seduced, boys corrupted, the feelings of his subjects outraged in every possible way. His overweening pride, his insolent bearing towards all who had to do with him, were such as no doom of yours can adequately requite. A man might with more security have fixed his gaze upon the blazing sun, than upon yonder tyrant. As for the refined cruelty of his ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... and ballast for the track. The stores are large fronted, with a mockery which would lead the unenlightened to believe they are two-storied; but this is make-believe. The upper windows have no rooms behind them. They are the result of overweening vanity on the part of the City Council and have nothing to ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... In overweening exultation so Vaunted a Trojan. Fool!—he had no vision Of ruin onward rushing upon himself And Troy, and Penthesileia's self withal. For not as yet had any tidings come Of that wild fray to Aias stormy-souled, Nor to Achilles, ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... village sneer. The young Squire and his wife loved each other devotedly, and their only child, Hetty, with an unreasoning and unreasonable affection which would have been the ruin of her, if she had been any thing else but what she was, "the old Squire over again." As it was, the only effect of this overweening affection, on their part, was to produce a slow reversal of some of the ordinary relations between parents and children. As Hetty grew into womanhood, she grew more and more to have a sense of responsibility for her ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... his offices, and, what was of more importance to him, refused to renew his patent of a monopoly of sweet wines. Although the earl soon regained his liberty he could not forget his disgrace, and his overweening vanity drove him to concert measures against the government. In 1601 he rode at the head of a few followers into the city, expecting the citizens to rise in his favour. The mayor had, however, been forewarned, and ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... of French origin, hailing from Bourbonnais, members of which occupied for generations the thrones of France, Naples, and Spain, and who severally ruled their territories under a more or less overweening sense of their rights as born to reign. Two branches, both of which trace back to Henry IV., held sway in France, one beginning with Louis XIV., eldest son of Louis XIII., and the other, called the Orleans, with Philip of Orleans, second son of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... shilling, if he ask for it at the proper office without particular recommendation. Are these things to be tolerated? Is it for the interest, is it for the honour, of the country, that they should not as speedily as possible be redressed? I should be as unwilling as any man, to give an overweening preference to the interests of my own profession; but I cannot help thinking that, under all the circumstances of the business, your lordships will be strongly disposed to advance this bill into a law, as speedily as may be consistent with the order of your proceedings, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... Antonio," continued Salvator, his eyes sparkling with delight "Very well then, you may rely upon it, I will overwhelm your envious overweening persecutors, and get you the honour you deserve. Intrust your picture to me; bring it to my studio secretly by night, and then leave all the rest to me. ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... she said, mistaking what he meant by the signs of the times, 'those who arrogate the gift of the Holy Ghost, while their sole inspiration is the presumption of their own hearts and an overweening contempt of authority, may well mistake signs of their own causing for signs from heaven. I but repeat the very ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... flattered, after a lapse of twenty years, and the sale of seventeen large editions, in receiving an application to write a Preface to a new and more handsome impression. In diminution, however, of any overweening vanity which they might be disposed to indulge on this occasion, they cannot but admit the truth of the remark made by a particularly candid and good-natured friend, who kindly reminded them, that if their little work has hitherto floated upon the stream of time, while so many others ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... surrounded by temptation and flattery, her course was marked by undeviating propriety, and not the faintest breath tarnished her fair fame. Such an idol of popular admiration would be sure to exhibit an overweening vanity. When in Hamburg in 1819, M. Schevenke, a great musician, criticised her vocal feats with severity. Mme. Catalani shrugged her beautiful shoulders and called him "an impious man." "For," said she, "when God has given to a mortal ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... apostolic age Judaism was a consolidated, petrified system, defended from outward influence on all sides by an invulnerable bigotry, a haughty exclusiveness; while Christianity was in a young and vigorous, an assimilating and formative, state. Fourthly, the overweening sectarian vanity and scorn of the Jews, despising, hating, and fearing the Christians, would not permit them to adopt peculiarities of belief from the latter; but the Christians were undeniably Jews in ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... to see, the hideous deformity of the life he and they and the young fellows of their usual companionship had been living. Even Ramsey knew, he continued as she and their old nurse silently reappeared, that by the plainest laws of the land, they were not too good for the penitentiary. An overweening pride in their lawlessness did not justify or excuse it; the devils had that, in hell. They, the twins, were not Christian gentlemen. They were not gentlemen at all. They'd shoot a man down in his tracks for saying so, or for calling them liars, yet ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... oath that he would surely die; he announced that Italy was not worth dying for and it was said that he had sailed away on an aeroplane. He had accomplished none of his desires; the town had not become Italian, though he had bathed it in Italian blood. His overweening personal ambitions had been shipwrecked on the rock of ridicule, for as he made his inglorious exit he shouted at the world that he was "still alive and inexorable." But yet he may have unconsciously achieved something, for his seizure of what he ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... like to be fetches of men: but thy wife sickens now, and she will give birth to a woman-child fair and lovely; and dearly thou wilt love her; but high-born men shall woo thy daughter, coming from such quarters as the eagles seemed to fly from, and shall love her with overweening love, and shall fight about her, and both lose their lives thereby. And thereafter a third man, from the quarter whence came the falcon, shall woo her, and to that man shall she be wedded. Now, I have unravelled thy dream, and I think things will ...
— The Story Of Gunnlaug The Worm-Tongue And Raven The Skald - 1875 • Anonymous
... condition of mind which those who know from experience the powerful electro-magnetic current generated by the rushing life of the New York metropolis can well understand. He struck out into the stream with the rest, and with overweening confidence in himself—in himself as master of circumstances which he intended to control in his own interests, in himself as the pivotal point of Flamsted affairs. The rapidity of the current acted as a continual ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... not only wild to have a lord for their leader, but must have that lord who is the especial incarnation of all those odious qualities which they ascribe most unjustly to the order of which he is a member: and he who is brimful of pride and arrogance, and of an overweening sense of his greatness and his rank, is content to associate with men whose chief recommendation is the profuseness with which they pander to his vanity, and to seek personal distinction and power by lending himself to the promotion of schemes ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... first appear strange and astonishing. But when the mind reflects on the tedious and irksome confinement, which they were compelled to undergo; the absence of the comforts, and frequently, of the necessaries of life, coupled with an overweening attachment to the enjoyment of forest scenes and forest pastimes, it will perhaps be matter of greater astonishment that they did not more frequently forego the security of a fortress, for the uncertain enjoyment of those comforts and necessaries, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... thou fare, far-darting Apollo, and camest to the city of the overweening Phlegyae, that reckless of Zeus dwelt there in a goodly glade by the Cephisian mere. Thence fleetly didst thou speed to the ridge of the hills, and camest to Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus, to a knoll ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... book, say you, sold by the hawking pedlars and balladmongers, entitled The Blason of Colours. Who made it? Whoever it was, he was wise in that he did not set his name to it. But, besides, I know not what I should rather admire in him, his presumption or his sottishness. His presumption and overweening, for that he should without reason, without cause, or without any appearance of truth, have dared to prescribe, by his private authority, what things should be denotated and signified by the colour: which is the custom of tyrants, who will have their will to ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... death to escape insult. The haughty spirit was unchanged, crushed but the same, unsoftened, and therefore roused to madder defiance of God and man. What an awful last saying for 'the anointed of Jehovah,' and how the overweening self-will and vehemence and passionate pride of his whole life ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... directed by you. You weak-minded scion of a depraved and obscene house—arrogant, overbearing, rapacious, ignorant—your brain is too feeble to realize that you are clutching at the Universe hundreds of years before the time has come. You by your overweening pride and folly have doomed our beloved planet—the most perfect planet in the Galaxy in its grateful warmth and wonderful dampness and fogginess—and our entire race to certain destruction. Therefore ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... found that he had again fallen into a profound slumber, which she at first regarded as a favorable omen; and, in the conscious security of the spot, in the belief that he had received none of the injuries she had apprehended from the motion of the boat, and, above all, in the indulgence of that overweening pride of affection which covets all pains and sacrifices for the loved one, she felt a satisfaction which was almost happiness, in her situation. But it was not destined to be of very long duration. ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... I knew him before I had seen him. I saw in the trash which he writes all that his pedantic person everywhere shows forth; the persistent haughtiness of his presumption, the intrepidity of the good opinion he has of his person, the calm overweening confidence which at all times makes him so satisfied with himself, and with the writings of which he boasts; so that he would not exchange his renown for all the honours of ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... unsophisticated but sympathetic ears all the duplicity, all the treachery, all the insidious cunning and all the serpent-like wisdom of her unscrupulous sex. What she said neither I nor any of the sons of men are ever likely to know! but so proud of belonging to that nefarious sisterhood, so overweening in her sex-conceit did she render Liosha, that when they entered the little private sitting-room next door whither, according to the instructions conveyed by Barbara's parting glance downstairs, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... was not merely a conceit of their vanity, or an overweening estimate of their local importance, but a calm, deliberate conviction entertained by others as well as themselves, can be shown by abundant evidence from the literature of that period. I will quote a single illustration of the form ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... time the aggressor in this legislation. Mr. Fillmore declared that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was "the Pandora Box of Evil." Mr. Douglas was reviled by his opponents and burned in effigy at the North. His leadership in this fight was ascribed to his overweening ambition to reach the presidency. The clergymen of New England and of Chicago flooded the Senate with petitions crying against this "intrigue." On May 26, 1854, at one o'clock in the morning, the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 31 to 13. The "nays" were Messrs. Allen, Bell, Chase, ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... been by his late father formed upon the strict principles of the national faith, and his morality upon those of the nicest honour. He had not escaped the predominant weakness of his country, an overweening sense of the pride of birth, and a disposition to value the worth and consequence of others according to the number and the fame of their deceased ancestors; but this pride of family was well subdued, and in general almost entirely concealed, by his ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... assumption among mankind," said her husband. "In reality, it is frightful pride and overweening arrogance to think that we shall live for ever—become like God. These were the serpent's wily words, and he ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... however, accompanied by the Bishop of Worms, and carrying with him his most precious effects, took refuge in Cologne, and abandoned his capital and territories to the rapacity of a tyrannical garrison. But these preparations, which bespoke less of true courage than of weak and overweening confidence, did not prevent the Swedes from marching against Mentz and making serious preparations for an attack upon the city. While one body of their troops poured into the Rheingau, routed the Spaniards who remained there, and levied ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... attention is called to the culmination of Saxon England, and the overweening power and disintegrating tendencies of the great earldoms just before the Norman conquest, as marking the turning-point of ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... disagreeable first impression on most persons, including those who became afterwards her best friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too many guns, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... winter nights the heavenly bodies seem to take on an additional splendour, something next to blazing, overweening boastfulness. "Now sleeps the world," they seem to say, "but we are awake and weaving destiny" And on they swing on ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... means of the balloon; and though, as before remarked, the experiments of M. Petin and others may probably not be without useful results, we dismiss these brilliant phantasmagoria with the charitable reflection, that the extravagance of overweening hopefulness is, at least in an age which has witnessed the advent of steam and electricity, more natural and more pardonable than the scepticism of confirmed despondency; and that "he who shoots at the stars," though missing his aim, will at all events shoot higher than he who aims ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... a glass window, and upon a dunghill. It lodges in palaces and cottages. Nay, it will spring and grow out of a pretended humility, and low carriage. In a word, the ambitious designs of men, the large appetite of earthly things, the overweening conceit of ourselves, and love to ourselves, the stirring of our affections, without observing a rule upon unlawful objects, or in an unlawful manner,—all these are common to men, and men walk after them. Every man hath some predominant or idol, that takes him most up. Some are finer and subtiler ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... mother smiled at this excess of tenderness, but Julien, whose habitual routine had been interfered with and his overweening importance diminished by the arrival of this noisy and all-powerful tyrant, unconsciously jealous of this mite of a man who had usurped his place in the house, kept on saying angrily and impatiently: "How wearisome ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... a compass was not a sure safeguard. A man could wander round and round without finding a fairly nearby camp. Shelby was a few years older than the other two, and of a far more prudent nature. He had no dare-devil instincts, and not an overweening love of adventure. He was enjoying his trip because of the outdoor life and wildwood sports, but as for real adventure, he was content to omit it. Not from fear—Kit Shelby was as brave as any,—but he saw no sense in ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... I went to hear the celebrated Edward Irving. His preaching, for the most part, I considered commonplace; his manner, eccentric; his pretensions to revelations, authority, and prophetic indications, overweening. I was disappointed in his talents, and surprised at the apparent want of feeling manifested throughout ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... my decision had not been inspired by an overweening pride in the public estimation of our home; rather than by an unselfish regard for the welfare and peace of mind of one of its members? What will the world think of us, must be subordinated to, what is the best for my young ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... skill of her sailors nor the valor of her armies, but the fury of the elements, saved them from danger in the most vulnerable part of their dominions. While these considerations are fitted to abate the confidence in invasion, they are calculated, at the same time, to weaken an overweening confidence in naval superiority, and to demonstrate that the only base upon which certain reliance can be placed, even by an insular power, is a well-disciplined army and the patriotism of its ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... grace felt infinitely more safe and comfortable when he was leaning upon Lord Oldborough than when he stood opposed to him, even in secret. There were points in politics in which he and Lord Oldborough coincided, though they had arrived at these by far different roads. They agreed in an overweening love of aristocracy, and in an inclination towards arbitrary power; they agreed in a hatred of innovation; they agreed in the principle that free discussion should be discouraged, and that the country should be governed with a high and strong hand. On these principles Lord ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... save the prisoner; I have exposed the weakness of the evidence; I have had the world searched for the missing girl; I have petitioned and agitated. In vain. I have failed. Now I play my last card. As the overweening Wimp could not be allowed to go down to posterity as the solver of this terrible mystery, I decided that the condemned man might just as well profit by his exposure. That is the reason I make the exposure to-night, before it is too late to ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... particular city should always be prepared for the advent of danger in their own quarters. The course of war cannot be foreseen, and its attacks are generally dictated by the impulse of the moment; and where overweening self-confidence has despised preparation, a wise apprehension often been able to make head against superior numbers. Not that confidence is out of place in an army of invasion, but in an enemy's country it should also be ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... world, and travel only to prove at every stage how far the rest of the universe is behind that favoured spot. He who desires to see how narrow his countrymen and countrywomen can be abroad, and how completely the mass of British travellers lay themselves open to the charge of insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore—if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the English quarter ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... thought necessary to confer such mutual right by express stipulation. Temptation was offered, to the distinguished gymnastic or musical competitors, by prizes of great value. Timaeus even asserted, as a proof of the overweening pride of Croton and Sybaris, that these cities tried to supplant the preeminence of the Olympic games by instituting games of their own with the richest prizes to be celebrated at the same time—a statement in itself not worthy of credit, yet nevertheless ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... overweening self-esteem may well be the hothouse atmosphere in which alone his genius can thrive, but from another point of view it seems a subtle poison gas, engendering all the ills that differentiate him from other men. Its first effect is likely to be the reflection that ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... bade him rival his father's glory by making wider conquests. The ruin of Persia is not yet complete, for when insolence is fully ripe it bears a crop of ruin and reaps a harvest of tears. This evil came upon Xerxes through the sacrilegious demolition of altars and temples. Zeus punishes overweening pride, and his correcting hand is heavy. Darius counsels Atossa to comfort their son and to prevent him from attacking Greece again; he further advises the Chorus to take life's pleasures while they can, for after death there is no profit in wealth. A distinctly ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... "Now hear, ye warriors, / how denies he not at all The cause of all my sorrow. / Whate'er may him befall Reck I not soever, / that know ye, Etzel's men." The overweening warriors / blank gazed upon ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... beauty and death go ever hand in hand. It was his wife's function to make comfortable his declining years; but it was his to make the task easy for her. He constantly repeats the assurance that he does not ask of her an overweening respect, or a service too humble or too hard, for such is not due to him; he desires only such care as his neighbours and kinswomen take of their husbands, 'for to me belongeth none save the ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... affecting, if we could forget all the pride and passion he has been shewing elsewhere, and the torments in which he has left his fellow-creatures. With these recollections upon us, it looks like an overweening piece of self-congratulation at other ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... was all contradictory. In one breath, on the self-abnegation principle, he would say, 'I don't know any thing about paintings;' in the next breath, his overweening egotism would make him loudly proclaim: 'There never was but one painter in this world, and his name is Hockskins; he lives in my town, and he knows more than any of your 'old masters'! I ought to know!' Or, 'I am an uneducated man,' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... court, and to gild his reputation as a man of letters by the smile of greatness. He thinks his works are stamped with additional value by having his name in the Red-Book. He looks up to the distinctions of rank and station as he does to those of learning, with the gross and overweening adulation of his early origin. All his notions are low, upstart, servile. He thinks it the highest honour to a poet to be patronised by a peer or by some dowager of quality. He is prouder of a court-livery than of a laurel-wreath; and is only ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... loss of dignity or effort to pay court to any, she had succeeded in gaining universal esteem; the discreet warnings of exquisite tact enabled her to steer a difficult course among the exacting claims of this mixed society, without wounding the overweening self-love of parvenus on the one hand, or the susceptibilities of her old ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... reason Riviere had refused to lend his name to a scheme under which Lars Larssen would hold the reins of control. He knew the ruthlessness of the man and his overweening lust of power, which had passed the bounds of ordinary ambition and had ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... head be it, Cappy. Here goes! However, before laying my plan before you, perfect frankness compels me to state that my visit to you was not born of an overweening desire to do you a kindness or make money for you. Philanthropy is not my long suit—in business hours; and my interest in you today is purely ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... on severely conventional lines, reared in the narrow tenets of a family whose salient characteristics were an overweening pride of race and a religious zeal amounting almost to fanaticism, while Diane had had no up-bringing worth speaking of. As for religious views, ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... or overweening presumption that led the admiral to leave the new home he had made within the strong defences of La Rochelle; or was he moved solely by a conscientious persuasion that he had no right to consider personal danger when the great interests of his country and his faith were ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... of duty—especially if it is a hard duty—already has one mark in his favor. The fact that he wants to do it is one-half of success. Before turning him down, there must be a substantially clear showing that he lacks the main qualifications. It must be a compelling reason, rather than the overweening excuse that it is more convenient to keep him where he is. In any case, he should be thanked for coming forward, and earmarked as a good prospect for the ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... unmilitary, and, as the French would say, "become cow-like." It was difficult to see in him the man who, however great his crimes in Mexico, had at least been a man of the most daring courage and of the most overweening ambition. In the suppressed volume of the papers of the Imperial family seized at the Tuileries there is a letter from General Felix Douay to his brother in which he describes Bazaine's attempt to become the Bernadotte of Mexico, and shows how, in order to obtain the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... "English" work meant the best kind of work. They worked church vestments with gold and pearls and precious stones. "Orfrey," or embroidery in gold, was a special art. Of course they are accused by the ecclesiastics of an overweening desire to wear finery; they certainly curled their hair, and, one is sorry to read, they painted, and thereby spoiled their pretty cheeks. If the man was the hlaf-ord [lord],—the owner or winner of the loaf,—the wife was the hlaf-dig [lady], ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... two offices were jealously kept apart, and when one monarch, in a fit of overweening self-importance, tried to unite in his own person the kingly and the priestly functions, 'the leprosy rose up in his forehead,' even as he stood with the censer in his hand, and 'Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day of his death.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... confident anticipation of success seemed to pervade all ranks; and in the hope of an ample reward in store for them, the toils and grievances of the moment were forgotten. Nor was this anticipation the mere offspring of an overweening confidence in themselves. Several Americans had already deserted, who entertained us with accounts of the alarm experienced at New Orleans. They assured us that there were not at present 5000 soldiers in the State; that the principal inhabitants had long ago left the place; that such as remained ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... the ladder for the purpose. Why, Phaethon,—for thou art Merops' son,— Wilt thou aspire to guide the heavenly car, And with thy daring folly burn the world? 155 Wilt thou reach stars, because they shine on thee? Go, base intruder! overweening slave! Bestow thy fawning smiles on equal mates; And think my patience, more than thy desert, Is privilege for thy departure hence: 160 Thank me for this more than for all the favours, Which all too much I have bestow'd on thee. But if thou ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... the influences which had until now guided his life and formed his character. The reminiscences of his father's friend had greatly increased his sense of magnanimity in his intentions towards Marian. In the overweening pride of youth he felt as if he were almost regally born and royally endowed, and that a career was opening before him in which he should prove his lofty superiority to those whose heads were turned by the hurly-burly of the hour. Young as he was, he had the sense to be in accord ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... were in all which was necessary to the active operations of an army, however gallant the men might be, and however able were the generals who directed and led them. From these causes, operating jointly, resulted undue caution at the North and overweening confidence at the South. The habits of our people in hunting, and protecting their stock in fields from the ravages of ferocious beasts, caused them to be generally supplied with the arms used for such purposes. The facility with which individuals traveled over the country led ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... his pipe for a silent minute or two. Then picking up the thread of his story he told us how he had started hot foot for Tower Hill. He had not been that way since the day of his examination—the finest day of his life—the day of his overweening pride. It was very different now. He would not have called the Queen his cousin, still, but this time it was from a sense of profound abasement. He didn't think himself good enough for anybody's kinship. He ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... philanthropist say that the evils, of which I have spoken, would be brought about only by the obduracy, prejudices, and overweening self-estimation of the whites in refusing to blend the races by marriage, and so create a homogenous population?[252] But what, if it be not prejudice, but truth, and nature, and right reason, and just moral feeling? As I have before said, throughout ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... as I was, how well I can recall the exaggerated ambition, nay, the certainty of success, as well as its desire, which then burned within me. I smile now at the overweening vanity of those hopes,—some, indeed, realized, but how many nipped and withered forever! seeds, of which a few fell upon rich ground and prospered, but of which how far the greater number were scattered: some upon the wayside, and were devoured ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... naturally swelled the overweening insolence of the Deys. A consul had a Maltese cook: the Dey objected to the Maltese, and took the man by force from the consul's house and sent him away in irons. If the consul objected, he might go too. When Captain Hope, of H.M.S. Romulus, arrived at Algiers, he received no salute; ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... impossible to prevent the tails of his trout from protruding arrogantly, as if to insinuate that there were shoals within. Another of Frank's weaknesses was, upon the hooking of every fish, to assert, with overweening confidence and considerable excitement, that it was a tremendously big one. Experience had, during all his piscatorial career, contradicted him ninety-nine times out of every hundred; but Frank's firm belief in his last minnow being ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... of Dryden and Lee's excellent tragedy The Duke of Guise, first performed 4 December. The play created a furore, and its political purport as a picture of the baffled intrigues of Shaftesbury in favour of Lucy Walter's overweening son is obvious, nor is it rendered less so by Dryden's clever and caustic Vindication of the Duke of Guise (1683). It is interesting to note that Lady Slingsby, who played the Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici, in this play, has some ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... his intellectual superiority seems to have given him an almost overweening confidence in his ability to induce his brethren to accept the broader theology he loved to preach; nor did he apparently realize that comprehension was incompatible with a theocratic government, and that his success would have undermined ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... asking any one else for his consent. A majority in a single assembly, when it has assumed a permanent character—when composed of the same persons habitually acting together, and always assured of victory in their own House—easily becomes despotic and overweening if released from the necessity of considering whether its acts will be concurred in by another constituted authority. The same reason which induced the Romans to have two consuls makes it desirable there should be two Chambers—that neither of them may be ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... Europe. Elizabeth and Cecil had seen where lay the weakness of his position; they had evaded, cajoled, finally had defied and triumphed over him. When he sank to the grave, the lordship of the sea had passed, the lordship of the Netherlands was passing, the lordship of the New World was tottering. His overweening egotism had sucked the life-blood of Spain. The Power which forty years before had threatened to dominate the world was no better than a decrepit giant; the form still loomed gigantic, but the substance was ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... daughter of Tisza. The Zilahs, in trying to free their country, had freed themselves from all littleness; and proud, but not vain, they bore but slight resemblance to those Magyars of whom Szechenyi, the great count, who died of despair in 1849, said: "The overweening haughtiness of my ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... that is made possible she must pass through the fire, and be purged of that corruption which is even now poisoning her blood and clouding her eyes in the presence of her enemies. The overweening lust of gold must be burnt out of her soul in the fiery crucible of war, and she must learn to hold honour once more higher than wealth, and rich and poor and gentle and simple must be as one family, and not as ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... let him lie dead: and be ye all parted with speed. Bring ye two lambs, one white ram and one black ewe, for earth and sun; and let us bring one for Zeus. And call hither great Priam, that he may pledge the oath himself, seeing he hath sons that are overweening and faithless, lest any by transgression do violence to the oath of Zeus; for young men's hearts are ever lifted up. But wheresoever an old man entereth in, he looketh both before and after, whereby the best issue shall come for ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... foresaw that his life's work would assuredly some day be wrecked. Did he despair of any remedy unless he took the spiritual law, as he had already taken the civil law, into his own hands? Or was even as noble a mind as his not proof against the overweening hubris to which a despotic genius has so often succumbed? One momentous evening, in the Hall of Disputations, he caused, or allowed, his devoted friend and confidant, Abul Fazl, to proclaim the Emperor's infallibility in the domain of faith. From ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... his confidence that four or five thousand choice troops of Spain would be enough to make a short war of it, but nevertheless warned his officers of the dangers of overweening confidence. He had been informed that the rebels had assumed the red scarf of the Spanish uniform. He hoped the stratagem would not save them from broken heads, but was unwilling that his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the object of the great movement now contemplated was to raise him to the Imperial throne at the next election, to assist the Bohemian estates, to secure the crown of Bohemia for the Elector-Palatine, to protect the Protestants of Germany, and to break down the overweening ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Highness for a moment in silence, and her face softened. After all, she loved Eberhard Ludwig, and in spite of her overweening prosperity, coupled with the world-hardness which marred her, there lingered something of tenderness in her love. Then, too, she was a consummate actress, and a being gifted with the womanly genius for charming, and therein lies sympathy. It is when this sympathetic ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... "Your overweening conceit would be laughable if it were not so irritating," Myra retorted curtly. "I want to tell you bluntly that unless you give me your word of honour not to attempt to make love to me I shall refuse to go to Auchinleven if you are to be one of the party, ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... the progress of the ballad, Mr. Mincin seizes him by the arm at one point of the melody, and softly beating time the while with his head, expresses in dumb show his intense perception of the delicacy of the passage. If anybody's self-love is to be flattered, Mr. Mincin is at hand. If anybody's overweening vanity is to be pampered, Mr. Mincin will surfeit it. What wonder that people of all stations and ages recognise Mr. Mincin's friendliness; that he is universally allowed to be handsome as amiable; that mothers think ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... more expensive to the public; but there is no well grounded room to suppose they will not fill up; and still less reason to believe, if the means for carrying on the war are attainable, that the vindictive spirit of the King and his ministry, and the overweening pride of the nation, will soon yield to make a peace, which involves their disgrace and humiliation. But as strength or weakness are mere comparative terms, we can form no judgment of the measures of Britain ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... it, the entire scene was driven temporarily from his thoughts and became a-whirl about another figure of which in the passing train he became suddenly aware. It was the cold, impassive, scrutinising face of an aged dame of such overweening pride and keenness that he seemed to feel himself pierced through by her gaze. He had heard of the severity of the Marechale de Noailles—"Madame l'Etiquette"—Cyrene's patroness, and knew intuitively ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... moment to greet Simonides. The little poet was delighted, despite overweening hopes, at the manly beauty yet modesty of the athlete, and being a man who kept his thoughts always near his tongue, made Glaucon blush more manfully ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... laugh, but he refrained, not wishing to offend Jim, who was evidently suffering from an overweening sense of his own importance, since he had graduated into a temporary occupancy of the editorial chair. Jim was considerably short of twenty at that, so it could not have been more than a year or two since he used to play ball, and train with the ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... Constantine during the interval. The warm interest she took in Swithin St. Cleeve—many would have said dangerously warm interest—made his hopes her hopes; and though she sometimes admitted to herself that great allowance was requisite for the overweening confidence of youth in the future, she permitted herself to be blinded to probabilities for the pleasure of sharing his dreams. It seemed not unreasonable to suppose the present hour to be the beginning of realization to her darling wish that this young man should ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... him see in an affectionate way that she can let others enjoy his company betimes, secure in the knowledge that she is supreme in his affections—cajolery that flatters his overweening vanity, and rarely fails. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... was German. But though tolerant of foreign dynasties, the English have, since the days of John, been excessively jealous of foreign influences. One of the main causes of Henry III.'s unpopularity was the overweening influence of his foreign favourites. From Edward I. downwards the Plantagenets ruled as English sovereigns. Henry VII., though he was crowned on the field of battle and claimed the throne by right of conquest, was too discreet to maintain his power, as ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... to treat Albert with something of the affectionate authority of a father; but, on the other hand, Albert was no Leopold. As the Baron was very well aware, he had none of his uncle's rigidity of ambition, none of his overweening impulse to be personally great. He was virtuous and well-intentioned; he was clever and well-informed; but he took no interest in politics, and there were no signs that he possessed any commanding force of character. Left to himself, he would almost certainly ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... Haethcyn the Hrethling from life-joys, When for pride overweening the War-Scylfings first did Seek the Geatmen with savage intentions. 35 Early did Ohthere's age-laden father, Old and terrible, give blow in requital, Killing the sea-king, the queen-mother rescued, The old one his consort deprived of her gold, Onela's mother and Ohthere's also, [99] 40 And then ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve; and was, in the very earliest times, closely connected with the agricultural interest. If it should ever be urged by grudging and malicious persons, that a Chuzzlewit, in any period of the family history, displayed an overweening amount of family pride, surely the weakness will be considered not only pardonable but laudable, when the immense superiority of the house to the rest of mankind, in respect of this its ancient origin, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... had about them, find it sore travail to remember what I had for dinner yesterday, what friends I conversed with, what Tavern I supped at, what news I read in the Gazette? But 'tis the knowledge of that overweening Craving to count up the trivial Things of my Youth that warns me to use despatch, even if the chronicle of my after doings be but a short summary or sketch of so many Perils by Land and Sea. And for this manner of the remotest ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... American title to the whole of it is "clear and unquestionable." They have displayed, in the conduct of their foreign relations during the past year, a vulgar indifference to the opinion of mankind, and an overweening estimate of their own power, which it is at once ludicrous and painful to behold. Nor is there reason to believe that these blots on the escutcheon of a nation, so young and so unembarrassed, are either ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... setting the example. Their violent abuse of the Church, their unfounded assertions that the clergy did not really believe what they preached, that the Christian religion as taught by them was a mere invention of priestcraft to serve its own ends, their overweening pretensions contrasted with the scanty contributions which they actually made either to theology or to philosophy or to philology,—all ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... tolerable to me than his son. Glimpses of his mind would at times flash out through those unnaturally bright eyes; and betray somewhat of the hell within; but Theophilus was close and dark—a sealed book which no man could open and read. An overweening sense of his own importance was the only trait of his character which lay upon the surface; and this, his master-failing, was revealed ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... occasion of the visit, the visitor should deprecate this, both by word and example. Every mother of young daughters knows the difference between visitors who are thoughtful and deferential and helpful, and those whose overweening interest in self and selfish plans makes them oblivious to the convenience and wishes and preferences of their hostess and ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... men who, when they are caught once, like burned children ever after dread the fire. Others there are who have such overweening confidence in their own smartness that their lives are nothing but a series of losses. Canada Bill and myself were nearing Magnolia, about a hundred miles above New Orleans, when Bill opened up his three cards. It was not long before a crowd gathered about to witness the sport. One large man in particular ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... been. There would have been something to say for him on that score, had he looked upon the sum of evil as a thing not to be diminished. But he shared the opinions of the most commonplace believers in sin and trouble, and only congratulated himself on being exempt from their consequences. The overweening old man found himself comfortably off somehow; and it is good that he did. It is a comfort to all of us, wise or foolish. But to reverence him is a jest. You might as well make a god of an otter. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... sense and of the world put upon it, by reducing every thing to the abstract predicament of size. He enlarges or diminishes the scale, as he wishes to shew the insignificance or the grossness of our overweening self-love. That he has done this with mathematical precision, with complete presence of mind and perfect keeping, in a manner that comes equally home to the understanding of the man and of the child, does not take away from the merit of the work ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... to tell the truth, Mr. Hume. Because you need me, because you are beaten now and must come hiding a whimper under big words, come to a woman who holds you so in the hollow of her hand that she can break you so utterly that your own overweening conceit cannot find the fragments with the microscope of a distorted vanity! Love me as you'd love any other fine thing just because it was yours. Because you'd use me, because you see that such a wife as I could be would be but a stone for you ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... recognised right to be arrogant." (Henry James.) The spirit of goodwill, of a desire to make others happy (especially when it does not incommode you to do so), swings through a much larger arc in American society than in English. One can be surer of one's self, without either an overweening self-conceit or the assumption ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... vain, haughty, overbearing, supercilious, cavalier, overweening, disdainful, imperious, lordly, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... madam o'er her evening tea; Surrounded with her noisy clans Of prudes, coquettes, and harridans, When, frighted at the clamorous crew, Away the God of Silence flew, And fair Discretion left the place, And modesty with blushing face; Now enters overweening Pride, And Scandal, ever gaping wide, Hypocrisy with frown severe, Scurrility with gibing air; Rude laughter seeming like to burst, And Malice always judging worst; And Vanity with pocket glass, And Impudence with front of brass; And ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... extended to me is evidence that while, by a jealous scrutiny and, sometimes, perhaps, a sharp conflict, we are reciprocally imposing checks upon loose exaggerations and overweening pretensions, a comprehensive good feeling predominates over all; truth in its purity is getting eliminated; and characters and occurrences, in all parts of the country, brought under the clear ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... as I am to no theory, but looking solely to the advancement of the public good, I shall be among the very first to urge its repeal if it be found not to subserve the purposes and objects for which it may be created. Nor will the plan be submitted in any overweening confidence in the sufficiency of my own judgment, but with much greater reliance on the wisdom and patriotism of Congress. I can not abandon this subject without urging upon you in the most emphatic manner, whatever may be your action on the suggestions which I have felt it to be my ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Tyler • John Tyler
... gladly know no law but his own will. He has a little world of his own, in which he lives, and moves, and has his being. He makes every one, with whom he comes in contact, contribute something to his own selfish purposes. His overweening desire to promote his own interests, disposes him constantly to encroach upon the rights of others; or, if not to encroach upon their rights, to take advantage of their good nature, to drag them into his service. You might as well walk for pleasure ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... don't observe them. I am Mariquita Saville. Nothing that I can do can alter that fact, or take from me the position to which I was born," replied Peggy, with that air of overweening pride in her belongings which had a distinctly humorous aspect in the eyes of her companion, for though a county name and some well-won decorations are, no doubt, things to be valued, nothing short of a pedigree traced direct from the Flood itself would have justified the ineffable ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... guileless mind: no, it is those who have prepared to wrong others that are ready to be suspicious of them because of their own conscience. If, again, nothing of this sort was at the bottom of his action, but he merely looked down on us and insulted us with overweening words, what must we expect him to do when he lays hold of some real project? For when a man has shown such disdain in matters where he was not going to gain anything, how has he not been convicted of entire injustice in ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... elated over his share in a conspiracy threatened by so formidable a foe; and when Emerson constituted him a sort of secretary, with duties mainly of sending and receiving telegrams, his delight was beyond measure. He grew, in fact, insufferably conceited, and his overweening sense of his own importance became a severe trial to Fraser, who was roused to his most elaborate efforts of sarcasm. The adventurer wasted hours in a search for fitting similes by which to measure the clubman's general and comprehensive ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... ultimate chamber crouched all that was left of the inmate, terrified, helpless, and ignorant. As I looked upon him I understood why man is never permitted really to know himself unless, in an access of mad folly and overweening pride, he succeeds in crossing the boundary which to pass is sheer wickedness. And I tried to turn away, but I could not—I could not. I made a supreme ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... officers and men of each particular city should always be prepared for the advent of danger in their own quarters. The course of war cannot be foreseen, and its attacks are generally dictated by the impulse of the moment; and where overweening self-confidence has despised preparation, a wise apprehension often been able to make head against superior numbers. Not that confidence is out of place in an army of invasion, but in an enemy's country it should also be accompanied by the precautions of apprehension: troops will by this ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... Thirdly, in the apostolic age Judaism was a consolidated, petrified system, defended from outward influence on all sides by an invulnerable bigotry, a haughty exclusiveness; while Christianity was in a young and vigorous, an assimilating and formative, state. Fourthly, the overweening sectarian vanity and scorn of the Jews, despising, hating, and fearing the Christians, would not permit them to adopt peculiarities of belief from the latter; but the Christians were undeniably Jews in almost every ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... aggressor in this legislation. Mr. Fillmore declared that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was "the Pandora Box of Evil." Mr. Douglas was reviled by his opponents and burned in effigy at the North. His leadership in this fight was ascribed to his overweening ambition to reach the presidency. The clergymen of New England and of Chicago flooded the Senate with petitions crying against this "intrigue." On May 26, 1854, at one o'clock in the morning, the bill passed the Senate by a vote ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... command, and embraces death to escape insult. The haughty spirit was unchanged, crushed but the same, unsoftened, and therefore roused to madder defiance of God and man. What an awful last saying for 'the anointed of Jehovah,' and how the overweening self-will and vehemence and passionate pride of his whole life are gathered up ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... work out fairly and fully complete what I have begun. And when that is done, I will courageously and cheerfully turn my back upon all my old aspirations. The world is wide, and there is everywhere room for honesty of purpose and earnest endeavour. Had I failed in attaining my wishes from an overweening self-confidence,—had I found that the obstacles after all lay within myself—I should have bitterly despised myself, and, worst of all, I should have felt that you ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... this is in himself, the Land to be won is himself."[8] The second one is that religion is a progressive movement, an unfolding revelation of life. "What a height of Presumption is it," he says, "to believe that the Wisdom and fullness of God can ever be pent up in a Synodical Canon? How overweening are we to limit the successive manifestations of God to a present rule and light, persecuting all that comes not forth in its height and breadth!" It is through this "unnatural desire" to keep Christians in "a perpetual infancy" that "our dry nurses" in the Church have ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... precarious as that of one whose very existence was dependent on a single agricultural product. What divinity hedges cotton, that competition may not touch it,—that some disease, like that of the potato and the vine, may not bring it to beggary in a single year, and cure the overweening conceit of prosperity with the sharp medicine of Ireland and Madeira? But these South Carolina economists are better at vaporing than at calculation. They will find to their cost that the figures of statistics have little mercy for the figures of speech, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... III. was a Dutchman; the Hanoverian dynasty was German. But though tolerant of foreign dynasties, the English have, since the days of John, been excessively jealous of foreign influences. One of the main causes of Henry III.'s unpopularity was the overweening influence of his foreign favourites. From Edward I. downwards the Plantagenets ruled as English sovereigns. Henry VII., though he was crowned on the field of battle and claimed the throne by right of conquest, was too discreet ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... education 'whose object was pretension, and whose principle was arrogance, made him at once a thing fearful and pitiable, at war with its species and itself, ready to crush in manhood as to sting in the cradle, and leading his overweening ambition to pursue its object by ways dark and hidden—safe from the penalty of crime, and exposed only to the obloquy which he laughed to scorn. If ever there was a man formed alike by nature and education to betray the land which gave him birth, and to act openly as the pander ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... last analysis a high self-valuation is part of the chronic choleric make-up, a conceit of overweening proportions. The man who realizes his own proneness to err, and who keeps in mind the relative unimportance of his aims and powers, is not apt to explode in the face of opposition or contradiction. G. is as a rule absolutely sure of his belief, tastes and importance, though ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... who got a little whipping, got what in the main was good for them; not that the judge was any better or wiser than the persons whom he sentenced, or indeed ever fancied himself so. Pen had a strong sense of humour and justice, and had not therefore an overweening respect for his own works; besides, he had his friend Warrington at his elbow—a terrible critic if the young man was disposed to be conceited, and more savage over Pen than ever he was to those whom he tried at his ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fitted that attractive word. Middle-aged men, "too Old at Forty," discoursed in the waiting-rooms on the outlook in the trade; it had never been so bad, they said, while Mr. Polly wondered if "De-juiced" was a permissible epithet. There were men with an overweening sense of their importance, manifestly annoyed and angry to find themselves still disengaged, and inclined to suspect a plot, and men so faint-hearted one was terrified to imagine their behaviour when it came to an interview. There ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... now and again with one of the Bowen boys, his old Hannibal schoolmates. He was reveling in the river life, the ease and distinction and romance of it. No other life would ever suit him as well. He was at the age to enjoy just what it brought him —at the airy, golden, overweening age of youth. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... darkness and he rose from his desk, the thing that had edged its way into a crowded mind took possession of the premises that strategy and tactics had vacated. It passed under the same analysis as his work. His overweening pride, so sensitive to the suspicion of a conviction that he had been fooled, put his relations with ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... by a formal declaration, that the American title to the whole of it is "clear and unquestionable." They have displayed, in the conduct of their foreign relations during the past year, a vulgar indifference to the opinion of mankind, and an overweening estimate of their own power, which it is at once ludicrous and painful to behold. Nor is there reason to believe that these blots on the escutcheon of a nation, so young and so unembarrassed, are either deeply regretted or will be speedily effaced. We see no reaction of national virtue ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... de Chagny, to please his brother, had done his best on her behalf with M. Richard; and she wrote to thank him and also to ask him to cease speaking in her favor. Her reason for this curious attitude was never known. Some pretended that it was due to overweening pride; others spoke of her heavenly modesty. But people on the stage are not so modest as all that; and I think that I shall not be far from the truth if I ascribe her action simply to fear. Yes, I believe that Christine Daae was frightened by what had happened to her. I have a letter ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... that the spirit which unchained it cannot prevail, that the hateful doctrines and methods in pursuance of which and in compliance with which it is conducted are rejected with abhorrence by the civilized world, and that the overweening ambitions which it was meant to serve can never ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... impostor and biped animal already alluded to, actuated by an overweening desire of notoriety, and in order to catch the applause of some one, grovelling in the morasses of insignificance and vice, like himself, leaves his native obscurity, and indulges in falsehood, calumny, and defamation. I ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... despised—either for men or flowers—may {124} be no ill-fortune; the real ill-fortune is only to be despicable. These faults of human character, wherever found, observe, belong to it as ill-trained—incomplete; confirm themselves only in the vulgar. There is no base pertinacity, no overweening conceit, in the Black Douglas, or Claverhouse, or Montrose; in these we find the pure Scottish temper, of heroic endurance and royal pride; but, when, in the pay, and not deceived, but purchased, idolatry of Mammon, the Scottish persistence and pride become ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... by two wounds, {138} one in the knee and one in the leg, which hindered him from walking. Still he urged the Hurons to renew the attack. But in vain. From overweening confidence the fickle savages had passed to the other extreme. Nothing could inspire them to another assault. Moreover, Champlain had lost much of his peculiar influence over them. They had fancied that, with him in front, ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... acute feelings of sorrow and despair. He was at last convinced that Kurugsar had spoken the truth; for there seemed to be no chance whatever of taking the place by any stratagem he could invent. Revolving the enterprise seriously in his mind, he now began to repent of his folly, and the overweening confidence which had led him to undertake the journey. Returning thus to his tent in a melancholy mood, he saw a Fakir sitting down on the road, and him he anxiously accosted. "What may be the number of ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... peculiar advantages for enforcing a policy which until that time had thriven conspicuously, if somewhat illusively, in its commercial results, and had substantially attained its especial object of maritime preponderance. Other peoples had to submit to the compulsion exerted by her overweening superiority. The obligation upon foreign shipping to be three-fourths manned by their own citizens, for instance, rested only upon a British law, and applied only in a British port; but the accumulations of British capital, with the consequent facility for mercantile operations and ability to extend ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... heart there entered also the exceeding bitterness of a lost ideal. She became to him, as he had become to her, the image of broken faith, capricious feeling, and overweening worldly ambition. ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... back to her glimmering stall; There let her stand and feed!— I am overweening, ambitious, small, A creature of pride and greed! Let me wash the hoofs, let me be the thrall, Jesus, of ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... therefore, of receiving indulgence from the critics, whose asperity is rarely excited except by the overweening pretensions of confident ignorance and self-sufficiency, he ventures on the ground already trodden by so many distinguished men, whose works, deep in research, beautiful in description, and valuable from ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... moved heaven and earth to get the verdict set aside and to save the prisoner; I have exposed the weakness of the evidence; I have had the world searched for the missing girl; I have petitioned and agitated. In vain. I have failed. Now I play my last card. As the overweening Wimp could not be allowed to go down to posterity as the solver of this terrible mystery, I decided that the condemned man might just as well profit by his exposure. That is the reason I make the exposure to-night, before it is ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... instance of submission naturally swelled the overweening insolence of the Deys. A consul had a Maltese cook: the Dey objected to the Maltese, and took the man by force from the consul's house and sent him away in irons. If the consul objected, he might go too. When Captain Hope, of ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... mittens on her hands! Can't I see her!" cried Max, throwing back his head with one of the cheery bursts of laughter which brought his mother's eyes upon him with a flash of adoring pride. "Now there's none of that overweening ambition about me. I could bear up if I never saw an improving book again. What I would like would be for some benevolent old millionaire to take a fancy to me, and adopt me as his heir. I feel cut out to be a country gentleman, and march about ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... himself called the great, the mighty son of Roussillon, ever since he was a helpless child. A succession of complacent tutors would by no means destroy the illusion; and it is from their hands that Shakspeare receives him, while yet in his minority. An overweening pride of birth is Bertram's great foible. To cure him of this, Shakspeare sends him to the wars, that he may win fame for himself, and thus exchange a shadow for a reality. There the great dignity that his valor acquired for him places him ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... I was born with an inordinate fondness for cats; or that I cried for them as an infant. I do not know, even, that my childhood was marked by an overweening pride in them; this, perhaps, was because my cruel parents established a decree, rigid and unbending as the laws of the Medes and Persians, that we must never have more than one cat at a time. Although this very law may argue that predilection, at an early ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... anticipation of success seemed to pervade all ranks; and in the hope of an ample reward in store for them, the toils and grievances of the moment were forgotten. Nor was this anticipation the mere offspring of an overweening confidence in themselves. Several Americans had already deserted, who entertained us with accounts of the alarm experienced at New Orleans. They assured us that there were not at present 5000 soldiers in the State; that the principal inhabitants had long ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... you hear yourself abused. What then? Nothing can be so good for you as such abuse; the instruction given is twofold; it warns you against foes whom you have perhaps considered friends, and it tones down any overweening conceit you may have had concerning your own importance or ability. Listen to everything if you are wise—I always do. I am an old and practised listener. And I have never listened in vain. All the information I have ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... work entitled Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, has clearly pointed out that Mr. Mill has only succeeded in duping himself on this point. A man cannot free himself from self-consideration. Christianity indeed appeals to the innate desire of happiness, but condemns the overweening and blind self-regard which cannot see that the highest happiness of self flows from a just respect to the selfhood of others and from the cultivation of the spiritual nature. Love your neighbor as yourself is the Christian precept; and it has the advantage of being practicable, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... centre upon myself?—self, an overweening regard to which has been the source of my errors! Falkland, I will think only of thee, and from that thought will draw ever-fresh nourishment for my sorrows! One generous, one disinterested tear I will consecrate to thy ashes! A nobler spirit lived ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... first, the State can prevent the growth of many of the evils of private capitalism. If China can acquire a vigorous and honest State, it will be possible to develop Chinese industry without, at the same time, developing the overweening power of private capitalists by which the Western nations are ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... with the life and death of the hero, crowded with persons and with startling action. In this he was conforming to the method of the dramatic narratives that pleased the theaters. But each play centers its dramatic interest on a mighty protagonist battling with his overweening desires and their inevitable disappointment. With the spectacle and sensation, the rant and absurdity, there is also dramatic structure and tragic significance in the revelation of these protagonists, their volitional struggles, and their ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... Riviere had refused to lend his name to a scheme under which Lars Larssen would hold the reins of control. He knew the ruthlessness of the man and his overweening lust of power, which had passed the bounds of ordinary ambition and had become ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... States of Western Europe, large and small (and including both a remodelled Germany and a largely remodelled Austria) in one great Federation—whose purpose would be partly to unite and preserve Europe against any common foe, from the East or elsewhere, and partly to regulate any overweening ambition of a member of the Federation, such as might easily become a menace to the other members. A secondary but most important result of the formation of such a United States of Europe would be that while each State would probably preserve a small military establishment of its own, the ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... sharp-witted as clever men without it; but they know the balance of the human intellect better; if they are more stupid, they are more steady, and are less liable to be led astray by their own sagacity and the overweening petulance of hard-earned and late-acquired wisdom. They do not fall in love with every meretricious extravagance at first sight, or mistake an old battered hypothesis for a vestal, because they are ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... his fleets, the camps would not take in his armies, the plains were not wide enough to deploy his cavalry in, and that the sky itself was scarcely large enough to enable all his troops to hurl their darts at once. While much boasting of this sort was going on around him, raising his already overweening self-confidence to a frantic pitch, Demaratus, the Lacedaemonian, alone told him that the disorganized and unwieldy multitude in which he trusted, was in itself a danger to its chief, because it possessed only weight without strength; for an army ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... at that other personality that had marred his fair hopes in his mine—that perverse, impulsive, overweening inner spirit that took the helm at each crisis of his life—was a rage to make the gods above weep if they did not laugh at the jest. And this blind, drunken self that rose up within him to sit leeringly in judgment on his acts, ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... "friends," than many of the white ladies to their married lords. Still, the white ladies constantly speak with the greatest contempt, and even with animosity, of these unhappy and oppressed beings. The strongest language of high nobility in the monarchies of the old world, cannot be more haughty, overweening or contemptuous towards their fellow creatures, than the expressions of the creole females with regard to the quadroons, in one of the much vaunted states of the free Union. In fact, such comparison strikes the mind of a thinking being very singularly! Many wealthy fathers, on account ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... actions were leading him, Smith did not stop to consider. He had no fear of results. With an overweening confidence arising from past successes, he believed that matters would adjust themselves as they always had. Smith wanted a home, and the MacDonald cattle, horses, and hay; but more than any of them he wanted Dora Marshall. How he was going to obtain them all was not then clear ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... with the foremost, but would hold him a little aback, and while the battle was young he forbore to smite, and would do nothing but help a kinsman who was hard pressed, or succour the wounded. So that if men were dealing with no very hard matter, and their hearts were high and overweening, he would come home at whiles with unbloodied blade. But no man blamed him save those who knew him not: for his intent was that the younger men should win themselves fame, and so raise their courage, and become high- hearted ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... out with idle finery, although I know how many poor people are starving in want and misery, and how much more pleasing in the sight of the Lord is the grey robe of the cloistered nun. I could scarcely leave the hall in my overweening pleasure, and yet it would have beseemed me far better to share the sufferings ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... cheated the imagination of the illusions which the prejudices of sense and of the world put upon it, by reducing every thing to the abstract predicament of size. He enlarges or diminishes the scale, as he wishes to shew the insignificance or the grossness of our overweening self-love. That he has done this with mathematical precision, with complete presence of mind and perfect keeping, in a manner that comes equally home to the understanding of the man and of the child, does not take away from the merit of the work or the genius of the author. He has taken a new view ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... something of selfishness, but they may serve as a stimulus and a support to the noblest and most constant resolutions. The scruples that trouble my conscience now, therefore, have not their source in pride, in an overweening self-confidence, in a desire for worldly fame, or in a too great love of knowledge. Nothing of this nature it is that troubles me; nothing bearing any relation to self-conceit, but, in a certain sense, something entirely opposed to it. I feel a lassitude, a debility and abandonment ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... constituency of the pleasant watering-place of Bath, in Somersetshire, elected the fierce little man as their representative in the Imperial Parliament. This was a great start in life for the new-fledged barrister, and, had he moderated his overweening vanity, and studied wisely, and with some self-abnegation and honest adherence to party, he might have risen to some useful position, and been saved, at least, from the indignity of fetching and carrying ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... dwelt a fierce and indomitable pride. His was one of those moody, sensitive natures, quick to resent, always on the look-out for offence. He was ever ready to translate things into the personal; for though he had an overweening sense of his own importance, there was yet room in him for a secret doubt; and with this doubt, he, as it were, put other people to the test. The loss of the flower of his flock made him doubly unsure; he felt himself ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... thought that I have an overweening confidence in the principle of natural selection, when I do not admit that such wonderful and well-established facts at once annihilate my theory. In the simpler case of neuter insects all of one caste or of the same kind, which have been rendered by natural selection, as I believe ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... of profound pity and disappointment with which Dr. Grey's eyes dwelt upon her countenance, hardened now by its expression of insolent haughtiness; but he allowed her no opportunity for retraction, even had she mastered her overweening pride, and stooping to whisper a brief sentence in his sister's ear, he took a medical book from the table, and left ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... object of the leaders of the agitation was the separation of Canada from Britain and would have nothing to do with them. The first time the master met Mackenzie he took a dislike to him, perceiving his overweening vanity, his habit of contradiction, and his lack of judgment. He said he was a specimen of the unpleasant type of Scot who meddled and denounced to attract attention and make himself of consequence. When he saw him shaping a rebellion he declared it would be a ridiculous ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... that fearless woman was superior to any personal ambition. It was quite otherwise with James. He was by no means fearless, and he cared more for James Stuart than for either England or Scotland. He had an overweening opinion of his skill in kingcraft. In coming to Westminster it was his policy to use his newly acquired power to break down the Puritan party in both kingdoms and to fasten episcopacy upon Scotland. In pursuing ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... bright spring morning, and their feelings were in accord with the fresh appearance of the world. No thoughts or anticipations of how their varying fortunes might be marred troubled for one instant their youthful minds. Their hearts were full of hope and the overweening vanity and self-confidence of their years. The East, to them, was paved with gold. Troubles looked like the necessary things to be combatted fearlessly to reach the success that must await them beyond; life, indeed, was one rosy, golden, glorious dream. The stern realities ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... forth one of those disgraceful panics, which so often follow overweening presumption; and shrieks, oaths, prayers, and reproaches, make night hideous. There are those too on board who recollect well enough Jenebelli's fire-ships at Antwerp three years before, and the wreck which they made of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... President's overweening desire to accommodate all persons who came to him soliciting favors, but the opportunity was never offered until an untimely and unthinking disease, which possessed many of the characteristics of one of the most dreaded maladies, confined ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... the directors. But Herr Schott, in an effort to promote his scheme, made an ungallant attack upon the artistic character of Mme. Materna, and this the public found to be "most tolerable and not to be endured." The occasion soon presented itself for Schott to show that he had an overweening sense of his own importance and popularity. At the end of the fourth of the five supplementary performances there was a demonstration of applause. Herr Schott interpreted it as a curtain call for himself, and promptly showed himself, and bowed his ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... from Adam and Eve; and was, in the very earliest times, closely connected with the agricultural interest. If it should ever be urged by grudging and malicious persons, that a Chuzzlewit, in any period of the family history, displayed an overweening amount of family pride, surely the weakness will be considered not only pardonable but laudable, when the immense superiority of the house to the rest of mankind, in respect of this its ancient origin, is taken ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government; but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... rather more to the level of ordinary mortals. They show him to us as a man possessed of splendid talents, of extensive and various attainments, and of the seeds of many noble and generous qualities; but as a man actuated by ungovernable passions, and by an overweening opinion of his own superiority to all other mortals. Self, whether intellectual or sensual, seems to have been the idol that he worshipped. His own antient family, his own talents, his own attainments, his own whims, his own passions, his own excesses, seem all to have furnished ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... Hetty, with an unreasoning and unreasonable affection which would have been the ruin of her, if she had been any thing else but what she was, "the old Squire over again." As it was, the only effect of this overweening affection, on their part, was to produce a slow reversal of some of the ordinary relations between parents and children. As Hetty grew into womanhood, she grew more and more to have a sense of responsibility ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... confidence is founded above all else on our enemies' incapacity for organization." In truth, it is not inborn incapacity to which we owe our unquestioned inferiority, but to the atrophy of will-power which is one of the consequences of years of egotism, overweening confidence, self-indulgence and the loss of an ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... appearance. Elizabeth was not to be thus cajoled. She ordered him into custody, deprived him of his offices, and, what was of more importance to him, refused to renew his patent of a monopoly of sweet wines. Although the earl soon regained his liberty he could not forget his disgrace, and his overweening vanity drove him to concert measures against the government. In 1601 he rode at the head of a few followers into the city, expecting the citizens to rise in his favour. The mayor had, however, been forewarned, and 1,000 men were held in readiness in each ward fully armed for the safeguard of the ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... and character. The Pahang Malay, in his unregenerate state, thinks chiefly of deeds of arms, illicit love intrigues, and the sports which his religion holds to be sinful. He is a cock-fighter, a gambler, and a brawler; he has an overweening opinion of himself, his country, and his race; he is at once ignorant, irreligious, and unintellectual; and his arrogance has passed into a proverb.[5] He has many good qualities also, and is, above all things, manly and reckless,—as those who know him well, and ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... In starlit winter nights the heavenly bodies seem to take on an additional splendour, something next to blazing, overweening boastfulness. "Now sleeps the world," they seem to say, "but we are awake and weaving destiny" And on they swing on ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... problems of the world are not found here. They are found in the decline of spiritual understanding, the decay of moral standards, the growth of the vindictive and unforgiving spirit, the lapse from charity, the overweening pride of the human heart. With these matters the church must chiefly deal; to their spiritual infidelity she must bring a spiritual message; to their poor thinking she must bring the wisdom of the eternal. This task, preventive not remedial, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Bonaparte's letters at this time show that he hoped for the conclusion of a peace with England, doubtless in order that his own pressure on Austria might be redoubled. In this he was to be disappointed. After Fructidor the Directory assumed overweening airs. Talleyrand was bidden to enjoin on the French plenipotentiaries the adoption of a loftier tone. Maret, the French envoy at Lille, whose counsels had ever been on the side of moderation, was abruptly replaced by a "Fructidorian"; and a decisive refusal was given to the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... under disaster and consented to sink slowly. Many have done worse—they have maintained after sharp warnings the pride of their blind years; they have maintained that pride on into the great disasters, and when these came they have sullenly died. France neither consented to sink nor died by being overweening. Some men must have been at work to force their sons into the conscription, to consent to heavy taxation, to be vigilant, accumulative, tenacious, and, as it were, constantly eager. There must have been classes in which, unknown to themselves, the ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... it. I have often lost something of my real value by this timidity, but nevertheless I have never regretted it. The consciousness of the superiority of others is a good feeling in youth, as at all ages, for it elevates the ideal standard to which we aspire. Self-confidence in youth is an overweening insolence towards time and Nature. If the feeling of the superiority of others is a delusion, it is at least a delusion which raises human nature, and is better than that which lowers it. Alas, we but too soon reduce it to its ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... that the evils, of which I have spoken, would be brought about only by the obduracy, prejudices, and overweening self-estimation of the whites in refusing to blend the races by marriage, and so create a homogenous population?[252] But what, if it be not prejudice, but truth, and nature, and right reason, and ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... mother-tongue of all, and to scorn all examination which did not commence with this confession. Even the late learned Dr. Owen Pugh has, in his Dictionary, by arbitrarily selecting certain syllables as the roots of all Cumrian words, done much to foster this overweening conceit. The system was carried to its extreme point of absurdity by the Rev. Edward Davies, who by the help of such syllables expected to unravel the mysteries of all languages. This failure has I hope paved the way ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... that had I disdained to toil, But sate in my loathsome cave the while, And ne'er to these hateful sons of Heaven, GOLD, MONARCHY, and MURDER, given; Hadst thou with all thine art essayed One of thy games then to have played, With all thine overweening boast, Falsehood! I tell thee thou hadst lost!— Yet wherefore this dispute?—we tend, Fraternal, to one common end; In this cold grave beneath my feet, Will our hopes, our ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... to me is evidence that while, by a jealous scrutiny and, sometimes, perhaps, a sharp conflict, we are reciprocally imposing checks upon loose exaggerations and overweening pretensions, a comprehensive good feeling predominates over all; truth in its purity is getting eliminated; and characters and occurrences, in all parts of the country, brought under the clear ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... injured by the milk of a married woman who will desert her own child for the sake of gain. The misfortune which has happened to this young woman is not always a proof of a bad heart, but of strong attachment, and the overweening confidence of simplicity." ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... heav'nly form, pretended To hellish falshood, snare them. But for thee I had persisted happie, had not thy pride And wandring vanitie, when lest was safe, Rejected my forewarning, and disdain'd Not to be trusted, longing to be seen Though by the Devil himself, him overweening To over-reach, but with the Serpent meeting Fool'd and beguil'd, by him thou, I by thee, 880 To trust thee from my side, imagin'd wise, Constant, mature, proof against all assaults, And understood not all was but a shew Rather then ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... husband? and wouldst thou take away my son's dudaim also?' And Rachel said, 'See, Jacob shall be thine to-night for thy son's dudaim.' But Leah insisted, 'Jacob is mine, and I am the wife of his youth,' whereupon Rachel, 'Be not boastful and overweening. To me he was betrothed first, and for my sake he served our father fourteen years. Thou art not his wife, thou wast taken to him by cunning instead of me, for our father deceived me, and put me out of the way the night of thy nuptials, so that Jacob could not see me. Nevertheless, give ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... of his wife, declaring that it could not be inherited by a female. In this he appears to have acted unjustly, from the strong desire to avail himself by any pretext of an opportunity of breaking the overweening power of the great turbulent nobles; and, to make up for the loss, he created the new earldom of Menteith, for the young Malise Graham, the son of the dispossessed earl. But the proud and vindictive Grahams were not thus to be pacified. Sir Robert Graham, the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... himself entitled. But in 1788 he was again placed in office, on this occasion as Comptroller-General, and, practically, Prime Minister, a post for which he was utterly unfit; for he had not one qualification for a statesman, was a prey to the most overweening vanity, and his sole principles of action were a thirst for popularity and a belief in "the dominion of reason and the abstract virtues of mankind." Under the influence of these notions he frittered away the authority and dignity of the King; and, as Napoleon afterwards truly told his ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... unquenchable life-flame of patriotism streaming through its petrified limbs; you stood up a protest of eternal right against the sway of imperious might; a "Mene Tekel Upharsin," written in letters of burning blood on the walls of overweening despotism. Time, misery, and sorrow have thinned the ranks of your scattered Israel; you have carried your dead to the grave, and those who survive went on to suffer and to hope. Wherever oppressed Freedom reared a banner, you rallied around;—the living statue ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... appear strange and astonishing. But when the mind reflects on the tedious and irksome confinement, which they were compelled to undergo; the absence of the comforts, and frequently, of the necessaries of life, coupled with an overweening attachment to the enjoyment of forest scenes and forest pastimes, it will perhaps be matter of greater astonishment that they did not more frequently forego the security of a fortress, for the uncertain enjoyment of those comforts and necessaries, and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... the lips of those who regard it as an evil necessity. Every word is torn from them, as from a reluctant witness. They come to speech as to a last resort, when all other ways have failed. The bane of a literary education is that it induces talkativeness, and an overweening confidence in words. But those whose words are stark and terrible ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... the next topic: you may work on the enemy's fears by the various devices of mock ambuscades, sham relief parties, false information. Conversely, his confidence will reach an overweening pitch, if the idea gets abroad that his opponents have troubles of their own and little leisure ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon
... religion of his fathers, stripped of supernaturalism, as the only hope of the world. The biography by Froude, while it does not conceal the atrabilious temperament of Carlyle, his bad temper, his intense egotism, his irritability, his overweening pride, his scorn, his profound loneliness and sorrow, and the deep gloom into which he finally settled, made clear at the same time his honest and tender nature, his noble independence, his heroic struggles with poverty of which he never complained, his generous ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... as a dukedom or the Holy See, they will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life without some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is to love and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other men. An overweening sense of the passion and importance of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women, they feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if they were so many Joan-of-Arc's; but this ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... birth divine And high prediction, henceforth I expose To Satan; let him tempt, and now assay His utmost subtlety, because he boasts And vaunts of his great cunning to the throng Of his Apostasy. He might have learnt Less overweening, since he failed in Job, Whose constant perseverance overcame Whate'er his cruel malice could invent. He now shall know I can produce a man, 150 Of female seed, far abler to resist All his solicitations, and at length All his vast force, and ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton
... on many not inconsiderable details of the dispute, and that so-called orthodox Christians in their hearts knew it but would not own it—or that if they did not know it, they were only in ignorance because it suited their purpose to be so—this conviction gave an overweening self-confidence to infidels, as though they must be right in the whole because they were so in part; they therefore blinded themselves to all the more fundamental arguments in support of Christianity, because certain shallow ones had been put forward in the front ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... arrogant, dictatorial, magisterial, lordly, dogmatical, supercilious, imperious, cavalier, overweening. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... to be too talented," said the Professor. "Your overweening ambition will ruin everything. Why, bless my soul, you be wanting to shave clean and have ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... asked myself, whether my decision had not been inspired by an overweening pride in the public estimation of our home; rather than by an unselfish regard for the welfare and peace of mind of one of its members? What will the world think of us, must be subordinated to, what is the best for my ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a fear of disappointment that he harshly withstood even the most friendly advances, for there lay at times a vague yearning for love in the depths of his eyes. To grow hard because unfulfilled claims afflict and darken the soul, to retire into solitude because overweening pride shuns to lay bare the glowing heart, to be unjust from a feeling of shame and misunderstood defiance—that was perhaps his lot, ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... is a reactionary product of his time. Humanity continuing in one direction acquires success, and finally through an overweening pride in its own powers, relaxation enters, and self- indulgence takes the place of effort. No religion is pure except in its inception and in its state ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... strange individuality, nor do I recollect having troubled to discover how far they were consistent with the high opinion I formed of him after I had got to know him more intimately. Obviously I had only seen the caricature of the man, although the tendency towards such plainly overweening self-confidence may, at all events, have manifested itself earlier in life. At the same time, one could trace in all this the influence of the decay of the musical and dramatic life of the period, which Spontini, situated as he was in Berlin, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... these two offices were jealously kept apart, and when one monarch, in a fit of overweening self-importance, tried to unite in his own person the kingly and the priestly functions, 'the leprosy rose up in his forehead,' even as he stood with the censer in his hand, and 'Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day of his death.' And the history of the world is full of instances, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... constitute the only religious, enlightened, and free people. They perceive that, for the present, their own democratic institutions succeed, whilst those of other countries fail; hence they conceive an overweening opinion of their superiority, and they are not very remote from believing themselves to belong to a distinct ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... patriotism of one leader and the overweening personal ambition of the other divided the Indians, then, into two camps and it was but natural that the idea should soon evolve that Indian interests could be best subserved by the formation of two distinct Indian brigades. To ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... dramatist had penned these words, the management of Blackfriars met with disaster. The cause, however, went back to December 13, 1600, when Giles and Evans were gathering their players. In their overweening confidence they made a stupid blunder in "taking up" for their troupe the only son and heir of Henry Clifton, a well-to-do gentleman of Norfolk, who had come to London for the purpose of educating the boy. Clifton says ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... commoner human elements which he finds in himself, and which most of us try to conceal or belittle, with such frankness and perception of their real worth that they acquire new meaning and value in our eyes. If he paraded these things unduly, and showed an overweening preference for them, as some of his critics charge, this is of course ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... constantly fastens the blame of the conflict on the rich; and accordingly at the beginning of the poem he says that he fears 'the love of wealth and an overweening mind', evidently meaning that it was through ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... repented that he had enlarged its territory both on the north and the south, to the Gulf of Bothnia and to the Danube. Hence, possibly, this eager desire to deal the country a blow arose from a spirit of preservation rather than from one of conquest, and the charge of an overweening and uncontrollable ambition is thus somewhat refuted." This observation is not wholly inaccurate. It may be that if the Emperor had had no son, he would not have made the Russian campaign, and possibly it was more by a mistaken calculation than by pride, that he was drawn into ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... of them. They advanced, receded, came up and studied them, wheeled away, smiled sometimes at each other with the high self-assurance of beauty and position, pranced, pawed, curveted, were noble or coquettish as the inner self impelled, but always the embodiment of overweening pride. Among the "real gentry," as he called them, there had unfailingly been for him and his colleagues a courtesy which might have been called only a distinction in ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... such an adventure. The amazingly sympathetic kindness which men of various temperaments, diverse views and different literary tastes have been for years displaying towards my work has done much for me, has done all—except giving me that overweening self-confidence which may assist an adventurer sometimes but in the long run ends by leading him to ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... was as far as he went; he did not think, with President du Ronceret, that Victurnien was likely to give justice another kind of hold upon him. Both men found an ally for their schemes of revenge in Victurnien's overweening vanity and love of pleasure. President du Ronceret's son, a lad of seventeen, was admirably fitted for the part of instigator. He was one of the Count's companions, a new kind of spy in du Croisier's pay; du Croisier taught him his ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... has an overweening sense of his superiority, and remains a nation apart, mixing little with the conquered populations, whose customs and ideas he tolerates, but makes little effort to understand. The expression indeed, ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... they defy even the owner of the animal, and they cheerfully give him the opportunity of putting down thousands if he wishes to do so. There must be some reason for this assurance which at first sight looks so very overweening. Better have ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... in not returning you my thanks for your most valuable present, Zeluco. In fact, you are in some degree blameable for my neglect. You were pleased to express a wish for my opinion of the work, which so flattered me, that nothing less would serve my overweening fancy, than a formal criticism on the book. In fact, I have gravely planned a comparative view of you, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett, in your different qualities and merits as novel-writers. This, I own, betrays my ridiculous vanity, and I may probably never bring the business to bear; ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... love-making in a bad school. She dropped dark hints that frightened Lorania, who would sometimes piteously demand, "Don't you think he could care for me—for—for myself?" Margaret knew that she had an overweening distrust of her own appearance. How many tears she had shed first and last over her unhappy plumpness it would be hard to reckon. She made no account of her satin skin, or her glossy black hair, or her lustrous violet eyes with their long, black lashes, or ...
— Different Girls • Various
... the nobility, its very detachment from the popular interest, was its main source of strength. It had ceased even to be a party; it had become a clique—a mere faction whose community of hope, interest and fear had given it its present position of overweening strength.[951] This strength, which sprang from perfect unity of design and action, could only be met and broken successfully by a people fired with a common enthusiasm. But what form should this enthusiasm assume? Should an adviser of the people advocate ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... that we ought ever to be on the alert, that we may not induce our friend into evil. We should be upon our guard, that we may not from overweening arrogance and self-conceit dictate to another, overpower his more sober judgment, and assume a rashness for him, in which perhaps we would not dare to indulge for ourselves. We should be modest in our suggestions, and rather ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... elements, saved them from danger in the most vulnerable part of their dominions. While these considerations are fitted to abate the confidence in invasion, they are calculated, at the same time, to weaken an overweening confidence in naval superiority, and to demonstrate that the only base upon which certain reliance can be placed, even by an insular power, is a well-disciplined army and the ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... bitterness of purpose; the court, composed of the two most unscrupulous partisans, Chief Justices Blackbourne and Doherty, and the weakest or falsest political convert, Mr. Justice Moore, simulated the uncontrollable emotions which an overweening loyalty awoke in the bosom of the Catholic Attorney-General. So far were their lordships swayed by the spirit of imitativeness, that the most polished speakers, mistaking the incoherent jargon of the official for the broken ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... took up arms, he became eager to afford them such aid as he could give. He made the acquaintance of Silas Deane, one of the most unscrupulous of the American agents, who promised him, though he was only twenty years of age, the rank of major-general. As he was at all times the slave of a most overweening conceit, he was tempted by that bait; and, though he could not leave France without incurring the forfeiture of his military rank in the army of his own country, in April, 1777, he crossed over to America ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... speculations of Shelley's earlier life, when his crusade against accepted usage was extravagant, and his confidence in the efficacy of mere eloquence to change the world was overweening. The experience of years, however, taught him wisdom without damping his enthusiasm, refined the crudity of his first fervent speculations, and mellowed his philosophy. Had he lived to a ripe age, there is no saying with what clear and beneficent lustre might have shone that light ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... while accustomed to operate largely in Wall Street through his brokers, was also the head of a cloth-importing firm. This in fact had been his regular and legitimate business, but like so many others he had been drawn into the vortex of speculation, and after many lucky hits had acquired that overweening confidence that prepares the way for a fall. He came to believe that he had only to put his hand to a thing to give it the needful impulse to success. In his larger and more exciting operations in Wall Street he had left the cloth business mainly ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... The poet's overweening self-esteem may well be the hothouse atmosphere in which alone his genius can thrive, but from another point of view it seems a subtle poison gas, engendering all the ills that differentiate him from other men. Its first effect is likely to be the reflection that his genius is judged by a ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... only to prove at every stage how far the rest of the universe is behind that favoured spot. He who desires to see how narrow his countrymen and countrywomen can be abroad, and how completely the mass of British travellers lay themselves open to the charge of insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore—if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the English ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... monarchy, Valenciennes became the theatre of the tolerably well-conceived, but intolerably ill-executed, attempt of Dumouriez to make himself a French Duke of Albemarle. It was quite as unprincipled as his political operations were at Paris in 1792, and in both cases he came to grief through his overweening self-confidence and consequent lack of the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... speed. Bring ye two lambs, one white ram and one black ewe, for earth and sun; and let us bring one for Zeus. And call hither great Priam, that he may pledge the oath himself, seeing he hath sons that are overweening and faithless, lest any by transgression do violence to the oath of Zeus; for young men's hearts are ever lifted up. But wheresoever an old man entereth in, he looketh both before and after, whereby the best issue shall come for ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... Since then, there is no conceivable iniquity which he has not perpetrated. His hapless fellow-citizens have been subjected to every form of cruelty and insult. Virgins have been seduced, boys corrupted, the feelings of his subjects outraged in every possible way. His overweening pride, his insolent bearing towards all who had to do with him, were such as no doom of yours can adequately requite. A man might with more security have fixed his gaze upon the blazing sun, than upon yonder tyrant. As for the refined cruelty of his punishments, it baffles description; ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... accept an appointment to Berlin as court composer for Frederick William III. There he brought out "Lalla Rookh," "Alcidor," and "Agnes Hohenstauffen," none of which found currency in other cities. His overweening conduct gradually made his position at Berlin untenable. He was finally driven out by the hostile demonstrations of his audiences, and retired, in 1841, a broken man. After a few years spent in Paris he returned ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... glass window, and upon a dunghill. It lodges in palaces and cottages. Nay, it will spring and grow out of a pretended humility, and low carriage. In a word, the ambitious designs of men, the large appetite of earthly things, the overweening conceit of ourselves, and love to ourselves, the stirring of our affections, without observing a rule upon unlawful objects, or in an unlawful manner,—all these are common to men, and men walk after them. Every man hath ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... of a great nation is in its reverence for its own past, and, since that is incomplete, in its admiration for whatever is noble and worthy in other nations. It is out of this reverence and humility and this self-respect that great works in literature and art grow, and not out of the overweening sensitiveness which makes one's nationality but a petty jealousy ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... for a silent minute or two. Then picking up the thread of his story he told us how he had started hot foot for Tower Hill. He had not been that way since the day of his examination—the finest day of his life—the day of his overweening pride. It was very different now. He would not have called the Queen his cousin, still, but this time it was from a sense of profound abasement. He didn't think himself good enough for anybody's kinship. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... of an overweening antagonism to her betrothed; yet remember that though the words had not been uttered to give her good reason for it, nature reads nature; captives may be stript of everything save that power to read their tyrant; remember also that she was not, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... discontent which led to this convention, that which had the strongest influence in overcoming our veneration for the work of our fathers, which taught us to contemn the sentiments of Henry and Mason and Pendleton, which weaned us from our reverence for the constituted authorities of the State, was an overweening passion for internal improvement. I say this with perfect knowledge, for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the West over and over again. And let me tell the gentleman from Albemarle (Mr. Gordon) that it has been another principal object of those who set this ball of revolution ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... dark-skinned as the rest of the crew, red-faced as old Pedro (from the same faithful indulgence in vintages), not younger than forty, yet aggressive, vibrating with physical power, elasticity, and an overweening insolence. His manner of approach—and he entered this tavern with the same studied grace with which he swaggered into half a hundred others—seemed to indicate that he delighted in disorganizing and terrorizing whatever he might find established and orderly—wherever ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... he was catching salmon with his Indian wife and relatives on the site of what was to become Dawson, the Golden City of the Snows. Henderson, bubbling over with good-will, open-handed, told Carmack of his discovery. But Carmack was satisfied where he was. He was possessed by no overweening desire for the strenuous life. Salmon were good enough for him. But Henderson urged him to come on and locate, until, when he yielded, he wanted to take the whole tribe along. Henderson refused to stand for this, said that he must ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... you are," said Victor, with the overweening assurance of youth. "Come, let's sit down here for a few minutes and discuss ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... she continued abruptly, "spread it out before you, with all its just defeats, all its broken faith, and overweening hopes, its beauty, and fear, and love, and its loss—its loss; then turn and say: this, this only, this duller heart, these duller eyes, this contumacious spirit is all that is left—myself. Oh! who could wish to one so dear a destiny so dark?" She rose hastily from the ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... see in an affectionate way that she can let others enjoy his company betimes, secure in the knowledge that she is supreme in his affections—cajolery that flatters his overweening vanity, and ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... which the clergy were held, for more than a hundred years after this date, was due in all probability to two causes. The first was the natural reaction from the overweening reverence anciently felt for the sacerdotal order: when the sacerdos was found to be but a presbyter, his charm was gone. But the second was the disgrace which had been brought upon their profession at large, by the evil lives ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... premium in the political market, and the respectable constituency of the pleasant watering-place of Bath, in Somersetshire, elected the fierce little man as their representative in the Imperial Parliament. This was a great start in life for the new-fledged barrister, and, had he moderated his overweening vanity, and studied wisely, and with some self-abnegation and honest adherence to party, he might have risen to some useful position, and been saved, at least, from the indignity of fetching and carrying for the Emperor of Austria, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the inhabitants of the United States that they constitute the only religious, enlightened, and free people. They perceive that, for the present, their own democratic institutions succeed, whilst those of other countries fail; hence they conceive an overweening opinion of their superiority, and they are not very remote from believing themselves to belong to a distinct ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... ill-executed, attempt of Dumouriez to make himself a French Duke of Albemarle. It was quite as unprincipled as his political operations were at Paris in 1792, and in both cases he came to grief through his overweening self-confidence and consequent lack of the most ordinary prudence ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... and the expression of her face was, I thought, one of sweetness and humility, contradicted in some degree by rather harsh lines about the mouth, denoting strong will and purpose. As a proof of the existence of this last characteristic, I may here mention that, when her first overweening confidence had yielded to doubt, she, although dotingly fond of her nephew, at this time about eight years of age, firmly refused to see him, "in order," she once said to me—and the thought brought a deadly pallor to her face—in order that, should the worst befall, her ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... recent occurrences in British India—that vast territory which only our prodigious enterprise and skill have acquired for us, and nothing but profound sagacity can preserve to the British crown—and observe, with mixed feelings, two principal matters: a perilous but temporary error of overweening ambition on the part of Great Britain, yet retrieved with power and dignity; and converted into an opportunity of displaying—where, for the interests of Great Britain, it was imperiously demanded—her irresistible valour, her moderation, her wisdom; exhibiting, under circumstances the most adverse ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... his actions were leading him, Smith did not stop to consider. He had no fear of results. With an overweening confidence arising from past successes, he believed that matters would adjust themselves as they always had. Smith wanted a home, and the MacDonald cattle, horses, and hay; but more than any of them he wanted Dora Marshall. How he was ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... morning, and their feelings were in accord with the fresh appearance of the world. No thoughts or anticipations of how their varying fortunes might be marred troubled for one instant their youthful minds. Their hearts were full of hope and the overweening vanity and self-confidence of their years. The East, to them, was paved with gold. Troubles looked like the necessary things to be combatted fearlessly to reach the success that must await them beyond; life, indeed, ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... instructed,' said Siegfried the good knight, 'To leave off idle talking and rule their tongues aright. Keep thy fair wife in order. I'll do by mine the same. Such overweening folly puts me indeed ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... them. And it is even possible to have these virtues so unhappily proportioned and inauspiciously mixed with other turns and casts of mind, as to end in work with little grace or harmony or fine tracery about it, but only overweening purpose and vehement will. And it is overweeningness and self-confident will that are the chief notes of Macaulay's style. It has no benignity. Energy is doubtless a delightful quality, but then Macaulay's energy is perhaps energy without ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... She ordered him into custody, deprived him of his offices, and, what was of more importance to him, refused to renew his patent of a monopoly of sweet wines. Although the earl soon regained his liberty he could not forget his disgrace, and his overweening vanity drove him to concert measures against the government. In 1601 he rode at the head of a few followers into the city, expecting the citizens to rise in his favour. The mayor had, however, been forewarned, and 1,000 men were held in readiness ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... must be for some secret vileness. They grow angry with him when he refuses to be persuaded against his knowledge of himself. They insist on his hypocrisy, he on his righteousness. Nor may we forget that herein lies not any overweening on the part of Job, for the poem prepares us for the right understanding of the man by telling us in the prologue, that God said thus to the accuser of men: 'Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... later, she met the gaze of profound pity and disappointment with which Dr. Grey's eyes dwelt upon her countenance, hardened now by its expression of insolent haughtiness; but he allowed her no opportunity for retraction, even had she mastered her overweening pride, and stooping to whisper a brief sentence in his sister's ear, he took a medical book from the ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... for it at the proper office without particular recommendation. Are these things to be tolerated? Is it for the interest, is it for the honour, of the country, that they should not as speedily as possible be redressed? I should be as unwilling as any man, to give an overweening preference to the interests of my own profession; but I cannot help thinking that, under all the circumstances of the business, your lordships will be strongly disposed to advance this bill into a law, as speedily as may be consistent with the order ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... to the Saviour who loved her, sinning against the truth and her own conscience. A fearful dread fell upon her, and deprived her of the power to lift her soul in prayer. She could not, she dared not, do what was required of her, and yet the overweening love of life which exists in every mortal led her feet to the base of the idol and there ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... with a large party at the consul's, and he seemed inclined to exact a deference to his dogmas, that was more lordly than philosophical. One of the naval officers present, I think the captain of the Salsette, felt, as well as others, this overweening, and announced a contrary opinion on some question connected with the politics of the late Mr Pitt with so much firm good sense, that Lord Byron was perceptibly rebuked by it, and became reserved, as if he deemed that sullenness ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... intellectually respectable. It has happened to me once or twice to listen to expositions from orators of the Salvation Army. Some of them struck me as sincere though limited, and others as the victims of an overweening vanity. The oratory, so far as I could hear, consisted in stringing together an endless set of phrases about the blood of Christ, which, if they really meant anything, meant a doctrine as low in the ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the weeping girl, "I am obliged to own that my mother-in-law's aversion to me arises from a very natural source—her overweening love for her ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... reflections perpetually centre upon myself?—self, an overweening regard to which has been the source of my errors! Falkland, I will think only of thee, and from that thought will draw ever-fresh nourishment for my sorrows! One generous, one disinterested tear I will consecrate to thy ashes! ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... made for the sternness of the Puritan poet's theology, there would still remain enough to show that his fiercely eloquent tract might well have been called forth by the presence in the church of an overweening army of "Mercenary Preachers." Further space, however, need not now be trenched on; but should any new facts be adduced by some of your correspondents illustrative of the curious entry referred to, I am sure they will be welcomed ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... disposition to make everything about the house bend to the occasion of the visit, the visitor should deprecate this, both by word and example. Every mother of young daughters knows the difference between visitors who are thoughtful and deferential and helpful, and those whose overweening interest in self and selfish plans makes them oblivious to the convenience and wishes and preferences of their hostess and ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... perhaps you'll say that, as an old and hardened offender, I don't deserve it. But I had an accomplice—a young man very respectably connected, and who, whatever his previous life may have been, had managed to keep a good reputation; a young man a little apt to be misled by overweening vanity and the ill-advised flattery of his friends; but I hope that neither of you gentlemen will be hard upon him, but will consider his youth, and perhaps his congenital moral and intellectual deficiencies, even when you find your watches—on Mr. Campbell's person.' He leans forward, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... must bear the blame of setting the example. Their violent abuse of the Church, their unfounded assertions that the clergy did not really believe what they preached, that the Christian religion as taught by them was a mere invention of priestcraft to serve its own ends, their overweening pretensions contrasted with the scanty contributions which they actually made either to theology or to philosophy or to philology,—all ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... as ever. He quickly returned home, and pointed out to the Senate that the former defeats and misfortunes suffered by the Carthaginians had not really broken their strength so much as they had dissipated their overweening self-confidence, and that in the late war they had not lost so much in strength as they had gained in experience and skill. Their present difference with the Numidians was, he urged, merely a prelude to an attack upon Rome, with which city they kept up the fiction of a peace which would ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... had taken full possession of Borax, so after fortifying himself with a half dozen drinks, he set forth for the Hat Ranch. Also, under the influence of the liquor and his overweening pride in his bright idea, he had taken pains to announce his destination and the object of his visit. A crowd of male observers stood on the porch of the Silver Dollar saloon and watched him depart, the while they spurred ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... in a trice. Within an hour staid old Simiti lay in the grip of martial law, with its once overweening Alcalde, now a meek and frightened prisoner, arraigned before Captain Morales, holding court in the shabby ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... French origin, hailing from Bourbonnais, members of which occupied for generations the thrones of France, Naples, and Spain, and who severally ruled their territories under a more or less overweening sense of their rights as born to reign. Two branches, both of which trace back to Henry IV., held sway in France, one beginning with Louis XIV., eldest son of Louis XIII., and the other, called the Orleans, with Philip of Orleans, second son of Louis XIII., the former ending with Charles X. and his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... too vague for definite feeling, and she had been too strongly swayed by Poleon and her father in their attitude towards him to be conscious of it. Finding him now, however, in a gentle humor, she was drawn to him unwittingly, and felt an overweening desire to talk with him, even at the hazard of offending her own people. The encounter fitted in with her rebellious mood, for there were things she wished to know, things she must find out from some one who knew the world ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... the novelty of his position. Intellectually self-confident, he suffered from being deprived of the only weapon he could use with effect. No intelligence could penetrate the darkness of the Placid Gulf. There remained only one thing he was certain of, and that was the overweening vanity of his companion. It was direct, uncomplicated, naive, and effectual. Decoud, who had been making use of him, had tried to understand his man thoroughly. He had discovered a complete singleness of motive ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... cried he, raising his hand to heaven. "Be a Christian. I absolve you from your oath, and oh, my Rachel! if I sought the world for a proof of my overweening love, it could offer nothing to compare with this sacrifice. Go, my ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... where lay the weakness of his position; they had evaded, cajoled, finally had defied and triumphed over him. When he sank to the grave, the lordship of the sea had passed, the lordship of the Netherlands was passing, the lordship of the New World was tottering. His overweening egotism had sucked the life-blood of Spain. The Power which forty years before had threatened to dominate the world was no better than a decrepit giant; the form still loomed gigantic, but the substance was gripped with the chill paralysis wherewith Philip ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... manners, and habits, of the nobility and the people; their public institutions, edifices, monuments, and collections in the fine arts; the overweening influence of the clergy, their power and political subserviency; the character of the foreign ministers, and the policy of the courts they represented, were carefully observed and noted down for future thought ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... lingered a moment to greet Simonides. The little poet was delighted, despite overweening hopes, at the manly beauty yet modesty of the athlete, and being a man who kept his thoughts always near his tongue, made Glaucon ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Court-Martial looked only stupid, like a fat old seal, utterly unmilitary, and, as the French would say, "become cow-like." It was difficult to see in him the man who, however great his crimes in Mexico, had at least been a man of the most daring courage and of the most overweening ambition. In the suppressed volume of the papers of the Imperial family seized at the Tuileries there is a letter from General Felix Douay to his brother in which he describes Bazaine's attempt to become the Bernadotte of Mexico, and shows how, in order ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... hills. Few men in literature have felt the burden of the world, the weight of the inexorable conscience, as has Carlyle, or drawn such fresh inspiration from that source. However we may differ from him (and almost in self-defense one must differ from a man of such intense and overweening personality), it must yet be admitted that he habitually speaks out of that primitive silence and solitude in which only the heroic soul dwells. Certainly not in contemporary British literature is there another writer whose bowstring ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... most of us try to conceal or belittle, with such frankness and perception of their real worth that they acquire new meaning and value in our eyes. If he paraded these things unduly, and showed an overweening preference for them, as some of his critics charge, this is of course an ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... me is evidence that while, by a jealous scrutiny and, sometimes, perhaps, a sharp conflict, we are reciprocally imposing checks upon loose exaggerations and overweening pretensions, a comprehensive good feeling predominates over all; truth in its purity is getting eliminated; and characters and occurrences, in all parts of the country, brought under the clear ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... Tresler in a bristling attitude. His hands were aggressively thrust into his jacket pockets, and he emphasized his final words with a scowl. And it was his attitude that roused Tresler; the words were the words of an overweening bully, and might have been laughed at, but the attitude said more, and no man likes to be browbeaten. His anger leapt, and, though he held himself tightly, it found expression in the biting ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... I have moved heaven and earth to get the verdict set aside and to save the prisoner; I have exposed the weakness of the evidence; I have had the world searched for the missing girl; I have petitioned and agitated. In vain. I have failed. Now I play my last card. As the overweening Wimp could not be allowed to go down to posterity as the solver of this terrible mystery, I decided that the condemned man might just as well profit by his exposure. That is the reason I make the exposure to-night, before it is too late to ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... nameless as I was, how well I can recall the exaggerated ambition, nay, the certainty of success, as well as its desire, which then burned within me. I smile now at the overweening vanity of those hopes,—some, indeed, realized, but how many nipped and withered forever! seeds, of which a few fell upon rich ground and prospered, but of which how far the greater number were scattered: some ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its abuse we shall hereinafter find exemplified in marked effects not only on individual minds, but also on the masses of mankind in past history: its use, in the development of true piety: its abuse, in asceticism, superstition, and overweening spiritual power resulting in crimes, which were "a sin unto death." Another abuse of secrecy has been manifested in means heretofore employed in the constant effort to obtain and maintain worldly power. This was by affecting the imagination and ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... Charles of Austria, second son of the Emperor Leopold, who was the descendant of younger sisters of the royal Spanish line, but did not excite the fear and jealousy of Europe, as did a scion of the already overweening house of Bourbon. This led to the War of the Spanish Succession, England and Holland supporting Charles, and fighting with Louis in Spain, Savoy, and the Low Countries. In Spain Louis was ultimately successful, and his grandson Philip V. retained the throne; ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... trouble came over her. Could it be that he, Robert Lyon, had been seized with the auri sacra fames, which he had so often inveighed against and despised? that his long battle with poverty had caused in him such an overweening desire for riches that, to obtain them, he would sacrifice every thing else, exile himself to a far country for years, selling his very ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... round, I was actually born into the fifth round of the human race in the planetary chain. "The adept," says an occult aphorism, "becomes; he is not made." That was exactly my case. I attribute it principally to an overweening confidence in myself, and to a blind faith in others. As ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... speaking of Shadynook and the fairies of that domain. Never have I seen Belinda, or rather Belle-bouche, so lovely, and I here disdainfully repel your ridiculous calumny that she's in love with you, you great lump of presumption and overweening self-conceit! Philippa too was a pastoral queen—in silk and jewels—and around them they had gathered together a troop of shepherds from the adjoining grammar-school, called William and Mary College, of which I am an aspiring bachelor, and you were an ornament before your religious opinions ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... whose lot it has been to grow old in literary retirement, devoted to classical studies with an exclusiveness which might lead to an overweening estimate of these two noble languages. Few, I will not say evil, were the days allowed to me for such pursuits; and I was constrained, still young and an unripe scholar to forego them for the duties of an active and laborious profession. They are now amusements only, however delightful ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... form, pretended To hellish falshood, snare them. But for thee I had persisted happie, had not thy pride And wandring vanitie, when lest was safe, Rejected my forewarning, and disdain'd Not to be trusted, longing to be seen Though by the Devil himself, him overweening To over-reach, but with the Serpent meeting Fool'd and beguil'd, by him thou, I by thee, 880 To trust thee from my side, imagin'd wise, Constant, mature, proof against all assaults, And understood not all was but a shew Rather then solid vertu, all ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... marching and counter-marching, frequent displays of courage—more courage than co-operation sometimes,—one or two defeats, and several rather barren successes. For the first eight months the advantage inclined to the insurgents. After that their overweening conceit of their Waikato contingent enabled our superior strength to assert itself. The Maoris, for all their courage and knowledge of the country, were neither clever guerillas nor good marksmen. Their tribal wars had always ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... every stage how far the rest of the universe is behind that favoured spot. He who desires to see how narrow his countrymen and countrywomen can be abroad, and how completely the mass of British travellers lay themselves open to the charge of insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore—if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... household for other gifts than courage or feats of arms, looked pale on each other, and had obviously received an unpleasant impression from the scene which had been just acted. Louis gazed on them with contempt, and then said aloud, "Although the Count of Crevecoeur be presumptuous and overweening, it must be confessed that in him the Duke of Burgundy hath as bold a servant as ever bore message for a prince. I would I knew where to find as faithful an Envoy to carry back ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... potatoes. The negroes of the village were our nearest neighbours, and we visited them occasionally, in the hope of ameliorating their condition by communicating to them such instruction as they were capable of receiving; but their grotesque ideas of liberty, overweening egotism, and marvellous superstition, together with the shortness of our stay in their vicinity, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... about the surrounding country; and Senorita Isolda frequently found herself contrasting the genial, hearty friendliness and chivalrous courtesy of her brother's English friends with the stiff, haughty, overbearing manner and overweening conceit of the Spanish officers, who seemed to think that such attentions as they chose to pay her ought to be regarded as a vast condescension on ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... paltry book, say you, sold by the hawking pedlars and balladmongers, entitled The Blason of Colours. Who made it? Whoever it was, he was wise in that he did not set his name to it. But, besides, I know not what I should rather admire in him, his presumption or his sottishness. His presumption and overweening, for that he should without reason, without cause, or without any appearance of truth, have dared to prescribe, by his private authority, what things should be denotated and signified by the colour: which is the custom of tyrants, who will have ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... superior officers have thrown a halo round their bloody graves, the stern truth still forces itself upon us, that the temporary eclipse of British glory was not the consequences of events beyond the power of human wisdom to foresee or ward off, but the natural results of an overweening confidence in our power, and of an infatuated blindness to the sure indications of the coming storm which for many months before it burst darkened our ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... favorable omen; and, in the conscious security of the spot, in the belief that he had received none of the injuries she had apprehended from the motion of the boat, and, above all, in the indulgence of that overweening pride of affection which covets all pains and sacrifices for the loved one, she felt a satisfaction which was almost happiness, in her situation. But it was not destined to be of very long duration. She at length began to perceive a gradual reddening of his cheeks, and ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... this cheating and screening Of cheats! this conscience for candle-wicks, Not beacon-fires! this overweening Of underhand diplomatical tricks, Dared for the country while scorned for ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... her husband until she thought its meaning was as clear as high noon. By the critic's advice the subject had been selected for musical treatment. Sordello's overweening spiritual pride—"gate-vein of this heart's blood of Lombardy"—appealed to Van Kuyp. The stress of souls, the welter of cross-purposes which begirt the youthful dreamer, his love for Palma, and his swift death when all the world thrust upon him its joys—here were motives, indeed, for any musician ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... safeguard. A man could wander round and round without finding a fairly nearby camp. Shelby was a few years older than the other two, and of a far more prudent nature. He had no dare-devil instincts, and not an overweening love of adventure. He was enjoying his trip because of the outdoor life and wildwood sports, but as for real adventure, he was content to omit it. Not from fear—Kit Shelby was as brave as any,—but he saw no sense in ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... poor little devil and all his works for half-a-crown? Ergo, the work taking shape on the canvas was his, Paragot's. What could be more logical? And it was he who had given me my first lessons. No mother showing off a precocious brat to her gossips could have displayed more overweening pride. It was pathetic, and I loved him for it, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... of disease. These physical disadvantages, combined with an education 'whose object was pretension, and whose principle was arrogance, made him at once a thing fearful and pitiable, at war with its species and itself, ready to crush in manhood as to sting in the cradle, and leading his overweening ambition to pursue its object by ways dark and hidden—safe from the penalty of crime, and exposed only to the obloquy which he laughed to scorn. If ever there was a man formed alike by nature and education to betray the land which gave him birth, and to act openly as the pander of political ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... thought we have an overweening love for our subject, beyond its just deserts, let us add here that the State has, in its geographical position, most extraordinary advantages, which, at present, are little known and of little worth, but which the future must inevitably develop. The vast and fertile region lying to the northwest ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... pitiable plight, half-starved and with torn uniforms, took refuge in Germany. Fully half a million lives had been sacrificed upon the fields of Russia to the ambition of one man. Yet in the face of these distressing facts, this one man had the unblushing effrontery and overweening egotism to announce to the afflicted French people that "the emperor has ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... he had grown up, how infinitely greater was the dislike against him of South Germans, more gifted, as a rule, by nature, to whom the name of Prussian is synonymous of all that is strait-laced and overweening and unnatural and—generally inconvenient. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... adoring slave. And she restored the whole shell of him. She restored the whole form and figure of him. But the core was gone. His pride was bolstered up, his blood ran once more in pride. But there was no core to him: as a distinct male he had no core. His triumphant, flaming, overweening heart of the intrinsic male would never beat again. He would be subject now, reciprocal, never the indomitable thing with a core of overweening, unabateable fire. She had abated that ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... even harder than she had expected. She herself had accepted the loss of her position with the easy fatalism of the poor, though it was a serious enough matter, in the slack midwinter and following three weeks of idleness. However, after her sex, her present overweening instinct was to erase that sort-of-white look from ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... all, and to scorn all examination which did not commence with this confession. Even the late learned Dr. Owen Pugh has, in his Dictionary, by arbitrarily selecting certain syllables as the roots of all Cumrian words, done much to foster this overweening conceit. The system was carried to its extreme point of absurdity by the Rev. Edward Davies, who by the help of such syllables expected to unravel the mysteries of all languages. This failure has I ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... the tragedy of overweening pride. The trouble with Coriolanus is not ambition, as is the case with Macbeth. He cares little for crowns, office, or any outward honor. Self-centered, self-sufficient, contemptuous of all mankind outside of his own immediate circle of friends, he dies at last because he refuses to ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... been spoiled by the over-careful fondness of women. No training is so useful for children, great or small, as the company of their betters in rank or natural parts; in whose society they lose the overweening sense of their own importance, which ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... succes d'estime. He was glad to accept an appointment to Berlin as court composer for Frederick William III. There he brought out "Lalla Rookh," "Alcidor," and "Agnes Hohenstauffen," none of which found currency in other cities. His overweening conduct gradually made his position at Berlin untenable. He was finally driven out by the hostile demonstrations of his audiences, and retired, in 1841, a broken man. After a few years spent in Paris he returned to Italy, where ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... compliments to that sovereign; but really, as we may suppose, to observe as much as he could of the numbers and condition of the troops. Savary, on his return, informed his master that the Russian prince was surrounded by a set of young coxcombs, whose every look and gesture expressed overweening confidence in themselves and contempt for their opponents. All the reverses of the previous campaign were, as they took care to signify, the result of unpardonable cowardice among the Austrians, whose spirit had been ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... agricultural product. What divinity hedges cotton, that competition may not touch it,—that some disease, like that of the potato and the vine, may not bring it to beggary in a single year, and cure the overweening conceit of prosperity with the sharp medicine of Ireland and Madeira? But these South Carolina economists are better at vaporing than at calculation. They will find to their cost that the figure's of statistics have little mercy for the figures of speech, which are so powerful in raising enthusiasm ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... which at all times I have taken more pains to subdue, than that overweening pride, and immeasurable conceit, which are the principal features of your lordship's character. Nature, indeed, has furnished you with one corrective to them, or they must infallibly have damned you. It is timidity. Other people may laugh at this quality. For my part I esteem it worthy ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... large and small (and including both a remodelled Germany and a largely remodelled Austria) in one great Federation—whose purpose would be partly to unite and preserve Europe against any common foe, from the East or elsewhere, and partly to regulate any overweening ambition of a member of the Federation, such as might easily become a menace to the other members. A secondary but most important result of the formation of such a United States of Europe would be that while ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... of prepossessing appearance, had been one of the most promising officers, and had early been promoted to commandant. Whether through overweening ambition on his part or not I cannot say, but Vilonel, accused of insubordination, was thenceforth given the distasteful and inglorious task of commandeering. He wearied of this, and applied for active service, but in vain. Then, smarting under a sense of injustice, he took the fatal ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... temperament: some taint or some flaw will be assumed to affect and to vitiate his creative instinct or his spiritual reason. And in the case of John Marston, the friend and foe of Ben Jonson, the fierce and foul-mouthed satirist, the ambitious and overweening tragedian, the scornful and passionate humorist, it is easy for the shallowest and least appreciative reader to perceive the nature and to estimate the weight of such drawbacks or impediments as have so long and so seriously interfered with the due recognition of an independent and remarkable ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... is that religion is a progressive movement, an unfolding revelation of life. "What a height of Presumption is it," he says, "to believe that the Wisdom and fullness of God can ever be pent up in a Synodical Canon? How overweening are we to limit the successive manifestations of God to a present rule and light, persecuting all that comes not forth in its height and breadth!" It is through this "unnatural desire" to keep Christians in "a perpetual infancy" that "our dry nurses" in the Church have "brought us to ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... moment he was silent, while she sensed that overweening hate and menace which charged ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... all with swift glances, and decided at once that Larkin and Cazotte, full of overweening confidence, would want their way, but he said nothing, merely leading the band into the mass of dense green foliage that rimmed the camp around. He looked back but once, and saw his four faithful comrades sitting by the fire, it seemed to him, in an attitude of dejection. ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... old religion of his fathers, stripped of supernaturalism, as the only hope of the world. The biography by Froude, while it does not conceal the atrabilious temperament of Carlyle, his bad temper, his intense egotism, his irritability, his overweening pride, his scorn, his profound loneliness and sorrow, and the deep gloom into which he finally settled, made clear at the same time his honest and tender nature, his noble independence, his heroic struggles with poverty of which he never complained, his generous charities, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... to laugh, but he refrained, not wishing to offend Jim, who was evidently suffering from an overweening sense of his own importance, since he had graduated into a temporary occupancy of the editorial chair. Jim was considerably short of twenty at that, so it could not have been more than a year or two since he used to play ball, and train with the ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... animal nature cannot long proceed without betraying the succours of reason. When the bands of morality are thus spurned, a man rapidly sins his understanding into lameness; as its better forces must needs be quickly rotted in such a vapour-bath of sensuality. In this way an overweening pride of wit often results in causing a man to be deserted by his wits; this too in matters where he feels surest of them and has most need of them. In refusing to see what is right, he loses the power of seeing what is prudent and safe. He who persists in such ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... judge the world. The sun continued to rise, and the seasons followed each other in their accustomed course, but the end was not yet. Nor did the civil power return to the old faith. Nikon fell a victim to Court intrigues and his own overweening pride, and was formally deposed. Tsar Alexis in the fulness of time was gathered unto his fathers. But there was no sign of a re-establishment of the old Orthodoxy. Gradually the leading Raskolniki perceived that they must make preparations, not for the Day of Judgment, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... was this woman?—An unbalanced mind in a sensually inclined body. As with all who are greedy of pleasure, the foundation of her moral being was overweening egotism. Her dominant faculty, her intellectual axis, so to speak, was imagination—an imagination nourished upon a wide range of literature, connected with her sex and perpetually stimulated by neurotic excitement. Possessed of a certain degree of intellectual capacity, brought up in all the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... his mood, And seized on every spoil was good; From chickens, rising by degrees, Until he took the butcher's fees: Then, in his overweening pride, Over the hounds he would preside; And, lastly, visiting the rocks, He took his province from the fox. And so it happened on a day A yawl equipped at anchor lay. He stopped, and thus expressed his mind: "What blundering puppies are mankind! What stupid pedantry in schools, Their compasses ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... for the final movement under cover of darkness and he rose from his desk, the thing that had edged its way into a crowded mind took possession of the premises that strategy and tactics had vacated. It passed under the same analysis as his work. His overweening pride, so sensitive to the suspicion of a conviction that he had been fooled, put his relations ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... animal already alluded to, actuated by an overweening desire of notoriety, and in order to catch the applause of some one, grovelling in the morasses of insignificance and vice, like himself, leaves his native obscurity, and indulges in falsehood, calumny, and defamation. I am convinced that ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... which until that time had thriven conspicuously, if somewhat illusively, in its commercial results, and had substantially attained its especial object of maritime preponderance. Other peoples had to submit to the compulsion exerted by her overweening superiority. The obligation upon foreign shipping to be three-fourths manned by their own citizens, for instance, rested only upon a British law, and applied only in a British port; but the accumulations of British capital, with the consequent facility ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... myself. It was not thus that I desired to be loved. And then I began to fall into a great pity for the girl herself. I thought how sharp must be her mortification, that she, the student, the recluse, Felipe's saintly monitress, should have thus confessed an overweening weakness for a man with whom she had never exchanged a word. And at the coming of pity, all other thoughts were swallowed up; and I longed only to find and console and reassure her; to tell her how wholly her love was returned on my side, and how her ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as useless and oppressive as undigested food; and as in the dyspeptic patient the appetite for food often grows with the inability to digest it, so in the unthinking patient an overweening desire to know often accompanies the inability to know to any purpose. Thought is to the brain what gastric juice is to the stomach,—a solvent to reduce whatever is received to a condition in which all that is wholesome and nutritive may be appropriated, and that ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... for the first time the aggressor in this legislation. Mr. Fillmore declared that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was "the Pandora Box of Evil." Mr. Douglas was reviled by his opponents and burned in effigy at the North. His leadership in this fight was ascribed to his overweening ambition to reach the presidency. The clergymen of New England and of Chicago flooded the Senate with petitions crying against this "intrigue." On May 26, 1854, at one o'clock in the morning, the bill passed ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... presume to read. Courage! Edward has seen the merchants; he has flouted Hastings,—who would gainsay us. For the rest, Elizabeth, be it yours to speak of affronts paid by the earl to your highness; be it yours, Jacquetta, to rouse Edward's pride by dwelling on Warwick's overweening power; be it mine to enlist his interest on behalf of his merchandise; be it Margaret's to move his heart by soft tears for the bold Charolois; and ere a month be told, Warwick shall find his embassy a thriftless laughing-stock, and no shade pass between the ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he fiercely issues his last command, and embraces death to escape insult. The haughty spirit was unchanged, crushed but the same, unsoftened, and therefore roused to madder defiance of God and man. What an awful last saying for 'the anointed of Jehovah,' and how the overweening self-will and vehemence and passionate pride of his whole life ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Holy See, they will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life without some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is to love and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other men. An overweening sense of the passion and importance of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women, they feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if they were so many Joan-of-Arc's; but this does not come out in their ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unformed personality. Nevertheless Duchemin was grateful, and with the young girl as guide for the nth time sailed with d'Artagnan to Newcastle and rode with him toward Belle Isle, with him frustrated the machinations of overweening Aramis and yawned over the insufferable virtues of that most precious prig of all Romance, Raoul, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... what he meant by the signs of the times, 'those who arrogate the gift of the Holy Ghost, while their sole inspiration is the presumption of their own hearts and an overweening contempt of authority, may well mistake signs of their own causing for signs from heaven. I but repeat the very words of good ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... these were not acknowledged in Rome and Florence by those who could reward them, yet in France he found one to recompense him for them, and that in such sort, that his glory might have sufficed to quench the thirst of the most overweening ambition that could possess the heart of any craftsman, be he who he may. Nor could he have obtained in this life greater dignities, honour, or rank, seeing that he was regarded with favour and much ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... his heart there entered also the exceeding bitterness of a lost ideal. She became to him, as he had become to her, the image of broken faith, capricious feeling, and overweening worldly ambition. ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... again and watched the frigate, for he felt that perhaps after all he might have been mistaken, and the sailor lying by him too. Terry was an officer and a gentleman. He had a horrible temper; he was as jealous and overweening as could be, but it seemed impossible that he could so degrade himself as to be guilty of an act that was like a betrayal of his brother officers ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... right on many not inconsiderable details of the dispute, and that so-called orthodox Christians in their hearts knew it but would not own it—or that if they did not know it, they were only in ignorance because it suited their purpose to be so—this conviction gave an overweening self-confidence to infidels, as though they must be right in the whole because they were so in part; they therefore blinded themselves to all the more fundamental arguments in support of Christianity, because certain shallow ones had been ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... privileged few, and of the general visible coercion which came of those laws. All that cause of violent crime is gone. Again, many violent acts came from the artificial perversion of the sexual passions, which caused overweening jealousy and the like miseries. Now, when you look carefully into these, you will find that what lay at the bottom of them was mostly the idea (a law-made idea) of the woman being the property of the man, whether he were husband, father, brother, or what not. That idea ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... he had learned his love-making in a bad school. She dropped dark hints that frightened Lorania, who would sometimes piteously demand, "Don't you think he could care for me—for—for myself?" Margaret knew that she had an overweening distrust of her own appearance. How many tears she had shed first and last over her unhappy plumpness it would be hard to reckon. She made no account of her satin skin, or her glossy black hair, or her lustrous violet eyes with their long, black ...
— Different Girls • Various
... consent. A majority in a single assembly, when it has assumed a permanent character—when composed of the same persons habitually acting together, and always assured of victory in their own House—easily becomes despotic and overweening if released from the necessity of considering whether its acts will be concurred in by another constituted authority. The same reason which induced the Romans to have two consuls makes it desirable there should be two Chambers—that neither of them may be exposed to ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... even the contempt, which he felt for the fallen idol. James had outraged the moral sense of the community; his name could not be mentioned without indignation; everything he did was wrong, even his very real modesty was explained as overweening conceit. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... to account, they are sources of power no longer. And here we might halt for a moment to remark on that tendency, so prevalent in the world, to regard everything as made for human use. Those who entertain this notion, hold, I think, an overweening opinion of their own importance in the system of nature. Flowers bloomed before men saw them, and the quantity of power wasted before man could utilise it is all but infinite compared with what now remains. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... of congratulation and thanksgiving—upon a bright prospect that the wishes will be crossed, and the endeavours frustrated, of those amongst us who, without their own knowledge, were ready to relinquish every good which they and we possess, by uniting with overweening Reformers—to compose the VANGUARD OF A ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the feet of powerful neighbours with gigantic armaments, which loves, enjoys, and cherishes liberty, but which at the same time fears lest that inestimable jewel should be wrenched out of its hands by overweening force—if there be such a State, and there may be such a State in the East and in the West—then I will venture to say that in that State, from the highest to the lowest, from sovereign to subject, joy and satisfaction will have been diffused by the ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... and the authorities in Tanna Fort from becoming suspicious. The latter would not be difficult. Manik Chand would gain nothing by blocking the fairway unless it were absolutely necessary to do so, and, in common with other of the Nawab's lieutenants, he had an overweening confidence in the power of the forts to repel an attack from the English ships. For this reason it was advisable to make the minds of the other men easy, and Desmond soon hit on ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... came soon enough. It was the work of a wretched political adventurer, who, inflated by an overweening estimate of his own abilities and importance, had made a preposterous claim to two high political offices—the post of Minister to Austria, and Consul to Paris—and receiving no encouragement in either direction, had deliberately made up his mind ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... has not perpetrated. His hapless fellow-citizens have been subjected to every form of cruelty and insult. Virgins have been seduced, boys corrupted, the feelings of his subjects outraged in every possible way. His overweening pride, his insolent bearing towards all who had to do with him, were such as no doom of yours can adequately requite. A man might with more security have fixed his gaze upon the blazing sun, than upon yonder tyrant. As for ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... as Hurst accompanied us to the stable-yard to "start us," as he complacently phrased it, it was clear that he was suffering, like a great many unfortunate individuals in public and private life, under an overweening sense of his own importance. "You'll have an uncommon pleasant drive of it; upon my word you will," he remarked; "it wouldn't do for me to say I would not stay, you know, as Miss Leicester—Mrs Leicester, that is—seemed to make such a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... threefold denial, and now found himself groping in something which was little better than a vacuum. And in his trouble he found himself wishing he was gifted with Sunny's wit. Wild Bill's force would have carried him through, or even Sandy Joyce's overweening confidence would have kept his head above water. As it was he was stuck. Hopelessly, irretrievably at ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... were jealously kept apart, and when one monarch, in a fit of overweening self-importance, tried to unite in his own person the kingly and the priestly functions, 'the leprosy rose up in his forehead,' even as he stood with the censer in his hand, and 'Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day of his death.' And the history of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... account in her 'fadaises,' or else they would not have been multiplied to such an extent—what advantage, we ask, has she derived from her faculty of scribbling, except that she has made herself pretty widely known, and ridiculed wherever she is known? Presumptuous ignorance, and overweening conceit, have, in her case, completely nullified, nay worse, have converted into a curse, in some respects, what was intended every way for a blessing. If Lady Morgan would forego her mongrel idiom, and use the English language; if she would confine herself ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Clerambault, they unmasked their batteries and violently taxed him with absurd, criminal pride. They asked him if he thought himself cleverer than anyone else, that he set himself up against the entire nation? On what did he found this overweening self-confidence? Duty consists in being humble, and keeping to one's proper place in the community; when it commands, our duty is to bow to it, and, whether we agree or not, we must carry out its orders. Woe to the rebel against the soul of his ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... weeks since, at a meeting of the club of the "Cheeryble Sisters," to which all three little girls belonged, Gracie's overweening self-conceit and irrepressible desire to be first had led her into conflict with another of her classmates, Lena Neville, in which she had proved herself so arrogant, so jealous and ill-tempered that she had excited the indignation of all who were present. But if they had known what followed ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... The game is up—is thoroughly played out. This he acknowledges to himself, and the knowledge does not help to sweeten his temper. It helps him, however, to direct a last shaft at her. Taking up his hat, he makes a movement to depart, and then looks back at her. His overweening vanity is still alive. ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... little favor in either House, and therefore it is necessary for me, Gentlemen, lest the whole burden fall on others, to say that it had my hearty, sincere, and entire approbation. Gentlemen, I hope that I have not manifested through my public life a very overweening confidence in my own judgment, or a very unreasonable unwillingness to accept the views of others. But there are some subjects on which I feel entitled to pay some respect to my own opinion. The subject of currency, Gentlemen, has been the study of my life. Thirty years ago, a ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... corruption, which Adam was said to have entailed. In short, I could scarcely find the modern doctrine of the "Fall" any where in the Bible. I then remembered that Calvin, in his Institutes, complains that all the Fathers are heterodox on this point; the Greek Fathers being grievously overweening in their estimate of human power; while of the Latin Fathers even Augustine is not always up to Calvin's mark of orthodoxy. This confirmed my rising conviction that the tenet is of rather recent origin. I afterwards heard, that both it and the doctrine ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... shew him worthy of his birth divine And high prediction, henceforth I expose To Satan; let him tempt, and now assay His utmost subtlety, because he boasts And vaunts of his great cunning to the throng Of his Apostasy. He might have learnt Less overweening, since he failed in Job, Whose constant perseverance overcame Whate'er his cruel malice could invent. He now shall know I can produce a man, 150 Of female seed, far abler to resist All his solicitations, and at length All his vast force, and ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton
... that he wants to do it is one-half of success. Before turning him down, there must be a substantially clear showing that he lacks the main qualifications. It must be a compelling reason, rather than the overweening excuse that it is more convenient to keep him where he is. In any case, he should be thanked for coming forward, and earmarked as a good prospect for the next ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... sanguinary hue, than has ever been sanctioned by the jurisprudence of any ancient or modern nation, civilized and refined like herself; the merciless whippings in her army, peculiar to herself alone, the conspicuous commission and freest acknowledgment of vice in the upper classes; the overweening distinctions shown to opulence and birth, so destructive of a sound moral sentiment in the nation, so baffling to virtue. These are some of the traits that rise up to a contemplation of the inhabitants ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... between different cities in which it is thought necessary to confer such mutual right by express stipulation. Temptation was offered, to the distinguished gymnastic or musical competitors, by prizes of great value. Timaeus even asserted, as a proof of the overweening pride of Croton and Sybaris, that these cities tried to supplant the preeminence of the Olympic games by instituting games of their own with the richest prizes to be celebrated at the same time—a statement in itself not worthy of credit, yet ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... badges of distinction. He took upon himself exactly the character his appearance presented, went to the stable and saw his horse accommodated, then returned to the house, and seating himself in the public room (for to request one to himself would, in those days, have been thought an overweening degree of conceit), he found himself in the very apartment in which he had some years before celebrated his victory at the game of the popinjay,—a jocular preferment which led to so ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... are prepared, let him lie dead: and be ye all parted with speed. Bring ye two lambs, one white ram and one black ewe, for earth and sun; and let us bring one for Zeus. And call hither great Priam, that he may pledge the oath himself, seeing he hath sons that are overweening and faithless, lest any by transgression do violence to the oath of Zeus; for young men's hearts are ever lifted up. But wheresoever an old man entereth in, he looketh both before and after, whereby the best issue ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... say that the evils, of which I have spoken, would be brought about only by the obduracy, prejudices, and overweening self-estimation of the whites in refusing to blend the races by marriage, and so create a homogenous population?[252] But what, if it be not prejudice, but truth, and nature, and right reason, and just moral feeling? As I have before said, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... between Sim and his inclinations. His feeling against Bas Rowlett was becoming an obsession of venom fed by the overweening arrogance of the man, but Bas still held him in the hollow of his hand, and besides these reefs of menace were yet other shoals ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Men, like the master, who ardently wished reforms, were repelled when they found the main object of the leaders of the agitation was the separation of Canada from Britain and would have nothing to do with them. The first time the master met Mackenzie he took a dislike to him, perceiving his overweening vanity, his habit of contradiction, and his lack of judgment. He said he was a specimen of the unpleasant type of Scot who meddled and denounced to attract attention and make himself of consequence. When he saw him shaping a rebellion he declared it would ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... a short while before his death in 1844, John Sterling committed the care of his literary Character and printed Writings to two friends, Archdeacon Hare and myself. His estimate of the bequest was far from overweening; to few men could the small sum-total of his activities in this world seem more inconsiderable than, in those last solemn days, it did to him. He had burnt much; found much unworthy; looking steadfastly into the silent continents of Death ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... too far, but I reserve to myself the right of retracing my footsteps wherever and whenever I please. I am sorry I conveyed to you or to any one else the impression that you had only to speak in order to obtain my hand, and I can only conclude that your overweening vanity has led you into a mistake which I will be generous enough to hold my ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... than he was to-day?—Men of a learned education are not so sharp-witted as clever men without it; but they know the balance of the human intellect better; if they are more stupid, they are more steady, and are less liable to be led astray by their own sagacity and the overweening petulance of hard-earned and late-acquired wisdom. They do not fall in love with every meretricious extravagance at first sight, or mistake an old battered hypothesis for a vestal, because they are new to the ways of this old world. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... I said. You're talking through a fog of cynicism which seems to obscure an otherwise fairly competent intellect. You've plundered so many innocents in your time by purveying an excessive quantity of bluestone disguised under the name of alcohol that your overweening conceit has entirely distorted your perspective till you fancy that your own dregs of human nature constitute the human nature of all the rest of the world, who would entirely resent being classed as your fellows. In a ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... foremost, but would hold him a little aback, and while the battle was young he forbore to smite, and would do nothing but help a kinsman who was hard pressed, or succour the wounded. So that if men were dealing with no very hard matter, and their hearts were high and overweening, he would come home at whiles with unbloodied blade. But no man blamed him save those who knew him not: for his intent was that the younger men should win themselves fame, and so raise their courage, and ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... beast come out of the waters, which spouted ghastly fire from its mouth, enveloping everything in a sheet of flame. Therefore the holes and corners of the island should, he said, be searched; nor ought they to trust so much to their position, as rashly to let overweening confidence bring them to utter ruin. No situation was so strong that the mere protection of nature was enough for it without human effort. Moreover they must take great care that the warning of his slumbers was not followed by a yet more gloomy and disastrous fulfilment. So they all sallied forth ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... contain, and done their utmost to blight their own happiness and that of all around them. Misanthropy is sometimes the product of disappointed benevolence; but it is more frequently the offspring of overweening and mortified vanity, quarrelling with the world for not being better ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... October day, he felt as if he owned all in sight—a condition of mind which those who know from experience the powerful electro-magnetic current generated by the rushing life of the New York metropolis can well understand. He struck out into the stream with the rest, and with overweening confidence in himself—in himself as master of circumstances which he intended to control in his own interests, in himself as the pivotal point of Flamsted affairs. The rapidity of the current acted as ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... culture, or any knowledge or intellect whatever.) With regard to the mental-educational part of our model, enlargement of intellect, stores of cephalic knowledge, &c., the concentration thitherward of all the customs of our age, especially in America, is so overweening, and provides so fully for that part, that, important and necessary as it is, it really needs nothing from us here—except, indeed, a phrase of warning and restraint. Manners, costumes, too, though important, we need not dwell upon here. Like beauty, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... There everything manifested an intense bitterness of purpose; the court, composed of the two most unscrupulous partisans, Chief Justices Blackbourne and Doherty, and the weakest or falsest political convert, Mr. Justice Moore, simulated the uncontrollable emotions which an overweening loyalty awoke in the bosom of the Catholic Attorney-General. So far were their lordships swayed by the spirit of imitativeness, that the most polished speakers, mistaking the incoherent jargon of the official for the broken utterance of overwrought zeal and shocked loyalty, mimicked ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... classical studies. Amid the pedantic farrago of his omni-sufficiency (to borrow one of his own words) we come suddenly upon passages whose gravity of sentiment, stateliness of movement, and purity of diction remind us of Landor. These lucid intervals in his overweening vanity explain and justify the friendship of Spenser. Yet the reiteration of emphasis with which he insists on all the world's knowing that Nash had called him an ass, probably gave Shakespeare the hint for one of the most comic touches in the ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
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