Word: conceit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...means of exercising the restlessness which seems to be continually in my heart. . . . It is why I tried so hard to win a Phi Beta Kappa key [and did];. . . . I hope to heaven . . . this constant hope of arriving at some degree of perfection is not a peculiar form of conceit. . . . To me it is Religion. The other people you have written to will have clearly expressed answers. . . . I wish I could see George Bernard Shaw's. He once told me that tennis should be played in a meadow, with grass a foot high, and with no balls...
...over more in the right than the M. S. C. faculty man who said the faculty often needed criticism. For them, or for any one else, to question this is a demonstration of abysmal conceit...
Frankenstein (Universal). Mary Wollstonecraft (Mrs. Percy Bysshe Shelley) wrote this story, supposedly to win a bet from her husband and Lord Byron. It is a grisly conceit about a young doctor who, experimenting with synthetic animation, produces a live, dangerous and somewhat human monster. Universal, encouraged by the success of Dracula to produce a series of horrific weirds, in which Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue will be next, entrusted the direction of Frankenstein to James Whale. He did it in the Grand Guignol manner, with as many queer sounds, dark corners, false faces and cellar stairs...
Some years ago a scientist announced that it was possible to cut the head from off the body and allow the intellect to exist without nourishment of any king. George Bernard Shaw thought the conceit a quaint one, it would save his getting dressed in the morning and allow him to exert his only important function unhampered, so he toyed idly with the idea in the columns of the London Times. Mr. Shaw is still at large. In direct antithesis we have Thomas Hardy, writing in the fullness of his fatalism "that thought is a disease of the flesh...
...golfers who were playing in the U. S. Open tournament at Inverness last week, you might have selected the two who tied for the championship after 72 holes. One was George Von Elm, a trim blond haired little man with self confidence so noticeable that it approaches conceit, who played in the Open last year as an amateur. A few months later, describing himself as a "business man golfer" he set about playing against professionals for money prizes, made a good business of it by tying John Golden in the $25,000 Agua Caliente Open. Five years ago he beat...