Use pedant in a sentence

The Wagnerian pedants, not content with proscribing every new melodrama, busied themselves with dressing up the old melodramas and operas.

These dogmatic pedants would lead one to believe that "program music" is the product of our degenerate age, invented by musicians barren of inspiration, eagerly clutching at anything enabling them to earn even a fictitious reputation.

People of condition, liberally educated, have unfortunately abandoned public affairs for some time; so that the incapacity of some, and the pride or despondency of others, have, in a manner, left the nation to the guidance of pedants, incendiaries, and adventurers.

Above all, he has victoriously shown his old faculty of conducting the story with such a series of enthralling, even if sometimes episodic passages, that nobody but a pedant of 'construction' would care to inquire too narrowly whether they actually make a whole.

They are fiercely resentful of what they deem the supercilious arrogance of those who possess or strive for some far-off touch or faint tincture of the culture and discipline which they denounce as shibboleths, taboos, and the arbitrary conventions of pedants.

As to its actual merits, Johnson's contemporaries differed widely, some proclaiming him a pompous pedant with a passion for words of six syllables and more, others delighting in those passages in which weighty meaning was illustrated with splendor and vigor.

Had you known him, as I have done, before he was seized with this systematic affectation, which, I am satisfied, causes him more study than the united pedants of both universities could inflict upon him, you would have seen the most delightful creature breathing!

And nothing can more powerfully tend to place this beyond our acquisition, even our contemplation, than the perpetual and hourly rebuffs which ingenuous youth is so often doomed to sustain from the supercilious pedant, and the rigid decision of his unfeeling elders.

For whatever arguments there may be in favor of a celibate priesthood, the celibate social philosopher most obviously suffers from a grave disadvantage; he lacks both the knowledge and the discipline that prevent men of thought becoming mere pedants and theorists.

During the military operations connected with this political maneuver, the Duke of Sung was guilty of the most ridiculous piece of ritual chivalry; highly approved, it is true, by the literary pedants of all subsequent ages, but ruinous to his own worldly cause.

Self-righteous pedants who had turned religion into a jumble of petty precepts, and very superior persons who keenly appreciated the good things of this world, and were too enlightened to have much belief in anything, and too comfortable to be enthusiasts, were not hopeful material.

He then retired again to his independence as a crafty old bachelor, and Saint Simon gives us a pleasant snapshot of him in these latest years, "a very straightforward man, capital company, simple, with nothing of the pedant about him, and entirely disinterested."

There were of course arguments of more weight than this, which we have ventured to present merely for the sake of its quaintness, characteristic as it is of the day when tireless pedants were wont to debate in this fashion all things in heaven and on earth.

It is imagination again which adds the piquant charm of voluptuousness to the tenderness of an amorous heart; which makes tenderness bud in the study of the philosopher and of the dusty pedant, which, in a word, creates scholars as well as orators and poets.

His self-laudatory inscriptions upon stone, scattered about as he travelled from place to place, tell us plainly, in his own royal words, that this hatred of presumptuous vassal claims was his prime motive in destroying all the pedants and books he could secure.

Here the spurious "greatness" of inhuman conquerors, of droning pedants, of paltry beaus, of hermits proud of their humility, is mercilessly laid bare; and something is disclosed of the "piercing discernment" of that genius which, Murphy tell us, "saw the latent sources of human actions."

Unhappily, even at the time of their first woodcut book, the beginning of the end was on them; about thirty years afterwards they received the Renaissance with singular eagerness and rapidity, and became, from the artistic point of view, a nation of rhetorical pedants.

All classifying of literature intrudes 'science' upon an art, and is artificially 'scientific'; a trick of pedants, that they may make it the easier to examine you on things with which no man should have any earthly concern, as I am sure he will never have a heavenly one.

In the first place, is there not a just distinction to be made, lest we commit the error of confounding in the same anathema studious women with learned women, cultivated women with absurd women, women of sense, reflection, and serious habits of application with pedants?

Psychology, like sociology, is still largely in the scholastic stage, it is ignorant and intellectual, a happy refuge for the lazy industry of pedants; instead of experience and accurate description and analysis it begins with the rash assumption of elements and starts out upon ridiculous syntheses.

I would invariably make pupils talk, during lessons, Latin and Greek, no matter how badly at first; but unfortunately I should have to begin with teaching the pedants who, as a class, are far more unwilling and unready to learn than are those they teach.

That old statesman, whose rough, gray hairs were like brushes for removing cobwebs, a pedant from head to foot, leaning in his favorite attitude against the mantel decorated only with flowers, by his mulish obstinacy contributed much to the fall of the last monarchy.

The grave and solid studies she had entered into with her father had strengthened her mind, as it were, with the "bark and steel" of literature; while the native tenderness of her heart had prevented her from becoming that odious creature, a female pedant.

It was not surprising that Denis, who practiced upon ignorant people that petty despotism for which he was so remarkable, should now, on coming in contact with great spiritual authority, adopt his own principles, and relapse from the proud pedant into the cowardly slave.

Much has been written on this debatable subject and doubtless will continue to be, either as an arrow shot into the air by some wary pedant, or an equally unconvincing statement, without proof, of some mere follower in the footsteps of an illustrious, but behind the times, expert.

According to Luke, their breach of the Rabbinical exposition of the law was an event more dreadful in the eyes of these narrow pedants; for there was not only reaping, but the analogue of winnowing and grinding, for the grains were rubbed in the disciples' palms.

The exoteric crowd of the Civil Service, that is, the great body of clerks attached to other offices, regard their brethren of the Weights as prigs and pedants, and look on them much as a master's favorite is apt to be regarded by other boys at school.

Even to-day when that country has been written to death, plowed up by pedants and harrowed by illiterate motorists and photographers, the papers are almost too good to leave in the dust of old libraries, with their tang of a spring morning early enough to taste of frost.

The two days for the consideration of the Governor's reply lengthened out to four, and four to a week; and when the poor secretary dared now and again to hint that duty required a settlement of the business, he was sharply bidden to hold his pedant's tongue.

Indeed, he ran into the opposite extreme; but it is one of the great beauties of art to show it waving and retiring, now losing and then recovering itself again, as it always does in nature, without any of that stiff, edgy appearance, which only pedants affect or admire.

These are the communicative and shining pedants, who adorn their conversation, even with women, by happy quotations of Greek and Latin; and who have contracted such a familiarity with the Greek and Roman authors, that they call them by certain names or epithets denoting intimacy.

He delighted in speaking to those who did not know how to answer him, whether because they were amazed at his arguments, or because they pretended to be so; but he called pedants, and avoided all persons, who by true reasoning pulled down the weak scaffolding of his arguments.

It was a close confutation of the charges made in Harvey's "Four Letters," the vulgarity and insolence of the pedant being pressed home with an insistence which must have been particularly galling to him as coming from a distinguished man of his own university, twenty years his junior.

If on the one side his pride revolted at the idea of being under an obligation to such a person as the pedant, on the other he was touched and gratified by this kind proposition so frankly made, and which, moreover, accorded so well with his own secret desires.

They were wise enough to consider, what a sanction it would give their performances, to fall under the animadversion of such a pen; and have therefore used all the forms of provocation commonly practiced by little obscure pedants, who are fond of distinguishing themselves by the fame of an adversary.

The pedant pours out an endless succession of facts with a monotonous uniformity of emphasis, and exhausts while he instructs; the man of culture gives us a few facts, luminous in their relation to one another, and freshens and stimulates by bringing us into contact with ideas and with life.

The pedants of the Convention are not unlearned in the history of the Praetorian Bands and the omnipotence of armies; and an offensive war is undertaken to give occupation to the soldiers, whose inactivity might produce reflection, or whose discontent might prove fatal to the new order of things.

A man who knows the world will not only make the most of everything he does know, but of many things he does not know; and will gain more credit by his adroit mode of hiding his ignorance, than the pedant by his awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition.

Even many of those pedants who slept through the preparatory period of imperialist development during the last decades, and continued to maintain a traditional attitude towards ideas of democracy and universal suffrage, began to feel during the war that their accustomed ideas had become fraught with some new meaning.

I could only admire, being unable to afford to buy masterpieces which I felt would have a future value, and which were then sold for a mere song, the pedants of David's school despising the French art of the eighteenth century, it being too amiable and witty for their taste.

For the rest, a stiff, narrow-minded, fussy pedant, with small toleration for any methods or aims but his own; who, while he appreciated the superior gifts of his son, was obstinately bent on guiding them in strict professional grooves, and teased him with the friction of opposing wills.

Finding himself at once, after years of theological study, face to face with a foreign commonwealth and a momentous epoch, in which politics were so commingled with divinity as to offer daily the most puzzling problems, the royal pedant hugged himself at beholding so conspicuous a field for his talents.

Men who had passed half their lives on the waves, and who had been in battles, storms and shipwrecks, were impatient of his somewhat pompous lectures and reprimands, and pronounced him a mere pedant, who, with all his book learning, was ignorant of what every cabin boy knew.

They were not pedants, but men of immense genius and learning, who blended the profoundest principles of moral wisdom with the most fascinating narratives, men universally popular among learned and unlearned, and men who were great artists in style, and masters of the language in which they wrote.

Having said all this, I cannot help reflecting, what a formal dull fellow, or a cloistered pedant, would say, if they were to see this letter: they would look upon it with the utmost contempt, and say that surely a father might find much better topics for advice to a son.

Thus, the speculative, cloistered pedant, in his solitary cell, forms systems of things as they should be, not as they are; and writes as decisively and absurdly upon war, politics, manners, and characters, as that pedant talked, who was so kind as to instruct Hannibal in the art of war.

The traditional garden, whose past had been one long series of noble chances in fine company, now found content as the pedant's darling where it could have no opening for living romance, but must be tricked out in stage conventions, and dwindle more and more into a thing of shreds and patches!

It is a far cry from Aristotle to atheism, but no sooner did the votaries of the new learning discard a system of philosophy which, however exaggerated by pedants, was still a guarantee of exact reasoning, than their disciples and followers fell a prey to the vagaries of their own bewildered intellects.

Many readers pronounced tire writer a pompous pedant, who would never use a word of two syllables where it was possible to use a word of six, and who could not make a waiting woman relate her adventures without balancing every noun with another noun, and every epithet with another epithet.

Many readers pronounced the writer a pompous pedant, who would never use a word of two syllables where it was possible to use a word of six, and who could not make a waiting woman relate her adventures without balancing every noun with another noun, and every epithet with another epithet.

As to the rest, this method of education ought to be carried on with a severe sweetness, quite contrary to the practice of our pedants, who, instead of tempting and alluring children to letters by apt and gentle ways, do in truth present nothing before them but rods and ferules, horror and cruelty.

Murdoch, who was an enthusiast in learning, much of a pedant, and such a judge of genius that he thought wit should always be laughing, and poetry wear an eternal smile, performed his task well: he found Robert to be quick in apprehension, and not afraid to study when knowledge was the reward.

Harvey was a pedant, but pedantry was part of the erudition of an age when our national literature was passing from its infancy; he introduced hexameter verses into our language, and pompously laid claim to an invention which, designed for the reformation of English verse, was practiced till it was found sufficiently ridiculous.

She makes songs, sings them, and remembers all that ever were made; and, having lived from the most agreeable to the most reasoning age, has all that was amiable in the last, all that is sensible in this, without the vanity of the former, or the pedant impertinence of the latter.

Lucky is the alumnus who can call the roll of his old instructors, and among the martinets and the pedants and the piously inane can here and there come suddenly upon a man; a man who taught him to think, or helped him to feel, and thrilled him with a new horizon.

No man has ever seen with deeper insight the working of those natural forces which build up communities, or which group communities into empires; and in the actual state of the American Colonies, in their actual relation to the mother country, he saw a result of such forces which only madmen and pedants would disturb.

Many of the Romans after they began to study Greek literature certainly piqued themselves on being good Greek scholars, and Cicero occasionally quotes with all the airs of a pedant; but so thoroughly was the contrary ideal, the ideal of the doer, established at Rome, that nobody ever dreamt of placing its rival above it.

A man whose brain was teeming with his own thoughts and creations, but who had neglected to stock it with the hundred thousand conventional facts culled from the hundred best books selected for him by other people, would be looked upon as an uneducated boor by cultured pedants of the conventional type.

Let pedants prate of wars of kites and crows; we take national life as a unity, and dare to face its evolution through all the throes of birth, owning ourselves debtors to the old times before us, without being either so unwise or ungenerous as to contemn the bonds of association, and affect a false and impossible isolation.

The Manna style and pedantic phrases were not meant for them; and, if they use them, the public will only say, 'would that they would remember that they are women and not men,' and they would only incur the reproach of being pedants, as many ladies, especially among the aristocracy, do.

"So necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learned only in the world."

Thus running on gaily, the worthy pedant strove to amuse the melancholy young nobleman, while he deftly performed his duties as valet; and they were very quickly completed, for the requirements of the stage necessitate great dexterity on the part of the actors to make the metamorphoses frequently needed with sufficient promptness and rapidity.

These flights, however, are very pardonable, when we consider the importance they give him in the eyes of his friends, and reflect upon that lofty and contemptuous pride, and those delectable sensations which the appearance of superior knowledge gives to the pedant, whether raw or trained, high or low, in this profession or the other.

The broad and general features of the time-serving courtier, of the servile coxcomb, of the rapacious mistress, of the expecting legatee, the frivolous man of fashion, and the still more frivolous pedant, will be the same, whatever be the country in which the scene is laid, and by whatever names they happen to be distinguished.

The time was coming when neither the pedants nor the people would really understand Cicero; though there were some indeed, like this new writer, Apuleius, who, departing from the custom of writing in Greek, which had been a fashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits since the days of Hadrian, had written in the vernacular.

The parlance I like is a simple and natural parlance, the same on paper as in the mouth, a succulent and a nervous parlance, short and compact, not so much refined and finished to a hair as impetuous and brusque, difficult rather than wearisome, devoid of affectation, irregular, disconnected, and bold, not pedant-like, not preacher-like, not pleader-like.

Because it is a land of mountain pines and cataracts and wild winds, I would have their speech smack always of their soil; and I would bewail the day that Canadians began to measure their phrases to suit the yard stick of some starveling pedant in a writer's attic, who had never been nearer reality than his own starvation.

It seems strange to the expert that delusions should prevail when orchids are so common and so much talked of; but I know by experience that the majority of people, even among those who love their garden, regard them as fantastic and mysterious creations, designed, to all seeming, for the greater glory of pedants and millionaires.

It has not been missed by the public, who have entered with enthusiasm into the painter's mood, perceived the originality of his vision and the joyousness of his art, and have radiated their own appreciation of this vitalized, healthful world of happy people until they have increased the distrust of the pedant for an art so helplessly popular.

Now, when this misrepresentation of beauty cries scorn at the same time upon the whole conception, upon history, upon character, upon action, and this openly attacks that as a lie, there comes a discord, something insupportable, into painting, which certainly the antique pedant is unaware of, but which is felt all the more by the true friend of the antique.

When he published Waverley he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books for some five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with a general and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream and could not comprehend, or they would not be pedants.

The observation was correct, but it should be added that Wesley matured at the end of an age famous for its great learning, an age whose most distinguished poet was so much the scholar that he appeared more the pedant than the gentleman to critics of the succeeding era; Wesley was not singular for erudition among his seventeenth-century contemporaries.

The one is a backwardness in communicating their knowledge, out of a false delicacy, and for fear of being thought pedants: the other, and much more common extreme, is a mean complaisance, which those who are worthy of your advice do not need, to make it acceptable; for such can best bear reproof in particular points, who best deserve commendation in general.

With such advantages, we can understand how, dissolved into a stream of continuous discourse, the doctrines which we only know in their crystallized form of heads and particulars, became a gladsome river; and how the man who spoke them with sparkling eye and shining face was not shunned as a buckram pedant, but run after as a popular preacher.

This is analogous to his contempt for the pedants who object to the use of a hybrid word: "If it happens that a composite of a Greek word and a Latin word renders the idea as well, and is easier to pronounce or pleasanter to the ear than a compound of two Greek words and two Latin words, why prefer the latter?"

It is under the calm light of moon and stars that soul speaks to soul, and we gain those subtler experiences, those deeper views of our own nature and that of our nearest and dearest, which so far transcend the plodding sciences of the laboratory, the useless learning of the pedant, and the empty wisdom of the children of this world.

Just as there may be found men with perfect excellence and those below them, till we may have a man who thinks himself learned, and yet he is not, being only a pedant, so there are arguments which are extremely certain, and those below them, then, there are specious arguments, and those which though really false seem to be true.

There is nothing more certain than that every man would be a wit if he could; and notwithstanding pedants of pretended depth and solidity are apt to decry the writings of a polite author, as flash and froth, they all of them show, upon occasion, that they would spare no pains to arrive at the character of those whom they seem to despise.

This is the more necessary, because there seems to be a general combination among the pedants to extol one another's labors, and cry up one another's parts; while men of sense, either through that modesty which is natural to them, or the scorn they have for such trifling commendations, enjoy their stock of knowledge like a hidden treasure, with satisfaction and silence.

If a funeral oration is wanted for a cardinal or other great personage, the executors do not apply to the best orators in the city, to whom they would have to pay a hundred pieces of gold, but they hire for a trifle the first impudent pedant whom they come across, and who only wants to be talked of whether for good or ill.

I could have bestowed her upon a fine gentleman, who extremely admired her wit, and would have given her a coach and six, but I found it absolutely necessary to cross the strain; for had they met, they had entirely been rivals in discourse, and in continual contention for the superiority of understanding, and brought forth critics, pedants, or pretty good poets.

I could have bestowed her upon a fine gentleman, who extremely admired her wit, and would have given her a coach and six: but I found it absolutely necessary to cross the strain; for had they met, they had eternally been rivals in discourse, and in continual contention for the superiority of understanding, and brought forth critics, pedants, or pretty good poets.

Consider the basis of Tartuffe; an obscene pedant, a red-faced hypocritical wretch, who, palming himself off on a decent and refined family, tries to drive the son away, marry the daughter, corrupt the wife, ruin and imprison the father, and almost succeeds in it, not by clever plots, but by vulgar mummery, and by the coarse audacity of his caddish disposition.

He has scarcely made his entrance into society before he receives a second education quite unlike the first, which teaches him to despise what he esteemed, and esteem what he despised; he learns to consider the teaching of his parents and masters as the jargon of pedants, and the duties they have instilled into him as a childish morality, to be scorned now that he is grown up.

For nowhere does his good faith in humanity so triumph as in cases where, in the old fogy, he can reveal the hero, and, in the poor pedant, show the man of inflexible will, which no other has discovered him to be than the poet who so well knows that every one of his creations bears within the depths of its soul an indelible stamp of nobility.

Johnson's prophetic vision of that Paradise of constitutionalism, shadowed forth in his exclamation that he would stand by the Constitution though all around him should perish, would be measurably realized; and among the ruins of the nation a few haggard and ragged pedants would be left to drone out eulogies on "the glorious Constitution" which had survived unharmed the anarchy, poverty, and depopulation it had produced.

There is a part of language which is disdained by the pedant or the declaimer, and which both, if they knew its difficulty, would approach with dread; it is formed of the most familiar phrases and turns in daily use by the generality of men, and is full of energy and vivacity, bearing upon it the marks of those keen feelings and strong passions from which it springs.

The name of a pedant is so formidable to young men when they first sally from their colleges, and is so liberally scattered by those who mean to boast their elegance of education, easiness of manners, and knowledge of the world, that it seems to require particular consideration; since, perhaps, if it were once understood, many a heart might be freed from painful apprehensions, and many a tongue delivered from restraint.

I knew very well what I was losing if I went away; but I could not control myself, and one day after a painful and revolting scene of which I was a witness, and which showed my friend in a most disadvantageous light, I quarrelled with him finally, went away, and threw up this newfangled pedant, made of a queer compound of our native flour kneaded up with German treacle.

Suffering from a badly healed wound, from water on the chest, degeneration of the heart, and gout in the limbs, dropsical, enfeebled, broken down into an old man before his time, Alexander still confronted disease and death with as heroic a front as he had ever manifested in the field to embattled Hollanders and Englishmen, or to the still more formidable array of learned pedants and diplomatists in the hall of negotiation.

Those who have little time for books, but who wish really to know many things, can accomplish a great deal by being careful to hunt for meats rather than for shells and husks; for though the outsides of things make a great show, and can be displayed by the pedant to great advantage before those who are superficial as himself, they contain no healthful nutriment for the mind.

Another puts on his nose a drogue, made of wood or pasteboard, in imitation of a pair of spectacles: he performs the duties of engineer, comes forward, walks away, prepares a plan, overlooks the workmen, draws lines, plays the pedant, cries out that they are spoiling the whole thing, orders the work to be abandoned and resumed according to his fancy, and makes the performance as long and as absurd as he can.

And with such effect was the punishment administered that not only did the pedants and theologians of his own time wince under the lash, but even their successors feel their ears tingle when they read his biting words; and they revenge themselves by reviling the memory of the great writer whose works are as a thorn in their side, and whose very name they hold in undisguised abhorrence.

And with such effect was the punishment administered, that not only did the pedants and theologians of his own time wince under the lash, but even their successors feel their ears tingle when they read his biting words; and they revenge themselves by reviling the memory of that great writer, whose works are as a thorn in their side, and whose very name they hold in undisguised abhorrence.

I am at a loss to know why a young female is instructed to exhibit, in the most advantageous point of view, her skill in music, her singing, dancing, taste in dress, and her acquaintance with the most fashionable games and amusements, while her piety is to be anxiously concealed, and her knowledge affectedly disavowed, lest the former should draw on her the appellation of an enthusiast, or the latter that of a pedant.

The son of a Hamburg banker and of a literary lady whose novels enjoyed some reputation in their day, he was placed from the beginning in a position of greater material and social independence than usually falls to the lot of German thinkers; and to this, combined with the fact that he failed entirely as a university teacher, it is partly due that he wrote about philosophy not like a pedant, but like a man of the world.

I speak with all due reverence to the ancients; for no man esteems their perfections more than myself, though I confess I have not that blind implicit faith in them which some ignorant schoolmasters would impose upon us, to believe in all their errors, and own all their crimes: to some pedants every thing in them is of that authority, that they will create a new figure of rhetoric out of the fault of an old poet.

In vain does the pedant complain of the architecture here displaying the genius of that munificent founder, and tell us that it marks a decline from the elevation of the decorated period; for who can but see, in what is called decline, something much more like an elaborate adaptation of sacred art to academic purposes, exhibiting high invention, and a sense of the fitting and appropriate, which proves a taste truly refined, and a fancy rich and creative?

Recently discouraged patriots, inspired by the victory of King's Mountain, flocked to General Greene's standard, and that able officer, supported by General Morgan and Colonel Washington, and aided by the daring bands led by Sumter and Marion, soon threatened Cornwallis on both his flanks, and by a series of surprises and sudden maneuvers so confused that military pedant that he did not know what next to expect, and hardly which way to turn.

Our masters, the moment they are born, are put into the hands of two or three pedants, one French, another German, and a third English, and whether they like them or not, they must be content with their society till they are seventeen, and whether they wish to or not, must learn three barbarous languages, at the expense of our noble Russian tongue, which they have sometimes completely forgotten by the time the others are acquired.