vainglorious

in a sentence

We streaked with idiot vainglory through the frosty countryside, and as the afternoon faded and evening fell, so did the mercury; at about five o'clock the Clipper halted somewhere far from home out in the pinewoods and I became aware of the sudden descent of windy, vicious cold.†  (source) William Styron, Sophie's Choice, 1976

Your efforts to instil either vainglory or false modesty into the patient will therefore be met from the Enemy's side with the obvious reminder that a man is not usually called upon to have an opinion of his own talents at all, since he can very well go on improving them to the best of his ability without deciding on his own precise niche in the temple of Fame.†  (source) C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1942

You could call it vainglory.†  (source) T. H. White, The Once and Future King, 1939

"I don't mean to be vainglorious," Uncle Monty began, using a word which here means "braggy,"†  (source) Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room, 1999

If under the presentiment of the most magnificent of all victories to be crowned by his own glorious death, a sort of priestly motive led him to dress his person in the jewelled vouchers of his own shining deeds; if thus to have adorned himself for the altar and the sacrifice were indeed vainglory, then affectation and fustian is each more heroic line in the great epics and dramas, since in such lines the poet but embodies in verse those exaltations of sentiment that a nature like Nelson, the opportunity being given, vitalizes into acts.†  (source) Herman Melville, Billy Budd, 1924

The brazen insensitive spirit of the boys he envied but could not imitate: they would howl loudly under punishment, in order to mitigate it, and they were vaingloriously unconcerned ten minutes later.†  (source) Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel, 1929

the teeth of the Crafty, the Unstable, the Audacious, the Vainglorious, and your Murderous Beast?†  (source) Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1962

It was not and is not money these seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts beating with red blood;—a gift which to-day only their own kindred and race can bring to the masses, but which once saintly souls brought to their favored children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in American history, and one of the few things untainted by sordid greed and cheap vainglory.†  (source) W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn't exist.†  (source) Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1925

And was this imprisonment God's way of curbing his pride, tempering his vainglorious dreams?†  (source) Dave Eggers, Zeitoun, 2009

The sight filled a measure of pride which would have made him drunk with vainglory but for the thought, princely as the property was, it did not any longer belong to his countrymen; the worship in the Temple was by permission of strangers; the hill where David dwelt was a marbled cheat—an office in which the chosen of the Lord were wrung and wrung for taxes, and scourged for very deathlessness of faith.†  (source) Lew Wallace, Ben Hur, 1880

Whither are gone our boastings when we said that we were bravest, the boasts ye uttered vaingloriously when in Lemnos, as ye ate your fill of flesh of tall-horned oxen and drank goblets crowned with wine, and said that every man should stand in war to face fivescore yea tenscore Trojans?†  (source) Homer, The Iliad, -850 B.C.

I know that tale as well, but Daeron made too much of it in that vainglorious book of his.†  (source) George R. R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons, 2011