Difficult Sentences in GRE Preparation

All these sentences are picked from relevant GRE preparation books.

Excessive secrecy tends to invite excessive curiosity and thus serves to provoke the very impulses against which it guards.

Prudery actually draws attention to the vice that it is supposed to suppress; the very act that forbids the speech or prohibits sight dramatizes what is hidden.

Although Caroline Gordon was rigorously objective in her journalistic writing, her lively and exuberant private correspondence exhibited a delightful capacity for biting commentary on the social scene.

It would be a waste of time for any reviewer to bother condemning a book whose utter worthlessness is obvious to even the least discerning reader.

It would be misleading to use a published play to generalize about fifteenth-century drama; the very fact of publication should serve as a warning of the play's unrepresentative character.

It is his dubious distinction to have proved what nobody would think of denying, that Romeo at the age of sixty-four writes with all the characteristic of maturity.

It is strange how words shape our thoughts and trap us at the bottom of deeply incised canyon of thinking, their imprisoning sides carved out by the river of past usage.

It is ironic that a critic of such overwhelming vanity now suffers from a measure of oblivion to which he was forever consigning others, in the end, all his self-adulation has only worked against him.

People should not be praised for their virtue if they lacked the energy to be wicked; in such cases, goodness is merely the effect of indolence.

Observable as a tendency of our culture is a withdrawal of belief in psychoanalysis: we no longer feel that it can solve our emotional problems.

Broadway audiences have been inured to mediocrity and so desperate to be pleased as to make their ready ovations meaningless as an indicator of the quality of the production before them.

Without seeming unworldly, William James appeared wholly removed from the commonplace of the society, the conventionality of academe.

Any language is a conspiracy against experience in the sense that it is a collective attempt to manage experience by reducing it into discrete parcels.

There is perhaps some truth in that waggish old definition of scholar - a siren that calls attention to a fog without doing anything to dispel it.

We realized that John was still young and impressionable, but were nevertheless surprised at his naivete.

The First World War began in a context of jargon and verbal delicacy and continued in a cloud of euphemism as impenetrable as language and literature, skillfully used, could make it.

Noting the murder victim's flaccid musculature and pear-like figure, she deduced that the unfortunate fellow had earned his living in some sedentary occupation.

Politeness is not a superficial attribute of human behavior, but a rather a central virtue, one whose very existence is increasingly being threatened by the faddish requirement to "speak one's mind".

Ever prey to vagrant impulses that impelled him to squander his talents on a host of unworthy projects, his very dissipation nonetheless enhanced his reputation, for the sheer energy of his extravagance dazzled observers.

While some see in practical jokes a wish for mastery in miniature over a world that seems very unruly, others believe that the joke's purpose is to disrupt, by reducing all transactions to chaos.

For all his boorishness, Honore de Balzac betrayed a remarkable sensitivity to the plight of 19th century women, populating his novel with characters sympathetic to women's right.

Inspired interim responses to hitherto unknown problems, New Deal economic stratagems became ossified as a result of bureaucratization, their flexibility and adaptability destroyed by their transformation into rigid policies.

The architects of New York's early skyscrapers, hinting here at a twelfth-century cathedral, there at a fifteenth-century palace, sought to legitimize the city's social striving by evoke a history the city did not truly possess.

Ethologists are convinced that many animals survive through learning - but learning that is dictated by their generic programming, learning as throughly stereotyped as the most instinctive of behavioral responses.

The senator's reputation, though shaken by false allegations of misconduct, emerged from the ordeal unscathed.

A human being is quite frail creature, for the gloss of rationality that covers his or her fears and insecurity is thin and easily breached.

The deference with which the French aristocracy greeted the middle-class Rousseau was all the more remarkable because he showed so little respect for them.

The influence of the Titnaeus among early philosophical thinkers was pervasive, if only because it was the sole dialogue available in Europe for almost 1000 years.

The Gibsons were little given to conformism in any form; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being seeming unlike their neighbors.

Salazar's presence in the group was so reassuring to the others that they lost most of their earlier trepidation; failure, for them, became all but unthinkable.

all but = almost, anything but = not at all

Read‘s apology to Heflin was not exactly abject and did little to resolve their decades-long quarrel, which had been as acrimonious as the academic etiquette of scholarly journals permitted.

An obvious style, easily identified by some superficial quirk, is properly decried as a mere mannerism, whereas a complex and subtle style resists reduction to a formula.

Jones was unable to recognize, the contradictions in his attitudes that were obvious to everyone else; even the hint of an untruth was repugnant to him, but he courted serious trouble by always cheating on his taxes.

The idea of an autonomous discipline called “philosophy,” distinct from and sitting in judgment on such pursuits as theology and science turns out, on close examination, to be of quite recent origin.

She writes across generational lines, making the past so vivid that our belief that the present is the true locus of experience is undermined.

The trick for Michael was to conjure for his son a illusory orderliness; only alone at night, when the boy was asleep, could Michael acknowledge the chaos he kept hidden from his son.

The current demand for quality in the schools seems to ask not for the development of informed and active citizens, but for disciplined and productive workers with abilities that contribute to civic life only indirectly, if at all.

Bob: It seems like this city is getting more dangerous every day.

Steve: Actually, it doesn't seem that much worse from when I first moved here. If anything, the crime rate has actually dropped since the city’s population has almost doubled in the last ten years.

Carruther‘s latest literature criticism belies her reputation for trenchant commentary; despite its intriguing titles and the fulsome praise on its dust jacket, it is nothing more than a collection of platitudes.

belie: contradict

Those who fear the influence of television deliberately underplay its persuasive power, hoping that they might keep knowledge of its potential to effect social change from being widely disseminated.

Far from being unctuous, Pat was always loath to appear acquiescent.

A desire to throw over reality a light that never was might give away abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might consider a novelist-scientist to record exactly and concretely the structure and texture of a flower

It has thus generally been by way of the emphasis on oral literary creativity that these Chicano writers, whose English-language works are sometimes uninspired, developed the powerful and arresting language that characterized their Spanish-language works.

Having no sense of moral obligation, Shipler was as little subject to the reproach of conscience after he acted as he was motivated by its promptings before he acted.

Only in the case of the February Revolution do we lack a useful description of participants that might characterize it in the light of what social history has taught us about the process of revolutionary mobilization.

She was criticized by her fellow lawyers not because she was not hardworking, but because she so minutely prepared her cases that she failed to bring the expected number to trial.

Religious philosopher that he was, Henry More derived his conception of an infinite universe from the Infinite God in whom he believed, a benevolent God of plenitude whose nature was to create abundance.

The author, mocked by many for his simple, almost childlike prose, can at least not be begrudged the distinction of writing with lucidness.

begrudge: give unwillingly

Perhaps there is nothing more to the album than its case that experimentalism into uncharted sonic landscapes did not die with Stockhausen. Or perhaps its forays—many of which could rightly be dubbed sophomoric—into the avant-grade also lead to the unsettling conclusion that to create an unprecedented sound one has to forgo producing a discernible melody.

There's hardly a generalization that can be made about people's social behavior and the values informing it that cannot be challenged from one or another point of view, or even dismissed as simplistic or vapid.