A pageant can refer to:
- Procession or ceremony in elaborate costume
- Beauty pageant
- Religion:
- Medieval pageant, a narrative medieval procession connected with a festival
- Nativity play, or "Christmas pageant"
- Pageant (film), a documentary film that explores the dramas and realities of the Miss Gay America Contest
- Pageant (magazine), a 20th-century monthly periodical
- Pageant (musical), a 1991 Off Broadway musical by Robert Longbottom
- Pageant (song), a single by Moi dix Mois
- Pageant, a PuTTY SSH authentication agent
Famous quotes containing the word pageant:
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself—
Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“What helps it now, that Byron bore,
With haughty scorn which mock’d the smart,
Through Europe to the Aetolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands counted every groan,
And Europe made his woe her own?”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)