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More "Insipid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Virginia. All at once the carnal man in me rose up and damned these lying foes of mine. Resignation went whistling down the wind. Hang me! Hang me! No, by the God that gave me breath! I sat back and laughed—laughed at my own insipid virtue, by which, to keep faith with the fanatical follower of Prince Charlie, I had refused my liberty; cut myself off from the useful services of my King; wasted good years of my life, trusting to pressure and help to come from England, which never came; twisted the rope for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... country folk in this insipid neighborhood Have nothing to confess, they're so ridiculously good; And if you marry any one respectable at all, Why, you'll reform, and what will then become of ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice of life." The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce. Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... be taking its place among the Lost Arts, and the smallest of small talk reigns in its stead. Society, instead of giving its tone to the children, takes it from them, and since it cannot be juvenile, becomes insipid, and because it is too old to prattle, jabbers. Talkers are everywhere, but where are the men that say things? Where are the people that can be listened to and quoted? Where are the flinty people whose contact strikes fire? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... Cemetery.—I visited, not long ago, one of the old-time cemeteries, the pride of a neighbouring city. It was indeed a place of beauty to the eye; but to my mind there is always something flat and insipid about a landscape lacking the music of singing birds. Therefore I looked and listened for my feathered friends. Some English Sparrows flew up from the drive, and I heard the rusty hinge-like notes of a small company of Purple Crackles that were nesting, I suspected, in the pine trees down the ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... Blanch not to let him out of her sight—to go off with him alone as often as possible and flirt with him to any length; a tremendous concession on Mrs. Forest's part—nothing less than a complete surrender, she being one of those proud but insipid mortals whose temperature could be easily gauged by the inclination of her long, slender, slightly upturned nose which seemed to be forever pointing toward a better world. For her, it was not enough that one's appearance and innate refinement marked one as a lady or a gentleman, but it must be ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... appeal was useless. The living waters were tainted in their source. Instead of health they spread abroad infection—instead of giving nourishment to the poor, they were the narcotics which drenched in slumber the consciences of the rich. Wretched forms, ridiculous legends, the insipid rhetoric of the Fathers, were the substitutes for all generous learning. The nobles enslaved the body; the hierarchy put its fetters on the soul. The growth of the public mind was checked and stunted and the misery ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... the reproachful gentleness in Mrs. Gay's face embarrassed her only less than did the intimate pleasantry of Jonathan's tone. Every detail of the library—the richness and heaviness of the furniture, the insipid fixed smiles in the family portrait, the costly fragility of the china ornaments—all these seemed to unite in some occult power which overthrew her self-possession and ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... survey of the scenery, could not help noticing that the color had washed from her friend's face. "I love this Western country—its big sweep of plains, of low, rolling hills, with a background of mountains. One can see how it gets into a man's blood so that the East seems insipid ever afterward," discoursed ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... more serious matter, for two reasons: first, they possess an unbounded influence over the people; and secondly. Amasis himself retains more affection than he likes to acknowledge to us, for this absurd and insipid religion—a religion which appears doubly sacred to its adherents simply because it has existed in this eccentric land—unchanged for thousands of years. These priests make the king's life burdensome to him; they ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and a stronger inclination to avoid the more showy and worthless callings into which too many are disposed to crowd. The story is most happily conceived, and is narrated in a style highly finished and attractive. There is nothing insipid or over-wrought, in the frame-work or filling up; but all is natural and lifelike. The witty, the lively, the startling, are finely interwoven with the more grave and instructive. A fertile and vivid imagination has enabled the author ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... those eggs that are of an oblong make, as being of sweeter flavor and more nutritive than the round ones: for, being tough-shelled, they contain a male yelk. Cabbage that grows in dry lands, is sweeter than that about town: nothing is more insipid than a garden much watered. If a visitor should come unexpectedly upon you in the evening, lest the tough old hen prove disagreeable to his palate, you must learn to drown it in Falernian wine mixed [with water]: this will make it tender. The mushrooms ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... done well to speak out openly—I hate deceit. So you love de Sigognac, do you? So much the better, say I—it will be all the sweeter to call you mine. It will be a pleasing variety to press ardent kisses upon sweet lips that say 'I hate you,' instead of the insipid, everlasting 'I love you,' that one gets a surfeit of from all the pretty women ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... univalve that has been much in vogue among the Chinese but has seldom found place on the tables of restaurants owing to the difficulty in preparing them, as they are tough and insipid under ordinary circumstances. When made tender either by the Chinese method of pounding, or by steeping in vinegar, they serve the purpose of clams but have not the fine flavor. The Hof Brau restaurant is now making ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... sportive wit, were the sweetest medicine to the wounded heart of Delia. When she had first chosen Miss Fletcher for her intimate friend, her own faculties had not yet reached their maturity; and habit frequently renders the most insipid amusements pleasurable and interesting. Southampton itself did not afford the largest scope for selection. And however our readers may decide respecting the merit of the easy, the voluble and the good humoured Miss Fletcher, ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... Euripides, as Aristotle, Heraclides, and Dicaerchus did. But I verily persuade myself that their neglecting to take care for such provisions as these, and finding all the other things they employed themselves in (as they use to say of virtue) but insipid and dry, and being wholly set upon pleasure, and the body no longer supplying them with it, give them occasion to stoop to do things both mean and shameful in themselves and unbecoming their age; as well when they ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... a little intolerant at home, and generally appeared there at his worst—caustic, silent, and unsympathetic. It seemed to him that the simple country life was unbearably insipid; he found there neither wit nor affairs: to see day after day the same faces, to listen to the same talk either on country subjects that were distasteful to him, or, out of compliment to himself, political subjects that were unfamiliar to the conversationalists, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... a small part of the entertainment prepared for the people. There were fountains which, instead of throwing up jets of cold, insipid water, were to spout forth incessantly into huge tanks a stream of the much-loved vodka, from which all around might draw forth and drink to ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... lashes fall like a silken fringe. My forehead sparkles, and the hair grows deliciously; it ripples into waves of pale gold, growing browner towards the centre, whence escape little rebel locks, which alone would tell that my fairness is not of the insipid and hysterical type. I am a tropical blonde, with plenty of blood in my veins, a blonde more apt to strike than to turn the cheek. What do you think the hairdresser proposed? He wanted, if you please, to smooth my hair into two bands, and place over my forehead a pearl, kept in place ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... is to be strong or weak; the juice, thus diluted, is strained through some fibrous stuff like fine shavings; after which it is fit for drinking, and this is always done immediately. It has a pepperish taste, drinks flat, and rather insipid. But, though it is intoxicating I only saw one instance where it had that effect, as they generally drink it with great moderation, and but little at a time. Sometimes they chew this root in their mouths, as Europeans do tobacco, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... had no insipid Casino, where people only gather for show, where they talk in whispers, where they dance stupidly, where they succeed in thoroughly boring one another, we sought some other way of passing our evenings ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... circumspect courtesy like that of a General, as though in giving me his hand he were warding off something. I had imagined, on the contrary, that on coming in he would at once break into his habitual thin, shrill laugh and fall to making his insipid jokes and witticisms. I had been preparing for them ever since the previous day, but I had not expected such condescension, such high-official courtesy. So, then, he felt himself ineffably superior to me in every respect! If he only meant to insult me by that ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... illustrate and inculcate the rule under study. This is the true connection that unites and harmonises them all, that each leads the pupil directly to the attainment of his object—the mastery of the rule. The illusory connection of some insipid narrative is ...
— The Aural System • Anonymous
... the influence of city boarders. The second, "Love and Despatches," inculcates a double moral, the usefulness of economy and the uselessness of mothers-in-law; and the third, "The Cutter Wild Duck," is a shudderingly insipid composition about a village lion who got drunk on his birthday, fell overboard, and committed no end of follies. A later volume of "Little Tales" is, indeed, so little as scarcely to have any excuse for being. The ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... swim after me shouting and gambolling in pursuit. But I as ever partial to what is termed in the 'Young Men's Own Book'—'the society of virtuous and intelligent young ladies;' and in the absence of the mermaids, the amusement became dull and insipid. One morning I expressed to my faithful servitor my desire for the return of the nymphs. The honest fellow looked at me bewildered for a moment, and then shook his head solemnly, and murmured 'taboo! taboo!' giving me to understand that unless the canoe was removed I could not expect to have ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Oregon grape, the salmon berry, red or yellow, as big as the yolk of an egg, the salal berry, any quantity of blueberries, huckleberries, both red and blue, sarvis berries, bear berries, mountain ash berries (also loved of bears), thimble berries, high bush cranberries, gooseberries—large and insipid—currants, wild cherries, choke cherries; many of these friends of old, others seen here for the first time, dainty picking in the autumn for deer, bears, foxes, squirrels and many birds. What particularly appealed to me was a wild apple, no larger than the eye of a hawk, but quite ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... nothing; the very places that now tire, might then have entertained me, and all that now passes for unmeaning dissipation, might then have worn the appearance of variety and pleasure. But where the mind is wholly without interest, every thing is languid and insipid; and accustomed as I have long been to think friendship the first of human blessings, and social converse the greatest of human enjoyments, how ever can I reconcile myself to a state of careless indifference, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... perfectly unconscious that she existed) was a managing thrifty soul, in a starched calico dress, with a natural capacity for driving a bargain; and Life, with grim humour, had rewarded this respectable preference by bestowing upon him feeble and insipid Belinda, who spent sleepless nights trying to add three and five together, but who could never, to save her soul, remember to put down the household expenses in the petty cash book. It was a case, he sometimes told himself, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... imagine a more pitiful, vulgar, dull and insipid allegory than this "literary quadrille." Nothing could be imagined less appropriate to our local society. Yet they say it was Karmazinov's idea. It was Liputin indeed who arranged it with the help of the lame teacher who had been at the meeting at Virginsky's. But Karmazinov had given ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... POETRY.—In the latter part of the eighteenth century, a class of poets who called themselves "The Arcadians" attempted to overthrow the artificial and bombastic school of Marini; but their frivolous and insipid productions had little effect on the literature. The first poets who gave a new impulse to letters were Parini and Monti. Parini (1729-1799) was a man of great genius, integrity, and taste; he contributed more than any other writer of his age to the progress of literature and the arts. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 'Men of loftier taste and bolder fancy early remonstrated against this chilling confinement of the noblest, the most aspiring, and most expansive of all the Arts. . . . It was not till the commotion of Europe broke the chain of indolence and insipid effeminacy that the stronger passions of readers required again to be stimulated and exercised and soothed, and that the minor charms of correctness were sacrificed to the ardent efforts of uncontrolled and unfearing genius. The authors of this class began to look back for their materials to ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... at her side, was having his attention called to this dark young creature across the table, whose wonderful still fire, the white blossoms crowning her hair, might well have made even a lovelier than Ina Vandeman look insipid. And Worth did take his time admiring her; I saw that; but all he found to ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... quality of the product they yield,—or rather the plants make the distinction for them—as with respect to honey, some yield liquid honey, like the skirwort,[216] and others thick honey like the rosemary. So again honey of insipid flavour is made from the fig, good honey from clover, and the best of all ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... but it was enveloped in a mysterious veil which it was never permitted the profane to penetrate, which signifies that all that he learned from God, concerning amorous adventures, should be wrapped in profound silence. How beautiful all these allegories are! And how true! How insipid life would be without these mysterious liaisons, by which Nature carries out her designs, eluding the social ties, without breaking them! Disciples of Mercury, I salute you, whatever be your sex; to your ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... thought. That is, when Capt. Percival did not talk; for he talked nothings. I did not know how to answer him. Of course it had been very hot to-day; and the rooms were very full; and there were a good many people at the hotel. I had nothing but an insipid affirmative to give to these propositions. ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... were once in the garden, Victoire had no time for anyone but Mrs. Val and Clementina. He had done his duty by the Misses Neverbend and those other two insipid young English girls, and now he had his own affairs to look after. He also knew that Miss Golightly had L20,000 ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... matters stood, it was trying to the sensibilities of us unfortunate bystanders, whose cousins were either ugly or at a distance; for the rest of our new acquaintances were not interesting. The younger sister was shy and insipid; the squire like ninety-nine squires in every hundred; and the lady-mother in a perpetual state of real or affected nervous agitation, to which her own family were happily insensible, but which taxed a stranger's polite sympathies pretty heavily. Though constantly in the habit, as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... which in Java is exclusively the manufacture of Chinese, and is nothing more than a rectification of the above spirit, with the addition of molasses and juice of the cocoa-nut tree. Before distillation the liquor is simply called tchoo, or wine, and in this state is a very insipid and disagreeable beverage. The vine grows extremely well in all the provinces, even as far north as Pekin, but the culture of it seems to meet with little encouragement, and no wine is made from the juice of the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... common a course I know it is, when the stream of life flows with absolute tranquillity, and ruffled by no menace of a breeze—the azure overhead never dimmed by a passing cloud, that in such circumstances the blood stagnates: life, from excess and plethora of sweets, becomes insipid: the spirit of action droops: and it is oftentimes found at such seasons that slight annoyances and molestations, or even misfortunes in a lower key, are not wholly undesirable, as means of stimulating the lazy energies, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... ours. They have agreed to recommend the work to all the learned bodies in Europe. I have recommended the Ramayana to begin with, it being one of the most popular of all the Hindoo books accounted sacred. The Veda are so excessively insipid that, had we begun with them, we should have sickened the public at the outset. The Ramayana will furnish the best account of Hindoo mythology that any one book will, and has extravagancy enough to excite a wish ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... and he was more than forty before he had ever made himself talked of. In vain was he conversant with Holy Writ, in vain did he argue about the rights of priests and deacons, and preach a few poor sermons and libels, he was ignored. I have seen one of his sermons which is very insipid, and which bears sufficient resemblance to the predications of the quakers; assuredly there is to be found there no trace of that persuasive eloquence with which later he carried the parliaments away. The reason is that in fact he was much more suited to public affairs than to the Church. It was ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... of Hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp only, when the first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor, while the latter was sweet and insipid." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... are sic fools, For all their colleges and schools, That, when nae real ills perplex 'em, They make enow themselves to vex 'em. They loiter, lounging lank and lazy, Though nothing ails them, yet uneasy. Their days insipid, dull, and tasteless; Their nights unquiet, lang, and restless, An' e'en their sports, their balls and races, Their gallopin' through public places, There's sic parade, sic pomp, an' art, The joy can ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... things, and the other allowed to be no more than the grave. Again, if we take this definition of happiness and examine it with reference to the senses, it will be acknowledged wonderfully adapt. How sad and insipid do all objects accost us that are not conveyed in the vehicle of delusion! How shrunk is everything as it appears in the glass of Nature, so that if it were not for the assistance of artificial mediums, ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... my master's right; For there's nothing more insipid Than a grand procession day, ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... speech. She was educated in the Presbyterian faith, and this was a source of some discordant feeling between her and her husband. The preaching of her favorite ministers seemed to him harsh and rigid, while she regarded Quaker exhortations as insipid and formal. But as time passed on, her religious views assimilated more and more with his; and about twenty-four years after their marriage, she joined the Society of Friends, and frequently spoke at their meetings. She was a ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... page; and secondly, by translating Homer himself into prose, which shall make him so unlike himself, that nobody will think he could be an original writer: and when he is become totally lifeless and insipid, it will be impossible but these Tales should be preferred to the Iliad; especially as I design to put them into a kind of style that shall be neither verse nor prose; a diction lately much used in ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... her a pretty, lively creature, and showed the usual inclination of the male sex to linger in her society. She mostly wanted to be informed as to the House and its ways. It was all so new to her!—she said. But her ignorance was not insipid; her questions had flavour. There was much talk and laughter; Letty felt herself the mistress of the table, and her social ambitions ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... melon, surrounded by heaps of others, while the plain brown chestnuts, that don't attract much notice, are really the best of all, for they are the marrons glaces for which Marseilles is famed, and once you have tasted these, freshly made, all other sweets will seem insipid to you. ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... know any thing of the existence of his long poem on Africa? We cannot doubt that the prejudice which would deny the superiority of an artist—though he should have produced nothing but such Sonatas as Franz Schubert has given us—over one who has portioned out the insipid melodies of many Operas, which it were useless to cite, will disappear; and that in music, also, we will yet take into account the eloquence and ability with which the thoughts and feelings are expressed, whatever may be ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... almost miss the cell, for it protected me, at least, against the curious glances that pass right through me. The murderer Maurice and his mistress! You don't love me any longer, Henriette, and no more do I care for you. To- day you are ugly, clumsy, insipid, repulsive. ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... this we are far from blaming him. Indeed, we feel that the personal note imported by the author's intellectual bias gives some flavour to a book which, owing to the complete absence of charm or distinction, would be otherwise insipid. It is a competent, but woefully uninspiring, piece of work. Above all things, Mr. Roberts lacks humour—a quality indispensable in a writer on Ibsen. For Ibsen, like other men of genius, is slightly ridiculous. Undeniably, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Smith says, "Translations were made of our Deistical writers of that time, and of a large number of vindications of Christianity which were published by some English divines of note in reply to Collins, Tindal, Morgan and their tribe; and which, in addition to their insipid and unimpassioned character, involved so much of timid apology and unchristian concession that they rather aided than obstructed the progress of infidelity." Through the influence of Baumgarten and others Deism now gained ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... to fermented liquors, than their being exposed to the open air, whereby they lose their strength and flavour. Take a bottle of wine, draw the cork, and let it stand exposed to the open air for twenty-four hours only, and you will then find it dead, flat, and insipid; for the spirit is volatile, and has been carried off by the air, and what remains is the gross, elementary part chiefly. A cyder-cask should never be kept open more than fourteen or fifteen days, that is, 'till ...
— The Cyder-Maker's Instructor, Sweet-Maker's Assistant, and Victualler's and Housekeeper's Director - In Three Parts • Thomas Chapman
... the dahlia, salted and boiled, are eaten by the Indians; it is a farinaceous food of a somewhat insipid taste. Certainly, the wild potato is not much better; and who can tell whether cultivation, after having enriched our gardens with its beautiful flowers, may not also furnish our tables with the bulbs of this plant rendered ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... having nothing to do, endeavours to convince everybody that he is extremely intelligent. Literature reconstructs life, and penetrates even to the very life- blood of humanity, from generation to generation. To destroy literature would be to take away all colour from life and make it insipid." ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... flowing quietly along, minding its own business, hates the Missouri for coming into it all at once with its muddy stream. I suppose the Missouri in like manner hates the Mississippi for diluting with its limpid, but insipid current the rich reminiscences of the varied soils through which its own stream has wandered. I will not compare myself to the clear or the turbid current, but I will own that my heart sinks when I find all of a sudden I am ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... brocade, and her hoop, that made her small figure like a little russet cask, and with busk and breast-knot and top-knot, was admired, as odd people will choose what is irregular, strange, and racy, in preference to what is harmonious, orderly, and insipid. ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... the wild ass bray when he hath grass? Or loweth the ox over his fodder? Would one eat things insipid without salt? Is there taste in the ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Halvorsen, in the forecastle, did his best to knock off Henrik Gjertsen's block when the latter was guilty of kicking Scraps out of his way. Yea, even more. When Simon Nishikanta, huge and gross as in the flesh he was and for ever painting delicate, insipid, feministic water- colours, when he threw his deck-chair at Scraps for clumsily knocking over his easel, he found the ham-like hand of Grimshaw so instant and heavy on his shoulder as to whirl him half about, almost fling him to the deck, and leave him lame-muscled ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... else. Saw the smoke of natives a few miles ahead of us; I suppose we will see something of them tomorrow. Shot a new pigeon, will try to preserve the skin. Some figs were got by some of the party this morning before starting; I ate one of them apparently ripe, it was very insipid, the principal part of them were full of small flies. Distance travelled by bed of river not direct about ten and a ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... for boiling turkeys, sweetbreads, fowls, and vegetables, to render them less insipid. This is ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... This morning my brother set out for Brampton again, and is gone. At noon home to dinner, and thence my wife and I and Willet to the Duke of York's house, where, after long stay, the King and Duke of York come, and there saw "The Coffee-house," the most ridiculous, insipid play that ever I saw in my life, and glad we were that Betterton had no part in it. But here, before the play begun, my wife begun to complain to me of Willet's confidence in sitting cheek by jowl by us, which was a poor thing; but ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... is to be omitted altogether, and indeed with more profit than loss to the opera; for if you will read the scene it evidently becomes cold and insipid by the addition of an air or a duet, and very irksome to the other actors, who must stand, by all the time unoccupied; besides, the noble contest between Ilia and Idamante would become too long, and thus lose ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... glance backwards to the condition in which I found myself; for while it lasted I had many hours of pure happiness. Do not believe, Coleridge, that you have tasted the grandeur and all the transport of fancy if you have not been insane. Everything seems to me now insipid in comparison." Quoted by A. Barine, Nevroses, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... the so-called respectable world, share her mother's prosperity, make the most of her personal attractions, and marry as other girls did—if anyone invited her. She was doing no good; all the experience to be had in a life of mild Bohemianism was already tasted, and found rather insipid. An artist she would never become; probably she would never even support herself. To imagine herself really dependent on her own efforts, was to sink into misery and fear. The time had come for a new step, a new beginning, yet ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... doth the quacks of the present time; and ever will while the majority of the world are fools." In another place, he curiously contrasts the too timid practice of some regular physicians, with the hazardous treatment, which is the leading feature of quacks: "The timid, low, insipid practice with some, is almost as dangerous as the bold, unwarranted empiricism of others; time and opportunity, never to be regained, are often lost by the former; while with the latter, by a bold push, you are sent off ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... idiosyncrasies, every man who had a peculiarity exhibiting it for the benefit of the others; while those who had not 249were even more amusing, either from their aping the manners of somebody else, or from the sheer absurdity of uttering insipid commonplaces in such an atmosphere of fun and frolic. How, later in the day, after healths had been drunk, and thanks returned, till every one, save Pilkington, was hoarse with shouting, that individual was partly coaxed, partly coerced into attempting to sing the only ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... knew there was such a being," said Miss Thayer, while young Robinson, a lisping, insipid dandy, drawled out, "A sthool-marm, J. Thee? I'th really romantic! Thend for her, of courth. A little dithipline won't ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... was not immaculate in point of temper any more than other men, but Lucy had never suffered from it before. She was frightened, but she did not give way. The colour went out of her cheeks, but there was more in her than mere insipid submission. She looked at her husband with a certain courage, though she was so pale, and felt so profoundly the displeasure which she had never ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... many more, go not so fast as my body to the earth. In the same instant that I feel the first attempt of the disease, I feel the victory; in the twinkling of an eye I can scarce see; instantly the taste is insipid and fatuous; instantly the appetite is dull and desireless; instantly the knees are sinking and strengthless; and in an instant, sleep, which is the picture, the copy of death, is taken away, that the original, ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... understand the grounds of the high admiration which the ancients expressed for Propertius, and I own that Tibullus is rather insipid to me. Lucan was a man of great powers; but what was to be made of such a shapeless fragment of party warfare, and so recent too! He had fancy rather than imagination, and passion rather than fancy. His taste was wretched, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Iceland," and the contents are, "Snakes in Iceland there are none." We suspect, when our "Life of William Somerville" is ended, not a few will find in it a parallel for that comprehensive chapter, although we strenuously maintain that the fault of an insipid and uninteresting life is not always to be ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... his terrific battle with the sovereign Yama. The poet in his description of these regions with the detested river with waves of blood, the dire lamentations, the cries for a drop of water, the devouring worm, all the tortures of the guilty and the somewhat insipid pleasures of the just, reminds one of the scenes in the under world so vividly described by Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Yama is defeated (Sect. XXVI.) by the giant, not so much by his superior power as because at the request of ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... or hope again to see in my days At a loss whether it will be better for me to have him die By his many words and no understanding, confound himself Church, where a most insipid young coxcomb preached Clean myself with warm water; my wife will have me Costs me 12d. a kiss after the first Find that now and then a little difference do no hurte Going with her woman to a hot-house to bathe herself Good discourse and counsel from him, which I hope I shall take ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Diary of Samuel Pepys • David Widger
... Grecian literature than any of his predecessors. He had, however, a natural keenness of discernment, which he greatly improved by art, and exerted with great address and dexterity, though in very indifferent language: but he was frequently warm and choleric, sometimes cold and insipid, and now and then rather smart and humourous. He did not long support the fatigue, and emulous contention of the Forum; partly, on account of the weakness of his constitution; and partly, because he could not submit ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... were the red osier, with its whitish fruit, hobble-bush, mountain-ash, tree-cranberry, choke-cherry, now ripe, alternate cornel, and naked viburnum. Following Joe's example, I ate the fruit of the last, and also of the hobble-bush, but found them rather insipid and seedy. I looked very narrowly at the vegetation, as we glided along close to the shore, and frequently made Joe turn aside for me to pluck a plant, that I might see by comparison what was primitive about my native river. Horehound, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... mashed yam with gravy, and a large basket of caffas. These are a kind of pudding, made into little round balls from bruised Indian corn, which is first boiled to the consistence of thick paste. From being made entirely of coarse flour and water, they have an insipid taste when new, but when kept for a day or two, they become sour, and in this state are eaten by the natives. There are several deep wells in the town, but most of them are dried up, so that water is exceedingly scarce, and it ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... and the tongue, that in proportion as the former is empty, the latter is acute and sensitive. This is the cause that "good appetite is the best sauce," and that the dish we find savoury at luncheon, is insipid at dinner, ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... are rather nice—a green fig-shaped thing, containing about a spoonful of SALT-SWEET insipid glue, which you suck out. This does not sound nice, but it is. The plant has a thick, succulent, triangular leaf, creeping on the ground, and growing anywhere, without earth or water. Figs proper are common here, but tasteless; and the people pick all their fruit green, and ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... aspect of Erasmus's mind may be defined as a heartfelt aversion to everything unreasonable, insipid, purely formal, with which the undisturbed growth of medieval culture had overburdened and overcrowded the world of thought. As often as he thinks of the ridiculous text-books out of which Latin was taught in his youth, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... progress mutually is the theatre. Look at the scenery of our patent theatres, and compare it with the vulgar daubs even of John Kemble's time. Some of the scenes by Stanfield, Roberts, Grieve, and Pugh, are "perfect pictures." Yet the language of the stage is at a stand, and insipid comedy, dull tragedy, and stupid farce are more abundant than before the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... a magnificent nature! Well, to say the truth, the Lady Gycia is not at all to my taste. It is a cold, insipid style of beauty, at the best; and she is as self-willed and as straitlaced as a lady abbess. I suppose she is well matched with ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... an affair of petty gallantry, which might entertain you if you were acquainted with the different characters I have to deal with; but, without that, they would be very insipid. ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... young women must be accompanied with seriousness approaching to gloom, he is, according to my experience and observation, very much deceived. The contrary is the fact; for I have found that as, amongst men, your jovial companions are, except over the bottle, the dullest and most insipid of souls; so amongst women, the gay, rattling, and laughing, are, unless some party of pleasure, or something out of domestic life, is going on, generally in the dumps and blue-devils. Some stimulus is always craved after by this description ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... that a patient has a pappy, insipid taste with a furred, pale, rarely dry and red tongue, and is suffering from continuous, dull sensations or pain in the region of the stomach, periodically increasing to paroxysms, often induced by pressure or ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... and went away by train to London. Leaving his luggage in a cloak-room at the station, he took a stroll about town, dropping into public-houses here and there, and drinking terrible brandy. At home he drank mastica as Englishmen drink beer, and brandy was insipid as water to his palate, and had just now almost as little effect upon his head. Demetri Agryopoulo had discovered the one secret of the true dissembler, that he who controls his features controls his mind. A man who can ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... a dissolving grain of contempt for women compelled by their delicacy to spoil that kind of story which demands the piquant accompaniment to flavour it racily and make it passable. For to see insipid mildness complacently swallowed as an excellent thing, knowing the rich smack of savour proper to the story, is your anecdotal gentleman's annoyance. But if the anecdote had supported him, Sullivan Smith would have ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... case of veal, we demand "stuffing." Yes, for veal is a somewhat insipid meat, and by experience we have discovered the best method of throwing into relief such inherent goodness as it has. The stuffing does not disguise, nor seek to disguise; it accentuates. Good veal stuffing—reflect!—is in itself a triumph of culinary ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... the life of Mr. de P—-, the President of the notorious Repressive Commission of some years ago, the Minister of State invested with extraordinary powers. The newspapers made noise enough about that fanatical, narrow-chested figure in gold-laced uniform, with a face of crumpled parchment, insipid, bespectacled eyes, and the cross of the Order of St. Procopius hung under the skinny throat. For a time, it may be remembered, not a month passed without his portrait appearing in some one of the illustrated papers of Europe. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... tea and sugary cakes, green tea like bitter hot water, insipid and unsatisfying. It was a shock to see the girls' faces as they raised the tiny china teacups. Under the glaze of their powder they ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... grace from Pope, even, when the original gave me no warrant for the appropriation. If Cowper's verse could be written by Cowper, it would probably leave nothing to be desired in a translation of this kind: handled by an inferior workman, it is in danger of becoming flat, pointless, and insipid: and Horace has many passages which, if not flat, pointless, or insipid in themselves, are painfully liable to become so in the hands of a translator. I have accordingly on various occasions aimed ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Ferrarese princes. The very flower of precocious iniquity, the young Baglionis, Vitellis, and Orsinis, grouped round Signorelli's preaching Antichrist at Orvieto, are, in their gallantly trimmed jerkins and jewelled caps, the veriest assemblage of harmless young dandies, pretty and insipid; we can scarcely believe that these mild beardless striplings, tight-waisted and well-curled like girls of sixteen, are the terrible Umbrian brigand condottieri—Gianpaolos, Simonettos, Vitellozzos, and Astorres—whose abominable deeds fill ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... a somewhat insipid pastoral, betraying the influence of the Lake School, more especially Coleridge, on a belated and irresponsive disciple, and wholly out of place as contrast or foil to the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... divinely sympathetic and tolerant attitude towards commonplace, erring, vulgar humanity. "Ah, poor real life, which I love!" he writes somewhere; "can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face!" We must remember in reading him his own theory of the duty of the novelist. "I am extremely opposed to what we call ideal characters. I think their portrayal is mischievous; it is altogether offensive to ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... The white nests are most in request. They are prepared by being first washed in three or four changes of lukewarm water. When they have been some time in it, they puff up like large vermicelli. Europeans, indeed, discover nothing more in this singular dish than an insipid jelly, very much indeed ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... the steps, dressed up for a visitor, her hair done for a visitor, and with phrases ready prepared for a visitor. She was no longer the light-haired, insipid girl I had seen in church fifteen years previously, but a stout lady in curls and flounces, one of those ladies of uncertain age, without intellect, without any of those things which constitute a woman. In short she was a mother, a stout, commonplace mother, a human layer and brood mare, a ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... everybody must find their level on board of a king's ship. Well, I've one comfort left—Sir Walter Scott has never succeeded in making a hero; or, in other words, his best characters are not those which commonly go under the designation of "the hero." I am afraid there is something irreclaimably insipid in ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... have wished to protest against, is the spirit of partisanship in which this question has too generally been discussed. For, whilst some with a foolish affectation of plebeian sympathies overwhelm us with the insipid commonplaces about birth and ancient descent, as honors containing nothing meritorious, and rush eagerly into an ostentatious exhibition of all the circumstances which favor the notion of a humble station and humble connections; others, with equal forgetfulness of ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of the traitor was darker and more gloomy than its wont. He had supped with his officers, Manlius and a nobleman of Fsul, whose name the historian has not recorded, who held the third rank in the rebel army, but their fare had been meagre and insipid, their wines the thin vintage of that hill country; a little attempt at festivity had been made, but it had failed altogether; the spirits of the men, although undaunted and prepared to dare the utmost, lacked all that fiery and enthusiastic ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Duke, where the King come also and staid till the Duke was ready. It being Collar-day, we had no time to talk with him about any business. To the King's Theatre, where we saw "Midsummer's Night's dream," which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... worst was to be anticipated; yet we could conceive no extremity so miserable as the suspense we were now suffering. I have never been an eager, though always a great, reader; but I never knew books so insipid as those which I took up and cast aside that afternoon in the pavilion. Even talk became impossible, as the hours went on. One or other was always listening for some sound, or peering from an upstairs window over the ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... between lovers is a very commonplace affair. It is a perpetual "I love you." A musical phrase which is very insipid and very bald for indifferent listeners, when it is not ornamented with some fioriture; but Claude was not ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... rooms, sometimes tete-a-tete with Villebecque, his private secretary, a cosmopolitan theatrical manager, whose tales and adventures about a kind of society which Lord Monmouth had always preferred to the polished and somewhat insipid circles in which he was born, had rendered him the prime favourite of his great patron. Villebecque's step-daughter Flora, a modest and retiring maiden, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... such edg'd Tools again. But after all, what were their Works against me, but a mere hot Hash of cold Meat, of fifty half read political Authors, and unknown common-place Party-Writers, mix'd up with common Reports, and a few insipid lifeless Scraps of their own tasteless ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... plant grows wild, and may be trained to form an almost impenetrable fence. It bears a sort of fruit somewhat resembling a pear, to which the natives are partial, but strangers generally consider it insipid, and not worth the trouble of ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... have lost it if he had not established a reputation for honesty, which drew customers to him, who, notwithstanding the denunciations of the parson, preferred tea with some taste in it from a Unitarian to the insipid wood-flavoured stuff which was sold by the grocer who believed in ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... was the latest poet in these islands whose passion warbled forth in perfectly artless strains; and he had the advantage of using a dialect still unsubdued and unvulgarized. Artlessness nowadays must be the result of the most exquisitely finished art; if not, it is apt to be insipid, if not positively squalid and fusty. The obvious uses of simple words have been exhausted; we cannot, save by infinite pains and the exercise of a happy genius, recover the old spontaneous air, the effect of an inevitable arrangement of the only ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... except on Fridays, when Mrs. Burton received seventy bosom and particular friends, and talked to them at the top of her voice in faulty German, Italian, which she spoke fluently, or slangy English. [277] In the insipid conversation of this "magpie sanhedrin," "these hen parties," as he called them, Burton did not join, but went on with his work as if no one was present. Indeed, far from complaining, he remarked philosophically that if the rooms had been ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... indulgences contains such insipid, antiquated, and absurd crimes, that it is impossible to turn it to much account. It was composed in stupid and barbarous times; and it is now highly necessary to make a new tariff of sin, for which Rome herself can furnish ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... elucidation." He insisted "that the secret be well kept is obviously necessary," because if it leaks out "against the author's will, his purposes are immediately at odds and ends." Then he remarked that altho "there can be no question that ... many points ... which would have been comparatively insipid even if given in full detail in a natural sequence, are endued with the interest of mystery; but neither can it be denied that a vast many more points are at the same time deprived of all effect, and become ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... ten years Sir Christopher was occupied with the architectural metamorphosis of his old family mansion, thus anticipating through the prompting of his individual taste that general re-action from the insipid imitation of the Palladian style towards a restoration of the Gothic, which marked the close of the eighteenth century. This was the object he had set his heart on, with a singleness of determination which was regarded with not a little ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... autobiography, "his passion for fencing which nothing could overcome." As an amateur actor he paid the manager of the Richmond Theatre seven guineas and a half for permission to undertake "the inferior insipid part of Richmond," who does not appear until the fifth act of the play. The Richard of the night was a brother-amateur, equally enthusiastic, one Litchfield by name. "I cared for nothing," wrote Mathews, "except the last scene of Richmond, but in that I was determined, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... the power of man to paint with a strength exceeding that of nature, in such scenes as the Hudson presents. Every mile shows some new and startling effect of the combination of rocks, trees, and water; there is no interval of flat or insipid scenery, from the moment you enter upon the river at New York, to that of quitting it at Albany, a distance of ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... renews my youth. His form, his bearing, his countenance, manifest self-confidence and happiness. Health glows in his face; his firm step is a sign of bodily vigor. His complexion, still delicate, but not insipid, has in it no effeminate softness, for air and sun have already given him the honorable stamp of his sex. His still rounded muscles are beginning to show signs of growing expressiveness. His eyes, not yet lighted ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... part of history would be curious to know how a handful of their countrymen, separated from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few years, one of the greatest empires of the world. Yet, unless we greatly err, this subject is, to most readers, not only insipid, but positively distasteful." Good God! Is it any wonder that British readers should find the conquest of India "positively distasteful?" Is it not quite natural that Englishmen had rather read of Turkish ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... inexplicable great mystery, in order to pass from Life to Death—and they were introducing each other. Life and Death moved simultaneously, and until the very end Life remained life, to the most ridiculous and insipid trifles. ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... things, have often been made on persons unaccustomed to such foods, or the foods have been given in excessive quantity. To those accustomed to it good wheatmeal bread is much pleasanter, more satisfying, and better flavoured than white; indeed, the latter is described as insipid. Most bakers' bread is of unsatisfactory quality. Flour and bread contain very little fat, the absence of which is considered a defect. This is remedied by the addition of butter, fat or oil, or by nuts, &c., which are rich in oil. ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... fur coat closer about her shoulders. She suggested to Magee a sheltered luxurious life—he could see her regaling young men with tea before a fireplace in a beautiful room—insipid ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... that he knew the personages. In the Dialogues it is assumed that the play had been written by the hero himself, and the hero is the chief speaker. Not a word is said from which the reader would guess that Diderot had borrowed the substance of his plot and some of its least insipid scenes from Goldoni. We can hardly wonder that he was charged with plagiarism. Yet it was not deliberate, we may be sure. When Diderot was strongly seized by an idea, outer circumstances were as if ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... prohibited. This gave rise to what is called the Middle Comedy. The form still continued much the same; and the representation, if not perfectly allegorical, was nevertheless a parody. But the essence was taken away, and this species must have become insipid when it could no longer be seasoned by the salt of personal ridicule. Its whole attraction consisted in idealizing jocularly the reality that came nearest home to every one of the spectators, that is, in representing it under the light of the most preposterous perversity; and how was it ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... French poetry, as compared with German poetry, seems to the English reader very tame and insipid; but the cause of this fact is by no means so apparent as the fact itself. That the poetry of Germany is actually and intrinsically superior to that of France, may readily be admitted; but this is not enough to account for ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... interview. Leonora Kimball had been taught to believe that the chief badges of an aristocracy were complete idleness of the women, and the possession of enough wealth to support such idleness. It mattered not how mentally insipid or morally opaque or physically inane such women might be, the true test of being fitted for the purple was whether or not they had ever done any useful work, and whether or not they had money enough ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... superior, that had not her talents been checked by a natural reserve, she might have stepped from the crowd, and have been hailed as a genius. She had been brought up by a foolish mother, and had in her earlier years been checked by her two insipid sisters, who assumed over her an authority which their age alone could warrant. Seldom, if ever, permitted to appear when there was company, that she might not "spoil the market" of the eldest, she had in her ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... by the storm and stress of our modern life, a mood so foreign to the hearts and environment of most present day human beings, that it is rarely understood by player or hearer, and still more rarely enjoyed. It seems flat and insipid as tepid water to the fevered lips of the young passion-driven, ambition-goaded soul in its first stormy period of struggle and achievement; but later, it is welcomed as the answer to that inarticulate, but ever increasingly frequent, sign for peace ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... happened to run against us whilst waltzing and whirling about, they always said "Je vous 'mande pardon, Monsieur," and nothing farther. We observed that the men paid for the musicians two sous each dance and the women one, and we came away rather disappointed at finding things so much more insipid than we expected; we visited several houses of the same description and found the same sort of scene going forward in them all. The working people in Paris are extremely frugal in their mode of living; bread being full seven-eighths of their food, what they eat with it varies according ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... they do not lead a youth through the dry places of literature, or stimulate him to severe intellectual training. Pope seems to have made some hasty raids into philosophy and theology; he dipped into Locke, and found him "insipid;" he went through a collection of the controversial literature of the reign of James II., which seems to have constituted the paternal library, and was alternately Protestant and Catholic, according to the last book which he had read. But it was upon poetry ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... be found in several districts. To understand properly the cult of nature, and, if I may say so, of landscape among the Celts, see Gildas and Nennius, pp. 131, 136, 137, etc. (Edit. San Marte, Berlin. 1884);] Even the French imitators of the Breton romances keep an impression—although a rather insipid one—of the attraction exercised by nature on the Celtic imagination. Elaine, the heroine of Lancelot, the ideal of Breton perfection, passes her life with her companions in a garden, in the midst of ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... of the thought, the structure, and the style of the great masters in language must lead to a discriminating taste for literature; and the effect upon the pupil's own habits of thought and expression will necessarily be to lift him above the insipid, commonplace matter and language that characterize much of ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... imagining. The brightness was dimmed; on the glitter there were defects; the warm inspirations which came from afar, grew stiff when they were touched, stiffened, as oil does when floating on water. In the taste of things, sweetness and tartness became insipid and nauseous, the moment ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... but one of God's creatures who would be guilty of such depravity as this: I refer to the Unreliable. I believe the Unreliable to be the very lawyer's-cub who sat upon the solitary peak, all soaked in beer and sentiment, and concocted the insipid literary hash I am talking about. The handwriting closely resembles his semi-Chinese ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... into very thin slices, and are much improved by a little lemon peel. Sweet apples are not good for pies, as they are very insipid when baked, and seldom get thoroughly done. If green apples are used, they should first be stewed in as little water as possible; and ...
— Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry Cakes, and Sweetmeats • Miss Leslie
... days dawned at last, and Johnnie was early at Manin's soda-fountain, drinking insipid beverages and anxiously watching the street. In due time the negroes appeared, their straw sarons laden with produce which they innocently disposed of. O'Reilly began to consult his watch with such frequency that ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... described in a word: he was the small bourgeois of Paris, the worthy middle-class being with a kindly face, relieved by pure white hair, but made insipid ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... Love a man who comes to me with a silly second-hand affection from his insipid baby-face, and offers me half, or two-thirds, or a third of his worthless heart? I hate him! and her! and ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... meets disgrace, Might meet with reverence, in its proper place. The fulsome clench, that nauseates the town, Would from a judge or alderman go down, Such virtue is there in a robe and gown! And that insipid stuff which here you hate, Might somewhere else be called a grave debate; Dulness is decent in the church and state. But I forget that still 'tis understood, Bad plays are best decried by showing good. Sit silent then, that my pleased soul may see A judging audience once, and worthy me; ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... endeavours to reduce all his politics into maxims, as being most easily portable for a travelling head, though, as they are for the most part of slight matters, they are but like spirits drawn out of water, insipid and good for nothing. His letters are a kind of bills of exchange, in which he draws news and politics upon all his correspondents, who place it to account, and draw it back again upon him; and though it be false, neither cheats the other, for it passes between both for good and sufficient ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... soap for washing linen. The foliage has the peculiar property of making meat or poultry tender if hung up in the branches. The fruit is of a rich olive green, and remains so almost to maturity, when it quickly turns yellow. Both in shape and flavour it is something like a melon, and, although more insipid, it is refreshing in this climate. Containing a quantity of pepsine, it is often recommended by doctors as a dessert for persons with ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... To be free, I have no taste of those insipid dry discourses with which our sex of force must entertain themselves apart from men. We may affect endearments to each other, profess eternal friendships, and seem to dote like lovers; but 'tis not in our natures long to persevere. Love will resume his empire in our breasts, ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... quite forgotten, but to which he had referred at the next short meeting, at some other house, on the corner of some other similar sofa. That was all that she could call up out of her memories. She had thought him insipid. Once she remembered distinctly that while he had been talking to her, she had been watching Bianca Corleone's handsome brother, Gianforte, whom she had seen only once before, and that when her companion had asked her to agree with him, she had said 'yes,' without having ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... don't hold your fork like that," corrected Marise, half-heartedly, thinking that she herself did not like the insipid phrase "very good" nor did she consider the way a fork was held so very essential to salvation. "How much of life is convention, any way you arrange it," she thought, "even in such an entirely unconventional one ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... farm, among monarchs incompetent alike to hold, to delegate, or—to resign the inheritance of the great warrior and lawgiver. The meek, bald, fat, stammering, simple Charles, or Louis, who successively sat upon his throne—princes, whose only historic individuality consists in these insipid appellations—had not the sense to comprehend, far less to develop, the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... good points, but not interesting ones. He is very tiresome with his eternal puns and insipid compliments, ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... At mid-morning Lockley found some mushrooms. They were insipid and only acute hunger would make them edible raw, but he filled his pockets. A little later there were berries, and as they gathered and ate them he lectured learnedly on edible wild plants to be found in the wilderness. Jill listened with apparent interest. When they left the ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... more hearty, but more generous to others. Thus he encounters Colonel Reames, "a man," says he, "who understands and loves a play as well as I, and I love him for it." And again, when he and his wife had seen a most ridiculous insipid piece, "Glad we were," he writes, "that Betterton had no part in it." It is by such a zeal and loyalty to those who labor for his delight that the amateur grows worthy of the artist. And it should be kept in mind that, not only in art, but ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... women: but Webster has no such purpose. What he was thinking and writing of was not truth, but effect; not the Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess (in the critical moment of the play) merely forward. That curious scene, in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him and makes him marry her, is, on the ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... decision what the law ordains or the wisdom of the race teaches. But we have an inward monitor. We often hang back from a recognized duty. But we feel an inward push. When the wrong impulse is pungent and enticing, and the right one insipid and tame, when we would forget if we could the perils of sin, conscience surges up in us and saves us from ourselves. It is a mechanism of extreme value, which nature has evolved in us for imposing on our weak ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... and working, for even their vacations were turned into days of toil. They spent their all in one endeavor—to save men from a yawning Pit and a lurid Hell. Nowadays we live in perpetual relaxation and recreation. Smooth, insipid preachers talk to shallow, giddy audiences, and the whole thing is on a gigantic landslide. Lord, save! or death and ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... fish properly is very important, as no food, perhaps, is so insipid as fish if carelessly cooked. It must be well done and properly salted. A good rule to cook fish by is the following: Allow ten minutes to the first pound and five minutes for each additional pound; for example: boil a fish weighing five pounds thirty minutes. ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... some, even of his pashints, were colourless; indeed, not to mince the matter, six or seven of that sacred band were nullity in person. "I can compare the beggars to nothing," said he, "but the globules of the Do-Nothings; dee——d insipid, and nothing in 'em. But the others make up. Man alive, I've got 'a rosy-cheeked miser,' and an 'ill-used attorney,' and an 'honest Screw'—he is a gardener, with ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... right out of the newspaper, tiresome sketches and wormy tales, all written in a colorless style and containing not the faintest hint of an outlook on life nor an appreciation of human nature. When I have waded through one of these books its insipid descriptions and interminable harangues go instantly out of my mind, and the only impression that remains is one of surprise that a man can write three or four hundred pages when he has absolutely nothing to reveal to ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... fellowship in disgrace he hurried to the library and sought out the works of the Dean of St. Patrick's. And in the "Journal to Stella" he found what he sought—and more. Expressions of the most appalling coarseness alternated with the most insipid tendernesses. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Myrrha bit by bit, with an infinity of pains. The task having taught him something of verse-making, he composed an ode, which he sent by post to his mistress. The poem was writ in tears of blood, yet it was as cold and insipid as a schoolboy's exercise. Still, he did get something said of the fair vision of a woman that hovered for ever before his eyes, and of the door he had kissed in a night ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... and walked slowly on. And I realized again, what I had once before noted, that overly refined proprieties—I do not mean proprieties of the essential kind—cannot endure between man and maid cast alone in a wilderness. They become frail, insipid; and mar, rather than perfect, the harmony of existence. Contraversely, their absence adds a deeper luster, strikes the tuning-fork that hums with the true note of life. Sorry the man who does not feel a sympathetic vibration! A woman is not exactly at her best ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... to live and die. Come, and bring any of your friends the mandarins with you. My best room commands a court in which are trees and a pump, the water of which is excellent cold—with brandy, and not very insipid without." At about the same time we find Mary Lamb recording that her genial brother had suddenly taken to living like an anchorite. He tabooed all alcoholic drinks, and confined himself to cold ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... insipid. There is nothing wrong with it, but it does not interest us—it lacks character, lacks color, lacks power. It too closely resembles what we conceive of the angels as having— impeccability without the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat and insipid; his comick wit degenerating into clinches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... but instead of leaving sickly elves in their places, he brings into the world exceedingly healthy or lusty youngsters which grow up into a full maturity, and develop traits of character superior to the ones they supplant. For instance he took away the ugly, thorny insipid cactus and replaced it by a beautiful smooth juicy one which is now making the western deserts blossom as the rose. The name of this man is Luther Burbank whose fame as a creator of new ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... carnal man in me rose up and damned these lying foes of mine. Resignation went whistling down the wind. Hang me! Hang me! No, by the God that gave me breath! I sat back and laughed—laughed at my own insipid virtue, by which, to keep faith with the fanatical follower of Prince Charlie, I had refused my liberty; cut myself off from the useful services of my King; wasted good years of my life, trusting to pressure and help to come from England, which never came; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a sound of drums. Twice on such a day, once the day before, thrice the next day, till by and by it was the common thing. High-stepping childhood, with laths and broom-handles at shoulder, was not fated, as in the insipid days of peace, to find, on running to the corner, its high hopes mocked by a wagon of empty barrels rumbling over the cobble-stones. No; it was the Washington Artillery, or the Crescent Rifles, or the ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... not answer the report or opinion that generally passes of it: they having often found that, not only what others have magnified, but even what they themselves have enjoyed with great pleasure and delight at one time, has proved insipid or nauseous at another; and therefore they see nothing in it for which they should forego a present enjoyment. But that this is a false way of judging, when applied to the happiness of another life, they must confess; unless they will say, God cannot make those happy he ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... strong enough to be resolutely wicked, not strong enough to be anything in particular, but that which her surroundings made her. If she had been well-born and well brought up, she would have been a pretty, insipid girl, who needed to be taken care of; as it was, she had "gone wrong." The excellent Rector of St. Michael's felt that she must ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... laughed, and mother said, "Wait a little longer, and I shall build a fire." She meant to make some real coffee. But neither she nor the warrior, whom the law of our custom had compelled to partake of my insipid hospitality, said anything to embarrass me. They treated my best judgment, poor as it was, with the utmost respect. It was not till long years afterward that I learned how ridiculous a thing ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... fresh and sparkling nature, never insipid, intent from morning to night on a vital enjoyment of life in all its aspects. I do not mean that he was always wanting to be amused—it was very far from that. Amusement was the spring of his social mood; but he had a passion too for silence and solitude. His ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to veal; green peas to lamb. Lemon juice makes a very grateful addition to nearly all the insipid members of the fish kingdom. Slices of lemon cut into very small dice and stirred into drawn butter and allowed to come to the boiling point, served with fowls, ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... eggs that are of an oblong make, as being of sweeter flavor and more nutritive than the round ones: for, being tough-shelled, they contain a male yelk. Cabbage that grows in dry lands, is sweeter than that about town: nothing is more insipid than a garden much watered. If a visitor should come unexpectedly upon you in the evening, lest the tough old hen prove disagreeable to his palate, you must learn to drown it in Falernian wine mixed [with water]: this will make it tender. The mushrooms that grow in meadows, are of the best ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... The usual apology for it is that it depicts family life with fidelity. Its characters are supposed to act and talk as people act and talk at home and in society. I trust this is a libel, but, for the sake of the argument, suppose they do. Was ever produced so insipid a result? ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... now within the loop of her husband's music it suddenly became insipid, futile, and lacking in those enchantments for which she yearned. Her eyes dropped to the shapely hands meekly folded in her lap, dropped because the bold, interrogative expression on Rentgen's face disturbed her. She knew, as any woman would have known, that he admired her—but was he ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... life, without passion, must be altogether insipid and tiresome; let a man suppose that he has full power of modelling his own disposition, and let him deliberate what appetite or desire he would choose for the foundation of his happiness and enjoyment. Every affection, he would observe, when gratified ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... was not one of that cloud of false witnesses, who, calling themselves Christians, take no trouble for the end for which Christ was born, namely, their salvation from unrighteousness—a class that may be divided into the insipid and the offensive, both regardless of obedience, the former indifferent to, the latter contentious ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... had gone, she said, "No, I don't think Maxwell Frayne is likely to be an enemy; at least, not one that you need fear. He is a gentleman, though he is too insipid to interest me." ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... was, but as perfection is Insipid in this naughty world of ours, Where our first parents never learned to kiss Till they were exiled from their earlier bowers, Where all was peace, and innocence, and bliss,[b] (I wonder how they got through the twelve hours), Don Jose, like a lineal son of Eve, Went plucking various ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... charm; imagination wanders with delight over that which is vague and undefined; and the pleasures we are deprived of seem to possess a fascinating power, compared with which all we daily feel in the narrow circle of sedentary life appears insipid. The taste for herborisation, the study of geology, rapid excursions to Holland, England, and France, with the celebrated Mr. George Forster, who had the happiness to accompany captain Cook in his second expedition round the globe, contributed to give a determined direction ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... palisade, and began one of the many meals with which Providence had supplied them in critical circumstances. Nobody was inclined to be fastidious, but opinions were divided as regarded the edible fern. Some thought the flavor sweet and agreeable, others pronounced it leathery, insipid, and resembling the taste of gum. The sweet potatoes, cooked in the burning soil, were excellent. The geographer remarked that Kara-Tete was not badly ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... the pastor commenced his sermon, Ned opened his eyes, threw back his head, dropt his under jaw, and surrendered himself to the most intense interest. The preacher was an indifferent one; and by as much as he became dull and insipid, by so much did Ned become absorbed in his discourse. And yet it was impossible for the nicest observer to detect anything in his looks or manner, short of the most solemn devotion. The effect which his conduct had upon the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... not intend to marry upon faith," retorted Bertha; then she broke out petulantly, "In a word, uncle, I do not intend to marry a man who is so insipid that I could not even quarrel with him; whom I could not think of seriously enough to take the trouble to dislike; to whom I am so thoroughly indifferent that for me he has no existence out of ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... a man who comes to me with a silly second-hand affection from his insipid baby-face, and offers me half, or two-thirds, or a third of his worthless heart? I hate him! and her! ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... He must have known that there were dark spots on his fame. He might also have felt with pride that the splendor of his fame would bear many spots. He would have wished posterity to have a likeness of him, though an unfavorable likeness, rather than a daub at once insipid and unnatural, resembling neither him nor anybody else. "Paint me as I am," said Oliver Cromwell, while sitting to young Lely. "If you leave out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling." Even in such a trifle, the great Protector ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... berry, red or yellow, as big as the yolk of an egg, the salal berry, any quantity of blueberries, huckleberries, both red and blue, sarvis berries, bear berries, mountain ash berries (also loved of bears), thimble berries, high bush cranberries, gooseberries—large and insipid—currants, wild cherries, choke cherries; many of these friends of old, others seen here for the first time, dainty picking in the autumn for deer, bears, foxes, squirrels and many birds. What particularly appealed ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... of an almost unaccountable craving. I am sick of shooting pheasants and partridges, and want to have a go at some large game again. There, you know the feeling — when one has once tasted brandy and water, milk becomes insipid to the palate. That year we spent together up in Kukuanaland seems to me worth all the other years of my life put together. I dare say that I am a fool for my pains, but I can't help it; I long to go, and, what is more, I ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... the entertainments of the theatre has been one cause of destroying that legitimate comedy, which such critics require. The eye, which has been accustomed to delight in paintings of caricature, regards a picture from real life as an insipid work. The extravagance of farce has given to the Town a taste for the pleasant convulsion of hearty laughter, and smiles are contemned, as the tokens of ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... attained it—more common, weaker than in his imagining. The brightness was dimmed; on the glitter there were defects; the warm inspirations which came from afar, grew stiff when they were touched, stiffened, as oil does when floating on water. In the taste of things, sweetness and tartness became insipid and nauseous, the moment they reached ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... be described as resuming her insipid and affected air when she made this exclamation; for she had never cast it off; nor was it likely that she ever would or could, in any other place than in the grave. But hurriedly dismissing whatever shadow ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... rapscallion, Wilke, who married a humpbacked seamstress, ran through her savings, and abused her daily—and I almost embraced him. I think of the blond Teuton, Captain von Kessel, that handsome man, somewhat too insipid-looking and too thick-set, who is our absolute lord and whom we trust at first glance. And, finally, I think about my constant laughing and admit to myself that laughing is a sensible thing ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... it is, that without this impulse to fame and reputation, our industry would stagnate, and that lively desire of pleasing each other die away. This opinion was so established in the heathen world, that their sense of living appeared insipid, except their being was enlivened with a consciousness, that they were esteemed by the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... is an insipid, pasty-complexioned doll, nine times out of ten, and would be vastly improved in looks and temperament if she were subjected to a course of shower-baths, and compelled to take horse-exercise regularly and earn her bread before she ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... would be the first to appreciate its good qualities if it were placed before them well cooked and served, now recoil from the idea of habitually feeding off what they know only under the guise of a stodgy, insipid, or watery mass. A few hints, therefore, respecting the best manner of preparing this vegetable ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... their daughters, confined in the harem—insipid, uneducated, ignorant of all but the mechanical arts, scarcely seen till they were married—could rarely excite interest; while their brilliant rivals, half graces, half harpies, elegant and refined, but fickle and ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... woman whom a word or two will describe. She was thoroughly commonplace—neither bad nor good, neither clever nor silly. She was what is called well-bred; that is, languid, silent, perfectly dressed, and insipid. Of her two children, Arthur was almost the exclusive favourite, especially after he became the heir to such brilliant fortunes. For she was so much the mechanical creature of the world, that even her affection was warm or cold in proportion as the ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... himself, made amends by due apology and promised reformation. For though Catherine never had truly loved this man, some years older than herself and of radically different character, still she liked and respected him, and found him—by his very force and dominance—far more to her taste than the insipid hangers-on, sons of fortune or fortune-hunters, who, like the sap-brained Van Slyke, made up so great a part ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... (print) enpresi. Insertion enpresajxo. Inseparable sendisigxa. Inside interne. Inside out returnite. Insidious insida. Insight elsciado. Insignificant sensignifa. Insincere nesincera. Insinuate proponeti. Insipid sengusta. Insist insisti. Insnare allogi, kapti. Insobriety malsobreco. Insolent insultema. Insoluble nesolvebla. Insolvent nepagokapabla. Insomnia sendormo. Insomuch tial ke. Inspect ekzameni. Inspector inspektoro. Inspiration ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... is very frequent amongst the children of the poor in large towns, who are in general ill fed, ill lodged, and ill clothed; and who are further weakened by eating much salt with their scanty meal of insipid vegetable food, which is seldom of better quality than water gruel, with a little coarse bread in it. See diarrhoea of infants, Class I. 1. 2. 5. Scrophulous ulcers are difficult to heal, which is owing ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... taken as the most distinguished exponent. 'Men of loftier taste and bolder fancy early remonstrated against this chilling confinement of the noblest, the most aspiring, and most expansive of all the Arts. . . . It was not till the commotion of Europe broke the chain of indolence and insipid effeminacy that the stronger passions of readers required again to be stimulated and exercised and soothed, and that the minor charms of correctness were sacrificed to the ardent efforts of uncontrolled and unfearing genius. The authors of this class began to look back for their ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... beheld with pleasure) by diverting the mind from its road of serious thoughts; by instilling gaiety and airiness of spirit; by provoking to such dispositions of spirit in way of emulation or complaisance; and by seasoning matters, otherwise distasteful or insipid, with an unusual, and ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... vinegar a quantity of powdered chalk or whiting, sufficient to destroy the acidity; and when the white sediment is formed, pour off the insipid liquor. The powder is then to be dried, and some oil of vitriol poured upon it, as long as white acid fumes continue to ascend. This substance forms the essential ingredient, the fumes of which are particularly useful in purifying rooms and places ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... not care a fig for doctors, with their insipid reasonings. Let them rule those who are sick without wishing to govern healthy people. They meddle with too many affairs when they seek to rein in our chaste desires; in addition to the dog days, and their strict rules, they tell us a hundred ...
— Amphitryon • Moliere
... entertained me, and all that now passes for unmeaning dissipation, might then have worn the appearance of variety and pleasure. But where the mind is wholly without interest, every thing is languid and insipid; and accustomed as I have long been to think friendship the first of human blessings, and social converse the greatest of human enjoyments, how ever can I reconcile myself to a state of careless indifference, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... pump-filter, for Bela Moshi had taken particular pains to leave it in a safe place before the sortie, the subaltern strained the liquid. It was warm and insipid, yet it was now free from contamination, and Bela Moshi drank ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... it so insupportably bitter to the taste that he could not keep it in his mouth. If, he contended, Ballet had been poisoned by tartar emetic, then twelve grains given in milk would have given it an insipid taste, and vomiting immediately after would have got rid of the poison. Later investigations have shown that, in cases of antimonial poisoning, vomiting does not necessarily get rid of all the poison, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... they had not warned him, these grave men, these instructors of youth, who had never known any world except their little world of books, who ranged women into two camps, one in which they held a docile Tennysonian place, as chaste adorners of the sacred home, mothers of children, man's property, insipid angel housekeepers of his demure middle age; the other where they were depicted as cheap, vulgar temptresses, on a level with the wine cup and ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... "motive." Some feature, some oddity, some temperament is seized, dwelt upon, played with, and turned inside out, with incessant repetition and unwearied energy. Every character, except the walking gentleman and the walking lady, the insipid lover, or the colourless friend, have some feature thrust out of proportion, magnified beyond nature. Sam Weller never speaks without his anecdote, Uriah is always "'umble," Barkis is always "willin'," Mark Tapley is always "jolly," Dombey is always solemn, and Toots is invariably idiotic. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... York but one night. I found it quite insipid after seeing Philadelphia. [The character of the two cities seems to have changed a trifle in a hundred years, for, with all her faults, no one could nowadays accuse New York of being insipid.] I went on board the packet on Saturday at twelve ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... drying in air, and then heating to about 110 deg. Different modifications are known, e.g. amylodextrine, erythrodextrine and achroodextrine. Its name has reference to its powerful dextrorotatory action on polarized light. Pure dextrine is an insipid, odourless, white substance; commercial dextrine is sometimes yellowish, and contains burnt or unchanged starch. It dissolves in water and dilute alcohol; by strong alcohol it is precipitated from its solutions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... companion's fish was as unpleasant and coarse eating as the one he discussed, giving him credit the while for his disinterestedness, he being in happy ignorance of the comparative merits of fresh-water fish when cooked; and therefore he struggled with his miserable, watery, insipid, bony, ill-cooked chub, while Bob picked the fat flakes off the ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... hour's absence, and since nobody but herself knew that her feet were quite wet through, there were no explanations to make. But for the first time she wearied a little of her courtiers. She found their compliments insipid and her repartees were slow. Her thoughts were wandering to that poor home where all undeservedly she had been received as an angel of light; and her anxieties were with the messenger stumbling along the half broken road to Lee to carry the warning. ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... lighting fires]—were not on fire in the yard. So that they are, as they swear, in absolute ignorance how this fire should come; which is a strange thing, that so horrid an effect should have so mean and uncertain a beginning. By and by called in to the King and Cabinet, and there had a few insipid words about money for Tangier, but to no purpose. Thence away walked to my boat at White Hall, and so home and to supper, and then to talk with W. Hewer about business of the differences at present among the people of our office, and so to ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... poets of a generation should have points in common; but to my fond eye those who have graced these collections look as diverse as sheep to their shepherd, or the members of a Chinese family to their uncle; and if there is an allegation which I would 'deny with both hands', it is this: that an insipid sameness is the chief characteristic of an anthology which offers—to name almost at random seven only out of forty (oh ominous academic number!)—the work of Messrs. Abercrombie, Davies, de la Mare, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... becoming black and heavy. And when a picture is composed chiefly of middle tint, the dark and light portions have a more equal chance of coming into notice, but the general effect is in danger of becoming common and insipid. Light and shade are capable of producing many results, but the three principal are relief, harmony and breadth. By the first the artist is enabled to give his work the distinctness and solidity of nature; the second is the result of a union and cement of one ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... Although as you're of course aware (I never tried to hide it) I moisten my insipid fare With ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... than three birds with one stone did not suit our sanguinary purpose. We disliked the widow not so much for her sentimentality as for being the mother of Bill Conway; we disliked Mr. Meeks, not because he was insipid, like his own syrups, but because the widow loved him. Bill Conway ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the structure, and the style of the great masters in language must lead to a discriminating taste for literature; and the effect upon the pupil's own habits of thought and expression will necessarily be to lift him above the insipid, commonplace matter and language that characterize much of ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... question is, not whether the butterfly can contentedly dispense with the higher instincts of the industrious, laborious, and useful bee, but whether the superior creature could content itself with the insipid and objectless pursuits of the lower one. The mind requires more to fill it in proportion to the largeness of its grasp: hope not, therefore, that you could find either their peace or their satisfaction in the purse-netting, embroidering lives of your thoughtless companions. ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... character of Sparkish, in Wycherley's Country Wife: in that of Sir Courtly Nice, by Crown, his excellence was still greater; there his whole man, voice, mien, and gesture, was no longer Mountford, but another person; there, the insipid, soft civility, the elegant and formal mien, the drawling delicacy of voice, the stately flatness of his address, and the empty eminence of his attitudes, were so nicely observed, that had he not been an entire matter of nature, had he not kept his judgment, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... a still slower process, and in this the pot should have only a sizzling round one part of the edge. All fresh meat should boil slowly; ham or corn beef should barely simmer. Yet they must not go off the boil at all, which would spoil fresh meat entirely; steeping in water gives a flat, insipid taste. ...
— Culture and Cooking - Art in the Kitchen • Catherine Owen
... in the matter. George's friends thought her a pretty, lively creature, and showed the usual inclination of the male sex to linger in her society. She mostly wanted to be informed as to the House and its ways. It was all so new to her!—she said. But her ignorance was not insipid; her questions had flavour. There was much talk and laughter; Letty felt herself the mistress of the table, and her social ambitions swelled ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... savour. applied to an insipid mannerless man as "brid" (cold) is to a fool. "Ahl Zauk" is a man of pleasure, a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... the previous day was gone. The eaters of the dinner, like the dinner itself, were lukewarm, insipid, overdone—and all owing to this poor little dull Young Barnacle. Conversationless at any time, he was now the victim of a weakness special to the occasion, and solely referable to Clennam. He was under a pressing and continual necessity of looking at that gentleman, which occasioned his eye-glass ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... with a heightened colour, and in this strange frame of mind, that when she was alone she seemed in high happiness, and when any one addressed her she resented it like a contradiction. A part of the way she had the company of some neighbour girls and a loutish young man; never had they seemed so insipid, never had she made herself so disagreeable. But these struck aside to their various destinations or were out-walked and left behind; and when she had driven off with sharp words the proffered convoy of some of her nephews and nieces, she was free to ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... longing to see her kept them rooted to the spot. It was very hot—the lamp glass threw a round, moonlike patch of light upon the ceiling, but the rest of the room was drowned in steamy darkness. Under the bed a deep plate full of phenol exhaled an insipid smell. And every few moments tiny gusts of wind swelled the window curtains. The window opened on the boulevard, whence rose a dull ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... venture to say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,) —poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections in London,) highly was I delighted, if any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into conversation ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... vaguely about, hoping fishing lines would fall from the skies for them, but as no such thing happened, they had pulled long hairy lines from the cactuses, and they had also brought in their pockets a fruit like an apple outside, but it was full of an insipid kind of custard. Jenny had got some sand for scouring her floors and kettles, also she said she had got a plant that looked like one in an old book she had, from which they made soap. This we found correct, and it proved ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... the other; but it all went towards relieving the monotony of the life in the cloister—a monotony which has been very much over-stated by those who have never studied the subject. To begin with, it does not follow that what would be very dull to us would be dull and insipid to the men of the thirteenth century. Before a man offered himself for admission to a monastery, he must have had a taste for a quiet life, and in many instances he had grown tired of the bustle, ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... commendation. He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... little knowledge of Norwegian to dismiss this as dull and insipid prose, a part of which has accidentally been turned into mechanical blank verse. Moreover, the work is marked throughout by inconsistency and carelessness in details. For instance the king begins (p. ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... the laughter of the critical." Dryden "regretted that Shakspere did not know or rarely observed the Aristotelian laws of the three unities," but was good enough to express his surprise at the powerful effect of his plays. "He is many times flat, insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling, ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... like all stimulants, should be used only in moderation. The use of either by children or dyspeptics is not to be recommended. Pure water is the best drink ordinarily for everybody. Most people prefer cold water, as it is not so insipid as boiled, but a cup of hot water taken in the morning on arising and one at night just before retiring will prove of benefit to sufferers ...
— The Community Cook Book • Anonymous
... despair. All the connexions which she had imprudently formed with numbers of fashionable but extravagant and thoughtless women would insensibly be broken off by this measure; for Lady Delacour, who was already weary of their company, would be so much struck with the difference between their insipid conversation and the animated and interesting society in Lady Anne Percival's family, that she would afterwards think them not only burdensome but intolerable. Lord Delacour's intimacy with Lord Studley was one of his chief inducements ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... glanced back at Cadover, and thought of the insipid day that lay before him. Generally he was attracted by fresh people, and Stephen was almost fresh: they had been to him symbols of the unknown, and all that they did was interesting. But now he cared for the unknown no longer. ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Are these details insipid? Look back, good friend, at your own youth, and ask how was that? I like to think of a well-nurtured boy, brave and gentle, warm-hearted and loving, and looking the world in the face with kind honest eyes. What bright colours it wore then, and how you enjoyed it! A man has not many years ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the play with Hobhouse. Mrs. Jordan superlative in Hoyden, and Jones well enough in Foppington. What plays! what wit!—helas! Congreve and Vanbrugh are your only comedy. Our society is too insipid now for the like copy. Would not go to Lady Keith's. Hobhouse thought it odd. I wonder he should like parties. If one is in love, and wants to break a commandment and covet any thing that is there, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... bright as glass beads, while Mammy's, I thought, approached a green, but with my own I felt perfectly satisfied; for a lady had remarked in my presence what beautiful eyes I had—adding that "dark eyes were so much more expressive than blue; blue ones were so very insipid looking." The observation about my hair, though, was only too correct, and touched me most sensibly. While most of the other children possessed those soft, flowing curls, so beautiful in childhood, mine obstinately refused to wave; and was, ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... vous 'mande pardon, Monsieur," and nothing farther. We observed that the men paid for the musicians two sous each dance and the women one, and we came away rather disappointed at finding things so much more insipid than we expected; we visited several houses of the same description and found the same sort of scene going forward in them all. The working people in Paris are extremely frugal in their mode of living; bread being full seven-eighths of their food, what they eat with it varies according ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... feeble will, and shallow thought can ever have a real right to the title of orator. Men of minds cultivated overmuch, and elaborately trained, are apt to lack central spiritual vitality, as some fruits grown to great size by art of the gardener fail of their native flavor, become insipid, and ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... day, her voice would have been sweet and girlish enough. As it was, it suggested an instrument tuned to a false key and consequently discordant with all true and womanly harmonies. Her conversation with young Minty was as insipid as himself, but occasionally Stanton's cynical banter evoked something like repartee ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... red spots on Lucy's face, but her lips were very white, and the buttons on her riding dress rose and fell rapidly with the beating of her heart as she looked steadily at Arthur. Was he going to send her from him, send her back to the insipid life she had lived before she knew him? It was too terrible to believe, and the great tears rolled slowly down her cheeks. Then, as a flash of pride came to her aid, she dashed ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... lives of fathers?"—"Often," I replied, "but I do not think they are the best kind of biographers, for you see, Walter, sons cannot well tell the faults and weaknesses of their fathers, and so filial biographies are often rather insipid performances."—"I don't know about that," he said, "I think I could write yours. I have made it already into chapters." "Now then, my boy," I said, "begin it: let us have the outline at least." Walter then commenced ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... inevitable too that the humanistic spirit should control the writing of history. A superficial comparison of the histories of this period with the earlier chronicles, especially with works so full of life, color, and brilliancy as those of the Villani, will lead us loudly to deplore the change. How insipid and conventional appear by their side the best of the humanists, and particularly their immediate and most famous successors among the historians of Florence, Leonardo Aretino and Poggio! The enjoyment of the reader is incessantly marred by the sense that, in the classical phrases of Fazio, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... curious change which fresh-water induces on the flounder. In the brackish water of an estuary it becomes, without diminishing in general size, thicker and more fleshy than when in its legitimate habitat the sea; but the flesh loses in quality what it gains in quantity;—it is flabby and insipid, and the margin-fin lacks always its delicious strip of transparent fat. I fain wish that some intelligent resident on the shores of Stennis would set himself carefully to examine its productions, and that then, after registering his ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... kind of difference," returned the philosopher, "as between light and earth,—both of which help the growth of flowers; but light gives color and beauty, earth only the insipid matter. I ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... knock off Henrik Gjertsen's block when the latter was guilty of kicking Scraps out of his way. Yea, even more. When Simon Nishikanta, huge and gross as in the flesh he was and for ever painting delicate, insipid, feministic water- colours, when he threw his deck-chair at Scraps for clumsily knocking over his easel, he found the ham-like hand of Grimshaw so instant and heavy on his shoulder as to whirl him half about, almost fling him to the deck, and leave him ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... prayed more fervently than I had ever prayed before. The ordinary prayers seemed insipid. I recited the Virgin's Litany. I hunted up the most beautiful hymns of praise that I could find, and repeated them without getting tired. "Star of the Morning, make Colette whole." The first time, I remained on my knees for so long that Sister Marie-Aimee ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... other seeds, it is insipid until it has undergone the saccharine fermentation; and this, you must recollect, is always a previous step to the vinous fermentation in those vegetables in which sugar is not already formed. Brandy may in the same manner be ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... and so in this concourse of strangers she felt more at home with him than with anybody. Young Mr. St. Leger was a very handsome fellow; with regular features and soft, rather lazy, blue eyes, which, however, were not insipid. Dolly rather liked him; the expression of his features was gentle and good, so were his manners. He seemed well pleased with his choice of a companion, and did his best to make Dolly ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... gentleman of great fortune in the funds. Women of quality treated him with great familiarity, young ladies began to spread their charms for him, when an accident happened that put a stop to his continuance in a way of life too insipid and inactive to afford employment for those great talents which were designed to make a much more considerable figure in the world than attends the character of a beau ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... future rivalry between Rome and Carthage, and the ultimate triumph of the former power. All through the poem there are allusions to the history of Rome, and to the descent of the Julian house from the great Trojan hero. The hero Aeneas, himself, is rather an insipid character, but, on the other hand, Dido is painted with great force, truth, and tenderness. The visit to Carthage gives occasion for the narrative of the fall of Troy in the second and third books, while the sixth book, describing ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth; and a deluge of false sentiments and over-stretched feelings, stifling the natural emotions of the heart, render the domestic pleasures insipid, that ought to sweeten the exercise of those severe duties, which educate a rational and immortal being for a ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Wou'd-be) thou dear Partner of my Greatness, and shalt be, of all my Pleasures! thy pretty satirical Observation has oblig'd me beyond Imitation.' I think your Majesty is got into a Vein of Rhiming to-night, (said Philadelphia.) Ay! Pox of that young insipid Fop, we could else have been as great as an Emperor of China, and as witty as Horace in his Wine; but let him go, like a pragmatical, captious, giddy Fool as he is! I shall take a Time to see him. Nay, Sir, (said Philibella) he has promis'd your Majesty a Visit in our Hearing. Come, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... Hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp only, when the first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor, while the latter was sweet and insipid." ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... distinction. For where would be the superior pleasure and satisfaction resulting from mixed conversation, if this difference were abolished? If the qualities of both were invariably and exactly the same, no benefit or entertainment would arise from the tedious and insipid uniformity of such an intercourse; whereas considerable advantages are reaped from a select society of both sexes. The rough angles and asperities of male manners are imperceptibly filed, and gradually worn smooth, by the polishing of female conversation, ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... blended his mirth and a truculent sense of the humorous with his cruelties, we cannot wonder that he should soon blend his cruelties with his ordinary festivities, and that his daily banquets would soon become insipid without them. Hence he required a daily supply of executions in his own halls and banqueting rooms; nor was a dinner held to be complete without such a dessert. Artists were sought out who had dexterity and strength enough to do what Lucan somewhere calls ensem rotare, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... accumulate wealth, acquire learning, rise to distinction in any of the professions or trades without system. Even the pleasures of life depend much on regularity; otherwise they cloy and become insipid. He, who is unsteady in his habits, now indulging in ease, and now straining every muscle; who, as some excitement arouses him,—such perhaps as the fresh inculcation of economy and industry, flares ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... numerous large, brightly-coloured flowers. The fruits of Opuntias, or, at least, some of them, are edible, and to some palates they are very agreeable. We have tasted them, and consider they are mawkish and insipid—not much better than very poor gooseberries. Sir Joseph Hooker has compared them to Pumpkins. They are pear-shaped, with a thick, spine-covered rind, containing green, yellow, or red pulp, with small, hard ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... he therefore let himself be persuaded by Monsieur Bonnet, who, judging by the gentle and winning expression of his face, thought him well-suited to co-operate in his own work at Montegnac. Roubaud was small and fair; his general appearance was rather insipid, but his gray eyes betrayed the depths of the physiologist and the patient tenacity of a studious man. There was no physician in Montegnac except an old army-surgeon, more devoted to his cellar than to his patients, and too old to continue with any vigor the hard ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... pronoun, a conjunction, or a conjunctive adverb: as, "The selfish man languishes in his narrow circle of pleasures. They are confined to what affects his own interests. He is obliged to repeat the same gratifications, till they become insipid. But the man of virtuous sensibility moves in a ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Hence the insipid or vapid taste of newly boiled water, from which these gases are expelled: fish cannot live in water deprived ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... straight trunks stood like rows of brown columns, while their shiny leaves showed brightly against the blue of the sky, and cast upon the ground a network of light and shadow, figuring the palms of some Indian fabric. Here there was shade beside which that of the European orchard seemed colourless, insipid; the warm joy of sunlight, softened into flying gold-dust; the glad certainty of evergreen foliage; the penetrating perfume of blossom, and the more subdued fragrance of fruit; all helping to fill the body with the soft ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... parties,—and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the caffe and the restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the higher privileges of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once the most gross and insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the world. Our boarding- house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as it often is, seems to me infinitely better than the restaurant life of young Italy. It ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... angles in it, perhaps so much the better. We are apt to be rounded by being rubbed against each other, like the stones on the beach, till there is not a sharp corner or a point that can prick anywhere. So society becomes utterly monotonous, and is insipid and profitless because of that. You Christian people, be yourselves, after your own pattern. And whilst you accept all help from surrounding suggestions and hints, make it 'a very small thing that you be judged of men.' And you, young men, in warehouses and shops, and you, students, and you, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... myself right. I felt called upon to explain, though well knowing that he who explains is lost. I told the story of the poppy over again. I went into the minutest details. I added to it, and expanded. I talked myself hoarse, and when I could talk no more they looked bored. Also, they said insipid things, and soothful things, and things concerning other things, and not at all to the point. I was consumed with anger, and there and then I ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... think you are. Formerly my husband neglected and abandoned me, doubtless finding me very insipid; but now he finds me much improved, and has returned to me. It is very easy to understand, and moreover, it is the worse for him, for he must believe that I have been a faithful wife ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... productiveness of the soil. There is no doubt, however, that all crops which can be raised without watering are superior in flavor and in nutritive power to those grown by the aid of irrigation. Garden vegetables, particularly, profusely watered, are so insipid as to be hardly eatable. Wherever irrigation is practised, there is an almost irresistible tendency, especially among ignorant cultivators, to carry it to excess; and in Piedmont and Lombardy, if the supply of water is abundant, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... too dull," she protested, and shrugged her shoulders, and disengaged herself—half-fearfully, it seemed to her husband. "Even more insipid than your comedy," she added, with a not unkindly smile. "Do ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... took a large mouthful, but spat it out, declaring that he would just as soon eat shoe-leather. I ate a small piece, but thought it tasted very insipid, and not very digestible. The savages looked astonished at our want of taste, and, to show that they appreciated the production more than we did, crammed quantities of it ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... the vanity of the world. He thought how much life exacts for the worthless or very commonplace blessings it can give a man. For instance, to gain, before forty, a university chair, to be an ordinary professor, to expound ordinary and second-hand thoughts in dull, heavy, insipid language—in fact, to gain the position of a mediocre learned man, he, Kovrin, had had to study for fifteen years, to work day and night, to endure a terrible mental illness, to experience an unhappy marriage, and to do a great number of stupid and unjust things which it would have been ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... in art, as in all true criticism. When one's curiosity is deficient, when one is not eager enough for new impressions, and new pleasures, one is liable to value mere academical proprieties too highly, to be satisfied with worn-out or conventional types, with the insipid ornament of Racine, or the prettiness of that later Greek sculpture, which passed so long for true Hellenic work; to miss those places where the handiwork of nature, or of the artist, has been most cunning; to find the most stimulating products of art a mere irritation. ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... said to have lent something of his fancy and amenity to most of the writers from Cowper to Rogers. As a draughtsman he is undoubtedly weak: his figures are often limp and invertebrate, and his type of beauty insipid. Still, regarded as groups, the majority of his designs are exquisite, and he possessed one all-pervading and un-English quality—the quality of grace. This is his dominant note. Nothing can be more seductive than the suave flow of his line, his feeling for costume, his gentle and chastened humour. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... he thought, "you are, in truth, about as puerile, insipid a scoundrel as ever escaped the law. I'll save you your drugged Dutch courage for evidence." But it was not drugged, as he learned later. It was good whisky—a leader—to warm his stomach while ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... 'Re," said Adrian. "These things want thinking out. A limited vision might be restricted in other ways than by mere stupid opaque fog, and bald, insipid position in Space. Consider how much more aggravating it would be—from the point of view of Providence—to limit the vision to the selection of peculiar objects which would give offence to the Taste or Religious Convictions of its owner! Suppose that Miss Scatcherd's eyes, for instance, could ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... is as idle to lament his deficiencies, in comparison with artists like Belletti, for instance, as to complain because the grand figures of Michel Angelo have not the delicacy of finish that marks the sweetly insipid Venus de Medici. Of the other solo performers in the oratorios it is not necessary for us to speak, save to commend the fine voice and good style of Mrs. Harwood, a rising singer, well known here, and whom the country, we hope, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... and passions unworthy of the deity, such as anger, revenge, delight in material sacrifices; they likewise represent human nature on a low level of selfishness and worldliness. Many hymns are utterly unmeaning and insipid, and we must search patiently before we meet, here and there, with sentiments that come from the depth of the soul, and with prayers in which we could join ourselves. Yet there are such passages, and they are the really important passages, as marking the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... frosty morning, and the bridesmaids at Lady Alexandrina's wedding were not very young. Lady Rosina's nose was decidedly red. Lady Margaretta was very wintry, and apparently very cross. Miss Gresham was dull, tame, and insipid; and the Honourable Miss O'Flaherty, who filled the fourth place, was sulky at finding that she had been invited to take a share in so very ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... the chips of oak and beech; and if logwood and walnut peels are used, the astringency will also be united to a portion of colour and flavour. All these substances may be rendered highly useful in giving positive qualities to insipid wines. A simple infusion alone is necessary, in such proportion as the exigencies may require; care being taken to rack and fine the wine after the desired effect has been ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... to tell, on many occasions, what it is that renders one man's conversation so agreeable and entertaining, and another's so insipid and distasteful. As conversation is a transcript of the mind as well as books, the same qualities, which render the one valuable, must give us an esteem for the other. This we shall consider afterwards. In the mean time it may be affirmed in general, that all the merit a man may derive ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... the insipid and immoral songs of the Provencal bards gave place to the immortal productions of the great creators of the European languages. Dante led the way in Italy, and gave to the world the "Divine Comedy"—a masterpiece of human genius, which raised ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... English way of accomplishing that ceremony, and does it by slipping into one's hand what might be taken for a dying flat fish, we took our seats, and the dancing began shortly afterwards. Though on a more magnificent scale than anything I had seen of the kind before, the programme was flat and insipid enough. The ladies came out two and two, and went through a monotonous die-away movement, acting, dancing, and singing all at the same time, and showing off their red-stained palms and the soles of their feet to the best advantage. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... power to the settlement of a point so obscure. What we have wished to protest against, is the spirit of partisanship in which this question has too generally been discussed. For, whilst some with a foolish affectation of plebeian sympathies overwhelm us with the insipid commonplaces about birth and ancient descent, as honors containing nothing meritorious, and rush eagerly into an ostentatious exhibition of all the circumstances which favor the notion of a humble station and humble ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the seminary. There was nothing there to interest him, he thought, as Euclid and algebra, French and rhetoric were bygone things, while young school misses in braided hair and pantalets were shockingly insipid. Still, to be polite to Mrs. Woodhull, a childless, fashionable woman, who patronized Canandaigua generally, and Katy Lennox in particular, he consented to go, and soon found himself in the crowded ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... has more than one episode not unlike that of the unfortunate Sophia Dorothea and Koenigsmark, her lover. A good many grim legends haunt the place and give interest to some of the faces, otherwise insipid enough, which look out of the heavy frames and the formal court-dresses ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... is true, had not the advantage of studying in an academy; but all Rome, and the works of Michael Angelo in particular, were to him an academy. On the site of the Capel la Sistina he immediately from a dry, Gothic, and even insipid manner, which attends to the minute accidental discriminations of particular and individual objects, assumed that grand style of painting, which improves partial representation by the general and invariable ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... unhesitatingly implored Blanch not to let him out of her sight—to go off with him alone as often as possible and flirt with him to any length; a tremendous concession on Mrs. Forest's part—nothing less than a complete surrender, she being one of those proud but insipid mortals whose temperature could be easily gauged by the inclination of her long, slender, slightly upturned nose which seemed to be forever pointing toward a better world. For her, it was not enough that ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... this same criticism. So regularly is it made, indeed, that Scott when he wrote a review of some of his own tales for the "Quarterly" felt obliged to adopt it in speaking of himself. He describes his heroes as amiable, insipid young men, the sort of pattern people that nobody cares a farthing about. Untrue as this is of many of Scott's creations, (p. 278) it is unquestionably true of the higher characters that Cooper introduces. They are often described in the most laudatory terms; but it is little ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... King come also and staid till the Duke was ready. It being Collar-day, we had no time to talk with him about any business. To the King's Theatre, where we saw "Midsummer's Night's dream," which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... folk in this insipid neighborhood Have nothing to confess, they're so ridiculously good; And if you marry any one respectable at all, Why, you'll reform, and what will ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... fritters, always make your batter an hour before you begin frying, that the flour may have time to mix thoroughly. Never fry them till they are wanted, or they will eat flat and insipid. Add a little lemon-juice ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... better if in some instances we had not praised or blamed so much. But in panegyric and satire moderation is insipid. ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... the repast was worthy of such. In all the world there is no cuisine superior to that of Mexico. By reason of certain aboriginal viands, which figured on the table of that Aztec sybarite, Montezuma, it beats the cuisine of old Spain, on which that of France is founded, and but an insipid imitation. ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... little time for botanizing; but I found there many plants unknown to the lowlands. Among them were a species of prune, the water-hemlock, and the strawberry. This last was like that species which grows in our woods; but it was insipid. I brought the roots with me to Fort Marlborough, where it lingered a year or two after fruiting and gradually died.* I found there also a beautiful kind of the Hedychium coronarium, now ranked among ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Should they taste insipid, trim off the rind, cut the remainder into neat pieces, pour over them a plain salad-dressing, and they will ...
— Breakfast Dainties • Thomas J. Murrey
... whom we know to have been well employed in and around Florence. In any case, we cannot reconcile this Madonna with Michelozzo's sculpture. As will be seen later on, Michelozzo had many faults, but he was seldom insipid. The Madonna and Saints on the facade of Sant' Agostino at Montepulciano show that Michelozzo was a vigorous man. This latter work is certainly by him, the local tradition connecting it with one Pasquino da Montepulciano ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... disappointed to find such a scarcity of fruit, there being none, as far as we could discover, beyond the cocoa-nuts and a few wild figs: the latter rather insipid to the taste, though still a welcome change after the food we had all been ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... or, if one is taking the wall, another yields it, and it is never a dispute.' He was very severe on a lady, whose name was mentioned. He said, he would have sent her to St Kilda. That she was as bad as negative badness could be, and stood in the way of what was good: that insipid beauty would not go a great way; and that such a woman might be cut out of a cabbage, if ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... they only losers by the separation. For philosophy itself, to use the words of a noble philosopher, 'being thus severed from the sprightly arts and sciences, must consequently grow dronish, insipid, pedantic, useless, and directly opposite to the real knowledge and practice of the world.' Insomuch that 'a gentleman,' says another excellent writer, 'cannot easily bring himself to like so austere and ungainly a form: so greatly is it changed from what was ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... seemed to be buckets of unmixed blood, torrents of blood, inundating the gentle flowers of the parterre. Although the room was thoroughly ventilated a nauseating smell arose from the tables and their horrid burdens, mingled with the sweetly insipid odor of chloroform. ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... summoned, brought in first some dry biscuits in deep tin boxes, those crisp, insipid English cakes which seem to have been made for a parrot's beak, and soldered into metal cases for a voyage round the world. Next she fetched some little gray linen doilies, folded square, those tea-napkins which in thrifty families never get washed. A third time ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... well-known musical connoisseur as a young man of great promise! Such surroundings as these were a species of purgatory to Berlioz, against whose bounds he fretted and raged without intermission. The director's receptions were signalized by the performance of insipid cavatinas, and from these, as from his companions' revels in which he would sometimes indulge with the maddest debauchery as if to kill his own thoughts, he would escape to wander in the majestic ruins of the Coliseum and see the ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... a garden, and find something to preserve. Preserving was almost a mania with Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild creature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. She had experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she could not see a fine bronze ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice of life." The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce. Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women. Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... following Lamartine's stupid, insipid policy," she then wrote, "we had challenged all absolute monarchies, we should have had war outside, but union at home, and strength, in consequence of this, it home and abroad."(43) Like the great ancestors, she declared that the revolutionary idea is neither that of a sect nor of a party. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... without meaning is a very insipid botch. The subject of the composition should always be strictly connected to the dances, so as that they should be in equal correspondence to one another. And, where a dance is expletively introduced in the intervals of the acts, the subject of it should ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... which give satisfaction, though they are told without preambles and verbal adornments; while others require to be decked in that way and set off by expressive play of features, hands, and voice; whereby, instead of flat and insipid, they become pointed and agreeable. Do not forget this hint, but profit by it in what ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... its objects or its men. The attack on capital now developing on all sides, the planning of the vast campaign, and the handling of its industrial troops, these things had made the pursuit of women look insipid, coupled as they were with the thrill of increasing personal success. Passion would require to present itself in new forms, if it was now to take possession ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... prowess of the East; not the triumphs and absolute dominions which followed: all this gave him not half that serene pride and satisfaction of spirit as when he retired himself to umpire the different excellencies of his insipid friends, and to distribute laurels among his poetic heroes. If now upon the authority of this and several such examples, I had the ability and opportunity of drawing the value and strange worth of a poet, and ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... the day declined. I habitually dined at home alone in my cell, and my repast generally consisted of a slice of boiled meat, some salad, and bread. I drank water only, to save the expense of even a little wine, so necessary to correct the insipid and often unwholesome water of Paris. By this means, twenty sous a day paid for my dinner, and this meal was sufficient not only for myself but to feed the dog who had adopted me. After dinner, I used to throw myself on my bed, overcome by the application and solitude of the day, and strove thus ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... were then the fashion in Italy, and every part of the peninsula abounded in them. They bore names fanciful or grotesque, such as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
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