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More "Stupidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... though the roof is beginning to sink." Silas Marner lost his money through his "sense of security," which "more frequently springs from habit than conviction." He went unrobbed for fifteen years, which supplied the only needed condition for his being robbed now. A compensation for stupidity: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Epaminondas desired, and Boeotia never produced another great man, as, indeed, the inhabitants had always been slow and dull, so that a Boeotian was a by-word for stupidity. The only other great Boeotian was the poet Pindar, who was living at ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... She took the teapot from the stove, and set it on the table. "There, young man— if you are the young man—you better pull up to the table, and have something to start your ideas. S'tira! Let him come!" and Lemuel, blushing for shame at his stupidity, did as he ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... the reckless hour when, at Blackpool, he had left her for ever, as he thought. In the flush of his criminal freedom he had married again—with the woman who shared his home on the little hillside, behind the Parish Church, she believing him a widower. Mary Muddock, with the stupidity of her class, had never gone to the right quarters to discover his whereabouts until a year before this day when she stood in the Avocat's library. At last, through the War Office, she had found the whereabouts ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... old cultivated field," the witnesses who ran to it picked up something that "had been upon the ground in the first place." The writer who tells us this, with the usual exclusion-imagination known as stupidity, but unjustly, because there is no real stupidity, thinks he can think of a good-sized stone that had for many years been in a cultivated field, but that had never been seen before—had never interfered with plowing, for instance. He is earnest and unjarred ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... almost total absence of articulation. Every aspect of the phenomenon had been freely discussed there and endless ingenuity lavished on the question of how exactly it was that so much of what the world would in another case have called complete stupidity could be kept by a mere wonderful face from boring one to death. It was Mrs. Brook who, in this relation as in many others, had arrived at the supreme expression of the law, had thrown off, happily enough, to whomever it ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... opposed to is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their stupidity. My heart is with them, but my mind has a contempt for them. I want peace, but I know how to get ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust upon them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad. We frequently see persons in insane hospitals, sent there in consequence of what are called religious mental disturbances. I confess that I think better of them ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... very sad, and his master shed bitter tears over his handsome camel. But, you see, it was Cara's own stupidity, for, like the rest of his tribe, he would always eat anything that was green, no matter where it grew ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... then the sensations of our animal loss or well-being to become spiritual perceptions, and had they to be created by thought, how often would the soul be obscured by the overwhelming blaze of passion; how often stifled by laziness and stupidity; how often overlooked in the absorptions and distractions of business! Further, would not, in this case, the most perfect knowledge of his economy be demanded of the animal man—would not the child need to be a master in a branch of knowledge in which, after fifty years of investigation, Harvey, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... honesty,—by precept out of stupidity. There is no real conviction in it, begotten by thought." This little bit of criticism, harsh as it was, had the effect, and the Prime Minister became less ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... they were doing us an evil, or that they intended to do us an evil. For my part, I am very much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because I think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because harder to fight and dislodge. If a man does not know enough to know what the consequences are going to be to the country, then he cannot govern the country in a way that is for its benefit. These gentlemen, ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... let us say through a small opening. He peeks. Playfulness gives place to curiosity; he looks quickly and furtively, perhaps through some tiny aperture, and probably at something he has no business to see. He peeps. The while he looks his mouth falls open, as from stupidity or wonder. He gapes. He looks at something a long time to study it. He cons or pores. His study is not of the thing itself; it is meditation or reverie. He pores. A member of the opposite sex is present; he looks at her with the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... friends with the most fearful bore or read the most stupid story.... If such people are marooned a few hours, not only without human companionship, but even without a book or magazine with which to screen their own stupidity from themselves, they are ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... exclaimed, with irritation at her own stupidity. "I suppose it wouldn't take twenty minutes to drive there?" She gathered up her purse and gloves and seemed about ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... charters, that its governing board should meet in London practically for the purpose of supervision by the king. That the omission of this condition was the result of wisdom on the part of the founders, and stupidity on the part of the officers of the king, seems undeniable. The founders, unhappy and alarmed at the political and religious situation in England under Charles the First, were seeking to provide for themselves and their families ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... of things when the only man whom the democracy would listen to and obey fell by the assassin's knife, and his death and the obstinate stupidity of the burghers of Antwerp sealed the fate of the city. Sainte Aldegonde had hailed the arrival of Elizabeth's envoy, and consulted with him as to the steps to be taken for the defence of the city. He himself did not believe in the possibility ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... their seven children incommoded them greatly, because not one of them was able to earn his bread. That which gave them yet more uneasiness was that the youngest was of a very puny constitution, and scarce ever spoke a word, which made them take that for stupidity which was a sign of good sense. He was very little, and when born no bigger than one's thumb, which made ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... shock went over Judith. She had forgotten; and here Huldah Spiller would wear a blue dress, and she—oh, the stupidity, the bat-like, doltish, blindness of it!—would be in white, because it was now too late to make a change. Out of the very tragedy of the situation she managed to pluck forth ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... you allow a subordinate to address you like that!' It was a stroke of genius. Prince Auersperg feels his dignity at stake and orders the sergeant to be arrested. Come, you must own that this affair of the Thabor Bridge is delightful! It is not exactly stupidity, nor rascality...." ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... rapidly up the street arrested the conversation of the trio. A countryman, a clumsy, frowsy fellow, in a terrible fright, stopped under Germain's window out of breath and turned at bay on his pursuer. The pursuer, likewise out of breath, was also clumsy, but rather from stoutness than stupidity; he was a short man of about forty, and his dress was that of one in the lower ranks of the law. Everybody in the place ran out of doors to see what the ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... by his mistakes as he profits by his successes in this world. Writing of this piece of stupidity, at a time in my work with moths when a little thought would have taught me better, reminds me of an experience I had with a caterpillar, the first one I ever carried home and tried to feed. I had an ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... discovered by a pipe being required, just as young Tuggs was by his coughing from the tobacco smoke. Boz was partial to this method of discovery, for, at the close, Snodgrass was thus concealed and shut up at Osborne's Hotel. His detection, through the stupidity of the Fat Boy, is ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... proud of since the beginning of the world? They were proud of their noses under Francis the First, of their perukes under Louis XIV, and later on of their appetites and stoutness. A man is proud of his wife, his idleness, his wit, his stupidity, the beard on his chin, the cravat round his neck, the hump on ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... there was a wonderful silence for a little, the baffled visitors recovering themselves with no waste of words, and mounting the stair in pursuit of the gentleman they presumed to have preceded them. When they were well up, he went to the door and made it fast again, leaving Mungo to the fate his stupidity deserved. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... remained silent for a second, looking steadfully at the prisoner. Pre Milon maintained his impassive demeanor, his air of rustic stupidity, with downcast eyes, as if he were talking to his cure. There was only one thing that could reveal his internal agitation, the way in which he slowly swallowed his saliva with a visible effort, as ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... to read what follows carefully and not to form any opinion on the matter till all the details are before you. This document is not a letter in the strict sense of the term, it's more in the nature of an invoice of the cargo of stupidity and bad luck, which I, the writer, Victor Jones of Philadelphia, have been freighted with by an all-wise Providence for its own ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... a similar stress to his own, would think of beer instead of chloroform, and of sleep instead of death—indeed, for whom a similar stress could not exist, so cushioned was both soul and body with stupidity and flesh against the pricks and stabs ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in a few words the history of Bodard,—he became a poor man, having failed for fourteen millions after the bankruptcy of the Prince de Guemenee. The stupidity he showed in not anticipating that "serenissime disaster," to use the expression of Lebrun Pindare, was the reason why no notice was taken of his misfortunes. He died, like Bourvalais, Bouret, and so many others, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... looked in, a merry shout went up. Not a drop of soup was in the tureen! The boy craned his head in amazement, and Mrs. Mulligan, who stood by with the plates, and who had broken out into violent gestures at the sight was about to upbraid the boy for his stupidity, when Margaret's quick eye discovered a trail of grease running down the table-cloth, along the floor and out of the door. Whereupon everybody got up, including Richard, and with roars of laughter followed the devious trail out into the hall ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... at a turn in the road, from the hill that lay beyond the valley, had finally discerned the 7th corps. For two hours he had been wandering about the country, thanks to the stupidity of a peasant who had misdirected him and the sullen ill-will of his driver, whom fear of the Prussians had almost deprived of his wits. As soon as he reached the farmhouse he leaped from the gig and had no further trouble ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... As soon as I saw him I asked the reason of so cruel a flagellation. The boor replied that he was flogging him because he was his servant and because of carelessness that proceeded rather from dishonesty than stupidity; on which this boy said, 'Senor, he flogs me only because I ask for my wages.' The master made I know not what speeches and explanations, which, though I listened to them, I did not accept. In short, I compelled the clown to unbind him, and to ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... certainly CHANGED ITS POSITION. Before, it seemed to be near the summer-house; now it was, undoubtedly, farther away. Could they, or SHE alone, have slipped from the house and be awaiting him there? With a muttered exclamation at his stupidity he stepped hastily from the veranda and walked towards it. But he had scarcely proceeded a dozen yards before it disappeared. He reached the summer-house—it was empty; he followed the line of hedge—no one was there. It could not have been her, or she would ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... this golden fever, which attacked the gentlemen more fiercely than it did the common people, the story of Jamestown would not have been one of disaster brought about by willful heedlessness and stupidity. ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... lady to me in Washington, after I had delivered myself of the above stereotyped remark. "Your English girls have awful figures, and they know absolutely nothing about putting on their gowns. Why, my dressmaker in London—the very best—made me laugh till I was nearly sick, by describing to me the stupidity of her English customers. She declares that she positively has to pin on a new dress when sending it home, a label stating: 'This is the front'; and one day, when she omitted this precaution, she had a riding-habit returned with the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... had been too startling for me to heed the stupidity that whined over missing a few bars of a silly overture when I was in sight. Indeed I had been frightened; yet why should not the world demand to look upon me? I thought only of hurrying to Prof. Darmstetter that he might share my triumph. But Aunt wouldn't hear of my leaving the house; scarcely ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... the latter serve as a setting, a chorus, howling the praise of the heroes, and also furnishing their blood money for the whims and extravagances of their masters. Such history only tends to produce conceit, national impudence, superciliousness and patriotic stupidity, all of which is in full bloom in ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... disgust had returned. If I went into the battle again, what work faced me? The same old monotonous round. To outflank Burbank and Goodrich by tricks as old as war and politics, and effective only because human stupidity is infinite and unteachable. To beat down and whip back into the ranks again these bandits of commerce disguised as respectable, church-going, law-upholding men of property—and to do this by the same old ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... slave in a mine. She began to believe, as she had begun to believe at Scutari, that none of her fellow-workers had their hearts in the business; if they had, why did they not work as she did? She could only see slackness and stupidity around her. Dr. Sutherland, of course, was grotesquely muddle-headed; and Arthur Clough incurably lazy. Even Sidney Herbert ... oh yes, he had simplicity and candour and quickness of perception, no doubt; but he was an eclectic; and what could one hope for from ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... summer, however, he has the first circuit in which there has been no improvement. On October 25 he is for once out of spirits. He has had 'miserable luck,' though he thinks in his conscience that it has been due not to his own fault, but to the 'stupidity of juries.' 'There is only one thing,' he says, 'which supports me in this, the belief that God orders all things, and that therefore we can be content and ought to take events as they come, be they small or great. Whenever I turn my thoughts ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... incapable of understanding how any dishonour could have come to her by him. They would think her stupid, Dick believed, with a tear stealing to the corner of his eye. Yes, she would be blank with a holy stupidity, God bless her, idiotic, if you like, my fine gentleman, in that—not capable of understanding dishonour. It was with a sort of grim pleasure that he got up after this and lighted a candle, which shone strangely yellow and ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... laid upon each other, with thumbs extending on each side to represent the ears. In each case the thumbs are generally moved forward and back, in the manner of the quadruped, which, without much apparent reason, has been selected as the emblem of stupidity. The sign, therefore, means stupid, fool. Another mode of executing the same conception—the ears of an ass—is shown in Fig. 99, where the end of the thumb is applied to the ear or temple and the hand is wagged up and down. Whether the ancient ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... for the jelly fish to do now but to repent of his stupidity, and to return to the Dragon King of the Sea and to confess his failure, so he started sadly and slowly to swim back. The last thing he heard as he glided away, leaving the island behind him, was the ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... slowly lost her rosy cheeks and grew hollow-eyed and thin. She was taken to a specialist who discovered a rapidly advancing case of consumption. He said that owing to the girl's ignorance, stupidity, and homesickness, her only chance of recovery was to return to the "auld countrie" at once. The girl agreed to go, but insisted on a few days "to talk it over with her cousins in New York." After two weeks had elapsed she was found in a stuffy, overcrowded New York tenement. She ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... Mammon's mode of perusing the gorgeous floors of heaven. Besides that, if the Bible escaped the Parliamentary War, the true art of the Ferrar family would be better displayed in a case of less cost and luxury. Certainly, in no one art was the stupidity of Europe more atrociously recorded than in this particular art practised by the Ferrars. Boundless was the field for improvement. And in particular, I had myself drawn from this art, as practised of old, one striking memorial of that remarkable ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... live one common life; we whose social existence beats with one common pulse—we aid one another, learn from one another, draw ever closer to one another to our mutual happiness, and find in this closeness the whole meaning of life!—and to- morrow some crazy ruler will say some stupidity, and another will answer in the same spirit, and then I must go expose myself to being murdered, and murder men—who have done me no harm—and more than that, whom I love. And this is not a remote contingency, but the very thing we are all preparing for, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... principles the confirmation of our doctrine; because, if equality of conditions and universal association are not soon realized, it will be owing to the obstacle thrown for the time in the way of the common sense of the people by the stupidity of legislators and judges; and also to the fact that, while society in its original state was illuminated with a flash of truth, the early speculations of its leaders could bring forth nothing ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... sit down to the perusal of a work entitled, "On the Government of Dependencies," or "Sermons on the Functions of Archdeacons and Rural Deans," though never so deficient in learning, vigour, and originality, who will reject with the supercilious ignorance of incurable stupidity, these volumes, in which the habits, the interests, the inalienable rights, the sacred duties of one half of the species, (and of that half to which, at the most pliant and critical period of life, the health, the disposition, the qualities, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... the language and sentiment of Mary Queen of Scots, when Rizzio was murdered in her presence? "I will dry up my tears," said the high-spirited descendant of the Stuarts, "and think of revenge." Man's remaining silent is not always an evidence of fortitude or resignation; it may be stupidity and want of feeling, or gloom and sulkiness; a disposition to find fault with Divine Providence for visiting him ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior talent in man is practically always accompanied by this feminine flavour—that complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable. Lest I be misunderstood I hasten to add that I do not mean to say that masculinity contributes nothing to the complex of chemico-physiological reactions which produces what we call talent; all I mean to say is that this complex is impossible without the feminine ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... portrait," she said with a simplicity that was like stupidity. "And I am his aunt. You made a picture of a bad man. I know he ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... genius is a form of scrofula closely allied to mania: in sleep, the brain loses blood, in intellectual excitement, attracts blood; in the illumination of the death-bed, or the delirium of drunkenness, the circulation through the brain is quickened; in torpidity, melancholy, stupidity, the circulation ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... sparkled, his mouth foamed, his hands were clenched "don't mention his name, sir," he vociferated, "unless you would see me go mad in your presence! That I should have been such a miserable dolt such an infatuated idiotsuch a beast endowed with thrice a beast's stupidity, to be led and driven and spur-galled by such a rascal, and under such ridiculous pretences!Mr. Oldbuck, I could tear myself when I think ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... grew dull; His kitten, late a sportive elf; The woods and lakes, so beautiful, 740 Of dim stupidity were full. All ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... there are no buckles to fall back upon; but it is worse still in a great company to become aware that wife and mother-in-law are talking nonsense, and that one cannot depend upon oneself for a happy piece of wit to carry off the stupidity ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... it frequently (it not suiting the Divine simplicity and stately gravity thereof to do so); yet its condescension thereto at any time sufficiently doth authorise a cautious use thereof. When sarcastic twitches are needful to pierce the thick skins of men, to correct their lethargic stupidity, to rouse them out of their drowsy negligence, then may they well be applied when plain declarations will not enlighten people to discern the truth and weight of things, and blunt arguments will not penetrate to convince or persuade them to their duty, then doth reason freely ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... say to Love: "Stand and deliver!" was not the way to touch Gyp. It seemed to her mere ill-bred stupidity. She froze against him in soul, all the more that she yielded her body. When a woman refuses nothing to one whom she does not really love, shadows are already falling on the bride-house. And Fiorsen knew it; but his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... tavern-politicians. They crowded round him, eying him from head to foot with great curiosity. The orator bustled up to him, and, drawing him partly aside, inquired "on which side he voted?" Rip started in vacant stupidity. Another short but busy little fellow pulled him by the arm, and, rising on tiptoe, inquired in his ear, "Whether he was Federal or Democrat?" Rip was equally at a loss to comprehend the question; when a knowing, self-important old gentleman, in a sharp cocked hat, made his way through the crowd, ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... had almost forgotten?—No! But he was in the power of ... in her power ... he no longer belonged to himself. He had been taken possession of. Taken possession of to such a point that he was no longer trying to free himself either by ridiculing his own stupidity, or by arousing in himself if not confidence, at least hope that all this would pass over, that it was nothing but nerves,—or by seeking proofs of it,—or in any other way!—"If I meet him I shall take him" he recalled Clara's words reported by Anna ... ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... keep on. After five days' work he heard of a deaf and dumb woman who sat every afternoon at a back window of her flat overlooking the back windows of Thayer's house. He had a trying struggle with her infirmity and stupidity, but finally was rewarded. On the afternoon of the murder, in its very hour (which the police had been able to discover), she had seen a man and woman in the bathroom of the Thayer house. Both were agitated and the man washed his hands again and again, carefully rinsing the bowl ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... practised eye will easily distinguish the silence of modest attention from the mute weariness of ignorance. The most inveterate talker, if he be not quite a fool, desires to be listened to as well as heard; and a "yes" or a "no" may be placed and accented so as to show intelligence, or betray stupidity. Grace in action and deportment is so essential, that it may almost be said to make all that is beautiful in beauty. We do not mean that a lady should, in dancing, walking, or sitting, display attitudes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... horse seldom does. All the same an automobile is like David Balfour's Scotch advocate: hard at times to ken rightly—most of the time, one may say without undue exaggeration. Often an automobile is as fickle as a stage fairy, or appears to be, but it may be that only your own blind stupidity accounts for the lack of efficiency. Once in awhile an automobile gets uproariously full of spirits and runs away with itself, and almost runs away with you, too, simply for the reason that the carburetion is good and everything is pulling well. Again it is ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... more into the unventilated, tobacco-poisoned beer-cellars and concert-halls, and persisted in supping on heavy food and cold beer in the open air, as though on purpose to spite the over-anxious magistrates and doctors. Nor was the stupidity confined entirely to the lower classes. People who ought to have known better defied the cholera in excess of rioting, while those of another turn of mind gave way to superstitious fears, and as soon as they felt the first symptoms of the disease fled to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... ocean of her love, so will I go about to marry him to her, and may Almighty Allah help me thereto!" Rejoined his mother, "Do as thou wilt, but beware of giving her father rough words, whenas thou speakest with him; for thou knowest his stupidity and violence and I fear lest he do thee a mischief, for he knoweth not respect for any." And Salih answered, "Hearkening and obedience." Then he sprang up and taking two bags full of gems such as rubies and bugles ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... new to his experience; but when she flounced angrily out of the room because he had confessed to carrying a note from Miss Fraley to Tip Watson, it occurred to him that he might be mistaken. Indeed, so cunning does masculine stupidity become when it is played upon by a woman, that he frightened himself with the suggestion that perhaps, after all, this perfectly original young lady was ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... commercial pirates who make casts and copies of his work and who profit at his expense. The Senate Committee on Judiciary, to whom the petition is referred, rejects the plea. On what ground? Because he "has not discovered any new invention on which he can claim the right."[100] Could stupidity go further? ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... in which he first made known to his western friends that he had fixed his abode in Nithsdale. "I am here," said he, "at the very elbow of existence: the only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity and canting; prose they only know in graces and prayers, and the value of these they estimate as they do their plaiden-webs, by the ell: as for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet." "This is an undiscovered ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... corporal standing before him, with the mulatto woman,—the first capture under his order. She was tall, well-formed, but unmistakably showing the negro type, even in her small features. Her black eyes were excited, but unintelligent; her manner dogged, but with the obstinacy of half-conscious stupidity. Brant felt not only disappointed, but had a singular impression that she was not the same woman that he had first seen. Yet there was the tall, graceful figure, the dark profile, and the turbaned head that he had once followed down the passage by ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... into the cities. The strength of the country-side is sobriety and slow incubation of the forces of life. Its vice is stupidity. The strength of the city is keen wittedness, versatility, quick response. Its vice is fickleness, morbidity, exhaustion. We have our great blanket sheet newspapers, representing a party, a clique, ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... apology, or an attempt at one at least, and though he would rather have faced a Sweetgrass blizzard than an interview he set his lips and with bitterness in his heart made his preparations. The incident only renewed his confidence in his incredible stupidity, but what he felt was that a girl with such eyes as hers could never be brought to believe ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... happened. I saw all this as plainly as if it had all been printed in great-primer type, instead of working itself out in her features. I like to see other people muddled now and then, because my own occasional dulness is relieved by a good solid background of stupidity in ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... should be heard. These—and there are many such—ask, What is the end which we should seek to attain? Can science alone be trusted to prevent education becoming, in the words of that sturdy old pagan, Thomas Love Peacock, a "means for giving a fixed direction to stupidity"? The answer they, or many of them, give to these questions is that the main end of education is to teach people to think, and that they are not prepared to play false to their own intellects to such an extent as to believe that the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... could not say. When Northcote came back in the evening she felt that her game was becoming more and more difficult to play. After a brief consultation with herself, she decided that it was most expedient to go in with him, taking her big body-guard along with her, and confiding in his stupidity not to find out more than was indispensable. She took Northcote to her grandfather's room, whispering to him on the way to make himself the representative of Cotsdean only, and to say nothing ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... asserted that I could not possibly have common sense, that I had been about town above a fortnight, and had made no steps towards commencing an amour. My friend pleaded for me that my stay was uncertain; and she believed that was the cause of my seeming stupidity and this was all she could find to say ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... of sluggishness and stupidity you judge by external appearances, and, consequently, by deductive logic. Beside, you do not take collateral matter into the case from which you draw your inference. You have never seen me when my physical energies have been aroused, consequently, your conclusion is both hollow ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... laugh at herself: "Of course. But don't you think that a man who is able to put things as he does—who can make you see, for example, the stupidity and cruelty of things that always seemed right and proper before—don't you think that he's guilty of a kind of hypocrisy if he doesn't feel ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... resolved, for Nature pleads that he Should only rule who most resembles me. Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dulness from his tender years; Shadwell alone of all my sons is he Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense. Some beams of wit on other souls may fall, Strike through and make a lucid interval; But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray." Mac ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... distributes little tracts "to stir up the witch's heart with special fire." Satan has nothing vulgar in him: he is capable of melancholy feelings, he can be pathetic and eloquent. Mephistopheles laughs at the stupidity of the world, and at his own. Satan believes in God and in himself, whilst Mephistopheles is the "Spirit that denies;" he believes neither in God nor in heaven nor in hell; he does not believe in his own entity—he is no supernatural, fantastic being, but man incarnate: he is the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... thief." All those whom he met commiserated him and asked him who was the author of the anonymous placard. Fortunately for him, everybody made allowance for his equivocal replies by reflecting on his utter stupidity; fools get more advantage from their weakness than able men from their strength. The world looks on at a great man battling against fate, and does not help him, but it supplies the capital of a grocer who may fail and lose all. Why? Because men like to feel superior ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... somewhat pompous, middle-aged Englishman, and though of stolid appearance, his face showed what might perhaps be described as an intelligent stupidity. ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... "What good will that do you? Excuse my stupidity," she added; "of course, it gets me away. Thank you ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Jackass as the type of self-sufficient stupidity and conceit—a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs, more conventional than fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham is Mr. Thomas ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... he had supposed himself so familiar with French! With the woman from the loge, indeed, he could have talked at large, had she been conversational instead of rude. But here, with this little glancing creature, he felt himself plunged in a perfect quagmire of ignorance and stupidity. When he spoke of being half French, she became suddenly grave, and studied him with an intent piercing look. 'No,' she said slowly, 'no, at bottom you are not French a bit, you are all English, I feel it. I should fight you—a outrance! Grive—what a strange name! It's ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has been doomed to perpetual prevarication; a humane man, he has had to condone every atrocity; an independent man, he must cringe before his master; a peaceful man, he must submit to the continuation of insensate slaughter; a highly gifted intellectual, he has had to pursue a policy of insane stupidity. Twenty-five years ago a professor of the University of Munich, Dr. Quidde, compared the Kaiser to Caligula. The analogy between William and Caligula or Nero points to another analogy, that between Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg and Seneca, the ill-fated counsellor of ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Since then the national spirit, hampered though it is by the traditions of party government and a legacy of intellectual and social heaviness, has been in uneasy and ineffectual revolt against deadness, against stupidity and slackness, against waste and hypocrisy in every department of life. We have come to see more and more clearly how little we can hope for from politicians, societies and organised movements in these essential things. It is this that has invested the energy and manhood, the untried possibilities ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... going to cut the knot that way. Two soldiers pushed the door noisily open, their muskets advanced. He took no notice of them; and they retained an attitude of military stupidity, their eyes upon him. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... inheritance. God has called us to be saints, called us, chosen us—chosen us before the world was made—He has chosen us that in us, through us, He might manifest Himself. It is not humility that prevents us recognising the fact. It is our selfishness and stupidity. For the very fact that He has called and chosen you and me and all His Church before we were born shows that everything comes from Him. We are utterly worthless and vile, but when united, as we are united to God, we are transformed into His {82} image, we partake ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... not," Ruth said. "A minister would hardly be guilty of doing that. He was simply comparing the advanced methods of the present with the stupidity of the past." ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... the madness of the people. They themselves were to blame for being unhappy, and they could be happy if they wished. This seemed so clear and simple that Max was dumfounded in his amazement at human stupidity. Humanity reminded him of a crowd huddled together in a spacious temple and panic-stricken at the ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... took revenge upon their tormentor from safe distance. Denver paused once, briefly, to re-assess and recapture the delight he took in gazing at Darbor's beauty seated opposite. Then he resumed his account of the life and times of Big Ed, an improvised essay into the folly and stupidity of untamed greed which ended upon ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... Provoked with my stupidity in feeling most moved in the wrong place, I turned away to the hotel, determined to set off for Buffalo that afternoon. But the stage did not go, and, after nightfall, as there was a splendid moon, I went down to the bridge, and leaned ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... retorted his wife with great sharpness, as if in contempt of her husband's stupidity; "sold good leather—of course he did. That was part of his plan to make people believe he was an honest man. Besides, if he hadn't, how could he have got rid of his stock as he did. Do you recollect," she proceeded with increasing asperity, as became a Cowfold matron, "as it was him as got ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... not more dense than my neighbors, but I was always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with Sherlock Holmes. Here I had heard what he had heard, I had seen what he had seen, and yet from his words it was evident that he saw clearly not only what had happened, but what was about to happen, while to me the whole ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... cheerfully and in health, Non est vivere, sed valere vita. That men whose very Being is Aer, should not breath it freely when they may; but (as that Tyrant us'd his Vassals) condemn themselves to this misery and Fumo praefocari, is strange stupidity: yet thus we see them walk and converse in London, pursu'd and haunted by that infernal Smoake, and the funest accidents which accompany it wheresoever ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... likes. At this moment two women entered, bringing salvers filled with ices and sherbet, which they placed on two small tables appropriated to that purpose. "My dear host, and you, signora," said Albert, in Italian, "excuse my apparent stupidity. I am quite bewildered, and it is natural that it should be so. Here I am in the heart of Paris; but a moment ago I heard the rumbling of the omnibuses and the tinkling of the bells of the lemonade-sellers, and now I feel as if I were suddenly transported to the East; not such as I have ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... inspiration had to take the form of a yelping, yapping two months' old puppy. And with the advent of the terrier the trouble had begun. The hotel clerk judged me a criminal before the act I had not even had time to meditate. And then Wada, on his own initiative and out of his own foolish stupidity, had attempted to smuggle the puppy into his room and been caught by a house detective. Promptly Wada had forgotten all his English and lapsed into hysterical Japanese, and the house detective remembered only his Irish; while ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... name of Love and its existence is that which the boldest need not defy, the most profound need not attempt to explain with clarity, the most brilliantly sophistical to argue away. Its forms of beauty, triviality, magnificence, imbecility, loveliness, stupidity, holiness, purity and bestiality neither detract from nor add to its unalterable power. As the earth revolves upon its axis and reveals night and day, Spring, Summer and Winter, so it reveals this ceaselessly ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... had gone through some trying ordeals and had lost not a little of his sense of locality, but he was rapidly recovering it as the pathway became easier and less obscure. At first he was irritatingly remiss in answering to the name of Medcroft; but, to justify the stupidity, it is only necessary to say that he had fallen into a condition which scarcely permitted him to know his own name, much less that of another. He was under the spell! Wherefore it did not matter at all what name he went by: he would have answered as ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... This it is that leads us astray. That old stargazer, with whom Aesop has made us acquainted, deserved, indeed, to fall into the well, no less for his profanity than his stupidity. Yet this same star-gazing it is that we miscall reflection. Thus, in our blank wonder at Nature, in our naked analysis of her life, expressed through long lists of genera and species and mathematical calculations, as if we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... through dark, social obstructions. "I would fain bind up many wounds, if I could be assured that neither by stupidity nor by malice I need make one!" is ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... imperial palace. He was greatly enraged that any subject should dare to take such a liberty, and sent his attendants to burn the house down. The poor frightened lord hastened to the emperor and humbly apologized for his stupidity. And he presented to the emperor in token of his humble submission a white dog clothed with cloth and led by a string. So he was forgiven ...
— Japan • David Murray
... flash of unexpected genius. The brilliant achievements of Jonathan Wild and of Jack Sheppard might have relieved the gloom of the darkest era, and their separate masterpieces make some atonement for the environing cowardice and stupidity. Above all, the Eighteenth Century was Newgate's golden age; now for the first time and the last were the rules and customs of the Jug perfectly understood. If Jonathan the Great was unrivalled in the art of ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Consuelo's carriage on her way to the tram and taking her by main force to his father's house. If she were compromised in such a way, she would be almost obliged to marry him. He afterwards wondered at the stupidity of his own inventions on that evening, but at the time nothing ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... spirits rose a little later when he found that he would only have to wait twenty minutes in the Lowell station before a slow train for Greentown would pick him up, and that he should still reach his destination before bedtime, and need never disclose his stupidity. ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... should have disarmed ridicule, but somehow or another this amiable man came to be regarded as the type of a dull author, and his name passed into a proverb for stupidity, so much so that when Dryden in 1682 was casting about how best to give pain to Shadwell, he devised the plan of his famous satire, "MacFlecknoe," where in biting verse he describes Flecknoe (who was happily dead) ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... man present, mourned inwardly over his own masculine stupidity. He felt sure that if his wife had been there she would have gently led Stewart's mind through these paradoxical matrimonial fancies, to dwell on another picture; a picture of marriage with a nice girl almost as pretty as Lady Hammerton, a good girl who shared his tastes, and, above all, who ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... the direction of the kitchen. Heigh-ho! How can any mortal laugh in Ratborough! Having nothing better to do, I will go and see who this very merry personage may be. I will inquire into this gay outbreak, in a land of stupidity. Hark, again!—how refreshing! I must and will know what caused such a gush of mirth. Irish humor, perhaps, for Norah is laughing, after her guttural ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... escaped him, "and tell me if you have ever imagined for one of your romances a situation similar to mine. You remember the mortal fear in which I lived last winter, with the presence of my brother-in-law, and the danger of his denouncing me to my poor Maud, from stupidity, from a British sense of virtue, from hatred. You remember, also, what that voyage to Poland cost me, after those long months of anxiety? The press of affairs and the illness of my aunt coming just at the moment when I was freed from Ardrahan, inspired me with miserable ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... can be no question of the astounding stupidity of the West Indian rank and file, a stupidity amusing if you are in an amusable mood, unendurable if you neglect to pack your patience among your bag of supplies in the morning. Tropical patience, too, is at best a frail child. The dry-season sun rarely even veiled his ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... that this second arc is one-sixth of the new circumference. Describing a third concentric circle, I test it in the same way, and continue the process with other concentric circles, until Emile, vexed at my stupidity, informs me that every arc, great or small, intercepted by the sides of this angle, will be one-sixth of the circumference to which it belongs. You see we are almost ready to use the ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... convictions were very few. To lose a criminal case was considered even mildly disgraceful. It was a point of professional pride for the lawyer to get his client free, without reference to the circumstances of the time or the guilt of the accused. To fail was a mark of extreme stupidity, for the game was considered an easy and fascinating one. The whole battery of technical delays was at the command of the defendant. If a man had neither the time nor the energy for the finesse that made the interest of the game, he could always procure interminable ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... priests were white men, for the negroes thought that black baptism would not stick; but they were fortune-hunters, like the rest of the colony, mere agents of the official will, and seekers of their pleasures in the huts of the negro-quarter.[I] The curates declared that the innate stupidity of the African baffled all their efforts to instil a truth or rectify an error. The secret practice of serpent-worship was punishable, as the stolen gatherings for dancing were, because it unfitted them for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... muscle, Tom nevertheless could hear the planter clearly. He mentally chided himself at his stupidity in allowing himself ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... tribe driving the other off the mainland. Then the Bubis {295}—as the inhabitants on Fernando Po are called, from a confusion arising in the minds of the sailors calling at Fernando Po, between their stupidity and their word Babi stranger, which they use as a word of greeting—these Bubis are undoubtedly a very early African race. Their culture, though presenting some remarkable points, is on the whole exceedingly low. They never wear clothes unless compelled to, and their language depends so much on ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... many pillows. Ink, as it resembles Styx in its colour, should resemble it a little in its operation too; whoever has been once dipt should become invulnerable: But it is not so; the irritability of authors has long been enrolled among the comforts of ill-nature, and the triumphs of stupidity; such let it long remain! Let me at least take care in the worst storms that may arise in public or in private ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... where Timmis (as he termed it) 'held out,' were five or six closets nick-named offices, and three other boys. One was the nephew of the before-mentioned Wallis, and a very imp of mischief; another, only a boy, with nothing remarkable but his stupidity; while the fourth was a scrubby, stunted, fellow, about sixteen or seventeen years of age, with a long pale face, deeply pitted with the small-pox, and an irregular crop of light hair, most ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... 'booked' himself at the coach-office utterly [Greek: analphabetos], unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given language, he had made his parting bows to his coach brethren (secretly returning thanks to them for their stupidity), in a condition for grappling with any common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or New Testaments published by Bagster, would be a perfect Encyclopaedia, or Panorganon, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads and in dull ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... runs the risk of being misunderstood. Men in their stupidity constantly mistake strong patience for weakness or indifference or lack of a gripping purpose. And God is misunderstood in this, even by His trusting children. But, even so, the object to be gained is so great, ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... they were discovered, and raised a shout of triumph, as though certain that we were within their toils. I heard the inspector utter a bitter curse at his stupidity in leaving his powder and bullets behind, and that was the only answer to ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... have said enough to show that, though not a fool, I have frequently passed for one, even among people capable of judging; this was the more vexatious, as my physiognomy and eyes promised otherwise, and expectation being frustrated, my stupidity appeared the more shocking. This detail, which a particular occasion gave birth to, will not be useless in the sequel, being a key to many of my actions which might otherwise appear unaccountable; and have been attributed to a ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... history of our own time, recorded in the newspapers. Every crime is more or less a mystery. You will see that the mysteries which the police discover are, almost without exception, mysteries made penetrable by the commonest capacity, through the extraordinary stupidity exhibited in the means taken to hide the crime. On the other hand, let the guilty man or woman be a resolute and intelligent person, capable of setting his (or her) wits fairly against the wits of the police—in other words, let the mystery really be a mystery—and ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... his eyes resolutely on an ungainly group in pinkish clay which represented an American commercial sculptor's idea of Romeo and Juliet at the moment when the Nurse separates them with a message from Lady Capulet. With artistic instinct he noted the stupidity of the composition, the vulgarity of the lines, the cheap ugliness of the group. In that singular abstraction which comes so frequently in moments of high emotion, he let his glance wander to the pictures on the wall, the enormities in embroidery which adorned the chair backs, ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... quickly enough, while the boy in the red cap, feeling quite confident in his powers of flight, turned again to jeer and shout at the sailors, whom he derided with impudent remarks about their fatness of person, weight of leg, and stupidity generally, till he judged it dangerous to wait any longer, when he went off like a clockwork mouse, skimming over the stones, and from the first strides beginning ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... parted. First came the frightened child, and she redoubled her weeping on finding herself in her mother's arms. Behind the child came a grinning woodsman and back of him rode a tall man of very powerful build, but with a face so fat as to appear round and wearing an expression of stupidity. ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... he went on; "Jackson is dead, and there is none to take his place. So, without leaders, with every sort of incompetence, with obstinacy and stupidity directing the public councils, and shaping the acts of the administration, we are gliding straight into the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... visible in his red-rimmed green eyes. What struck one most about him was the furtive, prying expression of his face; he was evidently a spy by nature, although he attempted to conceal his real character beneath a mask of stupidity and absent-mindedness. But he pricked up his ears at every word spoken in his presence. He reminded one of a snake which, when captured, stiffens itself out and pretends to be dead, and will let itself be broken in pieces before it ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... stupid (4) then, said (5) God, (4) The fault was not Who thus My (6) saints devour! that they devoured These (7) crimes have they not understood, saints, but that they Nor thought upon My power! were stupid. Qu: Whether stupidity makes men devour saints, or devouring saints makes a man stupid? I believe the latter, because they may be apt to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... their amusement on the way. Garth's mount, that a previous owner had christened "Cyclops," and who was tall enough and bony enough to be called a horse, was, like themselves, a stranger in the bush, and his face offered a comical study in anxiety, willingness and stupidity, under these new conditions. Natalie rode a young sorrel rejoicing in the name of Caspar. He had a dull eye, a long, sheeplike nose and a wagging under lip; and Natalie vowed he was half-witted. He would not ride abreast; but insisted on following; and he screamed with terror, if for an instant ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... quite simply—not as if he wished to defend his own reputation for charity all the time. He won't allow that Adela Delaport Green is a humbug: he says she is simply a happy combination of extraordinary cleverness and stupidity, of simplicity and art. 'I believe she hardly ever has a consciously disingenuous moment,' he said to me last night. 'She likes clergymen and she likes great ladies, and she likes to make people like her. Of course, she is always designing; but she never stops to think, so that she doesn't ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... sometimes falling down loose about them. Their forehead is broad and low, the nose somewhat flattened, the eyes long and narrow, almost like those of the Chinese, and the mouth large, with rather thick lips. To give a still greater effect to all these various charms, a peculiar look of stupidity is spread over the whole face, and is more especially to be attributed to the way in which their mouths are always ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... be a distinction. But the measure of his political capacity is given in the fact that he was an active promoter of the insurrection of September 4, 1870, in Paris against the authority of the Empress Eugenie. A more signal instance is not to be found in history of that supreme form of public stupidity which President Lincoln stigmatised, in a memorable phrase, as the operation of 'swapping horses while ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... peacock tufts from the helmets of the Germans, and having noticed such a tuft on the helmet of this comthur, he thought that God himself had sent the Krzyzak. He did not attack him, lord, through malice, but through stupidity; therefore be merciful and do not punish him, we beseech you on ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... method had specially commended itself to both Yeo and Chauncey, as most suited to embarrass the British situation throughout the upper province. In a subsequent report to the Admiralty, Yeo characterized the failure of the Americans to do this as an extreme stupidity, which had lost them the war, but upon a repetition of which in future hostilities Great Britain should not rely.[290] The importance of this intercourse is indicated by a mention of Chauncey's, that in the week before June ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... "corner post," at Flint's right, was a type of blond stupidity, huge of body, with a bull throat and a round, featureless face. You looked in vain to find anything significant in this fellow beyond his physical strength, until your glance lingered on his eyes. They were pale blue, expressionless, but ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... matter what is injected into it, I have heard people cry. That, it seems to me, is mere Teutonic stupidity, and has no part in the attitude of thinking men and women in a land like America. I suppose, arguing thus, that if a law were passed tomorrow prohibiting the carrying of, say, hand-bags or canes, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... see why she should not capture Lawrence. She felt her vitality, her health, her dominant will beat so strongly within her that it seemed to her that nothing could stop her. She loved him for his strength, his silence, his good-nature, yes, and his stupidity. This last gave her a sense of power over him, and of motherly tenderness too. She loved his stiff and halting Russian—it was as though he were but ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... to Paris, led him to indulge in the worship of Venus Pandemos, parallelement with his more exalted passions. No individual object or incident is mentioned in any detail; and the passages relating to this side of the matter are so obscurely phrased that a very innocent person might—without stupidity quite equal to the innocence—be rather uncertain what is meant. But the twin ravages—of more or less pure passion unsatisfied and wholly impure satisfied appetite—ruin the patient's peace of mind. Alongside of this conflict there is a certain political interest. The Marquis de Couaen ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... fancy. The indocile and rude liberty of this scurvy member, is sufficiently remarkable by its importunate, unruly, and unseasonable tumidity and impatience at such times as we have nothing for it to do, and by its most unseasonable stupidity and disobedience when we stand most in need of its vigour, so imperiously contesting the authority of the will, and with so much obstinacy denying all solicitations of hand and fancy. And yet, though his rebellion is so universally complained of, and that proofs are not ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... and a hard head may be able to tolerate much of the unconscious and undeliberate cruelty and torture of the world that is perpetrated in hot blood and stupidity. I have such a stomach and head. But what turns my head and makes my gorge rise, is the cold-blooded, conscious, deliberate cruelty and torment that is manifest behind ninety- nine of every hundred trained-animal turns. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... the stupidity of his countrymen, the Boeotians, to the profusion of animal food which they consumed, and even now, our lovely, soup drinking, coffee sipping friends on the continent, attribute the saturnine, melancholy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... doubt she's telling a crowd of men tonight that I'm in love with her—perhaps not exactly telling them that, but giving them to understand it. Why don't I stroll down to the club and deny it? For the same reason that you don't openly denounce her! It's semi- or wholly-sentimental chivalry—rank stupidity, if you like to call it that, but it's national, I'm glad to say, and I'm as proud ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... by our infernal stupidity," he panted, while Carlos dropped his empty canteen and lifted Porter's to his lips. "I rode round to the south of the mesa. There are a couple of possible ascents there. I found Carlos making one. We followed ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... air, seeing that you already see the peep of day through a narrow chink. I will say freely what my love of you, and your danger, and the importance of the matter requires. The devil is not unaware that you will see this light of day, if ever you raise your eyes to it. For what a piece of stupidity it would be to prefer Hanmers and Charks to Christian antiquity! But there are certain Lutheran enticements whereby the devil extends his kingdom, delicate snares whereby that hooker of men has caught with his ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... misrepresented, he was the most infamous of the many impostors who have so often disgraced the cause of religious reformation. By more than four centuries, he anticipated the licentiousness and greediness manifested by a series of false prophets, and was the first to turn both the stupidity of a populace and the viciousness of a priesthood to his own advancement; an ambition which afterwards reached its most signal expression in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... my disgust at my own stupidity returning in full force. "There was a lower roof and a maze of crisscross alleys," I ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... or as Spleen invades; A third, because his Father was well read, And Murd'rer-like, calls Blushes from the dead. Yet all for Morals and for Arts contend—— They want'em both, who never prais'd a Friend. More ill, than dull; For pure stupidity Was ne'er a crime ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... "but it is scarcely generous to forestall the person whose stupidity gave you the clew to this ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... we could not answer. We were oppressed by the injustice of the world, surprised to perceive how long we had lived under its burden without realising our unfortunate state, annoyed by the uneasy suspicion of our undiscerning stupidity. Donkin assured us it was all our "good 'eartedness," but we would not be consoled by such shallow sophistry. We were men enough to courageously admit to ourselves our intellectual shortcomings; though from that time we refrained from kicking him, tweaking ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... next driving, having now acquired the knack, I rendered several more denizens of the air the hors de combats, though—either on account of their great ingenuity in running out of the radius, or creeping into holes, etc., or else the stupidity of the ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... downright stupidity," he said to Major Stuart, who was blazing away as hard as ever he could cram cartridges into the hot barrels of his gun. "You can't tell whether you are hitting the bird or not. There! Three men fired at that bird—the other two ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... effort to clear himself, he exhibits the foulest stains. He thinks he made a most plausible excuse when he said, "Am I my brother's keeper?" But this very excuse becomes his most shameful accusation. The maxim of Hilary, that wickedness and stupidity always go hand in hand, finds unvarying application. If Cain had been as wise as he was wicked, he would have excused himself in quite a different manner. Now, under the operation of the divine rule that wickedness ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... intolerable situation?" we must plainly answer: "Because you are responsible for the situation, and it is intolerable that you should be permitted to throw off the results of your wickedness or your stupidity upon other ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... none will be present who are not vouched for by the Almanac de Gotha. There are no Royalists pour rire or pour vivre to-night. You have but time to change your clothes and dine. Your luggage arrived yesterday. You will forgive the stupidity of old servants who have forgotten their business. Come, I will lead the way and show ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... I do not meddle with their eternal state, as being no-ways my province or prerogative to determine upon) at least those I have here condescended upon, died either in a senseless, secure, supine stupidity, or else belching out the most fearful oaths, and imprecations against themselves or others, or worse, if worse may be, roaring out in despair in the most dreadful horror of an awakened conscience under the sense of God's wrath and fiery indignation ready to be poured forth ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... redeeming thing in the story, if it be true, he never was known to do it to a young nobleman; he is too well bred for that. He talks to her of society as it was before good-breeding was reformed out of the colonies. She is delighted; but, oh! was it stupidity, or was it insolence, or was it cruelty? he asked her if she recollected the Duke of Kent. To be sure it is only fifty-two years since he was here; but to have recollected him! How old did he suppose ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... sects and parties, they agree in treating all nations who will not conform their government, laws, manners, and religion to the new French fashion, as an herd of slaves. They consider the content with which men live under those governments as stupidity, and all attachment to religion as the effect of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... writes, in 1831, of Godwin, who still figures, in advanced age, as a martyr in the cause of good letter-writing—'A bald, bushy browed, thick, hoary, hale little figure, with a very long blunt characterless nose—the whole visit the most unutterable stupidity.' Lord Althorp is 'a thick, large, broad-whiskered, farmer-looking man.' O'Connell, 'a well-doing country shopkeeper with a bottle-green frock and brown scratch wig.... I quitted them all (the House of Commons) with ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... But d'you suppose they listen to me when I tell 'em so, when I point out the consequences, the consequences to the public purse, when I recommend 'em to read Coryphaeus? No, Mrs. Ambrose, you will form no just opinion of the stupidity of mankind until you have sat upon a Borough Council!" The little man fixed her with ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... life-time he possessed all the bad properties of the animal you see before you; so that, to speak the truth, he now appears in his proper shape. His rough coat of hair is a very suitable emblem of the ruggedness of his disposition; and his long and clumsy ears not only denotes his stupidity, but, as they afford a very secure and convenient hold to any one who has occasion to catch him when he runs loose in the fields, they sufficiently intimate that he was always open to the ill advice of his play-fellows. ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... themselves unable to understand the constancy of this people's affection for a line of kings from whom they had invariably experienced, not only neglect, but positive opposition, if not treachery. In their opinion, only the strangest obliquity of judgment can explain such infatuation. Some call it stupidity; but the Irish people have never been taxed with that. Even in the humblest ranks of life among them, there exists, not only humor, but a keenness of perception, and at times an extraordinary good sense, which is quick to detect ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... are, and must always be, a certain number of these Fiend's servants, who have it principally for the object of their lives to make money. They are always, as I said, more or less stupid, and cannot conceive of anything else so nice as money. Stupidity is always the basis of the Judas bargain. We do great injustice to Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above all common wickedness. He was only a common money-lover, and, like all money-lovers, didn't understand Christ;—couldn't make out the worth of Him, or meaning of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... remonstrating upon the general tone of the 'Times,' and inviting him to adopt some Conservative principles in the midst of his zeal for Reform. Stanley told me that his election (at Preston) was lost by the stupidity or ill-will of the returning officer, who managed the booths in such a way that Hunt's voters were enabled to vote over and over at different booths, and that he had no doubt of reducing ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... presented that we forget its departures from the possibilities of life. In "The Alchemist" Jonson represented, none the less to the life, certain sharpers of the metropolis, revelling in their shrewdness and rascality and in the variety of the stupidity and wickedness of their victims. We may object to the fact that the only person in the play possessed of a scruple of honesty is discomfited, and that the greatest scoundrel of all is approved in the end and rewarded. The comedy is so admirably written and contrived, the personages ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... as might be expected, to assist a heavy head, and one feather is not sufficient to enable my genius to take wing. If the public knew what dull work it is to write a novel, they would not be surprised at finding them dull reading. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Barnstaple, I am at the very bathos of stupidity. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... own petticoats. I wish the Registrar-General would tell us the exact number of deaths by burning occasioned by this absurd and hideous custom. But if people will be stupid, let them take measures to protect themselves from their own stupidity—measures which every chemist knows, such as putting alum into starch, which prevents starched articles ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... faithful old Army of the Potomac, "which has had hard fighting,—terrible fighting, and little praise." He lost patience with those staying at home depreciating the army and finding fault with General Meade. He wrote: "Frankly and bluntly, I cannot appreciate such stupidity. Why not as well ask if the sun rose this morning? That battle was the greatest of the war. It was a repulse which became a disastrous defeat to General Lee." He sarcastically invited critics, "instead of staying at home to weaken the army by finding fault, to step into the ranks ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... tepid feelings. She sympathized with Galbraith on the whole. The poor man was doing his best; and the girl, queerly, didn't seem to care. She confronted him in a sort of stockish stupidity, saying her lines, when he told her to try again, with the same frightful whang he was doing his best to correct, so that he was justified, Rose felt, in accusing her of not trying, or even ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... disappointment, turned to go to the other points of view to see if I was not mistaken in not feeling any surpassing emotion at this sight. But from the foot of Biddle's stairs, and the middle of the river, and from below the table rock, it was still "barren, barren all." And, provoked with my stupidity in feeling most moved in the wrong place, I turned away to the hotel, determined to set off for Buffalo that afternoon. But the stage did not go, and, after nightfall, as there was a splendid moon, I went ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... preservation, but all things renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... task with the machinery of transportation was the first clear duty. Scarcely one of the gigantic abuses can be touched apart from these highways of distribution. We have but just waked up to the plain stupidity of giving away so recklessly all sorts of franchise grants, and are beginning to see the equal stupidity of parting madly with such an overwhelming part of the main and primary sources of wealth—mines, forests, ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... certain kind of restitution has been made. For example, a friend of mine sins against me—he injures, perhaps, my good name; and my natural answer is the emotion of resentment towards him and, perhaps, of actual revenge. But what I chiefly resent is my friend's stupidity and his ignorance of my real character. "I am angry," I say, with perfect sincerity, "not so much at the thing he has said of me, as at this proof of his incapacity to understand me. I thought he was my friend, ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... document, the proof of his cruelty, his injustice, his stupidity! She must make sure that there was no mistake! Olga Vseslavovna went up to the window, and taking advantage of the last ray of the gray ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... taking great pains with any forms of literature except such as would be profitable, or by those who, if they are driven to the study of Philosophy for its own sake by the admonitions and the example of others, nevertheless, on account of their stupidity, hold a place among philosophers similar to that of drones among bees. Therefore, when I considered this carefully, the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the finest scarlet broadcloth and gold epaulets. Their intelligence, their good cause, their sore extremity, made them learn to be soldiers more quickly than seemed possible to English officers who knew the sturdy stupidity of the English peasant of whom the British regiments were composed. And while the Yankees (as they began to be called) were learning how to march and countermarch, and do whatever else the system of the British ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... not so fortunate. All New York rang with the story, and those who had tried hardest to bring this fate upon themselves were loudest in ridiculing the Swiggs for their "stupidity;" so that, at last, parents and daughter were glad to withdraw from fashionable life, to a more retired existence, where they still remain, sadder, and decidedly wiser than when their career began. Mr. Swigg takes the matter philosophically, consoling himself with the determination ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... to consist in something assignable and describable, and not remain a pure mystery, and I promise that if he can assign any determination of it whatever which I cannot successfully refer to some specification of what in this article I have called the empirical fundamentum, I will confess my stupidity cheerfully, and will agree never to publish a line upon this ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... drawled Jean Briggerland, "after my lecture on the stupidity of the average criminal, do you imagine I should ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... comparison, in this respect, between them. Every one knows that while Walter is dull, even to stupidity, Charles has a brilliant, well-informed mind. It is only necessary to hear each converse for an hour, to decide upon their ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... is found in the case of cerebral paralysis of young children, where there is mental defect amounting to stupidity or imbecility, accompanied by extensive paralysis of the body, so that the child is not able to sit up. With the gradual improvement of the physical condition, so that the muscles become firm and the child can sit, stand, and even walk, there is a corresponding mental development; from being stupid ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... are qualities that exist in people quite independently of their gifts and graces. The ugly and stupid are perhaps more often conceited than the beautiful or the clever,—vain, it would appear, of their very ugliness and stupidity. Besides, is it any worse for a woman to be vain of her looks than of her brains?—and the advanced woman is without doubt most inordinately vain of those. Of the two, so far as they are at present developed, is there ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... the kind aunt, hoping to soothe Juliet's sorrow for her awkwardness and carelessness. This sort of praise was quite new to the child. To be praised instead of reproved for her stupidity, to be met with smiles rather than sighs, was something so uncommon that Juliet almost believed that she really had done a clever and useful deed. After a few minutes she quite believed it, and held up her head, taking credit for her breakage which ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... type of self-sufficient stupidity and conceit—a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs, more conventional than fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham is Mr. ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... child, I can save you a lot of trouble. It's all my fault. If I hadn't been a miracle of stupidity the necklace would never have disappeared. This point being agreed to, let us go on to the next. When did you find out ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... the bright little puss when she said so; but there was a lumpish, soggy fellow accompanying her, whose nature appeared to be sufficiently unleavened to make almost any thing credible in the line of stupidity. In fact, it is one of the greatest drawbacks to the pleasure with which one travels through this beautiful country, to see what kind of human beings inhabit it. Here in the Alps, heaven above and earth beneath, tree, rock, water, light and shadow, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... far as we might make the difference—the facts having a way of being many and the truth remaining but one—he held that there would always be enough; since the truth, the true truth, was never ugly and dreadful, and we didn't and wouldn't depart from it by any cruelty or stupidity (for he wouldn't have had us stupid,) and might therefore depend on it for due abundance even of meat and drink and raiment, even of wisdom and wit and honour. It is too much to say that our so preponderantly humanised and socialised adolescence ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... or rash, or stupid will inevitably suffer the penalties of dishonesty, or rashness, or stupidity. ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... these things. It is some poor character only desiring to laugh, and have the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy; good laughter is not 'the crackling of thorns under the pot'. Even at stupidity and pretension this Shakespeare does not laugh otherwise than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the poor fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they will get on well ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Linley resumed, "at my own stupidity in not having discovered it before. We must be kinder than ever to the poor girl now; can't you guess why? My dear, how dull you are! Must I remind you that we have had two single men among our visitors? One of them is old and doesn't matter. But the other—I mean Sir George, of ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... the Americans, and tend to keep up that spirit of patriotism and nationality for which they are so distinguished. The excitement produced by these elections prevents the people falling into that ale-drinking stupidity, ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... gratified, my female pride was dreadfully mortified by what she says of the ladies of England; in fact, she could not judge of them. They were afraid of her. They would not come out of their shells. What she called timidity, and what I am sure she longed to call stupidity, was the silence of overawed admiration, or mixed curiosity and discretion. Those who did venture, had not full possession of their powers, or in a hurry showed them in a wrong direction. She saw none of them in their natural state. She asserts that, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... bustled off, and never knew! Dear one, you have only yourself and my stupidity to thank if you marry a failure. What might I not have done if I had ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... saying a word; he never gave an opinion upon any subject; but when once, in the course of the year, he did speak, he could express himself in terms sufficiently noble. Sometimes when he spoke one would say he was stupidity itself; at another time he would deliver himself with astonishing sense. At one time you would think he was the best Prince in the world; at another he would do all he could to give people pain. Nobody seemed to be so ill with him but he would take the trouble of making ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... very clever, then very stupid; if not very wise, then a fool: whereas in fact, the man probably is a curious mixture of good and evil, strength and weakness, wisdom and folly, knowledge and ignorance, cleverness and stupidity. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... exposed; and the foolish citizens crowded all the more into the unventilated, tobacco-poisoned beer-cellars and concert-halls, and persisted in supping on heavy food and cold beer in the open air, as though on purpose to spite the over-anxious magistrates and doctors. Nor was the stupidity confined entirely to the lower classes. People who ought to have known better defied the cholera in excess of rioting, while those of another turn of mind gave way to superstitious fears, and as soon as they felt the first symptoms of the disease fled to the cold, damp churches ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... the Commonwealth to risk himself in wild dashes to the dead, non-psionic lands, or out into the emptiness of space. As far as risking himself on combat missions of interplanetary war— He shook his head. This was pure stupidity. ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... appallingly stupid." He paused, with an effect of still more profound exhaustion, then breathed, "He hates me, no doubt because I resent his stupidity. I resent stupidity," he repeated, giving her a glance of weak alarm, as if wondering, "Are you stupid, too?" He seemed reassured by his scrutiny of her. A coldness began to ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... repeatedly witnessed in my observing hives, and admired the sagacity of the queen in economizing her necessary work after this fashion, instead of laboriously depositing the eggs in cells where they are not wanted. What a difference between her wise management and the stupidity of a hen obstinately persisting to set upon addled eggs, or pieces of chalk, and often upon nothing ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... sheep? It is mind, Williams, the generation of knowledge and virtue, that we ought to love. This was the project of Alexander; he set out in a great undertaking to civilise mankind; he delivered the vast continent of Asia from the stupidity and degradation of the Persian monarchy: and, though he was cut off in the midst of his career, we may easily perceive the vast effects of his project. Grecian literature and cultivation, the Seleucidae, the Antiochuses, and the Ptolemies followed, ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... His rapid gallop through the night air, added to the more than ordinary quantity of whiskey he had that day swallowed, was now producing its effect, and, while every feature of his countenance manifested the extreme of animal stupidity, his apprehension wandered and his voice became almost inarticulate. Without the power to acquaint his son with the purpose he had in view, and of which he himself now entertained but a very indistinct recollection, he yet strove, impelled as he was by his confusedness ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of men lying in unmarked graves in African soil to-day who ought to be alive and well, others who have been done to death by the crass ignorance, the appalling stupidity, the damnable conceit which will brook no teaching. I have seen men die like dogs, men who left comfortable homes in the old land to go forth to uphold the power and prestige of our nation's flag. I have seen them gasping out ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... assistant medico was not one of those priggish puppies who, having little professional knowledge to balance their own inherent stupidity, fancy it necessary to support their dignity by the agency of etiquettes alone. He was, on the contrary, a young man of skill, good sense, and right feelings, who cared nothing at all about his dignity when he could be of any use; or rather, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... choose the latter, then correct yourself. It is human to err, but it is stupidity to persist in error and refuse to be enlightened. If you cannot see for yourself, common sense demands that you get another to see for you. You are not supposed to know the alpha and omega of theological science, but you are bound to possess a satisfactory ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... pathos, tenderness, and moral indignation. The general wretchedness of the serfs, the indifference of their owners to their condition, the pettiness and utter meanness of village gossip, the ridiculous affectations of small-town society, the universal ignorance, stupidity, and dulness—all these are remorselessly revealed in the various bargains made by the hero. And what a hero! A man neither utterly bad nor very good; shrewd rather than intelligent; limited in every way. He is a Russian, but a universal type. No one can travel far ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... that I do not wish woman to be elegant, to dance or to sing; but I should like to see as much care devoted to her mind as to her body, and between being ignorant and savante I should like to see a road taken which would prevent annoyance from an impertinent sufficiency or from a tiresome stupidity. I should like very much to be able to say of anyone of my sex that she knows a hundred things of which she does not boast, that she has a well-balanced mind, that she speaks well, writes correctly, and knows ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... woman steeped in guilt from her infancy, had she been noted for cunning and fraudulent ingenuity, had she been known as an expert forger, you would not have convicted her on this indictment, having had before you the malice and greed of Dockwrath, the stupidity—I may almost call it idiocy, of Kenneby, and the dogged resolution to conceal the truth evinced by the woman Bolster. With strong evidence you could not have believed such a charge against so excellent a lady. With such evidence as you have had before you, you could not have believed ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... bewitched, and no one knows what might have happened if Wildrose, who had been all the time peeping out of her nest, had not lost patience at the old woman's stupidity, and cried out: 'The tripod won't stand on that hill, ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... of Mankind once only. Stranger theory of society, completely believed in by a clear, sharp and altogether human head, incapable of falsity, was seldom heard of in the world. For King: open your mouth, let the first gentleman that falls into it (a mass of Hanover stolidity, stupidity, foreign to you, heedless of you) be King: Supreme Majesty he, with hypothetical decorations, dignities, solemn appliances, high as the stars (the whole, except the money, a mendacity, and sin against Heaven): him you declare Sent-of-God, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... disappears altogether in a metaphysical cloud. None of these subtle resolvers of ancient riddles, however, approaches grand old Donne, who said in one of his fine discourses that "the Devil himself is only concentrated stupidity." What a magnificent flash of insight! Yes, the great enemy of mankind is stupidity; and, alas, against that, as Schiller said, the gods themselves fight in vain. Yet time fights against it, and time is greater than the gods; so there is ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... the province seven years, and, in spite of his stupidity, it prospered. In 1633, Adam Roelantsen, the first school-master, arrived—for the fruitful Walloons had opened the way by this time for his labors—and in the same year a wooden church was built in the present Bridge street, and placed ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... a party this afternoon and I went ashore for that purpose, carrying along with us a small present. Upon our landing he did not receive us setting, as all the other Chiefs had hitherto done, or in any manner of Form; this we attributed to his Stupidity, for such he appeared to be. However, he gave me a Hog in return for the present I made him, and this was paying us full as great a Complement. Before we took our leave we let him know that we should go to Otaha in the morning in our Boats, and would be glad to have him along with us, ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... slight accident after my last letter; but it produced no bad consequences: it only made a little more care necessary. Accordingly I shall go from Choisy to Fontainebleau by water. My children are quite well. My boy will spend his time at La Muette while we are absent. It is just a piece of stupidity of the doctors, who do not like him to take so long a journey at his age, though he has two teeth and is very strong. I should be perfectly happy if I were but assured of the general tranquillity, and, above ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... hearer must have been aware that the speaker was earnestly straining after something. To those who understood, it was as if he would force his way through every stockade of prejudice, ditch of habit, rampart of indifference, moat of sin, wall of stupidity, and curtain of ignorance, until he stood face to face with the ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... instead of beginning my labours in my study, remains an unrevealed mystery unless we charge it to the account of a much-abused eccentricity attributed to genius and which usually turns out to be arrant stupidity. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... thinks me rather a grinder, and despises me for not being very deft with my hands: that's the way nowadays. From what I have read of the nineteenth century literature (and I have read a good deal), it is clear to me that this is a kind of revenge for the stupidity of that day, which despised everybody who could use his hands. But Dick, old fellow, Ne quid nimis! Don't ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... that I was a fool, lower in the scale of intelligence than even the police of the modern romancer. Novelists build mountains of stupidity out of a footprint on the sand, or from an impression of a hand on the wall. That's the way innocent men are brought to prison. It might convince an examining magistrate or the head of a detective department, but it's not proof. You writers forget that what the senses furnish is not ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... have tipped us off. There is a very fine line dividing incredible stupidity and incredible stubbornness. It's often a tough differential to make. I didn't spot it until I found them wolfing down the tetracycline capsules in my samples case. Then I began to see the implications. Those Mud-pups were stubbornly and tenaciously ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... resentment, I advise you to be cautious in writing me a second of the same tenor; for though I understand you were drunk when you did it, yet give me leave to tell you that drunkenness is no excuse for rudeness. But for your stupidity and sottishness you might have known, by attending to the public gazette, that you had your full quantity of ten thousand acres of land allowed you; that is, nine thousand and seventy-three acres in the great tract, and the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... fly!" Chris muttered, and made a grab at it. The bluebottle buzzed towards the window, swirled about, hit Chris on the nose again with remarkable stupidity, and blundered off once ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... place they had so gallantly defended, and allowed them four-and-twenty hours to consider on the resolution they should take. Syburg continued deaf to his remonstrances; and, with an obstinacy that savoured more of stupidity than of valour, determined to stand the explosion. When the sentinels that were posted on the side of the hill gave notice, by a preconcerted signal, that fire was set to the mine, the governor ordered the guard to retire, and walked out to the parade accompanied by several ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... "Benjy is partly correct; such specimens will be treated as he describes, and be stared at in blank stupidity by hundreds of fellows like himself, but they will also be examined and understood by geologists, who from their profound knowledge of the plans which our Creator seems to have had in arranging the materials of the earth, are able to point out many interesting and useful facts which ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... fellow—by the ear and was saying, "What? Lost again—smothered o' wit." (I believe it was the boy who was himself supposed to be a wandering soul, and who was thus addressed as lost.) "Now, look here, my lad," he continued, "some boys are born stupid, and thou art one of them; some achieve stupidity—that's thee again, Jim—thou wast both born stupid and hast greatly increased thy birthright—and some" (and here came a climax during which the boy's head and ear were swayed from side to side) "have stupidity thrust upon them, which, if it please the Lord, shall not be thy case, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... "thrown back" to the Sicilian ancestor, as he had. She had the Southern eyes, the Southern grace, the Southern vivacity and warmth that had made him so attractive. But Artois divined a certain stubbornness in Vere that had been lacking in the dead man, a stubbornness that took its rise not in stupidity but in a ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... feel those eyes upon her. All his strength and bigness, all his manhood, huge and unaware, seemed to lie deep in them like a monster coiled up under the sea. When he looked at her he seemed to lose that heavy dumbness, that inarticulate stupidity which occasionally stirred and vexed even her good disposition; his mouth might still be shut, but his eyes were fluent—they told her not only of his manhood ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... than any other, and as I recall it now, it seems as if I could see the king's noble, melancholy face, and armed form, remembered not in picture, but in reality. All Sir Peter Lely's lewd women, and Kneller's too, were in these rooms; and the jolly old stupidity of George III. and his family, many times repeated; and pictures by Titian, Rubens, and other famous hands, intermixed with many by West, which provokingly drew the eye away from their betters. It seems to me that ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the guilty parties to go away. Moreover, these feigners were far from numerous, despite all that was related of them in the amusing stories concocted by Voltairean humourists. Apart from faith, human stupidity and ignorance, alas! were quite sufficient ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... excessive vagueness of the end. Hardly any other type of ending would have befitted a novel that treats of transition, of a landscape that dazzles and enthralls, of possibilities that founder, not through the malignance of fate, but through the stupidity of man. There is an epic swirl to the finale that reminds one of the disappearance of an ancient deity in a pillar of dust. For an uncommon man like Milkau an uncommon end was called for. Numerous questions are touched upon in the course of the ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... children at his heels, soon attracted the attention of the tavern-politicians. They crowded round him, eying him from head to foot with great curiosity. The orator bustled up to him, and, drawing him partly aside, inquired "on which side he voted?" Rip stared in vacant stupidity. Another short but busy little fellow pulled him by the arm, and, rising on tiptoe, inquired in his ear, "Whether he was Federal or Democrat?" Rip was equally at a loss to comprehend the question; when a knowing, self-important old gentleman, in a sharp cocked hat, made his way through the crowd, ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... with our rabbits, and had already carried it quite a distance, when suddenly I began to be sorry for it, and thought how its mother would grieve, upon which I took it back to the spot where I had found it and returned to the institution as fast as I could, but said nothing at first about my "stupidity," for I was ashamed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... spent at a boulevard table impressed him as the height of stupidity. He chafed under the enforced inaction of the situation. "How many more wasted hours must he endure?" ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... ability to perform the humblest office of daily life. An educated man, who can use his hands, will make an anthracite coal-fire better and quicker after half a dozen trials than a raw Irish servant after a year's experience; and many a lady charges her housemaid with stupidity and obstinacy, because she fails again and again in the performance of some oft-explained task which to the mistress seems "so simple," when there is no obstinacy in the case, and only the stupidity of a poor neglected creature who had been taught nothing till she came to this country, not even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... a fine night Alaric had declared his intention of walking home from Mrs. Val's party, and he and Charley started together. They soon parted on their roads, but not before Alaric had had time to notice Charley's perverse stupidity as ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... exploiting of anthills, and now it has no rival at that business, but it is fit for nothing else. Its awkward digging tools will not allow it to put the sole of its foot to the ground, so it has to double them under and hobble about like a Chinese lady. It has no teeth, and stupidity is the most prominent feature of its character. It has become that poor thing, a man of ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... account of all that had passed, with a very sedate gravity. He informed me that he had witnessed so much ingenuity among the seals, and had known so many brutes that seemed to have the sagacity of men, and so many men who appeared to have the stupidity of brutes, that he had no difficulty whatever in believing every word I told him. He expressed his satisfaction, too, at the prospect of hearing a lecture on natural philosophy and political economy from the lips of a monkey; although ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... measured him with slow eyes. "I am not sure it is stupidity," she remarked; "some ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... one like you, Jan, for stupidity," was Sibylla's retort. "I am young and pretty, and a bride; and they are two faded ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... be too tedious. She died. She was right. And now I am here in her place. I am here with my lord, who has good manners but does not care about me, wishes me anywhere but in his house; a nephew who has no manners and a great deal of stupidity, and a niece who is much too old to be my niece, and who is too like me in face and figure for us to get on well together. Otherwise, truly, she is not like me. She is content to spend all day in a boat on the sea catching fish. Conceive it yourself, Susanne, ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... This simple fellow actually believed that the English fought in scarlet. Even now he was not thoroughly convinced that they really were English. Ignorance goes hand in hand with obstinacy, and these simple old peasant folk defended their stupidity with a veritable wall of ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... steal in quietly like a shadow on the wall, sit down at table with a heart-breaking sigh, sulked with the women, and often was heard talking to himself in this fashion: "This is no sort of life. If women hold the cards, stupidity is trumps. The woman in the kitchen, the man in business," and so on. Finally the thing happened which Frau Brohl had foreseen with anxiety—Marker came with a new project, for which he wanted fifty thousand thalers. It was an entirely new idea, unheard of before; it couldn't miscarry, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... a right to sleep in peace. In private life one of the most amiable of men, and distinguished for courtesy and kindness, he was a swash-buckler in controversy. He had a trick of being in the right which his opponents found displeasing, and he was sometimes cruel in his impatience of stupidity and wrong-headedness. Scarcely any continuance in folly could have inspired most men to the retorts he occasionally made. He wrote to one unfortunate: 'Sir,—You have ventured to contradict me on a question with regard ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... have drank a little"—and I glanced at the streamlet—"but a cup of d'Arbois now, or even some white Rochecorbon, would be nectar. Confound my stupidity at losing the way! We should have been at Marcay hours ago; ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... possible advantage could ever fall to our share. However, it is certain, that all the regular seeds of party and faction among us are entirely rooted out, and if any new ones shall spring up, they must be of equivocal generation, without any seed at all; and will justly be imputed to a degree of stupidity beyond even what we have been ever charged with upon the score ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... finer mind. He left among other things two or three volumes of short fragmentary pieces on politics, religion, literature, and art. They are intelligent and elevated, but contain hardly anything to our point to-night, unless it be this,—that what is called Stupidity springs not at all from mere want of understanding, but from the fact that the free use of a man's understanding is hindered by some definite vice: Frivolity, Envy, Dissipation, Covetousness, all these darling vices ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... the kind is recorded of him. For surely, Socrates, Creophylus, the companion of Homer, that child of flesh, whose name always makes us laugh, might be more justly ridiculed for his stupidity, if, as is said, Homer was greatly neglected by him and others in his own ...
— The Republic • Plato
... her laundry," laughed Ethel. "It went out white linen skirts and silk blouses. It came back sheets and pillow cases. You should have seen her face when she opened the package. She threw up her hands and said: 'What stupidity! Must I then appear in my classes ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... close observer, would have suspected it from the gentle countenance and rounded features which, when seen in profile, bore some slight resemblance to those of a lamb. This extreme gentleness, though noble, had something of the stupidity of the little animal. "I look like a dreamy sheep," she would say, smiling. Laurence, who talked little, seemed not so much dreamy as dormant. But, did any important circumstance arise, the hidden Judith was revealed, sublime; and circumstances had, unfortunately, ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... on three occasions, the first two times more or less due to his own fault, but the third owing to the stupidity of one of the sailors. Nevertheless a third occasion couldn't be overlooked by his messmates, who made much merriment of the event. It was still funnier when he brought his final load (an exceptionally heavy one) with a set face and ardent pace, vouchsafing ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... dearth of the raw material; for maleable iron was selling in Rome at upwards of L21 per ton, at a time when the cost of bar-iron in this country was only from L6 to L7 per ton. Such insane legislation on the part of the sacerdotal Government could not be committed through ignorance or stupidity. There must be some strong reason that does not appear at first sight for this wholesale sacrifice of the interests of the country. We shall speak of this anon: meanwhile we pursue ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... take the opportunity of putting to him a second problem that puzzles me: the carelessness, nay, more, the stupidity of the Bee in the presence of the Philanthus. You would be inclined to think that the victim of persecution, learning gradually from the misfortunes suffered by her family, would show distress at the ravisher's approach and at least attempt to escape. In my cages I see nothing of the sort. Once ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... almost completed my first round of parish visits, and the experience has been a revelation to me of the mixture of pathetic narrowness, hardship, and self-denial of the people up here in the mountains. One minute I am all out of patience with their stupidity, and the next I am touched to the heart by their patience with unendurable conditions, and their generosity and kindness to each other. I hope to be able to adjust my mental equilibrium to the situation before long and to learn to understand them better; I find that a country ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... hall in no pleasant frame of mind. The whole affair had been bungled by his stupidity. He passed through the door which Hartmann presently opened at the end of the hall, and found himself in a long narrow passage, lit by a single electric lamp. Hartmann closed the door carefully behind him, ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... with that strange blend of industry, stupidity, mendacity and cunning which characterize the Prussian and all his acts. Under our noses a German solidarity was attempted here, and in part achieved. Organizations having Prussian ends in view were numerous, large, popular and ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... to her words, so that in all the country-side there was not any lad truer, gentler, braver, or more patient at labour than was Bernadou; and though some thought him mild even to foolishness, and meek even to stupidity, he was no fool; and he had a certain rough skill at music, and a rare gift at the culture of plants, and made his little home bright within the winter-time with melody, and in the summer gay ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... Shakespeare which was not prompted by a love of singularity; and there are half-a-dozen popular idols—I have not the courage to name them—a genuine attack upon whom I could witness with entire equanimity, not to say some complacency. If Johnson's blunder in this case implied sheer stupidity, one can only say that honest stupidity is a much better thing than clever insincerity or fluent repetition of second-hand dogmas. But, in fact, this dislike of 'Lycidas,' and a good many instances of critical incapacity might be added, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... common pulse—we aid one another, learn from one another, draw ever closer to one another to our mutual happiness, and find in this closeness the whole meaning of life!—and to- morrow some crazy ruler will say some stupidity, and another will answer in the same spirit, and then I must go expose myself to being murdered, and murder men—who have done me no harm—and more than that, whom I love. And this is not a remote contingency, but the very thing we are all preparing for, which ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... possibly have common sense, that I had been about town above a fortnight, and had made no steps towards commencing an amour. My friend pleaded for me that my stay was uncertain; and she believed that was the cause of my seeming stupidity and this was all she could find to say ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... amiss," she said, turning back to speak to him, as Lili drew her away, "I am not good at guessing, and I should only bother you with my stupidity." ...
— Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country • Johanna Spyri
... lest it be forgotten; so I will say this much further: we all know what people have said about the curse of labour, and what heavy and grievous nonsense are the more part of their words thereupon; whereas indeed the real curses of craftsmen have been the curse of stupidity, and the curse of injustice from within and from without: no, I cannot suppose there is anybody here who would think it either a good life, or an amusing one, to sit with one's hands before one doing nothing—to live like a ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... advantages, our moral standard is as false as the drawing upon a Chinese plate. We have no true moral perspective. Our ideas of right and wrong are confused and imperfect, and in danger of becoming corrupt. We laugh at the stupidity of the poor Chinaman in his attempts after beauty in art, while in morals we are quite as stupid as he. Believing ourselves wise, we are fools. It is very hard to escape being unduly influenced by the opinions of society; but the more earnestly ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... Cumnock persuaded Mr. Bowring to let him keep on. After five days' work he heard of a deaf and dumb woman who sat every afternoon at a back window of her flat overlooking the back windows of Thayer's house. He had a trying struggle with her infirmity and stupidity, but finally was rewarded. On the afternoon of the murder, in its very hour (which the police had been able to discover), she had seen a man and woman in the bathroom of the Thayer house. Both were agitated and ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... hour, and letting himself fall into their hands like a deer that tumbles into a pit," growled the old man, perceiving as usual the mote in his neighbor's eyes, while he overlooked the beam in his own; "if he is left to pay for his stupidity with his own flesh, he can blame no one ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... But argument there was on it, by persons capable and willing, more than one: and in result this surprising brand-new London moon-calf of a MATINEES was smitten through, and slit in pieces, for the fifth time,—as if that could have hurt it much! "MIT DER DUMMHEIT," sings Schiller; "Human Stupidity is stronger than the very Gods." However, in the course of these new inspections into matters long since obsolete, there did—what may truly be considered as a kind of profit by this Resuscitating of the moon-calf MATINEES upon afflicted ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... its piety in the sixteenth century, this was the period of its highest intellectual culture, especially in the drama. De Vega and Cervantes were enough of themselves to redeem Spain from any charges of intellectual stupidity. But for the Inquisition, and the Dominican monks, and the Jesuits, and the demoralization which followed the conquests of Cortes and Pizarro, Spain might have rivalled Germany, France, and England in the greatness of her literature. At this time ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... were somewhere nowadays where you could flee from all this stupidity, from all this cant of governments, and this hideous reiteration of hatred, this strangling hatred ..." he would say to himself, and see himself working in the fields, copying parchments in quaint letterings, drowsing his ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... and an infinitude of meretricious uglinesses, such as, to real taste and judgment, are intolerable." Three more letters appeared in the following numbers—two for (Amateur and Professor) and one against (Inquirer) Chopin; the editor continuing to insist with as much violence as stupidity that he was right. It is pleasant to turn from this senseless opposition to the friends and admirers of the master. Of them we learn something in Davison's Essay on the Works of F. Chopin, from which I must quote ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... were proudly presented to M. le Colonel, and received affable bows from the little man, who flattered himself that he could talk English, and insisted on speaking an unknown tongue, evidently wondering at their stupidity in not understanding ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... was a sufficient justification for the use of the rack. Whoever fell into its abyss returned no more to the world. All the benefits of the laws ceased for him; the maternal care of justice no longer noticed him; beyond the pale of his former world malice and stupidity judged him according to laws which were never intended for man. The delinquent never knew his accuser, and very seldom his crime, —a flagitious, devilish artifice which constrained the unhappy victim to guess at his error, and in the delirium of the rack, or in the weariness ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... "Grau's stupidity has been very annoying, to say the least," was the ungracious reply. "We came here on important business, and presented our papers—all in proper order—on demand. We had the right to expect decent treatment, as respectable American citizens engaged in humanitarian work; yet this—this—man," ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... account of this weekly festivity, which at that time was important enough to threaten to become an institution. The environs of the little town of Sceaux enjoy a reputation due to the scenery, which is considered enchanting. Perhaps it is quite ordinary, and owes its fame only to the stupidity of the Paris townsfolk, who, emerging from the stony abyss in which they are buried, would find something to admire in the flats of La Beauce. However, as the poetic shades of Aulnay, the hillsides of ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... private room of a well-known restaurant, when he heard the story of the financial trickeries of Nucingen, wittily related by Bixiou. [The Firm of Nucingen.] Finot concealed "a brutal nature under a mild exterior," and his "impertinent stupidity was flecked with wit as the bread of a laborer is flecked with garlic." [Scenes ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... every word uttered by the rosy witch over her bubbling miniature caldron. She was concocting a philtre to make a girl happy,—herself. She had confided to the warm-hearted Irishwoman that she was in love, and condemned her stupidity that it had not been love at first sight; but since it had not been, the flame was likely to burn the longer. Didn't Jenny think so? And Jenny ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... hobedy-hoy, there was a seriousness in his visage, and a much-ado-about-nothing-ness in his eye, which were proclaimed by good natured people to be indications of deep thought and profundity; while others less "flattering sweet," declared they indicated naught but want of comprehension, and the dulness of stupidity. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... foetal meningitis: genius is a form of scrofula closely allied to mania: in sleep, the brain loses blood, in intellectual excitement, attracts blood; in the illumination of the death-bed, or the delirium of drunkenness, the circulation through the brain is quickened; in torpidity, melancholy, stupidity, the circulation slackens ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... her jealousies and fears were troublesome, I think they were useful. Sometimes she had light and comfort; oftener otherwise. In her twentieth year she had a fever, and from the first she thought she should not live, complained of her stupidity of mind, impenitence and unbelief. I came home from afternoon exercise, found her so ill that her mother thought herself obliged to tell her, upon which she thanked her for her kindness, but quickly fell into great distress on being unprepared for eternity. It would break a heart of stone ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... Haiti or Hispaniola, is so inexplicably and inexpressibly unintelligible and absurd, partly because the original translator was unable to render the miserable sense or nonsense of the author into English, but chiefly owing to the innate stupidity and gross ignorance of the poor anchorite, that the present editor was much inclined to have expunged the whole as unsatisfactory and uninteresting: But it seemed incumbent to give the whole of this most important voyage to the public. The Editor however, has used the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... Sir Charles; "I know exactly how he felt. I hope you forgive me, Miss Lorton? Can I make amends in any way for my stupidity?" ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... may rather be said to be a sign of it, for it shows an intelligence unable to grasp the wider relations of life, and concentrated on the gratification of petty and immediate desires. Thus it happens that the cunning of criminals is frequently associated with almost inconceivable stupidity.[35] ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... had had the sense to ask him, though of course he would not offer to do so, if I was content to let it alone. But I could not bring myself to make the request, and it was not till after he was gone, that I saw how fair an opportunity I had lost; and then, indeed, I deeply regretted my stupidity and my foolish pride, but it was now too late ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... into the evening papers. The management at first had wished to attempt the impossible, to try to muzzle the pressmen. But their publicity agent knew better. Madame Sennier had been carried by temper into stupidity. She had made a false move. The only thing to do now was to make ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... published by Bruno during his stay in Paris are "Il Candelajo" and "Umbrae Idearum." The former, says Levi, is a work of criticism and of demolition; in this comedy he sets in groups the principal types of hypocrisy, stupidity, and rascality, and exhibiting them in their true colours, he lashes them with ridicule. In the "Umbrae Idearum" he initiates the work of reconstruction, giving colour to his thought and sketching his ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... which was doubtless very interesting, and part of which thrilled Ferris, but none of which enlightened him as to a dog's uncanny wisdom in certain things and his blank stupidity in others. Next day Link returned the book to the library, no wiser than before, albeit with a higher appreciation of his own good luck in being the god of one ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... have taken the old pack-horse road on the fell-side. One would be safe in that fool's stupidity. You have heard ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... he has the pleasure of feeling us as funny and slangy here as people can only be who have had the best of the bargains other people are having occasion to rue. We of course don't know—that is Mother and Grandmamma don't, in any definite way (any more than I do, thanks to my careful stupidity) how exceeding small some of the material is consciously ground in the great grim, thrifty mill of industrial success; and indeed we grow about as many cheap illusions and easy comforts in the faintly ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... perpetuated inanity,—among the lettered, too!—the learned! the studious! the critical! If that was not the case, what a long neglect! Anyhow, the silence is inexplicable. It indicates one of two things,—duncelike stupidity or studious contempt. Both these surmises must be dismissed,—the first as too absurd, the second as too improbable. There can arise a third conjecture—Taste for intellectual achievements, and appreciation of literary merit, had vanished for awhile from the earth, to return after an absence ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... requests for information, I doubt if I should have spoken. I felt like the spectator who is compelled to witness a tragedy which both wounds and bores him. I was obsessed by my own ill-luck and the stupidity of the rest of mankind. I was particularly annoyed by the spasmodic hymn-singing that went on in various parts ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... for you can get it spiritually or intuitively, while I get it only intellectually, and the intuition flies where reason walks. You had a perception of the unreality of matter last night and I had nothing at all but stupidity and sleepiness. But let us go on. I am more deeply interested than I can tell, and the Bible is a new book to me. I never dreamed there were such treasures of truth in it. No matter where I read in the Bible before, I could not understand, and then I ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... time in his life sat down regularly at table. His life, lying on the river bank through long summer afternoons or sitting perfectly still for endless hours in a boat, had bred in him a dreamy detached outlook on life. He found it hard to be definite and to do definite things, but for all his stupidity the boy had a great store of patience, a heritage perhaps from his mother. In his new place the station master's wife, Sarah Shepard, a sharp-tongued, good-natured woman, who hated the town and the people among whom fate had thrown her, scolded at him all day long. She treated ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... a poor idiot, give me a halfpenny," said Martin, in a doleful voice, as he threw into his face and whole figure a look of helpless stupidity and awkwardness, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... don't want you any more, I hate you both, even my own child. Too much is too much. He was ambitious, but nothing more. Honor, honor, honor. And then he shot the poor fellow whom I never even loved and whom I had forgotten, because I didn't love him. It was all stupidity in the first place, but then came blood and murder, with me to blame. And now he sends me the child, because he cannot refuse a minister's wife anything, and before he sends the child he trains it like a parrot and teaches it the phrase, 'if I am ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... being as degraded and scurvy as his own outward self, turned to him, called him "Dutzbruder," asked him how he left them all in Berlin, stared at Ronald's blank look of non-recognition, and passed on with a muttered curse on his own stupidity in mistaking a stranger, in broad daylight, for ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... as the interest of the anecdote clearly depends on HIS stupidity—not on what happened to ME. Let us then make m "he"; x "persons whom I sent, &c."; and y "persons ...
— The Game of Logic • Lewis Carroll
... undisturbed camping grounds, all these good things were provided for them, and in return they were expected to yield a large percentage of lambs and a good "clip." Even the touching patience of the poor animals beneath the shears, or amid the dust and noise of the yards, was generally despised as stupidity. ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... Feeling a certain sympathy for her painful confusion of mind, I did my best to give his words an interpretation which soothed her fears. Then she begged his pardon, taking all the blame to her own stupidity, and received his grudged, unwilling kiss with a restored happiness which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... newspapers; made the press free, and did everything to promote education and industry. But although much was done, the good was greatly hindered, especially in the inland districts, by the vice, ignorance, and stupidity of many of the Roman Catholic priests, who totally neglected their duties,—which, indeed, they were incompetent to perform,—and in many instances, were no better than miscreants in disguise, teaching the ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... associated in his early youth were of that class who regarded his imbecility as a terrible affliction, were charitable and kind, never allowing others to impose upon this simple fellow, who was incapable of taking his own part. But as George Howe advanced in years he gradually threw off his stupidity, and although he never outgrew the habit of keeping his mouth open, he ceased to slobber, and acquired the habit of looking respectable. He entered school and became quite proficient in one branch of study in particular—he ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... in the pages of literature as a commentary to their doings in practical life, and vice versa. The experience thus gained will be very useful in avoiding wrong ideas, whether about yourself or about others. But if you come across any special trait of meanness or stupidity—in life or in literature,—you must be careful not to let it annoy or distress you, but to look upon it merely as an addition to your knowledge—a new fact to be considered in studying the character of humanity. Your attitude towards it will be that of the mineralogist who stumbles upon ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... said, "a thousand pardons for my stupidity. I can tell you in two minutes what I want done with this thing." He held it in the flat of his hand, and looked from it to the jeweller, as ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... is resolved, for Nature pleads that he Should only rule who most resembles me. Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dulness from his tender years; Shadwell alone of all my sons is he Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense. Some beams of wit on other souls may fall, Strike through and make a lucid interval; But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray." Mac ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... of Burgos, while the slow purgatory of being served with tickets was endured, a traveler found fault in good Saxon English as to the stupidity of such delay about trifles, and also complained of having been robbed of some small article of luggage. Another Englishman, particularly disposed to palliate matters, said there must be some mistake about it; he had been here before, and the people of Burgos were proverbially ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... extraordinary, if you came to think of it. Mrs. Wilkinson had no understanding of the art. What did it mean to her? Where did it take her? You could see she was transported, presumably to some place of chartered stupidity, of condoned oblivion, where nobody could challenge her right to ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... all (it is a shocking thing to say), I doubt whether Mr. Yeats really knows the real philosophy of the fairies. He is not simple enough; he is not stupid enough. Though I say it who should not, in good sound human stupidity I would knock Mr. Yeats out any day. The fairies like me better than Mr. Yeats; they can take me in more. And I have my doubts whether this feeling of the free, wild spirits on the crest of hill or wave is really ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... utterly wretched, she dared not even look at the man whose unheard-of stupidity had inflicted such humiliation ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... surprised at the difficulty with which I got into conversation with the man; at his stupidity, feigned or real, I could not tell which; at the dogged, suspicious reserve with which he eyed me, and asked me whether I was "one of they parts"? and whether I was a Londoner, and what I wanted on the tramp, and so on, before he seemed to think it safe to answer a single ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... one knew Dicksie Dunning in the high country. This was Dicksie Dunning of the great Crawling Stone ranch, most widely known of all the mountain ranches. While his stupidity in not guessing her identity before overwhelmed him, he resolved to exhaust the last effort ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... desperation. I am staking all I have on this venture." Then, in low-toned intensity, he added: "It hurts me to have you forced to go over and over these lines because of the stupidity of a bunch of cheap little people. Why don't you ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the experience was not one of unmixed satisfaction. These letters have contained references to the demoralized condition of the State Department under Mr. Bryan and the succeeding ones will contain more; the Carden episode portrayed the stupidity and ignorance of that Department at their worst. By commanding Carden to cease his anti-American tactics and to support the American policy the Foreign Office had performed an act of the utmost courtesy and consideration to this country. By quietly "promoting" the same minister to another ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... highest wisdom (Brahma Gnana), and it gives immediate entrance into the heaven of beatification or of absorption. And the only sin which such a man, and which this system of thought, recognizes is the sin of ignorance (Avidia); that is, the folly, or stupidity, of thinking that one's soul is separate from the divine Soul. To know, under these mundane conditions of delusion (Maya), and while under the tyranny of passion and of action (Karma), that I ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... Europe, he was entrusted with a command in Portugal, against the French then occupying that country. He was much embarrassed by his own government, and the wilfulness of the people to rescue whom was his mission. The convention of Cintra arrested his successes. The stupidity of his superiors defeated his schemes of conquest. "Yet, even as things stood, the success achieved was of no ordinary character. The British soldiers had measured their swords against some of the best troops of the empire, and with signal success. The 'Sepoy General' had indisputably shown ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... "This is downright stupidity," he said to Major Stuart, who was blazing away as hard as ever he could cram cartridges into the hot barrels of his gun. "You can't tell whether you are hitting the bird or not. There! Three men fired at that bird—the other two were ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... animal in a front view, the hands being laid upon each other, with thumbs extending on each side to represent the ears. In each case the thumbs are generally moved forward and back, in the manner of the quadruped, which, without much apparent reason, has been selected as the emblem of stupidity. The sign, therefore, means stupid, fool. Another mode of executing the same conception—the ears of an ass—is shown in Fig. 99, where the end of the thumb is applied to the ear or temple and the hand is wagged up and down. Whether the ancient Greeks had the same low opinion of the ass ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn't it? It wasn't like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with him: I pisoned his dog." His clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks. I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of two words until I knew Irvine—the verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete his portrait. He could lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be more in everybody's way than any other two ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of life, stupidity, presumption, and blindness. If I had been less simple, should I have been taken in by Jardine's propositions? Should I have accepted this furniture, this apartment? He told me that the papers he made me sign ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... heavily built man of mature middle-age, of the blond North-German type, with a facial aspect that suggested stupidity and brutality. The stupidity of his mien masked an ability and shrewdness that was distinctly above the average, and the suggestion of brutality was belied by the fact that von Kwarl was as kind-hearted a man as one could meet with in a day's ...
— When William Came • Saki
... condition, as well as infidelity to her friendship for you, whom she might well see I adored:—but alas! I little suspected the obligations she had to you, and now I know what she is, am in the utmost consternation at her ingratitude, impudence and stupidity. Heavens! added he, could she have the vanity to imagine that the genteel garb you had put her in, could raise her to such an equality, as to make me hesitate one moment if I should give the balance of merit on her side, ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... is the stupidity of the whites," said Roberts, pausing to take a swig from his glass and to curse the Samoan bar-boy in affectionate terms. "If the white man would lay himself out a bit to understand the workings of the black man's mind, most of ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... to officer our ranks, and that really, besides Mr. Gladstone, who was an old man, there was only Chamberlain.... Hartington was a real man, but a man on the wrong side, and with little chance of his getting rid of his prejudices, which were those, not of stupidity, but of ignorance; with his stables and his wealth it was useless to expect him to do serious work. Bright was a great name, and had a power of stringing together a series of sound commonplaces, so put that they were as satisfactory to the ear as distinct statements of policy would ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... dripping fog, and the iron railings for which I sought seemed to have melted away. For many minutes I beat the mist with my arms like one at blind man's buff, turning sharply in circles, cursing aloud at my stupidity and crying continually for help. At last a voice answered me from the fog, and I found myself held in the circle of a ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis
... with this about a month, there was scarce a phaenomenon of stupidity or of genius, which he could not readily solve by it;—it accounted for the eldest son being the greatest blockhead in the family.—Poor devil, he would say,—he made way for the capacity of his younger brothers.—It unriddled the observations of drivellers and ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... with the actual agents. Their habit of lining their pockets at the expense of their Government, their unfulfilled pretensions, their vanity and extravagance, and, above all, their unimaginative stupidity in their estimation of men—these things were apt in the early years of the war to bewilder the man who had been so often told to fall down before the great idol of ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
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