"Imbecile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cases have been published of their bodies being remarkably hairy. (37. Prof. Laycock sums up the character of brute-like idiots by calling them "theroid;" 'Journal of Mental Science,' July 1863. Dr. Scott ('The Deaf and Dumb,' 2nd ed. 1870, p. 10) has often observed the imbecile smelling their food. See, on this same subject, and on the hairiness of idiots, Dr. Maudsley, 'Body and Mind,' 1870, pp. 46-51. Pinel has also given a striking case of ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... such an experience precisely what one wishes to pick out: the imbecile hatred in the Teuton—the perfidy of the British—the efficiency or the blundering of the German—or perchance the foolhardiness of the American, just as his nationalistic ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... old father; old mother; bedridden 15-year-old boy; water head; simple; old mother feeds it mouth to mouth[14]; "Die kind, leeraart, het ik nou al lang afgege aan de Heere Jesus!" (This child, Pastor, I have given to the Lord Jesus long ago.") She dotes on this imbecile, poor mother. Such a simple, homely, gladsome, believing old heart. "Ik ben velen een wonder geweest" ("I am a wonder unto many"); me certainly; daughter with sick girlie; "De Heere het haar ver ons terug gege" ("The Lord has given her back to us"); there was a fire in their tent, and ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... of prisoners exchanged since my escape mentions that in one case an imbecile Belgian was daily led out to the fields, wrapped up in several layers of clothes and then set upon by the dogs under the guidance of their guards; this was for the ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... my mouth with stirabout for fear I might give utterance to my anger. Tiresome old red-nosed imbecile! ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... single and certainly the sufficient tribute of a great poet, and a great master of the purest and the noblest English, to the most monstrous and preposterous taste or fashion of his time. As the product of an eccentric imbecile it would be no less curious than Stanihurst's Virgil: as the work of Cyril Tourneur it is indeed "a miracle instead of wit." For it cannot be too often repeated that in mere style, in commanding power and purity of language, in positive instinct of expression and direct eloquence of inspiration, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... seem to place them beyond the pale of moral and intellectual tolerance. "Sound" and "honest" they write above their creed. They pose as consecrated guardians of public honor and private property. We are depicted as dishonest and imbecile, repudiators of national and individual obligations, communists or anarchists bearing the torch and axe. This specialty is Mr. Cleveland's long suit. Little wonder that his school should place him at its head. His preeminence in the field where self-admiration is a supreme ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... streets; one blood-stained and horrible, carrying the heads of the victims on pikes; the other triumphant and pathetic, bearing on their shoulders the prisoners released from its cells. Of these, two had been incarcerated so long that they were imbecile, and no one could tell whence they came. On the pathway of this procession flowers and ribbons were scattered. The spectators looked on with ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... it came from his horrid father. But Graydon is a good boy. He couldn't long follow the impulses of his father. I dare say he could be a sinner if he tried, too. I' hate an imbecile. An imbecile to my mind is the fellow without the capacity to err intentionally. God takes care of the fellow who errs ignorantly. Give me the fellow who is bright enough to do the bad things which might admit him to purgatory in good standing, and I'll ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... gratefully as she covered him up again, but she felt her laugh to be a trifle hysterical. She hated the doctor to think her an imbecile, yet for some reason her identification of the man with the creature of her dream now struck her as extremely funny. She wanted to laugh and laugh; it took all her resolution to restrain herself.... Of course, the whole thing was clear ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you. A mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameless imposition. Because it is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... lifetimes—what incredible things had occurred in this island of ours! How did it all come about? "Not assuredly," Valeria remarked with sudden malice, "by taking things as they stood, and making the best of them with imbecile impatience. If everyone had done that, what sort of an England should I have had stretching before ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Richmond maintained that America was lost for ever, and he thought that we had better sit down quiet and contented at the loss, consoling ourselves with the reflection that it had been no fault of our own, but, solely that of an unjust and imbecile administration. But even Lord Shelburne did not concur in this opinion: he never meant, he said, this country to give up its right of commercial control over America, which was the essential bond of connexion between the two countries; and he declared that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... I have chatted nonsense with a grisette—have talked of liberty, progress, humanity, emancipation of women, with a young, excited girl; of Napoleon the Great, and all sorts of Bonapartist idolatry, with an old, imbecile soldier; of imperial glory, humiliation of France, hopes in the King of Rome, with a certain marshal of France, who, with a heart full of adoration for the robber of thrones, that was transported to Saint-Helena, has a head as hollow and sonorous ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... shook his head sadly. "I'm afraid I should have said, Mr. Burris, that we did once have one," he admitted. "He was, unfortunately, an imbecile, with a mental age between five and six, as nearly as we were ever ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... disgust that while of yore, when I own I was guilty, you never spared me abuse, but now, when I am so virtuous, where is the praise? Do admit that I have become an excellent letter-writer - at least to you, and that your ingratitude is imbecile. - ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so that the numbers continually vary, many passing through for their noviciate. The nuns collect alms for the aged poor and children, and many of the poor are thus sustained. Besides this, there are a number of imbecile or paralytic children who live permanently in the convent. The charity is ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... utterly incompetent to do so lays down the law on such subjects he or she becomes a bore. But if the young person who does not know how to talk treats these questions interrogatively, ten chances to one, unless she is seated next an imbecile, she will get some very good and light small-talk out of her next neighbor. She may give a modest personal opinion, or narrate her own sensations at the opera, if she can do so without egotism, and she should always show a desire to be answered. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... as to whose property the three houses in Ivinghoe Terrace were. Perhaps Kalliope knew, but she could not be asked; but the fact was that Captain White had been so lost sight of, that he had not known that this inheritance had fallen to him under the will of his grandfather, who was imbecile at the time of his flight. On his deathbed, the Captain had left the little he owned to his wife, and she had died intestate, as Richard had ascertained before leaving home, so that he, as eldest son, was heir to the ground. He had written to Kalliope, a letter which Alexis had opened, ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this?" said Luis to the horseman by his side. "It means," was the answer, "that Bishop Oppas is betraying the king." At this moment Don Alonzo rode up and cheered their march with explanations. "No more," he said, "will we obey this imbecile old king who can neither fight nor govern. He and his troops are but so many old women; it is only these Arabs who are men. All is arranged with Tarik, and we will save our country by joining the only man who can govern ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of his pamphlets, we see that he could be pithy enough when he chose to descend from his Latinized abstractions to good concrete English; but that is only when he becomes excited. His face when in repose, we are told, appeared to be almost imbecile; he was constantly sunk in reveries, from which he was only roused by a challenge to conversation. In his writings, for the most part, we seem to be listening to the reverie rather than the talk; we are overhearing a soliloquy ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... hundred feet lower is a shoulder of the hill on which stands the eagle-nest-like village of Ra-at, the ascent to which is like climbing by a ladder up the side of a house. This is one of the dwelling-places of the Sow Dyaks, a numerous but dispersed tribe. Their chief, or Orang Kaya, is an imbecile old man, and the virtual headship is in the hands of Nimok, of whom more hereafter. Our friends seemed pleased to see us, and Nimok apologized for so few of his people being present, as the harvest was approaching; ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... for the humble home where poverty had its abode, and it was not very strange that Maddy should shrink from it at first. She did not stop to ask what was her duty, or think how much happiness her presence might give her grandparents, or how much she might cheer and amuse the weak imbecile, her uncle. She was but human, and so when Guy began to devise ways of preventing her going, she listened, while the pain at her heart grew less as her faith in Guy grew stronger. He would drive down with her to-morrow, he said, and see what could be done. Meanwhile she ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... chief sufferers from this conflict are the authors of moving pictures. What they face at the hands of imbecile State boards of censorship is described at length by Channing Pollock in an article entitled "Swinging the Censor" in the Bulletin of the Authors' League of America ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... utmost importance. My sole purpose at that moment was to lull suspicion to rest; when that had been accomplished, then I might confidently hope to pump my trustful victim of such information as I imperatively required. The ignorant questions of an imbecile will oftentimes be frankly responded to, where a wise man might ask in vain, and my first play was to establish my character as a fool. That I had succeeded was ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... missed no one. The Governor "has dwindled into the mere instrument of an ambitious relative;" Tillotson was "a contemptible shuffling apothecary, without ingenuity or devise, or spirit to pursue any systematic plan of iniquity;" Richard Riker was "an imbecile and obsequious pettifogger, a vain and contemptible little pest, who abandoned the Federal standard on the third day of the election, in April, 1800;" John McKisson, "an execrable compound of every species of vice," was the man whom Clinton ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the satisfactory end of all things. She was, in fact, exceedingly indignant that an engagement so entirely advantageous from all practical points of view should be broken off; "simply to gratify Papa's imbecile prejudices!" she declared, with her usual emphasis. "Christian, you were a fool to mind what he said or did. He wouldn't have died! Not a bit of him! Of course, Mother has got to agree with him—that's ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... about other people that weren't there—of the commandant who was getting an impossible temper, and they explained that the more imbecile he got the harsher he got; and the General that made unexpected inspections with the idea of kicking all the soft-jobbers out, but who'd been laid up for eight days, very ill—'he's certainly going ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's insurgent son"; but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of defective eyesight; they are furnished with glasses, and the breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the name of charity, and a new line of degenerates ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... those truly unfortunate cases which, so far as present knowledge goes, cannot be guarded against. Eunice, age 31, mentally 2, is a low-grade imbecile. There is not in the whole family, for generations back, a single case of feeble-mindedness, nor of disease that would undermine the nervous organization. Close scrutiny does not reveal a single assignable cause. She came, as an accident, to ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... not fulfilled in this life. We read henceforth of no noble and heroical acts of David. From that time forth—I speak with all diffidence, and merely as it seems to me—he is a broken man. His attitude in Absalom's rebellion is all but imbecile. No act is recorded of him to the day of his death but what is questionable, if not mean and crafty. The one sudden flash of the old nobleness which he has shewn in pardoning Shimei, he himself stultifies with his dying lips by a mean ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... projects. At the time of the visit of the Landers, they were effectually in the heart of the kingdom, they had entrenched themselves in strong walled towns, and had recently forced from Mansolah a declaration of their independence, whilst this negligent and imbecile monarch beheld them gnawing away the very sinews of his strength, without making the slightest exertion to apply a remedy for the evil, or prevent their future aggrandizement. Independently of Raka, which is peopled wholly by Fellatas, who have strengthened it amazingly, and rendered it ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... did not stop at that. Yesterday he played a hard joke on me. He not only confiscated a package that a Tagalo [5] brought with him, but instead of directing him to the imbecile's department, he took him where we all were. The poor Tagalo carried with him a large collection of little books written by you, which were given him by his Priest, who told him they represented so much indulgency for his next life. As soon as the Indian ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... of the profound Hegel with the late Heinrich Beer, a brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is universally known by his reputation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journalists. This Beer, namely Heinrich, was a thoroughly stupid fellow, and indeed was afterward actually declared imbecile by his family, and placed under guardianship, because instead of making a name for himself in art or in science by means of his great fortune, he squandered his money on childish trifles; and, for example, one day bought six thousand thalers' worth ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... to teach the little fellow a very noisy and truculent vocalization of the ursine type, which Archie, who was a great favorite with his host, eagerly imitated, Briscoe appearing throughout the duet at the pitiable disadvantage of the adult imbecile ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the accused that she then held to be true the statements of the good Sire Harduin and of the innkeeper Tortebras. By her who speaks has it been replied, that she recognised as evidence the greater part, and also as malicious, calumnious, and imbecile certain portions. ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... tripping daintily, who effectually mimic the late partners of the dance in the most heartless manner. Another of these hideous creatures is sitting down, his head covered with a dirty rag, staring, stuttering, and mumbling, like an imbecile. His pantomime is recognized at once as a cruel mimicry of the chief penitent while at prayer, and it is universally pronounced to be a superb performance. To the Koshare nothing is sacred; all things are permitted, so long as they contribute ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... endure the unendurable at all. He was savage when he thought of it. That was her life and she would never get away from it. She, who was born for the wild open air and for youth and strength and freedom, would be shut up in that house and tied to that half-paralyzed, half-imbecile old man forever. It was damnable. And he, Rowcliffe, could have prevented it if he had only known. And if Mary had not ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... you be so pig-headed! You are talking like an imbecile. Your secretary, Miss Dore, is a nice girl. But how would you feel if Percy were to come to you and say that he was engaged ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the country is in (he observed)! One has scarcely time to think about poetry or painting, or anything else, when our stupid, imbecile Government allows public meetings of 150,000 men, where the most inflammatory language is used and the common people are called on to arm, beginning, too, with solemn prayer. Their prayer will never succeed. No, no, their solemn ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... imbecile, a song she had always hated because of its sickly sentimentality. She had no sweetheart, and having none, she certainly did not want him back. But she admitted that there was a certain melodious swing to the tune, and that her fingers had probably strayed into ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... Under the torpor of the drug her face changed; the muscles loosened, the flesh sagged, the widened, swollen mouth hung open; only the broad beautiful forehead, the beautiful calm eyebrows were the same; the face, sallow white, half imbecile, was a mask flung aside. She couldn't bear to look at it; it wasn't her mother's face; her mother had died already under the morphia. She had a shock every time she came in and ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... don't stop rocking your body in that inane way, and shaking your hand and your handkerchief, and saying those imbecile things, I shall go mad. I suppose this is the kind of sympathy a man gets from a woman in ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... blood thirst only just dying in his eye. He came down on to my table—out of breath as he agitatedly rearranged his untidy feathers—and indignant—almost unreconcilable because I had been such an undiscriminating and feeble- minded imbecile as to be for one ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... woman of education! What on earth is a person like that doing in this galere?' Vida asked, as if Mrs. Fox-Moore might be able to enlighten her. 'Can't she see—even if there were anything in the "Cause," as she calls it—what an imbecile waste of time it is talking to ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... the natural inferiority of the black man, connects him so closely with the animal creation, it looks passing strange to me that he should be made responsible for the violation of laws which he has been declared too imbecile to aid in framing or of comprehending. Nor is it less strange to see him enslaved and compelled by his labor to maintain both his master and himself, after having declared him incapable of doing either. Why not let him go then? Why hold with an unyielding grasp, so miserable ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... "I've a heap of critics and a lot of enemies. Some good men say I've no experience in Government, and that's about true. Up in New England the papers are asking who is this political huckster, this county court advocate? Mr. Stanton says I'm an imbecile, and when he's cross calls me the original gorilla, and wonders why fools wander about in Africa when they could find the beast they are looking for in Washington. The pious everywhere don't like me, because I don't hold that national ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... departments below the Loire, is shipped at Paimboeuf and taken out of the kingdom from there to be sold abroad." In the suburbs of Rouen they imagine that grain is purposely "engulfed in the swamps, ponds, and clay-pits." At Laon, imbecile and Jacobin committees attribute the dearness of provisions to the avidity of the rich and the malevolence of the aristocrats according to them, "jealous millionaires grow rich at the expense of the people. They know the popular strength," ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... President—which every other historian and biographer from Hildreth to Sydney Howard Gay has pronounced, and which has become a stock historical convention; holds Jackson's campaign ending at New Orleans an imbecile undertaking redeemed only by an act of instinctive pugnacity at the end; gives Scott and Jacob Brown the honor they have never before received in fair measure; and in many other points redistributes praise and blame with entire independence, and with curious effect on many popular ideas. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... blood and torturing and poisoning by way of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists, applauding with indelicate palms when one of your coward kind hurls a bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable; you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions to the labor problem" as there are dunces among you who can not coherently define it—do you really think ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... nursed a dear gazelle. But I was given a paroquet— How I did nurse him if unwell! He's imbecile, but lingers yet. He's green, with an enchanting tuft; He melts me with his small black eye: He'd look inimitable stuffed, And knows ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... Merovaeus had become so feeble and inefficient that they were contemptuously called "do-nothings," and an ambitious officer of the crown, who bore the title of Mayor of the Palace, pushed aside his imbecile master, and gave to the Frankish monarchy a new royal line,—the Carolingian ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... had not been oppressed by the tragedy of Want and Misery, one might have laughed at the farcical, imbecile measures that were taken to relieve it. Several churches held what they called 'Rummage' or 'jumble' sales. They sent out circulars something ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... leisure he had to apply to it had given him a remarkable appraising eye. Within ten minutes he had read much more than had greeted his eye. A wave of pity went over him—pity for the patient, the girl, and his friend. The poor old imbecile! Why, this child was a firebrand, a wrecker, if ever he had seen one; and the worst kind because she was unconscious ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... "cette grosse banquiere," coarse scion of a bad stock, false wife and faithless queen, paramour of an intriguing foreigner, tool of the Jesuits and of Spain, was Regent in the minority of her imbecile son. The Huguenots drooped, the national party collapsed, the vigorous hand of Sully was felt no more, and the treasure gathered for a vast and beneficent enterprise became the instrument of despotism and the prey of corruption. ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... thumb, two persons in the town each had an extra toe upon one foot. We have already stated that the presidente of the village was a fool. He had plenty of companions. One of the men, who made himself quite useful to us was an imbecile; he crossed himself, kissed our hands, nodded his head, and told us the most surprising things in regard to the subjects whom he brought before us. In connection with each case he cried and carried on at a great rate, and finally insisted that he was going to bring me a raw egg as an offering ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... dead From wounded honor. 'Come! no more of this!' Cried Charles; 'how happened it that you forgot You had a son? All shall be well, my father.' He paid off all the liabilities, And found himself without three thousand dollars Out of a fortune of at least a million. What shall we call him, imbecile or saint? His plan is now to set up as a teacher. Of such a teacher let each thrifty father Beware, or he may see his only son Turn out a poor enthusiast,—perhaps— Who ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... the careworn mother of H'Emma, who probably would have been quite neglected during the gale, and determined to take her something, and get Mr. Dutton to carry it and steady her own footsteps. Nothing could exceed the discomfort in which they found them. The nursery-maid was imbecile from terror and prostrate with sickness, and the harassed mother doing ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... he suddenly, as if answering the voices which whispered in his soul; "that would be an imbecile, miserable resort, and, moreover, we would not obtain our object; ho would not be humiliated, but a martyr's crown would be added to his laurels. When, however, ho is completely humbled, when, to this great victory at Hochkirch, ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... within the Tropics, and carries thither the strength and the energetic habits acquired in regions more propitious to the constitution. He differs as widely from princes nursed in the purple of imperial cradles, as the companions of Gama from their dwarfish and imbecile progeny, which, born in a climate unfavourable to its growth and beauty, degenerates more and more, at every descent, from the qualities ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... degrading bargain, by which a woman sold herself to a man for the social status of a wife and the right to be supported and pensioned in old age out of his income. That's the advanced view—our view. Besides, if you had married me, I might have turned out a drunkard, a criminal, an imbecile, a horror to you; and you couldn't have released yourself. Too big a risk, you see. That's the rational view—our view. Accordingly, you reserved the right to leave me at any time if you found our companionship incompatible with—what was the expression you used?—with your full development ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... the bridge, and the voice of Gazza cried out that the stupid key was at the imbecile club-house, whither he was now going for it, and not to be alarmed. Their voices answered reassuringly, and Gazza was heard growing distant, ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... we show them the lake and tell 'em to help themselves. It makes them hop with rage. They say, 'What! do you drink THIS?' Then, when we tell them that all their water supply comes from this lake, they grin like a dog and go about the city, —I mean depart on their imbecile way. But these people are all dressed up. Oh, Momus and Comus! There are girls on board! Come ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... not see, imbecile, that it's on my head," and he drew the cap from his pocket and proudly put it on his head, while he ran to his ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... it courteous to his parents, to the mother he pretended to love, to the father whose grey hairs he was by his general behaviour bringing down in sorrow to the grave—to assume without further enquiry that their eldest daughter was an imbecile? (My hair, by-the-bye, is not grey. There may be a suggestion of greyness here and there, the natural result of deep thinking. To describe it in the lump as grey is to show lack of observation. And ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... altogether and he became clean smooth. When his wife saw this, she said, "I have no occasion for thee, now thou are become pegless as a eunuch, shaven and shorn;" and he answered her, saying, "All this comes of thine ill-omened counsel and thine imbecile judgment. I had three prayers accepted of Allah, wherewith I might have gotten me my good, both in this world and in the next, and now two wishes are gone in pure waste, by thy lewd will, and there remaineth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... unless he has paid for it. He was of a race which elsewhere has so immemorially plundered hen-roosts that chickens are as free to it as the air it breathes, without any conceivable taint of private ownership. But the spirit of New England had so deeply entered into him that the imbecile broiler of another, slain by pure accident and by its own contributory negligence, was saddening him, while I was off in my train without a pang for the owner and with only an agreeable pathos for ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not from outside happenings but from some defect in a person's mind and body are often the subject of euphemisms. In Scotland a person who is quite an imbecile will be described as an "innocent"—a milder way of saying the same thing. Insane and crazy were originally euphemisms for mad, but now have come to be equally unpleasant descriptions. So for drunken the ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... the silence and overshadowing of that night whose fitful meteoric fires only herald the descent of a superficial fame into lasting oblivion, the imbecile and unavailing resistance which is made against the doom must often excite our pity for the pampered child of market-gilded popularity;" and as "it is not with such feelings that we behold the dark thraldom and long-suffering of true intellectual ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... iron, and severed the bands that bruised and held her white wrists. Even then she could not speak, though she smiled a little, faintly and forlornly and gratefully. She struggled to say one word, but it resolved itself into a cacophonous and inarticulate mumble, half-infantile, half-imbecile. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... imbecile to the world 'mid double danger, groans, and tears; The toy, the sport, the waif and stray of passions, error, wrath ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... greatness. If this purpose be kept steadily in mind, one may indeed see in Lord Fisher something quite childlike. At any rate it is only when the overmastering purpose is forgotten that he can be seen with the eyes of his enemies, that is to say as a monster, a scoundrel, and an imbecile. ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... rich, Jimmie. She wanted me not; and she married a wealthy fool and the imbecile made her happy. I could almost forgive her for not loving me, for I was a mate on a steamboat, but to let that fool make her happy—it was too much and I cast her out of my mind. But when is your wedding to take place? In the sweet light of a distant ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... could be deterred by President Wilson's messages. He saw something comic in shaking a long fore-finger and saying, "Tut, tut! I shall consider being very harsh, if you commit these outrages three more times.." To shake your fist at all, and then to shake your finger, seemed to Roosevelt almost imbecile. Cut off from serving the cause of American patriotism in any public capacity, Roosevelt struggled to take his part by writing. Every month in the Outlook, and subsequently in the Metropolitan Magazine, he gave vent to ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... of the family to whom it was possible to speak with profit. The mother, with little wit and knowledge of the Court, full of apparent confidence and sham cunning, received all advice ill. The, brothers were imbecile, the son was a child and a simpleton, the two other daughters too light-headed. I had often warned Madame de Dreux of the enmity of the Duchesse de Bourgogne; and she had spoken to her on the subject. The Princess had answered very coldly that she was mistaken, that she had no ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... world as the Mayflower with her company fared forth on their adventurous voyage. The foolish James was yet on the English throne, glorying that he had "peppered the Puritans." The morose Louis XIII, through whom Richelieu ruled, was King of France. The imbecile Philip III swayed Spain and the Indies. The persecuting Ferdinand the Second, tormentor of Protestants, was Emperor of Germany. Paul V, of the House of Borghese, was Pope of Rome. In the same princely company and all contemporaries were Christian IV, King ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... brother, who was the only one besides his master and himself to know that the dancer had been Zulannah, in the grip of such terror and physical pain as to be almost imbecile, though a look of cunning had shone for a moment in his bloodshot eyes when Qatim had inadvertently let drop a hint as to the ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... Witchcraft, p. 304,) discusses the point at considerable length, and with an earnest and implicit faith singularly at variance with his enlightened scepticism in other matters. But there were regions of superstition in which even this Sampson of logic became imbecile and powerless. The rationale of the bleeding of a murdered corpse at the touch of the murderer is given by Sir Kenelm Digby with his ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... betrayed. On the night of 29th May 1418, the son of an ironmonger on the Petit Pont, who had charge of the wicket of the Porte St. Germain, crept into his father's room and stole the keys while he slept. The gate was then opened to the Burgundians, who seized the person of the helpless and imbecile king. Some Armagnacs escaped, bearing the dauphin with them, and the remainder were flung into prison. The Burgundian partisans in the city, among whom was the powerful corporation of the butchers and fleshers, now rose, and on Sunday, 14th ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Fete of the Republic. I walked through the streets, and the crackers and flags amused me like a child. Still it is very foolish to be merry on a fixed date, by a Government decree. The populace is an imbecile flock of sheep, now steadily patient, and now in ferocious revolt. Say to it: "Amuse yourself," and it amuses itself. Say to it: "Go and fight with your neighbor," and it goes and fights. Say to it: "Vote for the Emperor," and it votes ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... conduct themselves with decorum. His guards are close at hand, and he is daring enough to make use of them if there is any resistance to that which he has undertaken. To the Directory, through their envoy Dottot, he says in substance, and not without vigour, "Do not sicken me with your imbecile arguments and lame, impotent conclusions. What I want to know is: What have you done with this France which I left you so glorious? I left you peace; I return and find war! I left you victories; I find reverses! I left you the millions ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... the newspapers made the most of her story, and were filled with denunciations and abuse of the prince, some of the sheets asserting, by way of explanation of his conduct, that he was mentally unbalanced, his mother having been an acknowledged lunatic, and his brother. Prince Alexander, an imbecile. Nothing can be further from the truth. It cannot be denied that he has a few harmless and kindly eccentricities which would attract no attention whatever in an ordinary septuagenarian, but which excite comment merely by reason of his rank as a prince of the blood. He is ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... The old imbecile put his damp finger upon this, and asked me what I thought of it. I said it was very simple but touching, and then, being anxious to get rid of him, ordered two dozen of Kate's fancy. He thanked me most fervently, and said he would bring them to me ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... your head entirely. You seem to want to make me look utterly foolish! I sigh! Am I such an imbecile? ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... throughout, and becomes no better than she should be with the facility of a predestined strumpet; her lover, Valmont's rival, and Mme. de Merteuil's plaything, M. le Chevalier Danceny, is not so very much better than he should be, and nearly as much an imbecile in the masculine way as Cecile in the feminine; her respectable mother and Valmont's respectable aunt are not merely as blind as owls are, but as stupid as owls are not. Finally, the book, which in many particular points, as well as in the general letter-scheme, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Chetwinde for one, and—we must see whom we can get. We'll try to make it cheery and not too imbecile." ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... and my wishes will lead me to seek your acquaintance with deep and undisguised interest. You see the trouble with me is that I have not changed, and it will require a little time for me to adapt myself to the new order of things. I am now somewhat stunned and paralyzed. In this imbecile state I am both stupid and selfish. I ought to congratulate you, and so I do with all the shattered forces of my mind and reason. You have improved amazingly. You are destined to become a belle par excellence, and probably are one now—I know so little of what ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... one he sought. The excess flesh of the deputy marshal would have brought his nickname to the mind of an imbecile. However, Fatty was humming softly to himself, and it is not the habit of men who treat very sick ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... into her life a few new suitors, but they came at a time when she was almost imbecile over Thomas Gilfoyle, the advertising bard. He was the first intellectual man she had met—that is, he was intellectual compared with any other of her men friends. He could read and write something ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... not perfectly imbecile and void of understanding, is an epicure in his own way. The epicures in boiling of potatoes are innumerable. The perfection of all enjoyment depends on the perfection of the faculties of the mind and body; therefore, the temperate man is ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... "It's imbecile!" says J. Bayard. "What can he do with a thousand in New York. You might as well try to sprinkle Central Park with a quart watering can. I told him so. I tried to get out of him too some suggestion as to how we could best carry out the terms of Gordon's crazy ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... socks in order not to be heard by anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in the dark. And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too. She would marry somebody else. His very soul writhed. The tenacity of that Feraud, the awful persistence of that imbecile brute, came to him with the tremendous force of a relentless destiny. General D'Hubert trembled as he put down the empty water ewer. "He will have me," he thought. General D'Hubert was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... he, "in proportion to his age, and his capacity. Minors, and the imbecile, are entitled to protection, but ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... I was met by a doctor. Mrs. Gurrage had lost her reason, he told me, upon hearing the news. She had been weak and ailing and in bed ever since her return from London, and this had proved the last straw, and now she lay, a childish imbecile, in her gorgeous ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... the thing: 'obey, obey.' Well, I will. I will be a stick, a dolt. I will be as unlike what God intended me to be as possible. I will be just what your father and Aunt Hester and you want me to be. I will let them think for me and save my soul. I am too much an imbecile to attempt to work out my own salvation. No, Elizabeth, I will not play ball any more. I can imagine the horrified commotion it caused among the angels when they looked down and saw me pitching. When I get back to school I shall look up the ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... give a fictitious name, and say that I was going to visit my son, an officer in the Federal army." Now, as I have barely entered on my eighth lustre, I can only suppose that the great bitterness of my heart imparted to my face, for the moment, a helpless—perhaps imbecile—look of senility. I had no alternative, however, but to retreat, as my men had done; the place was evidently too hot to hold me: already, through the window, I saw a shabby dragoon paying auspicious attention to my horses, contraband, and saddle-bags. I was greatly relieved, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... at first great murmurs among the abler but less influential brethren. But the murmurs of the weak prove only the tyranny of the strong; and so completely in the course of time do institutions depart from their original character, that the imbecile riders of the black bulls now avowedly defended their position on the very grounds which originally should have unseated them, and openly maintained that it was very evident that the stout were intended to walk, and ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... future, party on party, dances on suppers and suppers on plays; to dine every evening at some place where they hadn't dined before; to meet lots of nice amusing people with demobilised minds who wouldn't talk to him about the war; to let himself go in bursts of exquisitely imbecile laughter; never to be quiet for an hour, never to be alone with himself, never to ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... the mob began to set fire to houses in different quarters of the city. Growing bolder at the sight of their own violence, they broke open the prisons, and thus obtained a re-enforcement of hundreds of desperadoes, ripe for any wickedness. The troops were paralyzed by Louis's imbecile order to avoid bloodshed, and in the same proportion the rioters were encouraged by their inaction and evident helplessness. They attacked the great armory, and equipped themselves with its contents, applying to the basest uses time-honored ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... laws, from intermarrying with any persons but those of their own caste, they had here dwindled down, in the course of many centuries, to a few insignificant individuals, diminutive in stature, and imbecile in intellect. They were, nevertheless, held in high veneration and affection by the whole Iximayan community, probably as living specimens of an antique race so nearly extinct. Their position, as ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... dread, and I noticed this child, in consequence of his pale and melancholy countenance, and apparently miserable condition. I observed that no one took any notice of him; and that he was allowed to wander about the great straggling workhouse, among the insane, the idiotic, and the imbecile, without the slightest attention being paid to his going and coming; in short, he lived the wretched life of a ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... heart," he said, vexed in spite of himself by this rebuff, "I know I have been an imbecile. I ought to have acted the cave man and paid no attention to her supplications and lies. I ought to have taken violent possession of her lips and breast. Then it would be finished, whereas now I must begin at the beginning ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... to extreme old age and to continue my story with the years, I, an old man of seventy, shall be found dreaming dreams just as impossible and childish as those I am dreaming now. I shall be dreaming of some lovely Maria who loves me, the toothless old man, as she might love a Mazeppa; of some imbecile son who, through some extraordinary chance, has suddenly become a minister of state; of my suddenly receiving a windfall of a million of roubles. I am sure that there exists no human being, no human age, to whom or to which that ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... time; but the Camorra stepped in. They are foolish people, those Camorristi—foolish and ignorant. They punish for very trifling offences, and they do not make sufficient warning of their punishments. Then they are quite imbecile in the way they attempt to ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... was a woman very pure and very honest. Alas, the poor soul! To-day her hair is white as the snow, and they tell me she is mad. So much the better for her if she know nothing; but I fear the mad and the imbecile know all and see all, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor, and those who are in the prime of life raise their voice and talk artificially to seniors, hastily conceiving them to be deaf and rather imbecile. Gwendolen, with all her cleverness and purpose to be agreeable, could not escape that form of stupidity: it followed in her mind, unreflectingly, that because Mrs. Arrowpoint was ridiculous she was also likely to ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... window at two girls in Sunday splendour kissing one of the stable boys behind a farm cart. They were all three apparently enjoying themselves very much, the girls laughing, the boy with an expression at once imbecile and beatific. They thought the master's eye could not see them there, but the master's eye saw most things. He took up his pen again and added a postscript. "If you come soon you will be able to enjoy the society of your friend Bibi. She came on Wednesday, I believe." ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... upon a youth who had distinguished himself by no valiant deeds in war, nor by industry or dexterity in the chase. His name had never reached the surrounding nations. His own nation knew him not, unless as a weak and imbecile man. He was poor in everything which constitutes the riches of Indian life. Who had heard the twanging of Karkapaha's bow in the retreat of the bear, or who had beheld the war-paint on his cheek or brow? Where were the scalps ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... largely a history of social collapses due to demoralisation by indulgences following security and abundance. In the time of our Founders the signs of a world-wide epoch of prosperity and relaxation were plentiful. Both sexes drifted towards sexual excesses, the men towards sentimental extravagances, imbecile devotions, and the complication and refinement of physical indulgences; the women towards those expansions and differentiations of feeling that find expression in music and costly and distinguished dress. Both sexes became unstable and promiscuous. The whole world seemed disposed to do exactly ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Great Age. He made each person speak his own idiom: the uneducated freedmen, the vulgar Latin argot of the streets; the strangers, their barbarous patois, the corrupt speech of the African, Syrian and Greek; imbecile pedants, like the Agamemnon of the book, a rhetoric of artificial words. These people are depicted with swift strokes, wallowing around tables, exchanging stupid, drunken speech, uttering ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... had offered to take him to Uncle Macquart's, where he was to remain for the rest of the week. Fresh quarrels had disturbed the peace of the household, the husband having resolved to tolerate no longer in his house another man's child, that do-nothing, imbecile prince's son. As it was Grandmother Rougon who had dressed him, he was, indeed, dressed on this day, again, in black velvet trimmed with gold braid, like a young lord, a page of former times going to court. And during the quarter of an hour ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Palmerston would probably insist upon this, however; Lord Palmerston's retirement would be a great blow to the Government, as the Country persisted in thinking him the only able War Minister, and would cry out at "the imbecile old Head of the Government having it now all his own way." He thought, should he not be able to go on, new combinations could be formed, perhaps under the Duke of Newcastle and Mr Gladstone, as the Country liked younger men. Lord John must give ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... youth decide the features of a man for life, as they certainly are the foundation of his moral character. An inert and weak soul, which never overflows in passions, has no physiognomy at all; and want of expression is the leading characteristic of the countenance of the imbecile. The original features which nature gave him continue unaltered; the face is smooth, for no soul has played upon it; the eyebrows retain a perfect arch, for no wild passion has distorted them; the whole form retains ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... "honors"), in a free college, of which the professors are responsible only to a judicious board of directors, examinations for admissions and for advancements will be rigid and impartial, the administration will be vigilant and firm, the reckless who will not and the imbecile who cannot acquire a good education, will be dismissed for more congenial pursuits, the rich and the poor will be upon an equality, and only ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... sound; and, in spite of it, there was no fear in my soul—nothing but an apathetic, but indescribably sweet feeling of rest, and a complete inactivity of all the senses except hearing. A moment came when even this sense forsook me, because I remember that I listened with imbecile intentness to the dead silence around me. Is this death? was my indistinct wondering thought. Then I felt as if mighty wings were fanning me. "Kind wings, caressing, kind wings!" were the recurring words in my brain, like the regular movements ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... body. If his own or England's salvation had depended upon it, he could not, when in the least hurried, have uttered a distinct order, have dictated an intelligible letter; or, in time of need, have recollected the name of any one of his officers, or even his own name—quite imbecile and embruted. But, peace to his ashes—or rather to his dregs—and may there never be such another ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... Christopher Deering argues the matter at great length: but all the time we are hungering for him to say the one thing demanded by the logic of the situation: to wit: "Whatever the abstract rights and wrongs of the case, this man would be an imbecile to elope with this woman, who is an empty-headed, empty-hearted creature, incapable either of the passion or of the loathing which alone could lend any semblance of reason to a breach of social law." Similarly, in ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... until he himself long afterward made it impossible for me to deceive myself did I penetrate to his real purpose—that he wished to fill me with a prudent dread and fear of him, with a sense of the absoluteness of his power and of the hopelessness of trying to combat it. But at the time I thought—imbecile that my vanity had made me—at the time I thought he had let me be present because he genuinely liked, ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... classes of criminals: (i) The instinctive or born criminal. This is a person in whom the tendency to crime is inborn, and this inborn tendency is always due to some congenital defect. The most common type of the instinctive or born criminal is the moral imbecile, a person only slightly mentally defective who cannot distinguish right from wrong. It is evident that in the instinctive or born criminal biological causes of crime predominate. This class is however relatively small among the general criminal class, and it is estimated ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... Oxford or Cambridge would but ill compare with him. The former might excel in the knowledge—if we can dignify it by that name—of the laws of scansion, or in the composition of Greek idylls; but in all that constitutes real knowledge he would prove but an idle theorist, a dreamy imbecile, alongside our practical young scholar of ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... seemed to be imbecile, and Stratton grasped now his friend's object in bringing them face to face. It was to show him how little so mindless a creature ought to influence the future of two people's lives, and to consult with him as to what ought to ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn |
