"Insipidness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a certain undeniable insipidity, the volumes of Contarini Fleming cannot but be read with pleasure. The mixture of Byron and Voltaire is surprising, but it produces some agreeable effects. There is a dash of Shelley in it, too, for the life on the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... pathway only once in a lifetime—or not at all. In the latter case it is natural to doubt the absolute truth of the rumours that the thing exists. The abnormal creature seems a mere freak of nature and may chance to be angel, criminal, total insipidity, virago or enchanter, but let such an one enter a room or appear in the street, and heads must turn, eyes light and follow, souls yearn or envy, or sink under the discouragement of comparison. With the complete harmony and perfect balance of the singular thing, it would be ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... your expense. You might well have been amazed. Europe cannot produce anything so fine as this, my little regal cabinet. My other apartments are by no means of the same order—mere ultras of fashionable insipidity. This is better than fashion—is it not? Yet this has but to be seen to become the rage—that is, with those who could afford it at the cost of their entire patrimony. I have guarded, however, against any such profanation. With one ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of character as developed in our little community; for we had, if we may so speak, the salt, the pepper, and the vinegar of human dispositions, sprinkled throughout the party, which not only took from the cold insipidity of our confinement, but gave to it a rich and pleasant relish. Our host's cellar and larder happened to be well stored, while the house was, in all other respects, an excellent one; so, what with the produce of the former, and the roaring fires kept up by Jamie, the waiter, we had really nothing ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... so enlarged in the autumnal intermittents as to be perceptible to the touch externally, and are called by the vulgar ague-cakes. As these glands are stimulated into action by the specific pungency of the fluids, which they absorb, the general cause of their quiescence seems to be the too great insipidity of the fluids of the body, co-operating perhaps at the same time with other general causes ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... secret of being happy, and we exclaim that there is no happiness on the face of the globe! It is we ourselves who are 'flat, stale, and unprofitable,' not our neighbors; though we are sure to charge them with the dulness and insipidity for ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... was quite true, but it made the waiter Peter uncomfortably careful. There were no women in the kitchen, but there was an amatory stewardess, fat and forty, upon whom the factitious technique of the saloon fell with singular insipidity. He fled from her. Peter, the waiter, was already a good democrat but he was not ready to spread his ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... any Ministry. At this time there was no idea of another coalition. That is a state of things which cannot come about frequently,—which can only be reproduced by men who have never hitherto felt the mean insipidity of such a condition. But they who had served on the Liberal side in that coalition must again put their shoulders to the wheel. Of course it was in every man's mouth that the Duke must be induced to forget his miseries and once more to take upon ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... were—with that dish; the fact is, veal ought to be killed in its very first infancy; they suffer it to grow to too great an age. It becomes a sort of hobbydehoy, and possesses nothing of veal, but its insipidity, or of beef, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in which affection was lacking, and that he should lose something every day of his charm as an unfamiliar type in the eyes of that creature who was born bored, and who seemed to have lived her life already and to find the insipidity of repetition in everything that she heard or saw. Felicia was suffering from ennui. Only her art had the power to divert her, to take her out of herself, to transport her to a fairyland of dazzling beauty from which ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... late Lord Anson, related to me the following anecdote of the death of Lord Sc——. His Lordship sent to see Mr. Anson on the Monday preceding his death, and said, "You are the only friend I value in the world, I determined therefore to acquaint you, that I am tired of the insipidity of life, and intend to-morrow to leave it." Mr. Anson said, after much conversation, that he was obliged to leave town till Friday, and added, "As you profess a friendship for me, do me this last favour, I entreat you, live till I return." Lord Sc—— believed this to be a pious ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... intervals of the dancing, little trays of tea and of cakes are repeatedly carried round,—astonishing cakes, in every gradation of insipidity, with the oddest names: white poison, nuns' kisses, angels' crops, cats' tails, heavenly bacon, royal eggs, coruscations, cocked hats, and esquecidos, or oblivion cakes, the butter being omitted. It seems an unexpected symbol of the plaintive melancholy of the Portuguese ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... species of ridicule: her shape was neither good nor bad: her countenance bore the appearance of the greatest insipidity, and her complexion was the same all over; with two little hollow eyes, adorned with white eye-lashes, as long as one's finger. With these attractions she placed herself in ambuscade to surprise unwary hearts; but she might have done so in vain, had it not been for the arrival ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... his train and usually attended him even on journeys, knew how to adapt the system to clever men of the world, to keep its speculative side in the background, and to modify in some measure the dryness of the terminology and the insipidity of its moral catechism, more particularly by calling in the aid of the earlier philosophers, among whom Scipio himself had an especial predilection for the Socrates of Xenophon. Thenceforth the most noted statesmen and scholars professed the Stoic philosophy—among others ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in a bottle of wine, which I did. It was a family, bearing apparently all the elements within itself of a happiness the most perfect and profound. Particularly an amiable family. Yet there was no insipidity. The father has already been made known; the son should be by this time; the mother was one of those strong-minded, simple women, whose mind may be expressed by its most striking characteristic—independence. She had that most obvious trait of aristocratic breeding, a quiet, indefinable, easy ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and I—upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, not worth a damn in itself;' but among these are some leaders of the great nineteenth-century renaissance in English verse; and Byron was foremost in the revolt against unnatural insipidity which has brought us through romance to realism, by his clear apprehension of natural form and colour, and even by the havoc which he made among conventional respectabilities. He dwelt too incessantly upon his own sorrows and sufferings; ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... is not infected with the wilful provincialism of Lamb nor with the spirit of John Bullishness which seriously proclaims in its rivals "equally a want of books and men."[57] "We may be sure of this," says Hazlitt, "that when we see nothing but grossness and barbarism, or insipidity and verbiage in a writer that is the God of a nation's idolatry, it is we and not they who want true taste and feeling."[58] Having this wholesome counsel ever before him, he can be more generously appreciative of the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... and dogs loose, and then we'll go and snare pheasants in the far plantation!' They explained to me once that being found out and punished added the same zest to their pleasures that cayenne pepper does to their diet; a little too much of it stings, but just the right quantity relieves the insipidity and adds to the interest; and then there is the element of uncertainty, which has a charm of its own: they never know whether they will 'catch it hot' or not! When they are found out they always confess everything with a frankness which is quite provoking, because they so evidently enjoy the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... are very apt to despise lakes, perhaps from the usual insipidity of lake poetry, and to imagine that they can exhibit nothing but very placid and tranquil scenery. Lake Erie, the shallowest of the great Canadian fresh-water seas, very soon convinces a traveller to the contrary; for it is the ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... eye. Images of beauty enough are to be found in his four volumes of Travels in the East, to emblazon, with the brightest colours of the rainbow, forty volumes of ordinary adventure. We long for some repose amidst the constant repetition of dazzling objects; monotony, insipidity, ordinary life, even dulness itself, would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott says, in one of his novels—"Be assured that whenever I am particularly dull, it is not without an object;" and Lamartine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... generations of living trees," he seemed to see the possibility of satisfaction at last. For here there was a perfect love and self-sacrifice, outwardly expressed with a mystic grace better than the Greek blitheness, and a new beauty which contrasted brightly with the Roman insipidity. It was the humanism of Christianity that so satisfied him, standing as it did for the fullness of life, in spite of all its readiness for sacrifice. And it was effective too, for it seemed to be doing rapidly what the best paganism was doing very slowly—attaining, almost without thinking about ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... composition; but the misfortune is, that there are passages in all poems, that can neither be pathetic nor sublime; and that, on these occasions, a neglect of the embellishments of language is very apt to produce absolute meanness and insipidity. The language of passion, indeed, can scarcely be deficient in elevation; and when an author is wanting in that particular, he may commonly be presumed to have failed in the truth, as well as in the dignity of his expression. The case, however, is extremely different with the subordinate ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Mrs. Jordan; Angelica, Mrs. Ward; Florinda, Mrs. Powell; Valeria, Mrs. Kemble; Lucetta, Miss Tidswell. It is not entirely worthless from a purely technical point of view, but yet very modest and mediocre. As might well be surmised, the raciness and spirit of The Rover entirely evaporate in the insipidity of emasculation. This is the last recorded performance of Mrs. Behn's brilliant ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... about politics as pyrotechny—that we are as blissfully ignorant of all that relates to the science of government as that of gastronomy—and have ever since our boyhood preferred the solid consistency of gingerbread to the crisp insipidity of parliament. The candidates of whom we write were no would-be senators—no sprouting Ciceros or embryo Demosthenes'—they were no aspirants for the grand honour of representing the honest and independent stocks and stones of some ancient rotten ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... owing to the fastidiousness of my caprice than the delicacy of my taste; but I am so often tired, disgusted and hurt with insipidity, affectation, and pride of mankind, that when I meet with a person "after my own heart," I positively feel what an orthodox Protestant would call a species of idolatry, which acts on my fancy like inspiration; ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... living tradition of the great popular festivals, and the sap of springtime swelling the trees,—the still young art, sometimes rasping to the palate, like the hard fruits of wild pear-trees, sometimes with the sweetish insipidity of myrtles black and blue, but at least something smacking of the earth, is the work of self-taught men not cut off from the people by an archaic culture, but, with them, reading in ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... eulogies to the memory of the departed great is the most difficult that falls to the lot of a Leader on either side of House of Commons. In some hands it has uncontrollable tendency to the artificiality and insipidity of funeral baked meats. DISRAELI was a failure on such occasions; GLADSTONE at his best. PRINCE ARTHUR, usually supreme, did not to-day ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... specimens I have seen here and elsewhere, I should say that a cold, glaring, hard tea-tray style prevails in painting, and a still worse taste, if possible, in sculpture. No soul, no grandeur, no simplicity; a meagre insipidity in the conception, a nicety of finish in the detail; affectation instead of grace, distortion instead of power, and prettiness instead of beauty. Yet the artists who execute these works, and those who buy them, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... by these irrelevant persons of the dinner-table. Not that he noticed them much; but when he did it was to discover in them some quality that he had not observed before. He found imbecility in the manners of Spinks, coarseness and violence in the figures of Mrs. Downey and Miss Bishop, insipidity in the whole person of Miss Flossie Walker. And now, as he looked round the table, he wondered how it was he ever came there. After living for four weeks with Lucia Harden or the thought of her, he had a positive difficulty in recognizing ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... us, indeed, with no admiration of daring design or of fertile invention; but it presents within its narrow limits a distinct and unbroken view of poetical delightfulness. His descriptions and sentiments have the pure zest of nature. He is refined without false delicacy, and correct without insipidity. Perhaps there is an intellectual composure in his manner, which may, in some passages, be said to approach to the reserved and prosaic; but he unbends from this graver strain of reflection to tenderness, and even to playfulness, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Boulting, 1907, p. 793.] Like so much in the shapes and customs of Italy the cicisbeatura was in its origin partly Gothic and partly Oriental. It combined the chivalry of northern friendship with the refined passion of the South for the seclusion of women. As an experiment in protest against the insipidity which is too often an accompaniment of conjugal intercourse the institution might well seem to deserve a more tolerant and impartial investigation than it has yet received at the hands of our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could hardly be expected to outlive the bracing ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... not be forgotten, while condemning the meaningless insipidity of Wyatt's work, that it was enthusiastically approved in his own day, and that the public generally were as ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... pencil with equal success in the cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, in the livid flash, in evanescent twilight, and rendered darkness visible. Though made to bend a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature, yet he knew how to follow her into her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity and baldness, and plucked a flower in every desert. None ever, like Rembrandt, knew how to improve an accident into a beauty, or give importance to a trifle. If ever he had a master, he had no followers; Holland was not made to comprehend ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet |
