"Shallowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not many among them of those who were reckoned by the world's standards as wise or mighty or noble. On the contrary, in choosing His leaders God had purposely chosen those reckoned by the world's standards foolish that He might show plainly the shallowness of what they deem wise. And so things reckoned weak had been chosen to give the conception of what true strength is. And things even base, and despised, and not counted at all had been used that so men might learn the God-standards of wisdom and strength and honor ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... city of our land snobbery and plutocracy reign as twin evils, while in every small town, from Salem to some Pacific-slope settlement, the beginnings of the same social curse are manifest. Of course New York towers in bad eminence over the entire country. Abroad they are finding out the absurd shallowness of our professions. Nearly seven years ago an able literary man said to me in London: "I am wearied, here, by the necessity of continual aristocratic patronage. Especially true is this," he added, "regarding all new dramatic productions. Lord This and Lady That are more thought of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... passed with hardly a house to be seen, or a tree or a blade of grass. I might even add, or a mountain or a river, for the one was too often a heap of agglomerated sand and clay cut into unsightly chasms by the rain, and the other generally degenerated into a mere stagnant swamp, its shallowness and dryness increasing regularly with its length. The only houses were log ranches, called Relays, hardly visible in their sandy surroundings, and separate from each other by a mean distance of ten miles. The only trees were either stunted ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... while the other, who may be the greater, perhaps the better man, although in the wrong, is embittered by his smallness, and turns away with increased prejudice. Human nature can hardly be blamed for its readiness to impute to the case the shallowness of its pleader. Few men do more harm than those who, taking the right side, dispute for personal victory, and argue, as they are sure then to do, ungenerously. But even genuine argument for the truth is not preaching the gospel, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... and despair and the self-accusing, self-excusing thoughts were as real to him as they had been at the moment he recalled. He accepted that reality as a proof, scarcely needed, of the already established shallowness of his own nature—a brawling stream always ready to rave round any little impediment in its path; a mere miniature of the torrent, with no resolute strength or purpose in it, but full of a fussy vivacity and self-importance ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... forgive them, and even submit to them. He must know of them whether they be cold-blooded or passionate, whether true or false, and how far true, and how far false. The depth and the breadth, and the narrowness and the shallowness of each should be clear to him. And, as here, in our outer world, we know that men and women change,—become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them,—so should these creations of his change, and every change should be noted by him. ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... presumption, all else seems to me clear. Lily's childlike affection for me is too deep and too fond not to warm into a wife's love. Happily, too, she has not been reared in the stereotyped boarding-school shallowness of knowledge and vulgarities of gentility; but educated, like myself, by the free influences of Nature, longing for no halls and palaces save those that we build as we list, in fairyland; educated to comprehend and share the fancies which are more than booklore to the worshipper of art and ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... only port of entry to the vast region watered by the Amazons. It is a small village, formerly a missionary settlement of the Jesuits, situated a few miles to the eastward of the Para River. Here the ship anchored in the open sea at a distance of six miles from the shore, the shallowness of the water far out around the mouth of the great river not permitting, in safety, a nearer approach; and, the signal was hoisted for ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... ourselves with the matter at issue between the rival hierarchies on the other side of the water. It is a very pretty quarrel, however, and good must come out of it, as it cannot fail to attract popular attention to the shallowness of the spiritual pretensions of both parties, and lead to the conclusion that a hierarchy of any sort has very little in common with the fishermen and tent-makers of the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... earnestness of Beethoven, the chivalric spirit of Weber, and the poetry of Schubert. A new era had set in. These three composers were neither the fools of princes nor the servants of the public: they were in the world, yet not of it. They looked upon their art as a sacred thing; and most probably the shallowness of much of the music produced in such abundance towards the close of the eighteenth century spurred them on to higher efforts. Dussek had lived an irregular, aimless sort of life; he had wandered from one country to another, and had acquired the ephemeral fame of the virtuoso. ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... not using oars. That would have been impossible in a channel so narrow. They were pushing the boat through the water by means of a long pole, but it was not very easily managed, because of the shallowness of the water and the bushes ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... old? Even those two had been generations of tumultuous struggle. Oftener had the Shah been seen racing for his life on a Arab of the Hedjas, than eating "dillecrout"[1] in peace, or dealing round a card-table grand crosses of the Dooraunee order. The very origin of Affghan royalty fathoms the shallowness of the water on which it floated. Three coincidences of luck had raised Ahmed to the throne. One dark night his master Kouli Khan, for the benefit of all Asia, had his throat cut. This Kouli, or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... may be shattered. And yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it, it seems so trivial and commonplace a matter,—meaning nothing more than the manner in which we receive a thing into our minds,—that she fears she must have missed the point through the shallowness of her intelligence, and goes about thereafter afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of stupidity, and in each case remaining mortified at being so inadequate ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... which is expeditiously done by digging a large hole by the side and undermining them; when they are rolled over and buried. But to improve the passage materially, appears to me to be impracticable, from the shallowness of the water, and the rapidity of the current in many of the rivers. We saw that beautiful phenomenon called the 'Aurora Borealis,' or the northern lights, on most clear evenings, consisting of long columns of clear white light, shooting ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... ripe, the whole circular grove, at a little distance, looks like a big handful of flowers set in a cup to be kept fresh—a tuft of goldenrods. Its feeding-streams are exceedingly beautiful, notwithstanding their inconstancy and extreme shallowness. They have no channel whatever, and consequently are left free to spread in thin sheets upon the shining granite and wander at will. In many places the current is less than a fourth of an inch deep, ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... hint is given of the existence of Renan or Strauss. But the effect on his own mind has been to drive him back on a closer survey of the history in its first fountains, and to bring him from it filled more than ever with wonder at its astonishing phenomena, to protest against the poverty and shallowness of the most ambitious and confident of these attempts. They leave the historical Character which they pourtray still unsounded, its motives, objects, and feelings absolutely incomprehensible. He accepts the method to reverse the product. "Look at Christ historically," people ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... Eloisa and Abelard, bits of which might be used to excellent effect (as indeed Pope himself used the peroration) by a fine gentleman addressing his gallantry to a contemporary Sappho. It is only too easy to expose their shallowness, and therefore to overlook what was genuine in their feelings. After all, Pope's eminent friends were no mere tailor's blocks for the display of laced coats. Swift and Bolingbroke were not enthusiasts nor philosophers, but certainly they were no fools. They ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... even a farewell nod. She was not hurt over the ill-bred manner in which she had been treated. She was disgusted with the other girl's utter shallowness. She was also visited by a sense of dull disappointment. Hurrying to overtake her own party, she discovered she was still carrying the freshman's golf bag. In the annoyance of the moment she had forgotten all about it. Bravely she decided to ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... somewhat more sensibly, with the same social class as Bulwer's 'Pelham.' In his novels of this period, as in his dress and manner, he deliberately attitudinized, a fact which in part reflected a certain shallowness of character, in part was a device to attract attention for the sake of his political ambition. After winning his way into Parliament he wrote in 1844-7 three political novels,' Coningsby,' 'Sybil,' and 'Tancred,' ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... we are much more curious about the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and melodramatic situations. She should learn—and that she can only learn by cultivation—to discern with joy, and drink in with reverence, the good, the beautiful, and the true; and to turn with the fine scorn of a pure and strong ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... with the lower classes, for they seldom fail to give a certain character of rude poetry to their thoughts. Perhaps also this same observation may explain the sterility of the salons, their emptiness, their shallowness, and the repugnance felt by men of ability for bartering their ideas ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... our first passing by the mission of Atures, in the middle of the Raudal. After long waiting, the Indians at length arrived at the close of day. The natural coffer-dam by which they had endeavoured to descend in order to make the circuit of the island, had become impassable owing to the shallowness of the water. The pilot sought long for a more accessible passage in this labyrinth of rocks and islands. Happily our canoe was not damaged and in less than half an hour our instruments, provision, and ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea; for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... said Miller admiringly. "When I first used your elevator, Mr. Whitney, I was struck by its unexpected capacity to hold six people. Its shallowness is deceptive." ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... is not sensible of the vulgarity and coarseness of the account of Boswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a great writer ... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,' and so forth, in which the shallowness of the analysis of Boswell's character matches the puerile rudeness of the terms. Here again, is a sentence about Montesquieu. 'The English at that time,' Macaulay says of the middle of the eighteenth century, 'considered a Frenchman who talked ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... deep passion of his life, and memory of whom was to come to the surface touchingly in his old age. Miss Charpentier, or Carpenter, as she was called, with her vivacity and quaint foreign speech "caught his heart on the rebound"; there can be no doubt that, in spite of a certain shallowness of character, she made him a good wife, and that his affection for her deepened steadily to the end. The young couple went to live at Lasswade, a village near Edinburgh, on the Esk. Scott, in whom the proprietary instinct was always very strong, took great pride in the pretty little ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... all this does our world show its shallowness and its immeasurable stupidity. How dare woman say to her sister woman, "I am better than thou!" In how much has she been tried and tempted? How much does she know of life and its hideous tests? How much does she know woman's love that is at once her glory and her shame, ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... extent or shallowness of Paracelsus' claim is a matter of quite secondary interest. We are concerned with the poet's presentment of the man—of that strange soul whom he conceived of as having anticipated so far, and as having focussed all the vagrant speculations of the day into ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... a girdle round their respective bodies, and off they set along the banks; sometimes, on reaching creeks, irrigating channels, or unequal projections, plunging up to their necks, and wading or swimming with their burthen, as the depth or shallowness of the water required. In this way all the communication up the Tigris and Euphrates is carried on when the wind blows down those rivers. The business of tracking as may be conceived, is extremely fatiguing and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... light, withdrawn from the farther horizon, begins to pulsate more intensely in the quarter whence it must soon altogether fade, I begin to see that vague and widely ranging effects have a thinness and shallowness about them. It is a poor thing just to see oneself transiently reflected in a hundred little mirrors. There is no touch of reality about that. Little greetings, casual flashes of courteous talk, petty compliments—these are things that fade as soon as they are born. The only ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... friend," I continued, "I am determined that Senor Don Quixote shall remain buried in the archives of his own La Mancha until Heaven provide some one to garnish him with all those things he stands in need of; because I find myself, through my shallowness and want of learning, unequal to supplying them, and because I am by nature shy and careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself can say without them. Hence the cogitation and abstraction you found me in, and reason enough, what ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of fish, and the shallowness of the water did not hold out much hope that the arm we were tracing would prove of great extent; still many speculations were hazarded on the termination of it. The temperature in the night was down ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... interval of many years, she reappears as Persida, mother of a daughter who is in the fresh bloom of youth. She is now a sort of combination of her two earlier selves: in religious loyalty and subjection she is Zoe: in triviality of character and shallowness of judgement—together with a touch of vanity ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is so matter-of-fact that neither of us can be jealous. And it was a mere flirtation—she was too silly for him. He's fond of rowing, and kindly gave her an airing for an evening or two. I'll warrant they talked the most unmitigated rubbish under the sun—all shallowness and pastime, just as everything is at watering places—neither of them caring a bit for the other—she giggling like a goose all ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... be given of the shallowness of the Indian's mind. In his student days he will often slave at his books to an extent almost unparalleled in any other student world. But when he has attained the goal and secured his diploma, which is the summit of his ambition, the number of students who make any further use ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... "O shallowness of human judgments! It was enough to be born a Samaritan in order to be rejected by the priest, and despised by the Levite. Yet now, what to us the priest and the Levite, of God's chosen race though they were? ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... mass of alluvium, in which the stream swings from one side to the other, and even where it touches higher soil, touches nothing better than the continuation of this clay. In spite, therefore, of the shallowness and narrowness of the upper river there always existed this impediment which an insecure soil would present to the formation of any considerable settlements. The loneliness of the stretch below Kelmscott is due to an original difficulty ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... 10th the boat entered Jervis Bay, and on the 18th Bass discovered Barmouth Creek (probably the mouth of the Bega River), "the prettiest little model of a harbour we had ever seen." Were it not for the shallowness of the bar, he considered that the opening would be "a complete harbour for small craft;" but as things were, "a small boat even must watch her times for going in." On the 19th, at seven o'clock in the morning, Twofold Bay was discovered. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... all the selfish shallowness of that relative, loved her mother, tried to take her hand. At a shadow of sympathy she would have laid before Mrs. Hanway-Harley the last secret her bosom hid. There was no sympathy, nothing of mother's love; Mrs. Hanway-Harley, in the narrowness of her egotism, ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... beginning your yarn anywhere but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end; attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling but insignificant, like a game ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mr. John Stuart Mill, for no better reason than that nature sometimes drowns men and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed by such an argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness of man. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to measure the attributes and limit ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... of cone-bearing trees. In the Moor such self-sown woods come to no ripeness. The pines are unhealthy and stunted, hung with gray moss, and eaten out with canker. The excessive moisture and the impenetrable subsoil, and the shallowness of the congenial sand that encouraged them to root make the young trees decay ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... manners are true, but not sufficiently elevated above the range of every-day life; he has exhausted the surface of life; and as there is little progression in his dramas, and every thing turns usually on the same point, this adds to the impression of shallowness and ennui, as characteristic of the existing state of society. Willingly would he have abolished masks altogether, but he could hardly have compensated for them out of his own resources; however, he retained only a ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced; prodigies of self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the predominant faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and admiration, which ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... be such as to inspire respect. Many a marriage goes to pieces on this rock; it is found that the person who exercised a certain kind of fascination shows in the intimacy of married life a character and qualities which are repulsive; a shallowness which inspires contempt, an egotism which is intolerable, a laxity in the treatment of obligations which destroys any sense of the stability of life. A marriage which does not grow into a relation of mutual honour and respect must always be in a ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... attractions; originalities, and originalities, there are liberties, and liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think. Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh—soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime—it is free also. You may choose which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now glorifying,—and ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the water taken up proved to be 1.034, or .008 greater than the water of the Southern Indian Ocean, westward of the Island Amsterdam, although the temperature in which it was weighed was higher by 14 deg.. This circumstance, with the shallowness of the inlet and the land having been seen to close round so nearly, made me give up the intention of attempting to proceed any higher up, since no river of ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... Nevertheless, we think her admirers may be satisfied with this example of her youthful style. The charm with which she manages to invest a simple ingenuous girl like Catherine, the brightness of Henry Tilney—even the shallowness of Isabella and the boorishness of John Thorpe—are things we part from with regret. And in parting with our friends at the end of one of her novels, we part with them for good and all; they never re-appear in another shape elsewhere; ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... Margaret herself risen suddenly before me, I could not have been more astounded. It was a note from her,—and such a note!—full of love, suffering, and humility,—poured out of a heart so deep and tender and true, that the shallowness of my own seemed utterly contemptible, in comparison with it. I cannot tell you what was written, but it was more than even my most cruel and exacting pride could have asked. It was what would once have made me wild with joy,—now it almost maddened me with despair. I, who had often ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... Saturday, the 24th, Sir Charles Wilson at last sailed with the two steamers, Bordeen and Talataween, and it was then quite impossible for the steamers to cover the ninety-five miles to Khartoum in time. Moreover, the Nile had, by this time, sunk to such a point of shallowness that navigation was specially slow and even dangerous. The Shabloka cataract was passed at 3 P.M. on the afternoon of Sunday; then the Bordeen ran on a rock, and was not got clear till 9 P.M. on the fatal 26th. On the 27th, Halfiyeh, eight miles from Khartoum, was reached, and ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... conduct. But whatever another's consciousness of mental inferiority may be, this unhallowed temper will produce determined resistance. The very worm that crawls upon the earth will resent the giant's tread. If, on the contrary, it be united to shallowness of capacity, it will render its unhappy possessor utterly contemptible notwithstanding other exterior attractions which might otherwise command attention. It is, in this case, the effect of egregious ignorance; and so far from extorting respect, it only serves ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... by a British mercantile firm, and a British government steamer made its first trip in November 1900. On the other great lakes and on most of the navigable rivers steamers were plying regularly before the close of the 19th century. However, the shallowness of the water in the Niger and Zambezi renders their navigation possible only to light-draught steamers. Roads suitable for wheeled traffic are few. The first attempt at road-making in Central Africa on a large scale was that of Sir T. Fowell Buxton and Mr (afterwards Sir W.) Mackinnon, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... rightly, another object of national worship; yet Arnold denounced the "confident shallowness which makes him so admired by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so intolerable to all searchers for truth"; and frankly avowed that to his mind "a man's power to detect the ring of false metal in the Lays of Ancient Rome was a good measure of his fitness to give ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... also in the less clean punctures of the short and cancellous bones was probably the less accurate and hard shooting of the Mauser rifles as they became worn; the bullets seemed to evidence this by the comparative shallowness of their rifle grooves, which, I take it, would mean less velocity and accuracy in flight. This would be of importance, since the clean puncture of cancellous bone was no doubt favoured by ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... from any love, perhaps, but lest poverty should compel him, by new offences, to add more shame to that with which he had already stained them. But he showed no tendency to further guilt. His character appeared to have been radically changed (as, indeed, from its shallowness, it well might) by his miserable fate; or, it may be, the traits now seen in him were portions of the same character, presenting itself in another phase. Instead of any longer seeking to live in the sight of the world, his impulse was to ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hurt me long. Possibly I should weep, be cynical, maybe even do something desperate, but at last I would come up smiling, calm in the faith that my life was deeper, richer for the experience, and that yours was, too. Or if it proved that yours was not, I should be amused at the shallowness of the Claire that was, for having been so simple a dunce as to imagine that you were worth while. I should thank you for teaching the present Claire to forsake that shallow one, and should find you a rung on my ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to be found elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely external. This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend of his heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... it? Why does the great wind stir the deep waters? It does but ripple the shallow pool as it passes, for shallowness can but ripple and throw up shadows. We cannot tell, but this we know—that deep things only can be deeply moved. It is the penalty of depth and greatness; it is the price they pay for the divine privilege of suffering ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... I preyed upon the trout which preyed upon the flies. But by dint of keeping my hands, face, and neck constantly wet, I am convinced that the balance of blood was on my side. The trout jumped most within a foot or two of shore, where the water was only a few inches deep. The shallowness of the water, perhaps, accounted for the inability of the fish to do more than lift their heads above the surface. They came up mouths wide open, and dropped back again in the most impotent manner. Where there is any depth of water, a trout will ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... comprehend what now seemed so plain to me. But how would it ever be possible to get this serious, conscientious, slow-brained representative of English simplicity and honesty and thoroughness to understand the mixture of self-engrossed vanity, of shallowness, of poetic vision, of love of morbid excitement, that walked this earth under the name ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... out, in a page or so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light with the touches of a master, and lay on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love; and when all was done, what a triumph would my picture be of shallowness and dulness! how it would have missed the point! how it would have belied the boys! To the ear of the stenographer, the talk is merely silly and indecent; but ask the boys themselves, and they are discussing (as it is highly proper they should) the possibilities ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... strength, had an intellect not much adapted for comprehending subtile and difficult thoughts. He took up the ground that things are what they are in themselves, and was incapable of grasping the idea that greatness and littleness, depth and shallowness, are relative things. An altercation ensued, which resulted in threats on the part of Smith that he would throw Brown into the river; and a coolness was occasioned between the friends which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... which the gay world saw its own grinning face. It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human nature. As a whole, it leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness, and levity. The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious cynicism of Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry of Addison, the early worldliness of Prior and Gay are seldom relieved by any touch of the ideal. The prose of the time was excellent, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... "Middlemarch" lay on her lap; she had just begun to read it. Her hands, crossed upon each other, had fallen upon the page; she had found something of herself in those first chapters. Something that reminded of her old longings and hindrances; of the shallowness and half-living that had been about her, and the chafe of her discontent ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... truth, Fardorougha was so completely disguised by his dress, especially by his hat, whose shallowness and want of brim, gave his face and head so wild and eccentric an appearance, that we question if his own family, had they not seen him dress, could I have recognized him! At length he turned into the kitchen-yard, and, addressing a ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... tears issue from the same source, we are told, and the Gettysburg speech revealed a depth and a quality of tenderness that men had not, before, been able to recognize or appreciate. The absence of a sense of humor betokens shallowness in that it reveals an inability to feel deeply. People who feel deeply often laugh in order to forestall tears. Lincoln was a great soul and his sense of humor was one element of his greatness. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... promiscuously. She had lovers by the score, yet none could boast of having really won her heart. A woman of superficial emotions, she was entirely without depth, yet so long as it suited her purpose, she was able to conceal this shallowness and profess for the admirer of the moment the greatest affection and devotion. This is an art and she was an adept at it. Sensually she quickly attracted men, and it was not long before she became a prime favorite in the select circles ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... insignificant world, while Dory Hargrave had been born a citizen of the big world, the real world—one who understands human beings, because his sympathies are broad as human nature itself, and his eyes clear of the scales of pretense. He was an illustration of the shallowness of the talk about the loneliness of great souls. It is the great souls that alone are not alone. They understand better than the self-conscious, posing mass of mankind the weakness and the pettiness of ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... body leant forward till the head descends nearly to the feet when the spine and knees are extended. In the flat plunge, the swimmer must fling himself forward in an inclined direction, according to the depth or shallowness of the water; when he touches the bottom, he must rise in the same ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... sharp sarcasm. Some of the criticisms which had sounded full of keenness and wit when she heard them, recurred to her at this time, and some way, with Flossy's low, earnest voice filling her heart, they dwindled into shallowness and coarseness. All the same, their baneful influence was on her, and helped to hold her back from opening her lips, for the critic had been ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... preferred and had enjoyed her triumph hardened Diane's heart against her. Nay, the open violence and abandonment of her grief seemed to the more restrained and concentrated nature of her elder a sign of shallowness and want of durability; and in a certain contemptuous envy at her professing a right to mourn, Diane never even reconsidered her own resolution to play out her father's game, consign Eustacie to her husband's murdered, and leave her ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... presented a total result of deformity. It was also found, that, striking as some of the images, metaphors, and similes were, they gave little poetic satisfaction or delight. A certain thinness of sentiment, poverty of idea, and shallowness of experience, were not hidden from view, to one who looked sharply through the gorgeous wrappings of words. A small, but sensitive and facile nature, capable of fully expressing itself by the grace of a singularly fluent fancy, with an appetite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... a very large bay, perfectly secure from all winds, save from north to east, but unfortunately a great portion of it is rendered useless by the shallowness of the water. The best anchorage is with Point Sir Isaac, bearing north-north-west, about one mile and a half from the western shore in four or five fathoms. In working in with a southerly wind, you may stand to the eastward ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... Woman, indeed, is but an emphatic point in his larger criticism of human life, and he has singled her out essentially, it seems, because of the shallowness of her lovely pretenses. It is the shallowness, not the sex, which arouses him. In The Common Lot, in The Memoirs of an American Citizen, in Clark's Field, and in certain of the strands of Together it is the women who demand ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... the first lieutenant to return should he find the ship so moored as to render it impossible to bring her out. Bill, however, told him that he had observed a vessel at anchor some way below the landing-place, and that he supposed no large craft could get up higher on account of the shallowness of the water. The wind, which had hitherto been east and north-east, again shifting to the southward, blew directly down the harbour, which would enable the ship, should she be captured, to ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the book is admirable. Both the skeptic who sneers and the bigot who denounces might learn a beautiful lesson from its calm, yet earnest pages. It is free from the brilliant shallowness of Renan, and the bitterness which sometimes marred the teachings of Parker. It is a generous, tender, noble book,—enjoying, indeed, over most works of its class a peculiar advantage; for, while ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Caedmon and Cynewulf. From the death-like sleep of our language which followed the Norman Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the dull poetic pedantries of the age which succeeded Chaucer rose the glittering pinnacles of Shakespeare and his fellows. From the coldness and shallowness of the eighteenth century rose the rich and varied tableland of whose occupants Burns was one of the first and Tennyson and Browning perhaps the last. No other literature has shown such recuperative power, a thought full of ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... shallowness of the river at this season, and to the rapids, the steam-boat is unable to go up the whole way to Peterborough, and a scow or rowboat, as it is sometimes termed—a huge, unwieldy, flat- bottomed machine—meets the passengers at a certain part of the river, within sight of a singular ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... from which it issues forth in its course towards Chesapeake Bay, and here, where the hills recede to a distance, it expands into a great width, and its face is covered with islands. The only drawback to its being a grand river is its shallowness, and want of adaptation, therefore, to the purpose of navigation. There are no splendid steamboats to be seen here as on the Ohio, which make one feel that river, at the distance of more than 2000 miles from the sea, to be a noble highway of commerce, linking together with a common interest distant ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... firmer ground. Other writers of very different principles, and with different objects, had become alive, among other things, to the importance of true ideas about the Church, impatient at the ignorance and shallowness of the current views of it, and alarmed at the dangers which menaced it. Two Oxford teachers who commanded much attention by their force and boldness—Dr. Whately and Dr. Arnold—had developed their theories about the nature, constitution, and functions of the Church. ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... the cities and towns now, and only set down the rivers and main features, as they continued their steady journey day after day for all of a week. At the end of that time the increasing shallowness of the river, the many sand bars and the nature of the discolored, rolling waters, made them sure they were approaching the mouth of the great Platte River, which, as they knew, rose far to the west in the ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... orchards; and a lonely grove of pines covered the ground where the Roman fleet once rode at anchor. [62] Even this alteration contributed to increase the natural strength of the place, and the shallowness of the water was a sufficient barrier against the large ships of the enemy. This advantageous situation was fortified by art and labor; and in the twentieth year of his age, the emperor of the West, anxious only for his personal safety, retired ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Little River was effected with much toil and difficulty, from the shallowness of the water. We entered Lake Nipissing on the 10th; descended French River, a rapid and dangerous stream, without accident, and entered Lake Huron on the morning of the 12th. The guide pointed out to me a place near the mouth of the river ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... of the shallowness of the river, it had been found necessary to moor the gun boats at a point considerably below, and out of sight of the fort. Gerald Grantham had obtained permission to leave his command, and take charge ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... settlement, young Clarendon followed the regular trail, over which he had passed scores of times. Not far from the house he crossed a broad stream at a point where the current (except when there was rain) was less than two feet deep. Its shallowness led to its use by all the settlers within a large radius to the southward, so that the faintly marked trails converged at this point something like the spokes of a large wheel, and became one from that point northward ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... who are officers, as they can, from reading of their antics, but Americans just from farms, workshops, commercial pursuits, and the back woods and country villages of the north, are not of the material that foreign officials are made of, and in trying to imitate them they only show their shallowness. Do not, I beg of you, change one particle from what you have been as a private soldier, unless it is to have your pants fit better, and wear a collar. Of course, you will be thrown among officers more than you ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... is it to expose the shallowness and futility of the entire objection.—Mary Magdalene "had been mentioned three times before, without such appendix." Well but,—What then? After twice (ch. xiv. 54, 66) using the word {GREEK SMALL LETTER ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... acquiescence. This is peculiarly noticeable in Art, because Art depends on sympathy for its influence, and unless the artist has felt the emotions he depicts we remain unmoved: in proportion to the depth of his feeling is our sympathetic response; in proportion to the shallowness or falsehood of his presentation is our coldness or indifference. Many writers who have been fond of quoting the SI VIS ME FLERE of Horace have written as if they did not believe a word of it; for they have been silent on their own convictions, suppressed their own experience, ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... called "Holy Week" gives proofs of the shallowness of Rome's piety. Priests and people alike can weep, fast and faint, because their God is suffering and dying; all traffic can stop because, they say, "God has died"; but as soon as the death of Judas is announced, at noon on Saturday, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... declaration that she did not like him, he might have had some hope of a more favorable hearing in the future. But he had no conception of any under-current of feeling in Margaret Adair. She had always seemed to him so frank, with a sweet, maidenly frankness, so transparent—without shallowness, that he was thrown into despair when she dismissed him. He was singularly ignorant of the nature of women, and more especially of young girls. His mother's proud, upright, rather inflexible character, conjoined with great warmth of affection and rare nobility ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... deep consciousness under her feigning, an undercurrent of watchful pride and passion, of which her model was destitute. The last of the circle was a fair-haired, broad-shouldered lad, who stood apart from the others, big, shy, silent:—but he was earnest amid their shallowness, noble amid their hollowness, and devoted amid their fickleness. How he gazed on the arch, haughty girl, with her lilies and roses, her pencilled brows, her magnificent hair magnificently arranged, with her rich silk and airy lace, and muslin folded and gathered and falling into lines ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... said that eagerness to finish things shows weakness. It certainly leads to shallowness, "Without haste, without rest" was Goethe's motto. I have heard of a woman who began to study botany at ninety. That shows a mind so trained and cultivated that the soil could not be exhausted with age. How good it was that she was still fresh enough to respond to new thoughts! ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... great help, especially now that it had been converted into a mill-race, and flooded beyond its usual proportions; for, when the Indians rushed into the water to wade across and assault the camp at close quarters, as the shallowness of the stream at that season of the year would previously have easily enabled them to have done, they found, to their astonishment, first that the current, which they did not expect to be more than a foot deep, rose above their waist-belts, then above their ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... the expedition suffered a very great loss in the death of Mr Anderson, the surgeon of the Resolution, who had long been suffering from consumption. The ships were proceeding northward at the time, along the coast of Asia, but were compelled to return on account of the shallowness of the water. An island in sight was called Anderson's Island, to perpetuate the ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... afternoon our course along shore was more westward; and this, with the increasing shallowness of the water, made me apprehend that the Gulph would be found to terminate nearly as represented in the old charts, and disappoint the hopes formed of a strait or passage leading out at some other ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... also a good style—one that oils the wheels and makes progress possible. If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas; and I agree with the Archbishop at Naples who had a St. Januarius procession against the plague. It's no use having an Order in Council against popular shallowness. There is no action ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... man of action and of thought to be prodigal of words. And she knew that a facility in making pretty speeches is in nine cases out of ten merely the refuge of those who desire to conceal indifference or shallowness ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... that it was with great difficulty I could reach the shore. At another time, when swimming over to the small island, a shovel-nosed shark, which, as well as alligators, abound in those seas, struck me in the thigh, just as my foot could reach the bottom, and grounded itself, from the shallowness of the water, as I suppose, so that its mouth could not get round towards me. The blow I felt some hours after making the shore. By repeated practice, I at length became a pretty dexterous swimmer, and amused myself by passing from one island to ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... imitator and always desirous of the good opinion of Sister Agnes, Fouchette had acquired graceful and lady-like manners that would have been creditable to any fashionable pension of Paris. Continuous happiness had left her light-hearted even to shallowness. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... kingdom not of this world. Why did men turn their backs on these and all else, and betake themselves to revolutionary ideas? How came those ideas to rise up and fill the whole air? The answer is that, with all their contradiction, shallowness, and danger, such ideas fitted the crisis. They were seized by virtue of an instinct of national self-preservation. The evil elements in them worked themselves out in infinite mischief. The true elements in them ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... is to say, our own conspicuous quality—is liable to be out-stripped in this world by imposture. It is consoling if we can wrap ourselves in the belief that good work can be extracted from bad brains, and that shallowness, affectation, and levity can, by some strange chemistry, be transmuted into a substitute for genius. Do we not all, if we have reached middle age, remember some idiot (of course he was an idiot!) at school or college who has ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... factories. Some special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each special appeal. One said things carefully adjusted to the distinctive limitations of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible silliness and shallowness drifted about us. Our advisers made us declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he will live here." The enemy obtained a number of these bills and stuck them ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... affection which such a nature could give; but it was the affection of a trained singing-bird, or a pug-nosed spaniel; and the father, though he admired her beauty, and was pleased with her caresses, was shrewd enough to perceive the lightness of her disposition and the shallowness of her mind. He rejoiced in her marriage with a man ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... bubbling in man's breast, and for which their nice society provides no issue!—woman of the court is familiar with love as then practiced, simply a preference, often only a pastime, mere gallantry of which the exquisite polish poorly conceals the shallowness, coldness and, occasionally, wickedness; in short, adventures, amusements and personages as described by Crebillion jr. One evening, about to go out to the opera ball, she finds the "Nouvelle Heloise" on her toilet-table; it is not ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... footpaths, and access to the houses is obtained by three or four loose planks stretching across the open festering gutters. As a natural result, small pox and cholera commit yearly ravages amongst the populace. Another great evil against good sanitation, exists in the shallowness of their graves. The Japanese have also ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... carried the periogues on very well; the day was however so warm that several of the men worked with no clothes except round the waist, which is the less inconvenient as we are obliged to wade in some places owing to the shallowness of the river. At seven miles we reached a large sandbar making out from the north. We again stopped for dinner, after which we went on to a small plain on the north covered with cottonwood where we encamped, having made nineteen ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... of kinship, shriveled by the drought of uneventful years. But the poisonous nettles of memory were the only harvest that had sprung from the presence of Mrs. Robson's sisters, and Claire was glad to uproot the arid product of their shallowness. ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... prejudices." The above requirements are well stated for critics who, by reason of the authority of their position as press writers, are teachers of art. As to the personnel and qualifications of this Faculty of Instruction, investigation would prove embarrassing. The shallowness of the average review of current exhibitions is no more surprising, than that responsible editors of newspapers place such consignments in the hands of the all-around-reporter, to whom a picture show is no more important than a fire or a function. Mr. ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... easily, and they ran several rows of netting makai, the water being very shallow for quite a distance out. The shark's flippers were all bound by the ropes with which the man Nanaue had been bound, and this with the shallowness of the water prevented him from exerting his great strength to advantage. He did succeed in struggling to the breakers, though momentarily growing weaker from loss of blood, as the people were striking at him with clubs, spears, stone adzes and anything that ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... available against Christianity, were it not for the tone unhappily adopted by this author. But it is unfortunately quite impossible to mistake his meaning and intention, for he is a writer whose offensiveness is gross, while it is sometimes almost surpassed by an amazing shallowness. Of course, as might fully be expected, he adopts and reproduces the absurdly trivial objections to absolute morality drawn from differences in national customs.[7] And he seems to have as little conception ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... immediately ordered to the vessels already there. Subsequent information, however, has removed these apprehensions for the present. To secure our commerce in that sea with the smallest force competent, we have supposed it best to watch strictly the harbor of Tripoli. Still, however, the shallowness of their coast and the want of smaller vessels on our part has permitted some cruisers to escape unobserved, and to one of these an American vessel unfortunately fell a prey. The captain, one American seaman, and two others of color remain prisoners with them unless exchanged under an agreement formerly ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... considered premature, but for the rapidity with which form and intellect are known to ripen in that precocious climate—she had received, but listened with indifference to the vapid compliments of men whose shallowness she was not slow to detect, and whose homage conveyed rather a fulsome tribute to her mere personal beauty, than a correct appreciation of her heart and understanding. Not that it is to be inferred that she prided herself unduly upon this latter, but because it was by that standard ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... the French Academy of Sciences deals with Mr. Darwin as the first Napoleon would have treated an "ideologue;" and while displaying a painful weakness of logic and shallowness of information, assumes a tone of authority, which always touches upon the ludicrous, and sometimes passes ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... they were my own. And their father's away so much that I think their mother sort of depends on me. Sometimes I get a little bothered—they're having the very best schooling and all the things money can give young people and yet—there's a sort of shallowness possessing them that makes them—well, not value ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... slender grace flecked by the evening sun. These were moments, he knew, that could never come again; that are unique in a man's history. He tried to hold and taste them as they passed; tormented, like all lovers, by what seems, in such crises, to be the bitter inadequacy and shallowness ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the perfect naivete also as thus occupied, of his sixteenth year, to which the somewhat lengthy or attenuated structure of the limbs is conformable. And then, in this attenuation, in the almost Egyptian proportions, in the shallowness of the chest and shoulders especially, in the Phoenician or old Greek sharpness and length of profile, and the long, conventional, wire-drawn hair of the boy, arching formally over the forehead and round the neck, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... being; what constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish, without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be just to the popular theories. and yet not to blind ourselves to their shallowness and injustice-that is a problem for us, for the solution of which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... better is their position than they thought when it was recommended or extolled from their own side. JOSEPH not nearly so acrimonious to-night as sometimes. Still, as usual, his speech chiefly directed to his former Brethren who sit attentive, thinking occasionally with regret of the fatal shallowness of the pit, and the absence of arrangement for hermetically sealing it. If only—But that is another story. COURTNEY at end of Bench is thinking of still another, which has the rare charm of being true. It befel at a quiet ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... this speech they would have mistrusted him, but as women have a reputation for shallowness, such talk is never thought ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... Lake Borgne, and pushing directly on, to take possession of the town before any effectual preparation could be made for its defence. With this view the troops were removed from the larger into the lighter vessels, and these, under convoy of such gun-brigs as the shallowness of the water would float, began on the 13th ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... placed where Imogen had wished to place her. Let it be so, then, let it end on this note of seeming harmony and of silent discord; it was her mother's act, not her own. Truth was in her and had made once more its appeal; once more deep had called to deep only to find shallowness. For spiritual shallowness there must be where an appeal such as hers could be so misunderstood ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... unfitted to read the proofs of the villainy of one to whom he had surrendered his sympathies. A woman in love is a very poor judge of character. She can see nothing but excellence where others see nothing but shallowness ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... the La Plata in safety, but made no long stay there; for the extreme shallowness of the water, and the frequency and abundance of the shoals in the river, made the admiral fear for the safety of his ships; and accordingly, after a few days' rest, the anchors were weighed and the fleet proceeded down the coast. For some time they sailed without adventure, save that once ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... thoughts clearly, is far from true; and what perspicuity can be found among them proceeds not from the easiness of their language, but the shallowness of their thoughts. He that sees a building as a common spectator, contents himself with relating that it is great or little, mean or splendid, lofty or low; all these words are intelligible and common, but they convey ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... details of the great man's life, I have dwelt mainly on his public career. Apart from his brilliant conversations, his private life has few features of abiding interest, perhaps because he early tired of the shallowness of Josephine and the Corsican angularity of his brothers and sisters. But the cause also lay in his own disposition. He once said to M. Gallois: "Je n'aime pas beaucoup les femmes, ni le jeu—enfin rien: je suis tout a fait un etre politique." In dealing with him as a ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... who knew herself to be a woman could not interest herself in these things to which she tried to give attention. She felt that in giving herself to these things she would betray Life. She felt the hollowness, the shallowness, the emptyness of it all in comparison with that which is divinely committed to womankind. She could not but wonder: what would be the racial outcome? When women have long enough substituted other ideals for the ideals of motherhood—other ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... proposed, and more especially in reference to the long lines, the difficulty of rendering rivers navigable, which in the winter are swelled into impetuous torrents; the want of population along the greater part of the distances to be cut; the differences of elevation; and, above all, the shallowness of the water on all the extremities of the cuts projected, thus only affording admission to small vessels, are among the impediments which, for the time being at least, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... numbers, to the extent and variety of the danger to which they are exposed. Hence the smaller species are not only more numerous, but more productive than the larger; whilst their instinct leads them in search of food and safety near the shores, where, from the shallowness of the waters, many of their foes are unable to ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Riasantzeff and Novikoff and Sanine would never dream of doing so. They have not the remotest intention of criticising themselves, being perfectly happy and self-satisfied, like Zarathustra's triumphant pigs. The whole of life is summed up in their own infinitesimal ego; and by their spirit of shallowness it is that I am infected. Ah, well! when you are with wolves you've got to ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... speech; yet she knew that its apparent heartlessness did not really denote the state of her aunt's mind. It was merely bred of the lady's shallowness, and of ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... powers of heaven, what a solution! It is beside the matter to call the book ungodly, immoral, base. Le Sage would have answered: "Of course it is; for so is the world of which it is a picture." No; the most notable thing about the book is its intense stupidity; its dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance of the human heart, want of any human interest. If it be an epos, the actors in it are not men and women, but ferrets—with here and there, of course, a stray rabbit, on whose brains they may feed. It is the inhuman mirror of an inhuman ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... respects as well, these addresses adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! Your laments over the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and superficiality, over self-conceit and inexhaustible babble, over the contempt for seriousness and profundity in all classes, may be true, even as they actually are. Yet what ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... have neither the genius, the learning, nor the judgment to qualify you for literature.'" In the same magazine for June, 1874, Paul Hamilton Hayne condemned severely the provincial literary criticism which had prevailed, — "indiscriminate adulations, effervescing commonplace, shallowness and poverty of thought." "No foreign ridicule," he said, "however richly deserved, nothing truly either of logic or of laughter, can stop this growing evil, until our own scholars and thinkers have the manliness and honesty to discourage instead of applauding such manifestations of artistic weakness ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... great mistake that would suppose the man who has thus multiplied the objects of his exertion to be of necessity superficial; superficial, that is, in the sense of shallowness or ignorance. Ordinary minds are bound by fetters, no doubt. Custom has rendered the pursuit of more than one idea all but impossible to them, and the vulgar adage of "Jack of all trades, master of none," applies to them in full force. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... eleven days on melons and water, besides being momentarily exposed to the musketry of the Arabs and the fellahs. We luckily escaped with but a few killed and wounded. The rising of the Nile was only beginning. The shallowness of the river near Cairo obliged us to leave the xebec and get on board a djerm. We reached Gizeh at three in the afternoon of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the period of that ancient alliance of these two streams the tract of country between Lincoln and Boston, or rather between the points now occupied by those places, would be scoured by a greatly-augmented volume of water, and this may possibly account in some degree for the shallowness of “The Wash,” and the number of submarine sandbanks which lie off the mouth of the present Witham. Had the union of the two streams continued to the present time, bringing down their united body of silt, Boston would either never have come into existence at all, or would have been much further from ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... ignominiously ignored by the stylish Mrs. Money,—her father was a cobbler,—more noted for brocades than brains,—or the refined Miss Blood,—her grandfather was third-cousin to some Revolutionary major,—more distinguished for shallowness than for spirit,—does he not smile in his sleeve, with great irreverence for the brocades and the birth, at the easy way in which the old fellow has wheedled them into his power by tickling their conceit and vanity? He creeps into all sorts of corners, and lurks in the smallest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... corresponds to the moods which Mr Pickwick stimulated by indulgence in milk-punch. When it came face to face with death, and sin, and suffering, it made them mere occasions for displays of sentimentalism, disgusting because such trifling with the most awful subjects shows a hopeless shallowness of nature. Dickens's indulgence in deathbeds meant an effeminate delight in the 'luxury of grief,' revolting in proportion to the solemnity of the topic. This was only another side of the levity with which he treated serious political ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... here on the bank of Pracel, which seems alluded to in the text from the shallowness of the water; though the district named Casame in the text is not to be found in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... perfectly happy to look at her, although sometimes his face sobered, for hers had changed. It was paler; the delicate oval of her cheek had hollowed; the charming indolence had gone; the eyes had lost their sweet shallowness, something cowered in their depths that he could not clearly see—fear, perhaps, or pain. Or perhaps it was her soul. Sometimes when the body relaxes its grip a little, the convict soul within struggles up to look with frightened bewilderment ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... This shallowness has no part in Byron himself. His weariness was a genuine outcome of the influence of the time upon a character consumed by passion. His lot was cast among spent forces, and, while it is no hyperbole to say that he was himself the most enormous force of his time, he was only half ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... limits to his power of attaining it. But he saw, by some flash of intuition, that it must be bought by the dishonour of his works; that, in order to bring him fame, they must descend into the market, they must pass from hand to hand; they must endure the shallowness of their purchasers' comments, share in the pettiness of their lives. He has remained obscure, that his creations might be guarded against this sacrilege. "He paints Madonnas and saints in the twilight stillness of the cloister and the aisle; and if his heart saddens at the endless repetition ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... abroad, settling finally in Paris, where he again encountered governmental hostility in the unfriendliness of Bonaparte, whose rejection alike of Gall and of Fulton, who wished to introduce steam navigation, demonstrated that great military and political ability may co-exist with great shallowness of mind in reference to all things new, original, and philanthropic. So it has always been, and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything else than weaknesses. She had thought my weaknesses would put me in her power, and she found them unmanageable forces. Our positions were reversed. Before ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... has an affection of the eyes, but it is not blindness. Nobody else ever sees so much as he does. For here was Albert Charlton, bound by his vows to Helen Minorkey, with whom he had nothing in common, except in intellect, and already his sorrow was disclosing to him the shallowness of her nature, and the depth of his own; even now he found that she had no voice with which to answer his hungry cry for sympathy. Already his betrothal was becoming a fetter, and his great mistake was disclosing itself to him. The rude suspicion had knocked at ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... family had often to choose between total ruin, on the one hand, and comparative prosperity at the sacrifice of constancy, on the other. Some historians have adduced the incidents of this era as illustrating the shallowness of Japanese loyalty. But it can scarcely be said that loyalty was ever seriously at stake. In point of legitimacy there was nothing to choose between the rival branches of the Imperial family. A samurai might-pass from the service of the one to that of the other without doing any violence ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... came to feel the shallowness of fashionable society, but in the Salmagundi days he appears to have asked for nothing better. He had good looks, good humor, and good manners, showed a proper susceptibility, and knew how to turn a compliment or write a graceful letter. No ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... was the examination of the bay itself, from which it appeared that, though extensive, it did not afford a shelter from the easterly winds: and that, in consequence of its shallowness, ships even of a moderate draught, would always be obliged to anchor with the entrance of the bay open, where they must be exposed to a heavy sea, that rolls in whenever it ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... were told that we were quite at liberty to speak to the Ambassador if we desired, but unofficially we were warned to think twice before we took such a step, the hint being thrown out that it would be better for us to refrain from talking to him unless first questioned. The shallowness of the official decree was vividly brought home to us when we were forcibly confined to barracks, and this frequently occurred while the ambassadorial ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... numbed, with the shallowness of it all—the shale of sham which did not even conceal the base ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... The child had something Southern in her. So, for the matter of that, had Terry. She was fond of Eileen, but, simple as she was, she had not had Eileen with her pretty constantly for many years without being aware of a certain shallowness in the girl. The blood under the fair ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... criticism up to some decent standard of honest painstaking. We may thus explain the bewilderment which came over us at that burst of vulgar ribaldry from the leading British press, in which the organs above named have achieved a scandalous preeminence. Vibrating from the extreme of shallowness to the extreme of sufficiency, scorning to be limited in abuse by adhering to any single hypothesis, the current literature of England has gloated over the rebellion of Slavery with the cynical chuckles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... same time the difference in circumstances, the fuller, richer life that he must have led in these years of patronage and prosperity, accounts for a certain "shallowness and complacency" which distinguishes his work during this period as sharply from that which preceded as from that which followed it; and fine as is his accomplishment during these years, especially in portraiture, it includes fewer of those masterpieces which appeal to the heart ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... He had salmon steaks, hot biscuits, porridge with milk and apricots. They certainly enjoyed the meal, went fishing as usual. Coming back about eleven o'clock, they went in for a swim and got a lot of enjoyment out of this. In spite of the northern clime in which they were, the shallowness of the lakes permitted the water to get pretty well heated by the hot July and August sun, and swimming was a real pleasure. It was only now and then when they struck a lake fed mainly by springs that they found the water ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... know what I should like you to be?" she said, with a bright smile and one of those sudden descents into shallowness which he ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... cortege round his tent. These people, who hung upon Him thus, were those of whom He had afterwards to say that it would be 'more tolerable for Sodom, in the day of judgment, than for them.' But though He knew the shallowness of the impression, He was not deaf to the misery; and, with power which knew no weariness, and sympathy which had no limit, and a reservoir of healing virtue which the day's draughts had not emptied by a hairs-breadth, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... effort she came to. She would have come back from the edge of the grave to shield silk from water. Finally she wreathed her arms round Lucy, and kissed her so tenderly, warmly and sobbingly, that Lucy got over the shock of her shallowness, and they kissed and cried together most joyously, while Baldwin, after a heroic attempt at jubilation, retired from the room with a face as long as your arm. A bas les revenants!! She went to the housekeeper's room. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... unlaced, It runs like a stream with a musical waste, And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep;— 'Tis not deep as a river, but who'd have it deep? In a country where scarcely a village is found That has not its author sublime and profound, For some one to be slightly shallow's a duty, And Willis's shallowness makes half his beauty. His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error, And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror: 700 'Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice; 'Tis the true ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Mommsen. Among literary historians, the special detestation of the pseudo-scientific school, Froude was pre-eminent. Few things excite more suspicion than a good style, and no theory is more plausible than that which associates clearness of expression with shallowness of thought. Froude, however, was no fine writer, no coiner of phrases for phrases' sake. A mere chronicler of events he would hardly have cared to be. He had a doctrine to propound, a gospel to preach. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul |
