"Uncritical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by whom they have been most conspicuously displayed. Some wits have been humourists also; nearly all humourists have been also wits; yet the two fall, on the whole, into tolerably well-marked classes, and the ordinary uncritical judgment would, probably, enable most men to state with sufficient certainty the class to which each famous name in the world's literature belongs. Aristophanes, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Swift, Fielding, Lamb, Richter, Carlyle: widely ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... all the other guests filed out to enjoy the supper, the room rang with laughter and screamed witticisms. A popular feature of the entertainment was the mottoes, flat scalloped candies of pink and white sugar, whose printed messages caused endless merriment among these uncritical young persons. "Do You Love Me?"; "I Am A Flirt"; "Don't Kiss Me"; "Oh, You Smarty," said the mottoes insinuatingly, and the revellers read them aloud, exchanged them, secreted them, and even devoured them, in ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... a denouncer,' says Lord Strangford in a note on this expression, 'of Celtic extravagance, that is all; he is an anti-Philocelt, a very different thing from an anti-Celt, and quite indispensable in scientific inquiry. As Philoceltism has hitherto,—hitherto, remember,—meant nothing but uncritical acceptance and irrational admiration of the beloved object's sayings and doings, without reference to truth one way or the other, it is surely in the interest of science to support him in the main. In tracing the workings of old Celtic leaven in poems which embody the Celtic ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... The most uncritical reader can not fail to notice the success with which Charles de Bernard introduces people of rank and breeding into his stories. Whether or not he drew from nature, his portraits of this kind are exquisitely natural and easy. It is sufficient to say ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... not relate to a time or to persons characteristically religious. The variety of incident, the presence of historical characters, including Washington and "Captain" Molly, and a certain quantum of real skill in the author, will no doubt make this book acceptable to the uncritical, but it does not deserve the attention of others. We notice that the publishers announce the "fourteenth thousand," which is the best indication of the ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... have for the most part passed lightly over the undemocratic features of the Constitution and left the uncritical reader with the impression that universal suffrage under our system of government ensures the rule of the majority. It is this conservative approval of the Constitution under the guise of sympathy with majority rule, which has perhaps ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person may set up as an "expert," organise and direct the confused good intentions at large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert" quack and the bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in a dull-minded, uncritical, strenuous period as disease germs ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... they blaze with interest, they explode with it, they scorch and sizzle. And they are so pugnacious! Not to each other, for contrary to the attitude at Kloster's they are knit together by the toughest band of uncritical and obedient admiration for everything German, but they are pugnacious to the Swede girl and myself. Especially to myself. There is a holy calm about the Swede girl that nothing can disturb. She has an enviable gift for getting on with her meals and saying nothing. I wish I had ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... and the Jewish or Christian religions, whether it was invented or simply espoused by Mrs. Shelley, evinces in her—for the time being at least—a very considerable share of that adventurous if somewhat uncritical alacrity of mind which carried the poet through so many religious and political problems. It certainly vindicates her, more completely perhaps than anything hitherto published, against the strictures of those who knew her chiefly or exclusively in later years, and could speak of ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... from founding the art of criticism. His business was to create, and not to criticise. And, had he set himself to do so, there is no warrant that his success would have been great. In many ways he was still in bondage to the mediaval, and wholly uncritical, tradition. One classic, we may almost say, was as good to him as another. He seems to have placed Ovid on a line with Virgil; and the company in his House of Fame is undeniably mixed. His judgments have the healthy instinct of the consummate artist. They do not show, as those of his master, Petrarch, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... the earth believed that the stones fell from heaven—to wit, from the comet. But it would be unsafe to base a theory upon such a belief, inasmuch as stones, and even fish and toads, taken up by hurricanes, have often fallen again in showers; and they would appear to an uncritical population to have fallen from heaven. But it is, at least, clear that the fall of the stones and the clay are ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... she has endured, and with admiration of the valor and devotion of her gallant sons; though in no case, do the evident partialities of the writer appear to have interfered with his strict historical fidelity, or to have tempted him to an uncritical use of the facts at his command. His style is simple and unaffected, warmed with a persuasive earnestness, and animated with a chaste enthusiasm, but owing none of its interest to the allurements of rhetoric. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Hollister married. He had left his son property aggregating several thousand dollars and a complicated timber business disorganized by his sudden death. Hollister was young, sanguine, clever in the accepted sense of cleverness. He had married for love,—urged thereto by a headlong, unquestioning, uncritical passion. But there were no obstacles. His passion was returned. There was nothing to make him ponder upon what a devastating, tyrannical force this emotion which he knew as love might become, this blind fever of the blood ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... another; but there is nothing in this case but incompatibility with a theory to make this part of the evidence either more or less worthy of credit than any other part. What is certain is that it is in the last degree weak and uncritical to lay down, as the foundation and first pre-requisite of an historical view, a position which the records on which the view professes to be based emphatically and unambiguously contradict. Whatever we may think of it, the ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... Christ by a reference to the Jewish law, which compelled a man to marry the widow of his deceased brother, if the latter died without issue. His terse and pertinent letter to Origen, impugning the authority of the apocryphal book of Susanna, and Origen's wordy and uncritical answer, are both extant. The ascription to Africanus of an encyclopaedic work entitled Kestoi (embroidered girdles), treating of agriculture, natural history, military science, &c., has been needlessly disputed on account of its secular and often credulous character. Neander suggests ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... incredulous look on our modern 'twigs' and turning-tables and ghost stories as mere 'survivals' from the stage of savage culture, or want of culture, when the fancy of half-starved man was active and his reason uncritical. ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... H. M. Tomlinson's "The Sea and the Jungle," we pause to offer the uncritical opinion that this chap gets as good seawater into his copy as Conrad, and that, in the item of English, he can ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... conclude, then," with Professor Ladd, "that the reference to Jonah does not cover the question whether the prophet's alleged sojourn in the sea monster is an historical verity; and that it is no less uncritical than invidious to make the holding of any particular theory of the Book of Jonah a test of allegiance to the teachings of the Master." [Footnote: The Doctrine of Sacred ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... or catholicus of the Jacobite (Monophysite) Church in the 13th century, and (in Dr. Wright's words) "one of the most learned and versatile men that Syria ever produced." Perhaps no more industrious compiler of knowledge ever lived. Simple and uncritical in his modes of thought, and apparently devoid of any striking originality, he collected in his numerous and elaborate treatises the results of such research in theology, philosophy, science and history as was in his time possible in Syria. Most of his works were written ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... of enchantment for me, a golden haze of memory. I was allowed a freedom there I was allowed nowhere else, I was petted and made much of, and I used to spend most of my time in sauntering about, just looking, watching, scrutinising things, with the hard and uncritical observation of childhood. When I got to the place, I was surprised to find that I knew well the look of the house I went to see, though I had not ever entered it. Two neat, contented, slightly absurd old maiden ladies had lived there, who used to walk out together, dressed ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... philosophy, and the habit of thought demanded for their apprehension, are strange, unusual, and remote, it is here, more almost than anywhere else, that intellect proves superior to intuition, and that quick unanalysed convictions are least deserving of uncritical acceptance. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... moderne.' There is, no doubt, a great deal of truth in M. Spuller's observations, but we must not mistake a caricature for the reality. After all, Les Precieuses Ridicules contrasted very favourably with the ordinary type of womanhood of their day, not merely in France, but also in England; and an uncritical love of sonnets is preferable, on the whole, to ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the composer's relatives, with whom he was acquainted. While gratefully acknowledging his achievements, I must not omit to indicate his shortcomings—his unchecked partiality for, and boundless admiration of his hero; his uncritical acceptance and fanciful embellishments of anecdotes and hearsays; and the extreme paucity of his information concerning the period of Chopin's life which begins with his settlement in Paris. In 1878 appeared a second edition of ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Europe, was something more impalpable than the will-force of a domineering woman. They were born into the misty morning twilight of the medieval renaissance, of an age when intellectual curiosity was awakening, when philosophy, the sciences and Latin literature were studied with a lively but uncritical enthusiasm, when the rhetorician and the sophist were the uncrowned kings of intelligent society. The philosophy was little more than school-logic, derived at second or third hand from Aristotle, the science a ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... involuntary sentiment as the only way of accounting for something not unfamiliar in his voice and bearing. A man of average stature, with a vast black beard, and guileless blue eyes, set off by a powerful Armagh accent. Evidently unobservant, uncritical, and utterly destitute of devil in any form, it seemed that the Spirit of the Bog had followed him into the bush, preserving his noxious innocence and all-round ineptitude in their pristine integrity. Naturally, he had taken a slight local colour, but this seemed to express ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... novel of so elevated a spirit, yet of such strong interest, unartificial, and uncritical, that it is obviously a fulfillment of Mr. Harrison's intention ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... that which is a sign of virtue." The sentiments here are not so objectionable, but the description of the Pharisees as sophists, and the suggestion of a Valhalla for those who died for their country and for no others—for which there is no authority in Jewish tradition—betray again the uncritical copying of a ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... to one of the most prominent of his characteristics as a historian. Uncritical and often inconsistent as he is, his mistakes are not due to partisanship, for he is extraordinarily cosmopolitan. The Germans he dislikes as unchivalrous; but though his life lay in the period of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, and though ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... were a hard-drinking race whose bards chanted interminable battle songs to tables of uncritical, mead-filled heroes. As a result the English language grew up without many of the finer points of verse and bare especially of all fixed forms. It was this latter lack which Austin Dobson sought to supply by imitating in English the ballade, ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... is dependent upon the extent to which the government is representative of national traditions and is organized in the interest of valid national purposes. National traditions and purposes always contain a large infusion of dubious ingredients; but loyalty to them does not necessarily mean the uncritical and unprotesting acceptance of the national limitations and abuses. Nationality is a political and social ideal as well as the great contemporary political fact. Loyalty to the national interest implies ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... Scholasticism and Christianity were identified so closely that rejection or criticism of the former must imply disloyalty to the latter. The Humanists mocked at the Scholastics and dubbed them obscurantists on account of their barbarous Latinity, their uncritical methods, and their pointless wranglings; the Scholastics retorted by denouncing their opponents as pagans, or, at least, heretics. In this way the claims of religion were drawn into the arena, and, as neither ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... the departed for us. The Manes are the good people, not to be feared so long as their rites are duly performed, as we have already seen; Lemures are disembodied spirits; while Larvae are the ghosts that haunt houses. Apuleius, however, is wholly uncritical, and the distinction between Larvae and Lemures is certainly not borne out ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... uncommonly careful toilet, discarding two neckties before the operation was finished. When all was done the cravat presented a stuffed and warped appearance which was not at all satisfying, even to Aleck's uncritical eye; but the tie was the last of his supply and was, perhaps, slightly better than none ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... (in a postscript to the ninth Provincial Letter) that 'after having written my letter I read the works of Fathers Barry and Binet.' If such a man as Pascal could be so grossly unfair as to write a criticism on works which he had not read, what can be expected from the non-judicial and uncritical public which takes ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... in asserting the importance of these "supersensuous" values the religionist does not mean that they are beyond the reach of human appraisal or unrelated by their nature to the rest of our understanding. By the intuitive he does not mean the uncritical nor by the supersensuous the supernatural in the old and discredited sense of an arbitrary and miraculous revelation. Mysticism is not superstition, nor are the insights of the poet the whimsies of the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... much of what the past forces us to accept is not good enough for the future; recognising that, odious as this may seem to our self-conceit and sloth, many of the things we do and like and are, will not bear even our own uncritical scrutiny. Above all, that the lesser evil which we prefer to the greater is an evil for all ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... mistake to consist in the fact that it is only the Christian State, and not the "general State," that he subjects to criticism, that he does not investigate the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation, and consequently lays down conditions which are only explicable from an uncritical confusion of political ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... prospective son-in-law a promise that in twelve months' time he would return. During that interval correspondence went on apace not only between the affianced lovers, but between M. Forestier and Ingres, the former taking affectionate and not uncritical interest in the other's projects. For Ingres was before all things a projector, anticipating by decades the achievements of his later years. The glow of enthusiasm, the fever of creativeness were at its height. Italy possessed Ingres' entire ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... with warring impulses that Somerset slowly diminished in Paula's estimate; slowly as the moon wanes, but as certainly. Charlotte's own love was of a clinging, uncritical sort, and though the shadowy intelligence of Somerset's doings weighed down her soul with regret, it seemed to make not the least difference ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... this popular hero are too exactly similar to those of the other representatives of this myth, for them to leave any doubt as to what we are to make of Votan. Like the rest of them, he and his long-robed attendants are personifications of the eastern light and its rays. Though but uncritical epitomes of a fragmentary myth about him remain, they are enough to stamp it as that which meets us so constantly, no matter where we ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... this idea that Othello killed his wife, probably within twenty-four hours, certainly within a few days, of the consummation of his marriage, contradicts the impression produced by the play on all uncritical readers and spectators. It is also in flat contradiction with a large number of time-indications in the play itself. It is needless to mention more than a few. (a) Bianca complains that Cassio has kept away from her for a week (III. iv. 173). Cassio and ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... ignorant, narrow-minded men, imbued with a hatred of enlightenment and desirous of leading their country back to its primitive barbarism. What the Slavophils really condemned, at least in their calmer moments, was not European culture, but the uncritical, indiscriminate adoption of it by their countrymen. Their tirades against foreign culture must appear excusable when we remember that many Russians of the upper ranks could speak and write French more correctly than ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... depended on. This notion underlies the traditional debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.... This unhappy misconception of the relation of the natural to the supernatural has practically led the great body of uncritical thinkers into the grotesque inversion of all reason—the more law and order, the less ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... later career was based. This was nothing less than to issue practically the whole body of classic literature, Greek as well as Latin, in editions distinguished from all that had preceded in two important respects. First, they were to be not reprints of received uncritical texts but new revisions made by competent scholars based upon a comparison of all the best available manuscripts. Secondly, they were to be printed not in ponderous and costly folios but in small octavos of convenient size, small but clear ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... cockney flippancy and facetiousness, as Motteux's operators did, is not merely an impertinence like larding a sirloin of prize beef, but an absolute falsification of the spirit of the book, and it is a proof of the uncritical way in which "Don Quixote" is generally read that this worse than worthless translation—worthless as failing to represent, worse than worthless as misrepresenting—should have been favoured as ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... told that my progress at the piano is fair. But I am very certain I shall do no more with vocal and instrumental music than to play and sing acceptably for such kind and uncritical friends as do not demand much of an amateur. Without any unusual gifts, with a rather sensitive ear, and with a very slightly cultivated and perfectly childish voice—please do not expect anything from me ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... description is meagre. After a few mathematical details, he returns to things closer to his heart,—the Church's atmosphere of holiness, the emblematic radiance of the candle's light, the ecstasy of worshippers who seemed "to breathe the air of Paradise." And Saint Gregory's is the religious, uncritical spirit of his day, whose interest was in ecclesiastical establishment rather than ecclesiastical architecture. Churches there were in numbers; but they were not architectural achievements. Their building was like the planting ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... was not uncritical of the administrative work of the airline as it touched upon the fatal flight and concerning this ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... and tendencies of his times and not a sweeper of the chords that stir in human nature the heroic or the pathetic, it is none the less uncritical to rank this Spaniard as a brainless technician. Everything is relative, and the scale on which Fortuny worked was as true a medium for the exhibition of his genius as a museum panorama. Let us not be misled ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Tertullian in Rome or Africa, Irenaeus in Gaul. They all flourished about A.D. 190. They all speak of the Gospels, not only as well known and received, but as being the only Gospels acknowledged and received by the Church. One of them uses very "uncritical" arguments to prove that the Gospels could only be four in number; but the very absurdity of his analogies is a witness to the universal tradition of his day. To what date before their time must this tradition reach, so that it must be relied upon as exhibiting ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... got to a phrase of that quality for the undiscriminating imperatives of the fundamental social institution. You see how a particular situation may undermine the assumptions of a mind originally devoted to uncritical acceptances. He still insisted it was a necessary great unreason, absolutely necessary—for the mass of people, a part of them, a natural expression of them, but he could imagine the possibility—of 'understandings.' ... Mr. Brumley was very ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... say that they must by their nature be tentative and experimental. The radical mind is to-day one of the most dangerous elements in society, just because all the world over men are very ready to be influenced and are eager for change and are uncritical. Cleveland in an essay entitled Can Democracy be Efficient? exhibits a type of thinking about political questions that ought to appeal to all practical thinkers. It is his method rather than, in this connection, his conclusions that one should notice. Cleveland would study ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... point of view it will therefore be seen that we could not have read Mr George Moore's wonderfully uncritical and misdirected diatribe against Stevenson in The Daily Chronicle of 24th April 1897, without amusement, if not without laughter—indeed, we confess we may here quote Shakespeare's words, we "laughed so consumedly" that, unless for Mr Moore's high position and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... Milton, published in 1740, brought on the controversy with Gottsched. In the course of his long life Bodmer wrote vast quantities of didactic verse, also epics and tragedies, which are now forgotten, his theory of poetry having been better than his practice. His fragmentary and uncritical editions of Wolfram's Parzival, the Nibelung Lay, and the Minnesingers (1753-59) are the earliest attempts to arouse interest in the forgotten poetry of the despised Middle Ages. The selection is from the Discourse der Mahlern, following Bchtold and Vetter's reprint in Bibliothek lterer ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... Despite its uncritical method of compilation, Levy's bulky Vocabulary (1887-1804), with its two supplements and long tables of signs, is indispensable in this branch of research, since it gives a multitude of references to rare words and forms of words that occur in notable publications ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... enacted an affirmative result of this historical inquiry, as a test of one's spiritual state, and ordered me to think harshly of men like Marcus Aurelius and Lessing, because they did not adopt the conclusion which the professedly uncritical have established. It possessed me with a general gloom concerning Mohammedans and Pagans, and involved the whole course of history and prospects of futurity in a painful darkness ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... preposterous. It is impossible to doubt the severe chastity of Milton's own ideal, and to compare it for one moment to the conventional onesta which replaced virtue in Tasso's world, or with the nauseous unreality of the puppet Fletcher sought to enthrone in its place, would be to commit an uncritical outrage. Nevertheless, the expression Milton chose to give to his ideal cannot, therefore, lay claim to privilege. That expression had become intimately associated with pastoral convention, and he accepted it along with much else from his predecessors. I am not aware of any reason why ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... and dramatists by the modern world. Then and there he planned a conspiracy to rob the greatest character in literary history of his just fame; and, under the pseudonym of "Delia Bacon," advanced those theories of his own concealed authorship which have ever since deluded the uncritical and disgusted all lovers of common-sense and ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... of habits can endure at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a general desire. It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and, indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it is conscious of itself. The uncritical routine of which Burke is the sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of virtue. Yet in modern civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy. Our real need is less ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... began with the first sight of land, to be engrossed with the task of identifying each newly discovered country with some island or district of the Far East, named on his maps. He was an ignorant man, though he knew Ptolemy and Marco Polo by heart, credulous, uncritical, not consciously dishonest, but unready to correct false impressions caused by his ignorance and gullibility. His notes, as may be seen from a reproduction of a page of his manuscripts (facing p. 38), were in an execrable hand. The forger of the Journal of the First Voyage ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... Mr. Charles Edward Russell, who is the critic referred to by Mr. Walsh, and has undertaken with great success to uproot among the Socialists of this country the fanciful pictures and fallacies concerning Australasia that date in this country from the time of the radical and fearless but uncritical and optimistic books of Henry D. Lloyd ("A Country Without Strikes," etc.). Mr. Russell shows that a Labor Party as in Australia may gain control of the forms of government, without actually gaining the sovereignty over society or industry. (See the International Socialist Review, September, 1911.) ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... because he didn't want to work." Some such stuff is a common conception, though not as common as it used to be. If this teacher had had more brains, it would have been a lie. The word idled is the hopeless part of this criticism, or rather of this uncritical remark. To ask this kind of a man, who plays all the "choice gems from celebrated composers" literally, always literally, and always with the loud pedal, who plays all hymns, wrong notes, right notes, games, people, and jokes literally, and with ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... his wife's books as goods for sale, and his comments were, 'That should go all right. That's done it,' which attitude, though commercially helpful, was less really satisfying to the creator than Clare's uncritical absorption in the characters and the story. Clare was, in fact, the public, while Mr. Potter was ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... first book, but it was not a story-book, and I had no idea that it would ever become a printed book at all. It was merely a free-and-easy record of personal adventure and every-day life, written, like all else that I penned, solely for the uncritical eye of that long-suffering ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... a monk, perhaps a Syrian monk: he probably perpetrated a deliberate fraud—a pious fraud, in his own opinion—by suppressing his own individuality, and fathering his books on St. Paul's Athenian convert. The success of the imposture is amazing, even in that uncritical age, and gives much food for reflection. The sixth century saw nothing impossible in a book full of the later Neoplatonic theories—those of Proclus rather than Plotinus[158]—having been written in the first century. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... of the Jews, contained in their scriptures, and of the kingdoms of the world, which are found in gentile writers, and pursues them both into an ideal future. It need hardly be remarked that his use both of Greek and of Roman historians and of the sacred writings of the Jews is wholly uncritical. The heathen mythology, the Sybilline oracles, the myths of Plato, the dreams of Neo-Platonists are equally regarded by him as matter of fact. He must be acknowledged to be a strictly polemical or controversial writer who makes the best of everything on one side and the worst of everything ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Brasseur de Bourbourg will have it allied to the Maya, the old Norse or Scandinavian, the ancient Coptic, and what not. Rafinesque and Jegor von Sivors[17] have made vocabularies of it, but the former in so uncritical, and the latter in so superficial a manner, that they are worse ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... illustration of the uncritical association of names than the popular coupling of Robert Frost with Edgar Lee Masters? They are similar in one respect; they are both poets. But in the glorious army of poets, it would be difficult to find two contemporaries more ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... twentieth century, is insufficient appreciation of its meaning for mankind. It is true that there are thousands of workers scattered throughout the world contributing their mites to the general store. They increase yearly, almost daily, and their achievements, in spite of an uncritical enthusiasm in some quarters and a semi-charlatanism in others, have been and continue magnificent. But they are pecking at a mountain which requires organized, massive, engineering organization for ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... arbitrarily compiled, if extended, catalogues of names. To each name were attached brief annotations, which occasionally offered a fact or a date, but commonly consisted of a few sentences of grotesque, uncritical eulogy. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... herself morbid and hard to please. If she had not been so, to be Rodney's wife would surely have been enough; it would have satisfied all her nature. Why didn't it? Was it perhaps really because, though she loved him, it was not with the uncritical devotion of the early days? She had for so many years now seen clearly, through and behind his charm, his weakness, his vanities, his scorching ambitions and jealousies, his petulant angers, his dependence on praise ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... tendency to pronounce, in a general and uncritical fashion, many things to be “Roman” which are only ancient and of indefinite date; an easy way of getting out of a difficulty. Possibly we may trace to this source the origin of the Lincolnshire expression, descriptive of anything or anybody out of the ordinary, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... How can one forget that great seducer of the masses Hitler? In his book "Hitler Speaks" page 208 Rauschning reports Hitler as saying: "It is true that the masses are uncritical, but not in the way these idiots of Marxists and reactionaries imagine. The masses have their critical faculties, too, but they function differently from those of the private individual. The masses are like an animal they obeys instincts. They do not reach conclusions by reasoning. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... young girl would hardly have looked at a tradesman. But her ups and downs, capped by her indiscretions with Henchard had made her uncritical as to station. In her poverty she had met with repulse from the society to which she had belonged, and she had no great zest for renewing an attempt upon it now. Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... presents the records of some rather perplexing observations, not confirmed by later researches, but yet not easily to be explained away or accounted for. Such observations Humboldt described as belonging to the myths of an uncritical period; and it is in that sense that I employ the term 'astronomical myth' in this essay. I propose briefly to describe and comment on some of the more interesting of these observations, which, in whatever sense ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Village" (The Village Sorcerer), which was performed at Fontainebleau before the Court, and received with unexampled enthusiasm. His profession, so far as he had any, was that of a copyist of music, and his musical taste and facile talents had at last brought him an uncritical recognition. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... good temper made her not an outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... corner of the bitter-cold cloister, on the other hand many beautiful manuscripts preserved to us bear witness of cloisters where literature was tolerated if not officially honoured. I would not have you so uncritical as to blame the Church or its clergy for what happened; as I would have you remember that if the Church killed literature, she—and, one may ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... but fiercely strong. I wish to trace my ancestors a thousand years, if I trace them by gallowses. It is not love, not pride, not admiration; it is an expansion of the identity, intimately pleasing, and wholly uncritical; I can expend myself in the person of an inglorious ancestor with perfect comfort; or a disgraced, if I could find one. I suppose, perhaps, it is more to me who am childless, and refrain with a certain shock from looking forwards. But, I am sure, in the solid grounds ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is Wisdom in this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that 't is hence hindered in its effect. And though with all my heart I would stand well with my ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... we hated, And feared, or made love, or believed, For all the opinions we stated, The woes and the wars we achieved, We too shall lie idle together— In very uncritical case; And no one will win—but the Ether That ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Prussian Militarism or the rise of German Commercialism, or the long tradition and growth of a Welt-politik philosophy, or the general political ignorance which gave to these influences such rash and uncritical acceptance; or whether we accuse the somewhat difficult and variable personal equation of the Kaiser himself—the fact still remains that for years and years this war has been by the German Government most deliberately and systematically prepared for. The ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... of its uncritical methods Augustinianism has found but few defenders and deserves notice only in so far as it claims to base ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... utterly at variance with the fact; in the despotic monarchies of the East were the elements of the arts and sciences; it was to republics they were transferred, and republics perfected them. Hume, indeed, is often the most incautious and uncritical of all writers. What can we think of an author who asserts that a refined taste succeeds best in monarchies, and then refers to the indecencies of Horace and Ovid as an example of the reverse in a republic—as ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... co-ordinates have been established for measuring them, a single mathematical space and time may be deployed about them, conceived to contain all things, and to supply them with their respective places and dates. This gives us the cosmos of classical physics. But this system involves the uncritical notion of light and matter travelling through media previously existing, and being carried down, like a boat drifting down stream, by a flowing time which has a pace of its own, and imposes it on all existence. In reality, each "clock" and each landscape ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... when she and Marjorie played "house" together in the Raymonds' backyard. The blue silk stockings and heelless, blue kid slippers emphasized the babyish effect of her costume, and Marjorie had hard work to keep back her tears. But Mary could not read that sudden rush of emotion in the calm, uncritical face which ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... was crude and uncritical. In proportion as men learnt to reflect upon their experience, it was bound to be modified, and to submit to reactionary influences. Such was the case at the very beginning of philosophical and scientific enquiry—and such was the case also at the opening of the "modern" era. Speaking generally, ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... visit to Cambridge, a scholar delivered before her an oration, in which he exalted the antiquity of his own university at the expense of that of the University of Oxford. The University of Oxford was roused to arms. In that uncritical age any antiquarian weapon which the fury of academical patriotism could supply was eagerly grasped, and the reputation of the great antiquary Camden is somewhat compromised with regard to an interpolation ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... This Faith-way to God cannot be wholly separated—except by an artificial abstraction—from the inward way of mysticism, or from the implications of Reason. It is no blind acceptance of traditional opinions, no uncritical reliance on "authority," or on some mysterious infallible oracle. It is the spiritual response—or "assent," as Clement of Alexandria called it—the moral swing of our inmost self, as we catch insights of a loving Heart and holy Will revealed through the words and lives and sufferings ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... verses to older poets. He even forged verses which he quoted as if from Paradise Lost, and showed them as Milton's plagiarisms from preceding writers. Even these clumsy fictions might have passed without detection at that uncritical period of our literature, and under the shelter of the name of Samuel Johnson. But Lauder's impudence grew with the success of his criticisms, which he brought out as letters, through a series of years, in the ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... would then have all his material under his hand. What time, expense, and trouble are required to obtain, and that very imperfectly, any such advantage now, only those who have tried to do it know. Even Mr. Hazlitt's welcome, if somewhat uncritical, reprint of Dodsley, long out of print, did not boldly carry out its principle—though there are plans for improving ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... slaughtered 4000 head of cattle, which they could not drive away. Of this tremendous destruction of property the Four Masters do not say a word. Such omissions often occur in their annals, even when dealing with contemporary events. Uncritical as they were and extremely credulous, how can we trust the records which they give ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... had his inherited instincts of reverence for the rituals that embodied the spiritual life of his race. He was impatient with dissent and with facile scepticisms. He did not expect a woman to have reasoned beliefs, nor did he ask a credulous, uncritical orthodoxy; but he did want the Christian colouring of mind, the Christian outlook; he did want his wife to be a woman who would teach her children to say their prayers at her knees. It was with something like dismay that he gathered from Karen that her conception of life was as untouched by any ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... This does not mean that I wish to swear by Vasari, when he can be proved to have been wrong, but that I regard the present tendency to mistrust tradition, only because it is tradition, as in the highest sense uncritical. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... outwardly beautiful; inwardly she was as deformed—as I! But in neither case was he ever able to get the right slant. He loved us both in his splendid, uncritical way. His love brought me to his feet in abject devotion: it lured the woman to accomplish his destruction. Something, some one, menaced her! He tried to ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... of Poesy, composed in 1581, but not printed till 1595, was written in manlier English than the Arcadia, and is one of the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time. He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich (with whom he was not at all in love), according to the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... never had what might be called a girl friend. But she had arrived at a time when a woman friend was a necessity, and it now suddenly occurred to her that there would be something wonderfully sweet and satisfying in the uncritical love of a woman younger than herself. She felt that the love of this innocent creature who knew nothing, who never would know anything, and who therefore would suspect nothing, would help her to forget her past as Monsignor wished. She felt a sympathy awaken in her ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... brought out what I believe to be the most significant parts of Roosevelt's character and public life, I have not wished to be uncritical. I have suppressed nothing. Fortunately for his friends, the two libel suits which he went through in his later years, subjected him to a microscopic scrutiny, both as to his personal and his political life. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... well in the opinion of; laudari a laudato viro[Lat]. Adj. approving &c.v.; in favor of; lost in admiration. commendatory, complimentary, benedictory[obs3], laudatory, panegyrical, eulogistic, encomiastic, lavish of praise, uncritical. approved, praised &c.v.; uncensured, unimpeached; popular, in good odor; in high esteem &c. (respected) 928; in favor, in high favor. deserving of praise, worthy of praise &c.n.; praiseworthy, commendable, of estimation; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... supper. This, with the regular Sunday service at Rev. Henry Glynn's church, rounded out the weeks to his perfect satisfaction. He was conscious of feeling that the situation did not admit of improvement, for though, when he measured himself with Selma, Babcock was humble-minded, a cheerful and uncritical optimism was the ruling characteristic of his temperament. With health, business fortune, and love all on his side, it was natural to him to regard his lot with complacency. Especially as to all appearances, this was the sort of thing Selma liked, also. Presently, ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... its statements, and the enthusiasm-inspiring character of its style would have contributed to make it highly prized wherever it was known. Then would come speculation as to its authorship, and what wonder if in uncritical times an Athanasian authorship was first guessed, then confidently affirmed and believed?" (Father Sydney F. Smith, S.J., ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... scholastics were often uncritical. They were too intent on building up and buttressing their system on the broad human or religious foundations which they had chosen for it. They nursed the comfortable conviction that whatever their thought contained was eternal and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... fulfillment of a design, formed about twenty-seven years ago, of one day presenting to the world, if I might, something like a complete grammar of the English language;—not a mere work of criticism, nor yet a work too tame, indecisive, and uncritical; for, in books of either of these sorts, our libraries already abound;—not a mere philosophical investigation of what is general or universal in grammar, nor yet a minute detail of what forms only a part of our own philology; for either of these plans falls very far short of such ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... rapidly over the stony path. Even Richie Moniplies, even Gentle Geordie, good as both are, fall short of their predecessors. Ten years earlier The Fortunes of Nigel would have been a miracle, and one might have said, 'If a man begins like this, what will he do later?' Now, thankless and often uncritical as is the chatter about 'writing out,' we can hardly compare Nigel with Guy Mannering, or Rob Roy, or even The Abbot, and not be conscious of something that (to use a favourite quotation of Scott's own), 'doth appropinque an end,' though an end as yet afar off. The 'bottom ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... which makes their differences the more incomprehensible to each other; just as in politics, theology, or that most disputatious of all things disputable, metaphysics, the nearer the reasoners approach each other in points that to an uncritical bystander seem the most important, the more sure they are to start off in opposite directions upon reaching ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fell into the same mistake, or were too polite to take notice of it, we cannot tell, for they drank it without comment, and with evident satisfaction, like men of simple tastes and uncritical minds. ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... meeting of the British librarians at Cambridge in 1882 a bomb was thrown into the camp of the book producers in the form of the question: Who spoils our new English books? In the explosion which followed, everybody within range was hit, from "the uncritical consumer" to "the untrained manufacturer." This dangerous question was asked and answered by Henry Stevens of Vermont, who, as a London bookseller, had for nearly forty years handled the products of the press new and old, had numbered among his patrons such critical booklovers ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... in the date of Cimon's return from ostracism. The ordinary account says that he was recalled after the battle of Tanagra (457) to negotiate the Five Years' Truce (451 or 450). To ignore the unexplained interval of six or seven years is an uncritical expedient, which, however, has been adopted by many writers. Some maintaining that Cimon did return soon after 457, say that the truce which he arranged was really the four months' truce recorded by Diodorus (only). ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Even to an uncritical eye, the differences between ungulates and carnivores of to-day are many and obvious, but as we trace them back into the past we follow on converging lines, and in our search for the prototypes of the carnivora ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... as a poet. It is true that his style remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen, then as now uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes of his verse, and thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil, his prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of his poems, and here were to be ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... out more than once that though neglect of such books as these may be perfectly natural and probable in the average reader, such neglect—and still more any contempt of them—is, though it may not be unnatural, utterly unscholarly and uncritical from the point of view of history. Their authors themselves learnt something from their own mistaken experiments, and their successors learnt a good deal more. They found that "sculduddery" was not a necessary attraction. Ducray does not ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... express his sense of it. He had replied to his reviewer and had acted unwisely in so doing; but when one after one—in the Quarterly Review, the North American Review, and elsewhere, in articles more or less ignorant, uncritical, and stupid—the accusations he had rebutted were repeated with increased bitterness, he lost all hope of stemming the torrent of hostile criticism. He had, as we have seen, for years lived in partial retirement, enjoying at intervals a garden party behind the house, or going ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... feature must be pointed out that the belief in God owes its existence, not to the trained and educated observation of civilized times, but to the uncritical reflection of the primitive mind. It has its origin there, and it would indeed be remarkable, if, while in almost every other direction the primitive mind showed itself to be hopelessly wrong, in its interpretation of the world in this particular ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... who agree to the necessity of independent judgment on the part of adults may demur at the idea of placing similar responsibility upon children. Are not children normally uncritical and imitative or passive? they say. And if we teach them to judge and criticise freely, are they not very likely to develop priggishness that will result in immodesty and disrespect for others? "Memory," says John Henry Newman, "is one of the first developed of ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... having too good a time to wonder long. Too good a time to remember whether or not it was in the baronial spirit. She was entirely uncritical when, the time for good nights finally at hand, Mr. Brown ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... article—convinced as he is that it was produced in the neighbourhood of the cathedral city of the same name, and unaware of the existence of such a place as Canterbury in New Zealand, or that the name, if not exactly a fraud, is calculated to mislead. Doubtless it is the mint sauce that satisfies the uncritical palate. Just as the boy who, when asked after a treat of oysters how he liked them, said with gusto, "The oysters was good, but the vinegar ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... suffering because I struck my hand against that table; I sat down because I chose to do so. His doctrine is not supposed to deny the truth contained in such statements; it is supposed only to give a fuller understanding of it. Hence, we cannot condemn either doctrine simply by an uncritical appeal to such statements and to the experiences they represent. We must look ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... winning; but he could administer a rebuke longer to be remembered than most men's; though more, perhaps, because it came from him than for any other reason. The union in him of fastidious taste and of uncritical temper was very marked. No man was more sensitive than he to all the proprieties of the occasion; and one might at first fear lest himself should say or do what would jar upon that delicately attuned spirit, for whatever he said or did was ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... the supposed smaller brain of the Negro race; but this is as yet an unproved assumption, based on the uncritical measurement of less than a thousand Negro brains as compared with eleven thousand or more European brains. Even if future measurement prove the average Negro brain lighter, the vast majority of Negro brain weights fall within ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... delights in as to belong spiritually to that period rather than his own. To deny sincerity of accent to Morris because of his love of the simple old Scandinavian note—the note which to him represents every other kind of primitive simplicity—would be as uncritical as to deny sincerity of accent to Charles Lamb because of his sympathy with Elizabethan and Jacobean times, or to Dante Rossetti because of his sympathy with the period of his ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... in the reading of the "Ancient Mariner"; whereupon he took up the tale, and carried it on to the end. He had some facility in reading with expression, and his few affectations—for it must be confessed he was not free of such faults—were not of a nature to strike uncritical hearers. When he had finished, he looked up, and his eye chancing to light upon Margaret first, he saw that her cheek was quite pale, and her eyes overspread with the film, not of coming tears, but of ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... of Empedocles to those more particular rationalisations of particular problems which very largely provided the motive of early philosophies, while scientific methods were in an undeveloped and uncritical condition, we may notice such interesting statements as the following: [135] "The earth, which is at the centre of the sphere of the universe, remains firm, because the spin of the universe as a whole keeps it in its place like the water in a spinning cup." He has the same conception of the early ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... latter case we have a mere coincidence of idiom; in the former a proverbial allusion.[57] An uncritical pursuit of such mere accidents of resemblance has led Mr. Feis to such enormities as the assertion that Shakspere's contemporaries knew Hamlet's use of his tablets to be a parody of the "much-scribbling Montaigne," who had avowed that he made much use of his; the assertion that Ophelia's ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... was a good dancer was an alleviation, but among those stigmatised by Eliza Hosford as the riff-raff of Cluhir, those now forgotten measures of the first years of this century, the prancing barn-dance, the capering pas-de-quatre, lent themselves to a violence that, even at the uncritical age of eighteen, Christian found overpowering. "They danced like the Priests of Baal," she told Judith. "One expected to see them cut ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... biometricians' tables; but had they married ten years sooner, a child born when the parents were thirty might rank as the tenth child, and would be so reckoned by the biometricians. One does not need to be a biologist to perceive that conclusions based upon assumptions so uncritical are worth nothing at all, and it is tempting to suggest that the biometricians are so called, on a principle long famous, because they measure everything ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... dressed alike; they are a tide of men. They all look alike. Their mouths are set. They move together with the common, irresistible, uncritical urge of migratory animals. Their eyes fix you in a ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... be mistaken, is that which marks them all as belonging to a romantic school, in almost all the modern senses of that term. That is to say, they are not the spontaneous product of an uncritical and ingenuous imagination; they are not the same sort of thing as the popular stories on which many of them are founded; they are the literary work of authors more or less sophisticated, on the look-out for new sensations and new literary devices. It is useless to go to those ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... quality, and still more for germinal influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and directly Mr Arnold's work. He was not even the voice crying in the wilderness: only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be eared and pathed. But ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... was so yielding, so selfless, so absolutely uncritical, that if any woman could marry late she was the woman. She could have lived with a monster of egotism without finding it out. Had she not devoted herself to two such monsters most of her life? And perhaps Mr. Kingston was not a monster. Aunt Emmy arranged the ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... masters of Gaul, we find Rouen the capital of the province, called the Secunda Lugdunensis; and from that tine forward, it continued to increase in importance. Etymologists have been amused and puzzled by "Rothomagus," its classical name. In an uncritical age, it was contended that the name afforded good proof of the city having been founded by Magus, son of Samothes, contemporary of Nimrod. Others, with equal diligence, sought the root of Rothomagus ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... being told to an uncritical and unchronological audience, or Dame Agnes might have received a gentle intimation that she was antedating the reign of King Arthur by the short period ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... essays in historical literature were all of them, as a matter of course, pervaded by an easy, uncritical spirit; neither authors nor readers readily took offence at inward or outward inconsistencies. King Tarquinius the Second, although he was already grown up at the time of his father's death and did not begin to reign till thirty-nine years afterwards, is nevertheless ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... uncritical and boisterous atmosphere of the Satyr-play it was natural hospitality, not especially laudable or surprising. From the analogy of similar stories I suspect that Admetus originally did not know his guest, and received not so much the reward ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... the origin of the Old Testament, we forget that it is a unity, that it is a divine unity, that it is a progressive revelation, and that 'the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy' then I venture to say that the most uncritical, old-fashioned reader of the Old Testament that found Jesus Christ in the Song of Solomon, and in the details of the Tabernacle, and in all the minutiae of worship and sacrifice, was nearer to the living heart of the thing than the most ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... reached the stage of their coffee. The band was playing the latest waltz. It was all very commonplace, but they were both young and uncritical. The waltz was one which Fenella had played after dinner at Bourne End, while they had sat out in the garden, lingering over their dessert. A flood of memories stirred him. The soft sensuousness of that warm spring ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... must, for various reasons, be completely rejected. It is in all respects much to be deplored that Signor Margiotta has largely and approvingly cited the testimony of two of these witnesses who are most open to condemnation, and that he has himself exercised an imperfect and uncritical censorship over papers which have come into his hands. From first to last all documents ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... Philosophie und zur Goethe-Litteratur."[67] Springer cites at some length the liberal opinions of Molire, La Bruyre, Wieland, Heine and others concerning the literary appropriation of another's thought. He then proceeds to quote Goethe's equally generous views on the subject, and adds the uncritical fling that if Goethe robbed Sterne, it was an honor to Sterne, again to his literary fame. Near the end of his paper, Springer arrives at the question in hand and states positively that these maxims, with ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... applause; but Beatrix, her nerves still tense from The Erl-King, felt a difference in the quality of the welcome to the two musicians. The critical few were impartial, and in the case of Arlt they led a wavering fugue of the uncritical many. Arlt was young, small and insignificant. His tailor was not an artist, and Arlt was too palpably conscious that his coat tails demanded respectful care. Society applauded Arlt with punctilious courtesy; but it promptly took Thayer to its ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... treating of Thackeray's view of life, as reflected in his novels, critics vary greatly, and the following summary must be taken not as a positive judgment but only as an attempt to express the general impression of his works on an uncritical reader. He is first of a realist, who paints life as he sees it. As he says himself, "I have no brains above my eyes; I describe what I see.". His pictures of certain types, notably the weak and vicious ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... art that makes the obviously impossible seem perfectly plausible and commonplace he surpassed not only him but Edward Everett Hale and all others. After Stockton and The Lady or the Tiger? it was realized even by the uncritical that short story writing had become a subtle art and that the master of its subtleties had his reader at his mercy."[8] The publication of Stockton's short stories covers a period of over forty years, from Mahala's Drive (November, ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... transmission and it is rare to see a book used in religious services. Diagrams accompanied by letters and a few words are credited with magical powers, but still tantric spells are things to be recited rather than written. This view of scripture makes the hearer uncritical. The ordinary layman hears parts of a sacred book recited and probably admires what he understands, but he has no means of judging of a book as a whole, especially of its coherency ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... throughout all this time of trial—an uncontrollable emotion, but he would not let his mind speculate about the grief and attitude of his family, forcibly interposing a veil between himself and them. Tired out at length, he let his reverie merge into mere uncritical perception. He was conscious of afternoon sunshine, of a great stretch of sky, with a continent of white cloud containing big blue lakes; his eye took in the expanse of sea, glistening, streaked, ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... the crudest (and commonest) forms of "uncritical method" is that which consists in employing as if they were documents, and placing on the same footing as documents, the utterances of modern authors on the subject of documents. Novices do not make a sufficient distinction, in the ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... these the titles of four indicate that they were designed for very little children. In each community the pastor appointed the catechism to be taught in the school, and joined the teacher in drilling the children in its questions and answers. Indeed, the answers were regarded as irrefutable in those uncritical days, and hence a strong shield and buckler against manifold temptations provided by "yt ould deluder Satan." To offset the task of learning these doctrines of the church, it is probable that the mothers regaled ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... critics, who make an abundance of conjectural emendations, and then embody them in their versions, with only a brief note, deserves severe condemnation. Had the ancient critics generally adopted this uncritical method, the sacred text would long ago ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... impressions he gave me, anyhow," said Clayton, modestly. "I may, of course, have been in a rather uncritical state, but that was the sort of background he gave to himself. He kept flitting up and down, with his thin voice going talking, talking about his wretched self, and never a word of clear, firm statement from first to last. He was thinner and sillier and more pointless ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... readings which materially affect the sense. Textual inaccuracy is a grave fault in the new edition of an old poet; and Mr. Farr is not only liable to this charge, but also to that of making blundering misstatements which are calculated to mislead the careless or uncritical reader. Infected by the absurd cant which has been prevalent for the last dozen years among literary sciolists, he says,—"The language used by Wither in all his various works—whether secular or sacred—is pure Saxon." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Irish Saints have remained largely a mine unworked. Into the causes of this strange neglect it is not the purpose of the present introduction to enter. Suffice it to glance in passing at one of the reasons which has been alleged in explanation, scil.:—that the "Lives" are uncritical and romantic, that they abound in wild legends, chronological impossibilities and all sorts of incredible stories, and, finally, that miracles are multiplied till the miraculous becomes the ordinary, and that marvels ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda
... large number of persons who have refused to be vaccinated! This would be laughable if it were not really serious; it is sad and serious that a man of Mr. Coleridge's education and social position should so consistently mislead the uncritical readers of the Contemporary Review to whose pages he has unfortunately very free access. If Mr. Coleridge really believes these things he is either very stupid or very ignorant; if he knows them to be otherwise, but wilfully deceives the public, he is immoral. He suffers from ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the superman as a posturing personage, misunderstood by the vulgar, fantastic, wonderful. But the antic Personage, the thing I have called the Effigy, is not new but old, the oldest thing in history, the departing thing. It depends not upon the advance of the species but upon the uncritical hero-worship of the crowd. You may see the monster drawn twenty times the size of common men upon the oldest monuments of Egypt and Assyria. The true superman comes not as the tremendous personal entry of a star, but in the less dramatic form of a general increase of goodwill ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... each of us, it offers us a perpetual temptation to fall back into something below our best possible. The impulsive mind is inevitably conservative; always at the mercy of memorized images. Hence its delighted self-yielding to traditional symbols, its uncritical emotionalism, its easy slip-back into traditional and even archaic and self-contradictory beliefs: the way in which it pops out and enjoys itself at a service of the hearty congregational sort, or may even lead its unresisting owner ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... is here too vast to mention even the works of the very first importance: I can only select a very few books which have been useful to myself. The late Sir John Seeley's Ecce Homo may be regarded as in the light of modern research a somewhat uncritical book, but it remains to my mind the most striking expression of the appeal which Christ makes to the Conscience of the modern world. It has proved a veritable fifth Gospel to many seekers after light. Bishop Moorhouse's little book, The ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... ideal Republic and the duty of the young to fit themselves for it. The lecturer's comprehension of his subject was somewhat vague; but Arthur listened with devout admiration. His mind at this period was curiously uncritical; when he accepted a moral ideal he swallowed it whole without stopping to think whether it was quite digestible. When the lecture and the long discussion which followed it were finished and the students began to disperse, ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... staring straight upward at one of the poplar trees, where a gray squirrel was playing among the branches, and for several minutes before he was aware of her presence, she watched him with her impassioned, yet not wholly uncritical, gaze. The sunlight sparkled in his eyes, which shone brightly blue against the red brown of his flesh; and between his smiling lips, which were thick and somewhat loosely moulded, she saw the gleaming whiteness of his teeth. She could not explain—she ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... were fading before the theatres were closed. Davenant collected what he could in the way of information from old people of the stage; he told Shakespearean anecdotes in conversation; a few reached the late day when uncritical inquiries began, say 1680-90 at earliest. The memories of ancient people of the theatre and clerks and sextons at Stratford were ransacked, to very ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... or still invoke his name. The gospel was truth and life to him, not a mere subject for strife and debate. It was far otherwise with the Arians. On one side their doctrine was a mass of presumptuous theorizing, supported by alternate scraps of obsolete traditionalism and uncritical text-mongering; on the other it was a lifeless system of spiritual pride and hard unlovingness. Therefore Arianism perished. So too every system, whether of science or theology, must likewise perish which presumes ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin |
