"Unintelligent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... matter." She said, "Oh, was that a lie? And how could I mention her one single fault, and she is so good?—It would have been cruel." I said, "One ought always to lie, when one can do good by it; your impulse was right, but your judgment was crude; this comes of unintelligent practice. Now observe the results of this inexpert deflection of yours. You know Mr. Jones's Willie is lying very low with scarlet-fever; well, your recommendation was so enthusiastic that that girl is there nursing him, and the worn-out family have ...
— On the Decay of the Art of Lying • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... of people—unintelligent, superstitious, uncivilized! What a dismal drain they will be on the race's strength! Not merely will they lessen its ultimate chance of achievement; their hardships will always distress and preoccupy ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... be," he said to himself, "that I shall have to take it to an asylum, but I shall let it stay there only during the period of unintelligent howling. When it is old enough to understand that I am its master, then I shall take it in hand again. It is ridiculous to suppose that a human being cannot be as easily ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... is of doubtful value in the discipline of children, because it is so unintelligent; it is well called blind. Blind submission to authority in intellectual matters, on the part of either children or adults, is no less objectionable. It is not any person's mere assertion that makes a thing true, but evidence of some sort; and evidence is likewise ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... hard eyes, low, unintelligent forehead, and sneering yet self-indulgent mouth, had been for five years the mistress of her fate. The slave had feared to speak lest she should say the wrong thing, had hesitated before taking the most insignificant step, knowing that ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... fully developed, their flesh and clothing being alike green. They stood perfectly lifeless upon their branches, which swayed softly in the breeze, and their wide open eyes stared straight ahead, unseeing and unintelligent. ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... Auntie, with her unintelligent gaze divided between his movements and the glove which so reluctantly covered her arm, ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... operation which can be effected by Nature, for man interferes intelligently. Reduced to its elements, this argument implies that an effect produced with trouble by an intelligent agent must, a fortiori, be more troublesome, if not impossible, to an unintelligent agent. Even putting aside the question whether Nature, acting as she does according to definite and invariable laws, can be rightly called an unintelligent agent, such a position as this is wholly untenable. Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... evenings from one small retailer's to another, and to annex in each the bulk of the week's takings. His was thus an active life, and to a man of the type of a rat, filled with recondite joys. An unexpected loss, a law suit, and the unintelligent commentary of the judge upon the bench, combined to disgust him of the business. I was so extraordinarily fortunate as to find, in an old newspaper, a report of the proceedings in Lyall v. The Cardiff Mutual Accommodation ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... considered this to be the noblest bit of mortuary verse ever written; but since reading the article in the Sydney paper I have changed my opinion, and now think it poor. Bonaparte, however, was a great subject, and even the most unintelligent mortuary verse-maker could not fail to achieve distinction when the Longwood visitors' book was given up unto him. Frenchmen, especially, figure largely. Here, ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... The Goddess of Liberty was impure. As we read the poem addressed to her, not long since, by Beranger, we can scarcely refrain from tears as painful as the tears of blood that flowed when "such crimes were committed in her name." Yes! Man, born to purify and animate the unintelligent and the cold, can, in his madness, degrade and pollute no less the fair and the chaste. Yet truth was prophesied in the ravings of that hideous fever, caused by long ignorance and abuse. Europe is conning a valued ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... is a white-faced house, with little unintelligent eyes of windows, burnt blind, it seems, in the sun—neat with the neatness ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... the only thing to do was to tumble into bed, and books were out of the question. He was being "hardened," as his father called it, but not in a desirable way; for while his body remained slender and weak as ever, his mind became daily more stupid and unintelligent. ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... The preaching which appeals to the Anglo-Saxon race appears cold and unmeaning to the warm-blooded Negro; the preaching which arouses in him a real religious fervor appears to his cold-blooded neighbor imaginative, passionate, unintelligent. To attempt to force the two races into a fellowship distasteful to both, to attempt to require the two to listen to the same type of sermon and join in the same forms of worship, is a "reform against ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 7, July, 1889 • Various
... into an arena for warring Hierarchies, warring for the universe, or it was like the wild countenance of God defeated, and flying marred and bloody from His enemies. But many evenings I watched with unintelligent awe, believing it but a portent of the un-sheathed sword of the Almighty; till, one morning, a thought pricked me like a sword, for I suddenly remembered the great sun-sets of the later nineteenth century, witnessed in Europe, America, and, I believe, over the world, after the eruption of ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... forward to seeing and the one which was now turned up to him was that between a mirror and a pane of glass. In a mirror there would have been reflection and responsiveness. Here there was nothing but a blank, shiny stare, vitreous and unintelligent. Jasper Fay, it seemed to his son, had passed into some pitiful ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... but no! Far away as my thoughts had been, my ears had mechanically retained those last melodious strains, and I answered, promptly, "Latitudinarianism of an unintelligent emotionalism!" ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... consolation. He gives freely the affection one has been disappointed in finding elsewhere, and seems to stand by one in his brute vigour and generous unreasoning nature like a true friend. I always feel inclined to pour my griefs into poor Brilliant's unintelligent ears, and many a tear have I shed nestling close to my favourite, with my arms round him like a child's round its nurse's neck. That very afternoon, when I had made sure there was no one else in the stable, I leaned my head ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... obvious to all who are concerned with this art that a knowledge of the structure and functions of these delicate arrangements of Nature would be at least of great if not of essential importance. The engineer knows the structure and uses of each part of his engine, and does not trust to unintelligent observation of the mere working of mechanisms which others have constructed. The architect studies not only the principles of design, etc., but also the nature and relative value of materials. In his own way he is a kind of anatomist ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... be, I owe much to that close attention to the discharge of my duties which I was compelled to pay, for nine successive years, from day to day, by Mr. Mason's efforts and arguments at the same bar. Fas est ab hoste doceri; and I must have been unintelligent, indeed, not to have learned something from the constant displays of that power which I had so much occasion to see and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... interchange of conventional talk, mere gregariousness, must be eschewed by an artist, for the simple reason that his temptation will be to expend his force in entering into closer relations with the casual, and possibly unintelligent, person than the necessities of the situation warrant. The artist is so impatient of dulness, so greedy of fineness, in all his relations, that he is apt to subject himself to a wasteful strain in talking to unperceptive and unappreciative persons. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... all of the testing work at Good Housekeeping Institute is to test every device so as to duplicate the conditions under which the device will be used by the ultimate consumer, be she intelligent or unintelligent. It has furthermore been the Institute's special province to express to each manufacturer the trend of consumer demand as seen, not only through the Institute's use of appliances, but through the thousands of consumers who report ...
— The Consumer Viewpoint • Mildred Maddocks
... a great measure the fault of artists themselves if they suffer from this partly unintelligent, but thoroughly well-intended, patronage. If they seek to attract it by eccentricity, to deceive it by superficial qualities, or take advantage of it by thoughtless and facile production, they necessarily degrade themselves ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... foundation, the root of justification and cannot justify the sinner until it has absorbed the other preparatory acts required by Holy Scripture and transformed them into perfect love. This fact was already pointed out by St. Augustine. "Unintelligent persons," he says, "with regard to the Apostle's statement: 'We conclude that a man is justified by faith without the works of the law,' have thought him to mean that faith is sufficient for a man, even if he leads a bad life and has no good deeds to allege. ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... came down, carrying an electric candle like the footman's. Its rays illumined from below one of those faces of crude comeliness common to her class, the face of an animal not unintelligent but first and last an animal. With a hand on the lower newel-post she hesitated, looking up toward the room of her mistress, as if lost in thought. Poised thus, her lifted face partly turned away from Lanyard, its half-seen expression was hopelessly ambiguous. But some secret ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... a very interesting matter, and were it borne in mind by our modern legislators they would escape a good deal of unintelligent legislation; that is, the distinction between a sin and a crime. A sin is against the church, or against one's conscience; matter, therefore, for the priest, or one's spiritual adviser. A crime is an offence against other men; that is, against the state, in which all are ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... recent years proved inefficient; yet the land laws themselves have not been so much to blame as the lax, unintelligent, and often corrupt administration of these laws. The appointment on March 4, 1907, of James R. Garfield as Secretary of the Interior led to a new era in the interpretation and enforcement of the laws governing the public lands. His administration of the Interior Department ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... That instinctive, unintelligent force in the state—that blind volcanic force—which foolish states dare to keep pent up within them, is that which the philosopher's eye is intent on also; he, too, has marked this as the primary source of mischief,—he, too, is at war with it,—he, too, would annihilate it; but he has his own ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... made inquiries concerning this soldier, learned that he was a good fellow, and not unintelligent. On the next promotion he was made sub-lieutenant. It is impossible to give an idea of the effect of such occurrences on the army. They were a constant subject of conversation with the soldiers, and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Liverpool Medical Institute (ibid., p. 617) had previously reported that a considerable number of patients stated that they had suffered a distinct loss of sexual feeling. Lawson Tait, however, throws doubts on the reliability of the Committee's results, which were based on the statements of unintelligent ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... maintained an existence during the two years and a half that he was with it at Jamestown. And to effect this mere holding on, with the vagabond crew that composed most of the colony, and with the extravagant and unintelligent expectations of the London Company, was a feat showing decided ability. He had the qualities fitting him to be an explorer and the leader of an expedition. He does not appear to have had the character necessary to impress his authority on a community. He was quarrelsome, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... experience, the belief in the order of nature—by whatever phrase we designate the same instinct—is to operate as a practical basis for the affairs of life and the carrying on of human society.' To sum up, the belief in the order of nature is general, but it is 'an unintelligent impulse, of which we can give no rational account.' It is inserted into our constitution solely to induce us to till our fields, to raise our winter fuel, and thus to meet the future on the perfectly gratuitous supposition that it ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... robes; then, tying up the muscles of his face into a knot, expressive of utter abstraction, he struck the bell upon the table thrice, burnt a little incense, and read a passage from the sacred book, which he reverently lifted to his head. The congregation joined in chorus, devout but unintelligent; for the Word, written in ancient Chinese, is as obscure to the ordinary Japanese worshipper as are the Latin liturgies to a high-capped Norman peasant-woman. While his flock wrapped up copper cash in paper, and threw them before ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... that the advertising sections of newspapers are no different than farming lands. And it is as preposterous to hold the publisher responsible for the outcome of unintelligent copy as it would be unjust to blame the soil for bad seed and poor culture. Every advertiser gets exactly the same number of readers from a publisher and the same readers—after that it's up to him—the results fluctuate in accordance with the intelligence and the pulling ...
— The Clock that Had no Hands - And Nineteen Other Essays About Advertising • Herbert Kaufman
... explain. The first comprises all those manifest indications of provident forethought, intelligent design, and moral purpose, which appear in the course of Nature, and which cannot be accounted for by a blind, unintelligent, undesigning cause. The second comprises all those facts of consciousness which bear witness to the moral nature and responsible agency of man, as the subject of a government which rewards and punishes his actions, in some measure, even here, and which irresistibly suggests the idea of a future ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... Matthew Arnold, had he visited Mount Zion, might have discoursed with a charmingly insolent urbanity on the genius for ugliness in English dissent, and the supreme need of bringing a current of new ideas to play upon the unintelligent use of its traditional formulae. And Matthew Arnold would have been right. These are the precise subjects of Browning's somewhat rough-and-ready satire. But Browning adds that in Mount Zion, love, at least in its rudiments, is present, and where ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... than any other class, however altruistic that class may be; but I call your attention to two qualifications in that statement. One is that the class should be intelligent enough to know its own interests. The theory that Hottentots or any other uneducated, altogether unintelligent class is fitted for self-government at once or to take part in government is a theory that I wholly dissent from—but this qualification is not applicable here. The other qualification to which I call your ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... small devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on deck. But now and again an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip him bodily, make him gasp and writhe under the blankets, and then the unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such sensations filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost. Then fine weather returned, and he ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Perceval there is neither a Weeping Maiden, nor a Bier, and the passage must therefore be either an unintelligent addition by a scribe familiar with the Gawain versions, or an interpolation from a source which did contain the features in question. So far as the texts at our disposal are concerned, both features belong exclusively ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... great cleverness into the story Mother Waterhouse told, or the jurors and the judges neglected the first principles of common sense and failed to inquire about the facts.[6] The questions asked by the queen's attorney reveal hardly more than an unintelligent curiosity to know the rest of the story. He shows just one saving glint of skepticism. He offered to release Mother Waterhouse if she would ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... a desire to square accounts with Marix. But it was part of his nature to excuse the weak, and on the way down to Wall Street the remembrance of the broker's timid-looking wife and the three little ones came to him. It was easy, after all, to forgive. Marix was too unintelligent to understand that it paid to be honest. "Perhaps," he reasoned, "God meant that even the fools and ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... watching the embers flare up and die. "I'm not proud of the States," he went on, as if speaking to something which he saw in the flames. "I can't be, after the ruin their unintelligent propaganda and legislation have brought upon Alaska. But they're our salvation and conditions are improving. I concede we have factions in Alaska and we are not at all unanimous in what we want. It's going to be largely a matter of education. ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... medium of dialogue is in cases where its form might mislead the reader into mistaking fiction for fact, and the author's invention for the ipsissima verba of the characters he portrays. I hope that this book will attract no readers so unintelligent. Having chosen dialogue for these studies of historical events because I find in it a natural and direct means to the interpretation of character, my main scruple is satisfied when I have made it plain that they have no more ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... physical changes proceed more quickly as thoughts become more comprehensive, feelings more intense, and will, stronger." Does the time it needs to think, feel, and will become less? And we may add are the physical and mental processes of the intelligent brain, quicker, or slower than the unintelligent? For if it is the sensitive quick witted organisation, which is destined to live twice as long as it does now, how will it bear the burden of such added years? Leaving aside inquiries into Time, and Space Sense—(and what ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... mean, indignant and not unintelligent country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,—and that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxagoras was pounded! I did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old folios in calf and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... corps to prevent an outbreak of typhoid, dysentery, and the ordinary train of nearly fatal diseases which are common to large military camps, and which are almost inevitable when dealing with an unorganized and unintelligent mob. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... peasants sleeping under the hedges. They were just as homeless, friendless, just as much in need of food and sleep, and in their eyes was the same look of fear and horror. Bernhardi tells his countrymen that war is glorious, heroic, and for a nation an economic necessity. Instead, it is stupid, unintelligent. It creates nothing; ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... brutal, selfish, rude; he drank and smoked to excess; physical hardships and poverty had depraved him. Moreover, he considered himself persecuted; and the effect of that idea is to make persons who are unintelligent persecutors and bigots themselves. To Philippe's conception of life, the universe began at his head and ended at his feet, and the sun shone for him alone. The things he had seen in New York, interpreted by his practical ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... there are husbands and wives, the latter will be guided, in greater or less degree, by the opinions of the former. The women who do not read, the women who do not care, the women who do not think, invariably take the opinions of the men nearest them, no matter how ignorant and unintelligent these men may be; and the women who do read and care and think,—but it may be as well to carry the ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... going," said the ardent bishop of Hippo, "to show you, by an example, the power of formulas. It deals, it is true, with a diabolical operation. But if it be established that formulas taught by the Devil have effect upon unintelligent animals or even on inanimate objects, how can we longer doubt that the effect of the sacramental formulas extends to the minds of beasts ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the natural world through the books or the eyes of others. All this talk about "babbling brooks" is a stereotyped humbug. Brooks never "babble." To babble is to be unintelligent and imperfect of tongue. But when the brooks speak, they utter lessons of beauty that the dullest ear can understand. We have wandered from the Androscoggin in Maine to the Tombigbee in Alabama, and we never ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... been laid to economic pressure. Frequently the pressure has existed, but the driving force behind woman's aspiration toward freedom has lain deeper. It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... into its view all the facts of the case, nor is influenced by these, has no right to call itself strength. It is only, to quote a modern saying—I know not whether true of the person to whom it was originally applied or no—is 'only a lath painted to look like iron.' Unintelligent obstinacy is folly, like the conduct of some man who sticks to his pick and his task in a quarry after the bugle has warned him of an impending explosion, which will blow ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the Giant. "But it is the flesh of unintelligent creatures. I have not yet shed the blood of any being that can talk with the tongue ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... the doors, when he should have wholly relieved himself of his testimony. I confess to a satisfaction in the self act of preaching, nor do I esteem a discourse to be wholly thrown away even upon a sleeping or unintelligent auditory. I cannot easily believe that the Gospel of Saint John, which Jacques Cartier ordered to be read in the Latin tongue to the Canadian savages, upon his first meeting with them, fell altogether upon stony ground. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... subject, and impart to his client honest knowledge concerning the various matters about which he is consulted? That he shall keep abreast of the tide of discovery and improvement, and that upon these subjects he shall know, not trusting to mere hearsay or to unintelligent prejudice ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... one intelligence is in many ways connected with beings whose minds differ, owing to the difference of their own acts' (sl 43, second half). Intelligence, pure, free from stain and grief, &c., which constitutes the intelligent element of the world, and unintelligent matter—these two together constitute the world, and the world is the body of Vasudeva; such is the purport of sloka 44.—The next sloka sums up the whole doctrine; the words 'true and untrue' there denote what in the preceding verses had been called 'being' and ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... "The Dream." The gross canaille are represented, but now no longer the most accurate in colour and most absorbing in interest of the characters of the play, or unessential to the evolution of the plot. They have a distinct importance in the movement of the piece, and represent the unintelligent, material resistance to the work of regeneration that Prospero seeks to carry out, and which must be controlled by him, just as Sebastian and Antonio form the intelligent, designing resistance. The spirit ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... his thumb to his broad snub-nose, with that look of shrewdness which a child, spending much of his time in the street, so soon learns to throw over his features, however unintelligent in themselves. Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him, without answering his mother's ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... generals, the conceited and swaggering West Pointers; oh, how very little, if at all are they aware of the inexhaustible ingenuity and resources, the marvelous skill and power of such intelligent masses as those of which they are the unintelligent, the unsympathising and the thoroughly ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... billet of wood which Lew kept beside his chair all that day, and had guessed its purpose, and that it was a mute witness to the reputation which one Ford Campbell bore among his fellows. Lew was too wise to consider for a moment the revolver meant to protect the contents of the safe. Even the unintelligent know better than to throw a lighted match ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... "Beds Barrack" the method is slightly different and is just as ably shown on Sealed pattern X.B.452. During moments of intense depression one is apt to fear the war-winning properties of X.B.451 and 452 have not been sufficiently appreciated by an unintelligent public. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... that the probable effect of this new kind of industry upon the character of the people was most attentively considered by the founders. In Europe, as most of them had personally seen, the operatives were unintelligent and immoral, made so by fifteen or sixteen hours' labor a day, and a beer-shop on every corner. They caused suitable boarding-houses to be built, which were placed under the charge of women known ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... scowled, but another element was present in their expressions too. They thought the question unintelligent. ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... other great man, has been the object of much unintelligent, and misdirected adulation, but his greatness, so far from suffering diminution, grows more apparent with the passage of time and the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... grace and dexterity, that was to her the revelation of a descending god. She found herself face to face with him,—his features cleansed of dirt and grime, his hair plastered in wet curls on his low forehead. It was a face of cheap adornment, not uncommon in his profession—unintelligent, unrefined, and even unheroic; but she did not know that. Overcoming a sudden timidity, she nevertheless told him briefly and concisely of the arrival and departure of ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Decorative Arts, which I have to speak about: it is only in latter times, and under the most intricate conditions of life, that they have fallen apart from one another; and I hold that, when they are so parted, it is ill for the Arts altogether: the lesser ones become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent, incapable of resisting the changes pressed upon them by fashion or dishonesty; while the greater, however they may be practised for a while by men of great minds and wonder-working hands, unhelped by ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... welcomed me warmly, and their rather unintelligent maid had just brought in the saddle of mutton—a great weakness of mine—when we heard a firm knock on the hall door. She returned to say that someone wanted to speak to Mr. Brown immediately. "Who is it?" I demanded. "I don't know, Sir," said ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... military courage, but of courage of all sorts, tried both amid pleasures and pains. Laches replies that this universal courage is endurance. But courage is a good thing, and mere endurance may be hurtful and injurious. Therefore (3) the element of intelligence must be added. But then again unintelligent endurance may often be more courageous than the intelligent, the bad than the good. How is this contradiction to be solved? Socrates and Laches are not set 'to the Dorian mode' of words and actions; for their words are all confusion, although their ...
— Laches • Plato
... forgotten incidents, revealed and coloured by the light of after events! This is a penalty of genius, and it is sometimes called fame, as if fame were a gift given of the world out of a boundless and unintelligent curiosity, and not the life-record of work achieved. It is easier to collect ana and to make them into the patchwork pattern of a life than to read the character of the man in his writings; and patchwork, of necessity, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... advance have been either utterly lost sight of, or grossly confused with mere material gain. At length we see the Conservative reaction in full swing, and who knows where it will land us? It seems to be leading to the vulgarest and most unintelligent form of chauvinism. In politics our need now is of brains. A stupid routine, or a rowdy excitability, had taken the place of the old progressive Liberalism, which kept ever in view the prime interests of civilisation. We want men ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... Shiraz wine—would one call that reason? Nature had need of animals, plants, inanimate bodies; there are in these creatures, devoid of reason, marvels which serve for exercise of the reason. What would an intelligent creature do if there were no unintelligent things? What would it think of, if there were neither movement, nor matter, nor sense? If it had only distinct thoughts it would be a God, its wisdom would be without bounds: that is one of the results of my meditations. As soon as there is a mixture of confused ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... enthusiasts still applauded with vociferation, with mystic faith, with sublime obstinacy. It was carrying on a sort of religious war against the base apathy of the rest of the audience. It was determined to force its belief down the throats of the unintelligent mob. It had made up its mind that until it had had its way the world should stand still. No encore had yet been obtained, and the gallery was set on an encore. The clapping fainted, expired, and then broke ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... Forum with a guide to the most recent excavations in their hands. Mrs. Hilary felt completely uninterested to-day in recent or any other excavations. But, obsessed even now with the old instinctive desire (the fond hope, rather) not to seem unintelligent before her children, more especially when she was not on good terms with them, she accompanied Nan, who firmly and deftly closed or changed the subjects of unlawful love, Stephen Lumley, Capri, returning to England, and her infant ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... survivor, has human pity in the heart of him full surely. But George is dead; careless of it now. [Coxe (i. 266) is "indebted to his friend Nathaniel Wraxall" for these details,—the since famous Sir Nathaniel, in whose Memoirs (vague, but NOT mendacious, not unintelligent) they are now published more at large. See his Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, &c. (London. 1799), i. 35-40; also Historical Memoirs (London, 1836), iv. 516-518.] After sixty-seven years of it, he has flung his big burdens,—English ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to deal with children of lazy, unintelligent, and indifferent character, we should confine ourselves to practicing verbal suggestion in their waking state, and to be effective it would be best to follow the experiments at Nancy, especially of Dr. Liebeault, and make great effort to gain the implicit confidence ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... because it has power given neither to individuals nor to other corporations, it is a settled policy that both the State and general Government should have the power to regulate its rates, and should in every way prevent unjust discrimination. Both problems are very difficult, however, and the unintelligent adjustment of rates has frequently resulted in injustice both to the roads ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... great transformation, social, religious, and political. The process is full of embarrassments, difficulties, and perils. These are the dominant marks of our era. To set them all down to popular government is as narrow, as confused, and as unintelligent as the imputation in a papal Encyclical of all modern ills to Liberalism. You cannot isolate government, and judge it apart from the other and deeper forces of the time. Western civilisation is slowly entering on a new stage. Form of government ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... over himself when he undertakes to teach a dog. The dog takes after the master. Show me your dog and I'll tell you what you are. The criminal has a dog who is a rogue. The burglar's dog is a thief; the country yokel has a stupid, unintelligent dog. A kind, thoughtful ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... looking at the Princess, so arranged the curtain that no stray ray should fall on her. It was again unsatisfactory, and again the exhausted Princess was obliged to interrupt her conversation about mysticism and correct the unintelligent Phillip, who was pitilessly tormenting her. For a moment Phillip's eyes ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... interest, the opportunity to read it, and our young woman had, thereupon, on the morrow, directed her maid to carry it to Mrs. Verver's apartments. She was afterwards to observe that this messenger, unintelligent or inadvertent, had removed but one of the volumes, which happened not to be the first. Still possessed, accordingly, of the first while Charlotte, going out, fantastically, at such an hour, to cultivate ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... family, in fact. The sort of thing I don't want is the Athanasian Creed. I can't regard it simply as a picturesque monument of ancient and ferocious piety. It seems to me an overhanging cloud of menace and mystification! It doesn't hurt the unintelligent Christian, of course—he simply doesn't understand it; but to the moderately intelligent it is like a dog barking furiously which may possibly get loose; a little more intelligence, and it is all right. You know the dog is safely tied up! Again, I don't mind the cursing ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... together with the vault of the apse of S. Giovanni[10] and various portions of the side aisles, and the so-called Camera di S. Paolo, are covered by frescoes of Correggio and his pupil Parmegiano. These frescoes have suffered so much from neglect and time, and from unintelligent restoration, that it is difficult in many cases to determine their true character. Yet Toschi did not content himself with selections, or shrink from the task of deciphering and engraving the whole. He formed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... established fact. And history proves that most Zen masters enjoyed a long life in spite of their extremely simple mode of living. Its mental discipline, however, is by far more fruitful, and keeps one's mind in equipoise, making one neither passionate nor dispassionate, neither sentimental nor unintelligent, neither nervous nor senseless. It is well known as a cure to all sorts of mental disease, occasioned by nervous disturbance, as a nourishment to the fatigued brain, and also as a stimulus to torpor and sloth. It ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... and all uncharitableness—which make for world anarchy. He has never been able to love God because he has never been able to love his neighbour. It is in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in the most Christian nations, not the most pagan, that we find unintelligent conditions of industrialism which lead to social disorder, and a vulgar disposition to self-assertion which makes for war. History and Homicide, it has been said, are indistinguishable terms. "Man is born free, and ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... frying come chiefly from unintelligent and careless methods of applying it. It is somewhat wasteful of food material, particularly of meats; although, if the fat which is fried out in the process can be used in other cooking, or turned into ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... have begun individual features predominate, and what has been a rich canvass becomes a speaking portrait. Constitutional questions, in which Livy is singularly ill informed, are hinted at, [36] but generally in so cursory and unintelligent a way, that it needs a Niebuhr to elicit their meaning. And Livy is throughout led into fallacious views by his confusion of the mob (faex Romuli, as Cicero calls it) which represented the sovereign people in his day, with the sturdy ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... and organiser, individually cowardly, individually swayed by appetite, collectively incalculable. The memory of countless figures in pale blue canvas came before his mind. Millions of such men and women below him, he knew, had never been out of the city, had never seen beyond the little round of unintelligent grudging participation in the world's business, and unintelligent dissatisfied sharing in its tawdrier pleasures. He thought of the hopes of his vanished contemporaries, and for a moment the dream of London in Morris's quaint old News from Nowhere, and ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... was young and florid, tall and strong. The parting of his curly Saxon locks began in the center of his forehead, traveled over the top of his head, and ended, rigidly-central, at the ruddy nape of his neck. His features were as perfectly regular and as perfectly unintelligent as human features can be. His expression preserved an immovable composure wonderful to behold. The muscles of his brawny arms showed through the sleeves of his light summer coat. He was deep in the ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... come after you—and on Saturdays at least they are many—to climb the fence. The Silent Pool, when I saw it first, a little disappointed me. I ought to have known that it would, because everybody could tell me where it was, even quite unintelligent people walking about the road two miles away. I think I hoped the pool would be, not only solitary and sequestered, but entirely deserted by human beings; a pool on which you came suddenly, lying hidden in the heart of ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... Some feeling of a tear, some half-formed drop that was almost a tear, came to her eye as she thought of his fate. How foolish he had always been, how unintelligent, how deficient in all those qualities which recommend men to women! But the very memory of his deficiencies created something like a tenderness in his favor. Hugh was disagreeable, nay, hateful, by reason of the power ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... there ought to be other animals on each hand having affinity to him, whereas there are none, the resemblance of the orangs being one of mere analogy. Mr. Swainson therefore considers our race as standing apart, and forming a link between the unintelligent order of beings and the angels! And this in spite of the glaring fact that, in our teeth, hands, and other features grounded on by naturalists as characteristic, we do not differ more from the simiadae than the bats do from the lemurs—in spite ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... the type of man who really never knew all the facts about his own affairs. Many of the brightest kept their books in such a way that they did not actually know when they were making money on a certain operation and when they were losing. This unintelligent competition was a hard matter to contend with. Good old-fashioned common sense has always been a mighty rare commodity. When a man's affairs are not going well, he hates to study the books and face the truth. From the first, the men who managed the Standard Oil Company kept their books intelligently ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... table near our own. They wear the loose, coloured robes of soft material that are the usual wear of common adult Utopian women; they are both dark and sallow, and they affect amber and crimson in their garments. Their faces strike me as a little unintelligent, and there is a faint touch of middle-aged coquetry in their bearing that I do not like. Yet on earth we should consider them women of exceptional refinement. But the botanist evidently sees in this ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... achievement, his not very lengthy march to Paris in '70 and '71, the conditions of modern warfare have been almost completely revolutionized and in a direction that subordinates the massed fighting of unintelligent men to the rapid initiative of individualized soldiers. And, on the other hand, since those years of disaster, the Frenchman has learned the lesson of humility; he is prepared now sombrely for a sombre struggle; his is the gravity that precedes astonishing victories. In the air, in the open field, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... 1777. 'I shall inquire,' he says, 'about the harvest when I come into a region where anything necessary to life is understood.' Piozzi Letters, i. 349. At Lichfield he reached that region. 'My barber, a man not unintelligent, speaks magnificently of the harvest;' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... lofty; he dreamed of a relationship between university instruction and a liberal public culture which was not to be realised in his time. He was anything but complacent; had he been less intolerant in his hatred of unintelligent and indolent thought on the subjects that were near his heart, his way would have ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... and Colonel Beamish screw a heavy tripod to the deck and balance above it a quick-firing one-pounder. They worked very slowly, and to David, watching them from the lee scupper, they appeared extremely unintelligent. ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... than to reflect upon the unintelligent grounds on which people base their adherence to the principles of modern education. They are unable, in the first place, to get over the fact that their forefathers were brought up in the same fashion before them. It is a sheer impossibility for most people ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... dull, a. unintelligent, obtuse, stolid, loggerheaded, inapt, doltish, beetle-headed, blockish, sluggish; apathetic, unfeeling, insensate, callous; blunt, obtuse, dulled, pointless; dim, faint; tedious, uninteresting, prosaic, stupid, wearisome, jejune, depressing; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... expensive cuts of meat to wage earners who were by no means well-to-do, but who happened for the time to be getting good wages, than to people of larger means. One reason, perhaps, for extravagance in food and clothing on the part of unintelligent people who find themselves unusually prosperous, is that they see no better way to spend their money. Those who find pleasure in books, in education for their children, in travel, in investing money ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... tendency, or to encourage it from a notion that it weans men from political passions and thus wards off revolutions, they might eventually produce the evil they seek to avoid, and a time might come when the inordinate passions of a few men, aided by the unintelligent selfishness or the pusillanimity of the greater number, would ultimately compel society to pass through strange vicissitudes. In democratic communities revolutions are seldom desired except by a minority; but a minority may sometimes effect them. I do not assert that democratic ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... this obscure and narrow view, was fundamentally characteristic of the man as well as of the epoch. It is not even so striking in his public life, where he failed, as in his poems, where he notably succeeded. For wherever we might expect a poet to be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in his poetry. And Charles is unintelligent even there. Of all authors whom a modern may still read, and read over again with pleasure, he has perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contempt. While it was true that orders had to be obeyed, there was no reason, Harry felt, why the lieutenant should not have shown some discretion. An officer of the regular army would have done so, he felt. But this man looked unintelligent and stupid. Harry felt that he might safely reply on his appearance. And he was right. The officer found himself in a quandary at once. His men were mounted on cycles; Harry was on foot. And Harry saw that he didn't quite ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston
... perhaps Mr. Belloc's most valuable contribution to the study of modern English history that he has destroyed piecemeal that unintelligent, unhistorical and false statement, found in innumerable textbooks and taught so glibly in our schools and universities, that "the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product of material and impersonal ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... new spirit from extending itself. Never was seen a more striking example of how much such a course of procedure defeats its own object. Left free, Jesus would have exhausted himself in a desperate struggle with the impossible. The unintelligent hate of his enemies decided the success of his work, and ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... fixing two intelligent blue eyes on dolly junior's unintelligent violet ones, and holding his toes. "Dorly carn't!" said he contemptuously. "Her legs gives. Besides, she's no inside, only brand." This was a new dolly, who had replaced Struvvel Peter, who perished in the accident. His legs had been ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... but nothing has parted them. It is not conceivable that anything ever will; success of arbitration, antecedently improbable, is demonstrably impossible. Most of the work of the world is hard, disagreeable work, requiring little intelligence. Most of the people of the world are unintelligent—unfit to do any other work. If it were not done by them it would not be done, and it is the basic work. Withdraw them from it and the whole superstructure would topple and fall. Yet there is too little of the work, and there are so many incapable of doing anything else that adequate ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... his own men and his own facilities, and it soon became painfully evident that they were not equal to the requirements of the situation. I watched the landing of supplies all day Tuesday, and formed the opinion that it was disorderly, unskilful, and unintelligent. In the first place, many of the steamers from which supplies were being taken lay too far from the beach; and there seemed to be no one who had authority or power enough to compel them to come nearer. As a result of this, ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... strongest man. Upon my word, I'm inclined to think that the rights of the weakest are even more detestable: they're sapping the thought of to-day, the weakest man is tyrannizing over the strong, and exploiting them. It really looks as though it has become a merit to be diseased, poor, unintelligent, broken,—and a vice to be strong, upstanding, happy in righting, and an aristocrat in brains and blood. And what is most absurd of all is this, that the strong are the first to believe it.... It's a fine subject for ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland |
