"Brainless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its attendant swarm of flies, and vultures soared in flocks in the air. The river was yellow with mud, and the air oppressively hot and heavy. Now and then a whiff of putrid air was blown across the deck. The three men watched the bodies drifting past, brainless skulls, eyeless sockets, floating along many of them as if they were swimming on their backs. "It is really a fine example of the power of civilization," said the stranger. "I don't approve of everything ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... scrolls, crackling as he brushed them aside. How long had the day lasted, then? And would it ever end? The vision of young Sagramore followed him. He had known Sagramore at Halifax and invited him to mess one night with the 46th—as brainless and sweet-tempered a boy as ever ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... trial of the candy on the first premonitory symptoms of a cough or influenza. The degree to which this system of advertising has since been carried has rendered it a bore and a nuisance. The usual result of almost any great and original achievement is, the production of a shoal of brainless imitators, who ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... were said to have met at a noted hotel or on change, when one accosted the other by the question, "Who did you marry?" "Ah," said he, "I married fifty thousand dollars. I forget her other name." Such men, however, are exceptions to the rule. There are brainless creatures called men, who will marry a pretty face, though the heart and brain be uncultured, provided there be associated with her sufficient of this world's goods to gratify a mercenary ambition; but the majority, both of ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... bright, interesting mind, the love of learning things, the desire to be keeping apace with just a little bit of the world's progress, and, best of all, teaching oneself how to live wisely and well. There never was—to my way of thinking—a brainless, silly woman who was beautiful. It takes the light of intellect, the splendor of sweet womanliness, the glory of kindness, unselfishness and goodness to complete a perfect picture ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... said, "you seem to me entirely vapid and brainless; at other times you say or do things which suggest that there are possibilities in you; that, properly stimulated and encouraged, you might overcome the handicap of large private means and do something worthwhile. I wonder if that is simply my imagination?" She watched me ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... Rastignac guided the brainless, blind creature concealed within the body. He was helped by the somatically-generated radar it employed to steer it past obstacles. When he came to the Rue des Nues, he slowed it down to a trot. There was no use tiring it out. Halfway up the ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... The skipper was a lardy-da sort of a beast, and fell foul of me on account of talking to her too much—so he told the girl's mother—who was a silly, brainless sort of a woman, and thought him a perfect gentleman—I knew him to be a beast. Between the two of them they made trouble enough for me, though the old gentleman stuck to me, and didn't believe in the skipper. And anyway the girl liked ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... In English! over this the brainless loons That cannot spell Esaias from St. Paul, Make themselves drunk and mad, fly out and flare Into rebellions. I'll have their bibles burnt. The bible is the priest's. Ay! fellow, what! Stand staring at me! ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... a crowded assemblage of wealth and fashion she may see one of her masterpieces in the dress-making art, torn into shreds under the clumsy heel of a Cabinet Minister, or a Duchess may speak unkindly in her hearing of her latest devices in floral decoration. Or, some brainless nincompoop may, in his ignorance of her profession, cast aspersions on the general character and behaviour of all who keep shops. And it may be that friends, after a prolonged period of non-payment, will desert her, and speak ill of her business. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... at the shame of them, Poster-Pan, Poltroons of the pigeon-liver. Your placards gibbet them, Poster-Pan, Who crowd like curs in the cowardly crush, Who flock like sheep in the brainless rush With fear ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... commented Don Jorge, coming up. "Those brainless buzzards, if they only knew it and had sense enough to unite, could strip every feather off that swaggering vulture and send him packing. Fools! And we poor Colombians, if we had the courage, could as easily throw the Church into the sea, holy candles, holy oils, holy incense ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... repudiated, misconstrued, vilified, by so many generations and ages of Galilean preachers and Pharisaic schoolmen)—Rabelais was content to paint the flesh merely, in its honest human reality—human at least, if also bestial; in its frank and rude reaction against the half brainless and wholly bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himself on the one hand, and Luther on the other, arose together to smite severally—to smite them hip and thigh, even till the going down of the sun; the mock sun or marshy meteor that served only to deepen the darkness encompassing on every side ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to be so pitiful that a wretched, brainless dog, when placed in a position like this, should be able to scramble out, while I, with the power of thinking given to me, with reason and some invention, was ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... ill enough in the Court of old," saith Father, "but it doth seem me we were scantly so brainless of old time as this. I shall send a letter to my cousin of Oxenford touching Walter. He must not ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... skull of a rebel," said Jonathan, with marked emphasis on the word, "blown by the wind from a spike on the bridge above us. I don't know whose brainless head it may be, but it'll do for my collection." And he tossed it carelessly into the ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... audience was so small. Tressa's confidence was no new thing; she had always believed in him—no more now than before. Conrad still clung to his megrims—phantom fears that had all but faded from Torrance's mind. As for the five hundred brainless creatures to whom his great victory should be a matter of personal pride, it meant no more to them than last ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... certain height, makes one inevitable mistake, and then as steadily falls, while many of her simple companions, whom she despises as weaklings, succeed from the very simplicity with which they follow the instinctive sagacity of pure and honest feeling. Colonel Rawdon Crawley, a brainless sensualist, whom Becky marries, and in some degree reforms, but who, by having an occasional twinkle of genuine sentiment in his heart, always was her superior, is drawn both with a breadth and a nicety ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... from the Mogul, Some elephant from Africa, I had been, Or some strange beast from the Amazonian Queen. As buzzards, widgeons, woodcocks, and such fowl, Do gaze and wonder at the broad-faced owl, So did these brainless asses, all amazed, With admirable Nonsense talked and gazed, They knew my state (although not told by me) That I could scarcely go, they all could see, They drank of my beer, that to me was given, But gave me not a drop to make all even, And that which in my mind was most amiss, ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... creator, and one, moreover, with the well-won reputation of Miss STELLA CALLAGHAN, what is there to say? After all she must know. As a portrait of futility, Jacynth is the most mercilessly realistic thing that I have met for some time. Pretty, brainless, egotistical, utterly unable ever to understand even the least of the men who loved her—this was Jacynth. The picture is so unsparing that (though I am not calling the book a masterpiece or free from dull moments) the very completeness of the dreadful ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... little fires would be raging over the crest and destroying acres and acres of forest-trees, to say nothing of causing the work all the farmers and forest-rangers would have in trying to control it. Just because a brainless scout forgot his duty!" The scorn in Alec's last words ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... had that brainless idea, they would do their utmost to hide it, and conceal their cards, so as to catch you afterwards.... But it was all ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... heads; they just have necks that grow up and are covered with hair. These brainless mollusks are now telling the people that the Sultan of Sulu is to capture Texas and that Japan is to invade Indianapolis; Germany is to capture Quebec, and France is to ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... interesting and modest knave; Scapin directly the reverse. He had no cause to boast so much of his tricks: they are so stupidly planned that in justice they ought not to have succeeded. Even supposing the two old men to be obtuse and brainless in the extreme, we can hardly conceive how they could so easily fall into such a clumsy and obvious snare as he lays for them. It is also disgustingly improbable that Zerbinette, who as a gipsy ought to have known how to conceal knavish tricks, should run out ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... "you wish to cause my death, you ecclesiastical idiot. The principal thing for you is to enjoy yourself; my sweet carcass, a thing accessory. Your pleasure will be my death, and then you'll canonise me perhaps? Ah, you have the plague, and you would give it to me. Go somewhere else, you brainless priest. Ah! touch me not," said she, seeing him about to advance, "or I will ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... yet twenty and it seems to me that I have lived thousands of years, and exhausted every sensation. I have seen every thing, learned every thing, experienced every thing; and I am tired of every thing, and satiated and nauseated. You see me looking like a brainless hoyden, I sing, I jest, I talk slang. My gayety surprises everybody. In reality, I am literally tired to death. What I feel I could not express, there are no words to render absolute disgust. Sometimes I say to myself, 'It is stupid to be so sad. What do you ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... whirlwind, hurricane, tornado, cyclone, typhoon Straight, perpendicular, vertical, plumb, erect, upright. Strange, singular, peculiar, odd, queer, quaint, outlandish. Strong, stout, robust, sturdy, stalwart, powerful. Stupid, dull, obtuse, stolid, doltish, sluggish, brainless, bovine. Succeed, prosper, thrive, flourish, triumph. Succession, sequence, series. Supernatural, preternatural, superhuman, miraculous. Suppose, surmise, conjecture, presume, imagine, fancy, guess, think, believe. Surprise, astonish, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... sure of it. These men will not stand fire, and small blame to them. What chance have they? As your captain says, he could annihilate the lot of them before they crushed in the front door. The men who ran away have far more sense than that brainless spalpeen who led them on, although I can see he is brave enough. One or two more useless attacks will lead him to a more conciliatory frame of mind, unless he appeals to the law, which is what I thought he would do; for I felt sure a sheriff would be in ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... wild men cried. "Oh, you forest pigs! On, on! Block the way through that valley, you brainless sons of jackals! Are you afraid? Ai! Stand close! Watch, Puran! Guard your post, Khusru! Now on, on—do not let them halt! ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... washin. Desdemony in fact don't have to git the water to wash her own hands with. But a low cuss named Iago, who I bleeve wants to git Otheller out of his snug government birth, now goes to work & upsets the Otheller family in most outrajus stile. Iago falls in with a brainless youth named Roderigo & wins all his money at poker. (Iago allers played foul.) He thus got money enuff to carry out his onprincipled skeem. Mike Cassio, a Irishman, is selected as a tool by Iago. Mike was a clever feller & a orficer in Otheller's army. He liked his tods too well, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... you poor fish!" Jack exploded unexpectedly, and smote Hank on his lantern jaw with the flat of his palm. "You hick from hick-town! You brainless ape! You ain't a man—you're a missing link! Give you a four-foot tail, by harry, and you'd go down the mountain swinging from branch to branch like the monkey that you are! What are you, you poor piece of cheese, to talk ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... rented a house and yard situate at the end of the field in which the young bird-fanciers had arrived, which house and yard he didn't occupy or keep any one else in. Nevertheless, like a brainless and unreasoning Briton, he persisted in maintaining on the premises a large stock of cocks, hens, and other poultry. Of course, all sorts of depredators visited the place from time to time: foxes and gipsies wrought havoc in the night; while in the daytime, I regret to have ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... coarse and brainless, Alden. I can't imagine a boy like my Joey falling in love with a woman like that. He ought to know better. Just ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... Collingwood has discharged his task, except, of course, Mr. Ruskin himself, who would certainly have scored through all the eulogies in passionate red ink and declared that his dear friend had selected for admiration the very parts of his work which were vile, brainless, and revolting. That, however, was merely Ruskin's humour, and one of the deepest disappointments with Mr. Collingwood is that he, like everyone else, fails to appreciate Ruskin as a humourist. Yet he was a great humourist: half the explosions which are solemnly scolded as "one-sided" ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... foes—although no more so. Neither side can claim any superiority on the average, though each can in individual cases, as regards courage. Foolhardiness does not imply bravery. A prize-fighter who refused to use his guard would be looked upon as exceptionally brainless, not as exceptionally brave; yet such a case is almost exactly parallel to that of ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... is obtained under the proper conditions it broadens the life. Everything has its value. Everything has a good use and a bad use. The forces of mind like wealth can be directed either for good or evil. A little rest will re-create forces. Too much rest degenerates into laziness, and brainless, dreamy longings. ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... make good matches in any one sense of the word. The struggling barrister, the clerk, the curate, the brainless masher—such are their prey; and if they make richer prizes than these, still the match cannot be called good; presently there is dis-union as the clever husband finds the pretty but nonsensical wife utterly unable to follow him through the paths of ...
— How to Marry Well • Mrs. Hungerford
... it, he strolled pensively down towards the swimming-pool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabby finery across the turf of the lower lawn. Odious birds! Their necks, thick and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up to the cruel inanity of their brainless heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. The fabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate their tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all the truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... up; the shades of the second floor were illumined: she was up there. Doing what? Sharply then he realized what a partial life she led, the decayed middle-class associates of the boarding-house, tired, brainless, and full of small talk, the lonesome evenings, the long days. He became more agitated, and climbed the stoop, unlocked his way into the house, went up the dim, soft, red-cushioned stairs, past the milky gas-globe in the narrow hall, and knocked ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... for some of our friends to realize that the silly gossip and idle curiosity which so entirely fill the lives of the brainless majority on earth can have no place in the more real life of the disciple; and so they sometimes enquire whether, even without any special wish to see, a clairvoyant might not casually observe some secret which another person was trying to keep, ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... weak. But I do not blame her; I pity her. When the time comes, as soon it will, when woman is no longer a puppet, dancing to the threads held by some brainless man—when a woman is not threatened with social ostracism for daring to follow her own conscience instead of that of her nearest male relative—then will be the time to judge her. It is not for me to betray the confidence reposed in me by a ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... mail. That is his maddest dream. I have heard him boast of it to his friends—the brainless boys who alone look up to him—I have even heard him rave of ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... will, such trifles kill. Comrade, for one good deed of yours, Your history shall not help to fill The mouths of many brainless boors. It may be death absolves or cures The sin of life. 'Twere hazardous To assert so. If the sin endures, Say only, "God, who has judged him thus, Be ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... of impudence; and when I have shown it to you, I will leave the rest to your own thoughts. Meanwhile I will say thus much: The man who refuses consideration and weight to a Plenary Council, brought to a conclusion in due and orderly fashion, seems to me witless, brainless, a dullard in theology, and a fool in politics. If ever the Spirit of God has shone upon the Church, then surely is the time for the sending of divine aid, when the most manifest religiousness, ripeness ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried. Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the earth with seven-league ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... would be paltering with the truth to say that he had not had far more champagne than was good for him. Also, the general of Monaco had brought a pack of cards with him, and was spoiling the harmony by trying to induce Prince Ping Pong Pang to find the lady. And the brainless laugh of the Mad Mullah ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... the pacification of the unreasonable contentions of Poland. I have to do there with brainless heads, each of which, instead of contributing to the common peace, on the contrary, throws impediments in the way of it by caprice and levity. My embassador has published a declaration adapted to open their eyes. But it is to be presumed that they will rather expose themselves to the last ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... he who hoarded wealth and did not spend it, and he who acquired science and did not practise it:—However much thou art read in theory, if thou hast no practice thou art ignorant. He is neither a sage philosopher nor an acute divine, but a beast of burden with a load of books. How can that brainless head know or comprehend whether he carries on his back a library or ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... it?" she exclaimed, with most unnecessary vehemence, I thought. "He wants the child and—and—well, you can see why he wants her, can't you? He is making the most desperate efforts to recover her. Max says the newspapers are full of the—the scandal. They are depicting me as a brainless, law-defying American without sense of love, honour or respect. I don't mind that, however. It is to be expected. They all describe the Count as a long-suffering, honourable, dreadfully maltreated person, and are doing what they can to help him in ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... always been a theory of mine," returned the Philosopher, "that by Nature she was intended to possess one. It is her admirers who have always represented her as brainless." ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before seen a woman. Caliban becomes the most sordid of clowns, and is allotted a sister, Milcha, who apes his coarse buffoonery. Ariel, too, is given a female associate, Sycorax, together with many ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... depends the whole debatable question of her character. According to the professed champions of that character, this conduct was a tissue of such dastardly imbecility, such heartless irresolution, and such brainless inconsistency as forever to dispose of her time-honored claim to the credit of intelligence and courage. It is certain that just three months and six days after the murder of her husband she became the wife of her husband's murderer. On February 11th she wrote to the Bishop of Glasgow, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... Manu. The great Manu, anticipated Darwin and Haeckel. Judge for yourself; the latter derives the genesis of man from a group of plastides, from the jelly-like moneron; this moneron, through the ameoba, the ascidian, the brainless and heartless amphioxus, and so on, transmigrates in the eighth remove into the lamprey, is transformed, at last, into a vertebrate amniote, into a premammalian, into a marsupial animal.... The vampire, in its turn, belongs to the species of vertebrates. You, being well read people all of ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... intermittent senses, is converted into motion, and the mind, yielding utterly to its environment, knows the happiness of faith, the ecstasy of compliance, the rapture of congruity. And this the dull dunces—the eyeless, earless, brainless and bloodless callosites of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... was within twenty yards, but invisible beyond the crowded undergrowth. The new arrival was perfectly attired, and handsome, in a supercilious, brainless way. He wore a Norfolk Jacket and knickerbockers, and his tanned boots were polished till they shone like glass. For a while he poked about the tent and its neighbourhood, and, having satisfied his curiosity, drew ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... stimulus-response loop, conditioned response, instinctive reaction, Pavlovian response. mimicry, aping (imitation) 19. moron, imbecile, idiot; fool &c 501; dumb animal; vegetable, brain dead. Adj. unendowed with reason, void of reason; thoughtless; vegetative; moronic [Sarc.], idiotic [Sarc.], brainless [Sarc.]. Adv. instinctively, like Pavlov's dog; vegetatively. V. mimic, ape ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... All authority comes from the people, and not from the aristocracy of the air. Upon these texts of scripture which I have just read rest the thrones of Europe, and these are the voices that are repeated from age to age by brainless kings and ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... bee. Bees and dogs share the faculty of direction, enabling them to find their way home, a talent implying a very miracle of infallible and yet unconscious intuition, and in the strictest sense a one-sided business qualification. The goose, the sturgeon, and the almost brainless tortoise possess the same gift in a transcendent degree; the oriole builds her first nest as skilfully as the last; the young bee constructs her hexagons with an ease and a uniform success that leave no possible doubt ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... contemporary writers, we say, find that the native is a creature something more than a monkey but much less than a man, an anthropoid, dull-witted, stupid, timid, dirty, cringing, grinning, ill-clothed, indolent, lazy, brainless, immoral, ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... who flourish Unruffled where gods would fall. For a conscience He carried a snug deceit that made him The man of the time and the place, whatever The time or the place might be. Were he sounding, With a genial craft that cloaked its purpose, Nigh to itself, the depth of a woman Fooled with his brainless art, or sending The midnight home with songs and bottles, — The cad was there, and his ease forever Shone with the smooth and slippery polish That tells the snake. That night he drifted Into an up-town haunt and ordered — Whatever it was ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... fools? Do you think any born imbecile is good enough to outwit the German Headquarters Staff? Do you think the lives of hundreds of his men—and perhaps the fate of thousands—can be entrusted to any brainless ass? An officer can't have too much brains. We're clamouring for brains. It's the healthy, brilliant-brained men like Randall that the Army's yelling for—simply yelling for," I repeated, bringing my hand down on ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... and withdrew. The couple were thus revealed to me clearly: both removed their cloaks, and there was 'the Varens,' shining in satin and jewels,—my gifts of course,—and there was her companion in an officer's uniform; and I knew him for a young roue of a vicomte—a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely. On recognising him, the fang of the snake Jealousy was instantly broken; because at the same moment my love for Celine sank under an extinguisher. A woman who could betray ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... "No, brainless one," said Dick; "the young earl, Lord Angleford. Rather a curious sort of customer, I should fancy, for nobody seems to know where he has been, or where he is. Left England suddenly—kind of disappearance. They couldn't find him in time for the funeral, and he's away still; but he's sent ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... condition for service. Its army, once the strongest in Europe, was now but a handful of poorly equipped and half-drilled men. Its finances were in a state of frightful disorganization. The government of a brainless king, a dissolute queen, and an incapable favorite had brought Spain into a condition in which she dared not raise a hand to resist ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... nor was its position strengthened by her assertion (unsupported by Mrs. Markham), that she was directly descended from Queen Elizabeth. Consequently, it was trying to Mrs. Thursby—who, as every one knows, was one of the brainless Copleys of Copley—that Mrs. Alwynn, who in the lottery of marriage had drawn an honorable, should take precedence of herself. To obviate this difficulty, Mrs. Thursby, with the ingenuity of her sex, had at one time introduced Mr. and Mrs. Alwynn ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life—production, politics, and education—rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... "As a brainless observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... late afternoons over bars, exchanging that brainless but well-willed talk by which men of his sort come to know men. He sat beside roped rings to witness the best muscle of the world—and not the worst brain—revive in ten thousand men the primeval brute. He frolicked with trifling painters, bookless poets, apprentice journalists, ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... attempt. He takes no notice of the sentence I have put in italics: nor does he mention my notice of him, unless he means to include me among those by whom he has been "ridiculed and sneered at" or "branded as a brainless heretic." I did neither one nor the other: I thought Mr. Upton a paradoxer to whom it was likely to be worth while to propound the definite assertion now in italics; and Mr. Upton does not find it convenient to take ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... the room for some air and some water. Returning refreshed, my composure resumed, I awaited the end, like a criminal doomed. With one demoiselle I essayed to converse, Whose sense I discovered was not worth a—purse. Disgusted with one so insipidly brainless, I turned from a task that was tedious and gainless, Adapted myself to my strange situation, And buried ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... on his head and a friend to set the pace; the scent of new leaves is upon them; they rejoice in the freshness of spring; over their heads the plane-tree whispers to the elm, perhaps the most glorious invitation to the brainless life ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... were neither more interesting nor less bigoted. Gay young men dazzled by operettas and races, they played lansquenet and baccarat, staked large fortunes on horses and cards, and cultivated all the pleasures enchanting to brainless fools. After a year's experience, Des Esseintes felt an overpowering weariness of this company whose debaucheries seemed to him so unrefined, facile and indiscriminate without any ardent reactions or excitement of nerves ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... you the greatest of boons, namely to open up the Rhine, and bring back prosperity to Frankfort, which you brainless, cowardly merchants have allowed to slip through your fingers, blaming now the Barons, now the Emperor, now the Electors; censuring everybody, in fact, except the real culprits ... yourselves. You speak of the money as a favor, but it is merely ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... can produce it at any time that it's wanted," Prescott made reply. "If anyone has been injured, Dodge, in health or in business, by your stupid, brainless bit of horse play and meanness, then I imagine that you'll find yourself in for a serious time of it. So now you know why we took the tires off your automobile. We knew that our campfire would show you the way to our camp, and that you'd surely be here to hear what we had to say to you. ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... friend and gossip to the Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena. It runs thus: "I beg your most reverend Lordship, not as a friend or servant, for I am not worthy to be either, but as a low fellow, poor and brainless, that you will cause Sebastian, the Venetian painter, now that Rafael is dead, to have some share in the works, at the Palace. If it should seem to your Lordship that kind offices are thrown away upon a man like me, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Dulness," in three cantos,—an imitation, in manner, of Goldsmith's "Double Transformation." The title is happy. The decline of Miss Harriet Simper from bellehood to an autumnal marriage, in Canto III., is more tiresome than the progress of Tom Brainless from the plough-tail to the pulpit, in Canto I. The Reverend Mr. Brainless, when called ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... thunder I had an idea of how much she knows," he muttered. "Did I act like a brainless idiot when I ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... Channel into Life, for which they had been prepared by a course of lectures on the Dangers of Paris. There also went the confidential secretaries, the clerks and shorthand typists, in their hundreds; degreeless, brainless beings, ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... and the Kewp is a careless child. But I feel it, Sara; I have to confess to you that I am a prey to the 'last infirmity of noble minds.'" After a moment he added, less sadly but more irritably, "That creature, now, brainless as it is, is just a doll. ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... says, "Be dull and soulless, like a beast of the field - a brainless animal, with listless eye, unlit by any ray of fancy, or of hope, or fear, or love, or life." And after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, it says, "Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... HERGESHEIMER has above all else the gift of suggesting atmosphere and colour (ought I not in mere gratitude to bring myself to say "color"?); his picture of Linda's amazing mother and the rest of the luxurious brainless company of her hotel existence has the exotic brilliance of the orchid-house, at once dazzling and repulsive. Later, in the course of her married life, inspiring and inspired by the sculptor Pleydon (in whose fate the curious may perhaps trace some echo of recent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... devising any, even fanciful, reason for such a supposition; upon which the comment of some foolish critic is," The sharpness of the satire is said to have stung the man so much that he never forgave it. "We have heard of the sting in the tail atoning for the brainless head; but in this doggerel the tail is surely as stingless as the head is brainless. For, 1st, Ten in the Hundred could be no reproach in Shakspeare's time, any more than to call a man Three-and-a-half-per-cent. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... baffling the inquisitor, foreseeing his wiles by intuition, evading his masked pitfalls by instinct. She was terribly afraid of him, yet more afraid of herself, afraid that she would break down and become a brainless, weeping thing. It was the sincerity of her fight against this weakness that made her so dangerous to the prosecuting attorney. He wanted to compel her to admit that her son had confessed his deed to her. She sought to avoid this admission. She had not guessed that he was ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... sympathy, and to have lost almost entirely that delicate relation with home that was at once so indefinable and so real. But he comforted himself by the thought that his elder son was not wholly wasting time as so many of the country squires were doing round about, absorbed in work that a brainless yeoman could do with better success. Ralph at least was occupied with grave matters, in Cromwell's service and the King's, and entrusted with high secrets the issue of which both temporal and eternal it was hard to predict. And, no doubt, the ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... shrine, she set about converting him with a haste which would have been dangerous but for its transparent dishonesty. In love herself, so far as such a woman could ever be in love at all, with the dashing and brainless jockey who managed her race-horses, she was quite accustomed, none the less, to add the passionate confessions and gold-sick protestations of others to her volume of amatory recollections, and it was not a little amazing that a mere youth should be discovered, so obstinate, ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... outrage on the Negro, at the expense of innocent childhood, a brainless fabrication ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... by unwritten law, to receive travellers and water their cattle; but our travellers, after one or two experiences, ceased to trouble them; for, added to the dirt, the men were sullen, the women moody, silent, brainless; the whole reception churlish. Staines detected in them an uneasy consciousness that they had descended, in more ways than one, from a civilized race; and the superior bearing of a European seemed to remind them what they had been, and might have been, and were not; so, after an attempt ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... recite, and recited fairly well for fear of reproof and bad marks should they be derelict. Out of school, books and bookish thoughts were cast to the four winds of heaven. Their talk was cheery chatter, as brainless as the rattle of grasshoppers in ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... the most refined, ingenious and humorous authors of our time." He asserts with capable judgment that Sterne's use of the borrowed passages, the additions and alterations, the individual tone which he manages to infuse into them, all preclude Sterne from being set down as a brainless copyist. Nicolai's attitude may be best illustrated by the ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... life save its crust? I tell you that I have been down in the depths, aye, single-handed, there in the devil's own cauldron, where creatures in the shape of men and women, the very sight of whom would turn you sick with horror, creep like spawn through life, brainless and soulless, foul things who would murder one another for the sake of a ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the leaden gravity of any money-monger; in whose profession all serious subjects are concluded. But he that shuns trifles must shun the world; out of whose reverend heaps of substance and austerity I can and will ere long single or tumble out as brainless and passionate fooleries as ever panted in the bosom of the most ridiculous lover. Accept it, therefore, good Madam, though as a trifle, yet as a serious argument of my affection; for to be thought thankful for all free and ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... living a simple and brainless life. No field-days, of course, and for this relief much thanks. We don't know in the least what is happening. Troops come and troops go, and guns go by during the night, and Red Cross waggons go hither and thither, and ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... like the brainless speech of a fool,— The lives travelling dark fears, And as a boy throws pebbles in a pool ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... walls where Folly holds her throne, And laughs to think Monro would take her down, 30 Where o'er the gates, by his famed father's hand,[244] Great Cibber's brazen, brainless brothers stand, One cell there is, conceal'd from vulgar eye, The cave of Poverty and Poetry. Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, Emblem of music caused by emptiness. Hence bards, like Proteus long in vain tied ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... designated the members of the Indian Civil Service by lesser mortals, such as army officers—who in return are contemptuously termed "brainless military popinjays" by the ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... manifestly absurd, he told himself with conviction, that it was not worth a second thought, but this did not prevent him from thinking of it again and again. What manner of undertaker could hope to obtain business by giving away foolish handbills in the street? Really, the whole thing had the air of a brainless practical joke, yet his intellectual fairness forced him to admit that as far as the man who had given him the bill was concerned, brainlessness was out of the question, and joking improbable. There had been depths in those little bright eyes which his ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... drove away to the station he congratulated himself on the fact that while his fiancee had a "touch of the tar-brush," as he expressed it, in her descent, her English bringing-up and society training under her worldly-minded but rather brainless aunt had led her to accept him as her future ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... of Parliament, compelled to give his vote on innumerable questions of which he does not understand the rudiments, and giving it at the dictation of party chiefs who themselves are controlled by the blind and brainless mechanism of the caucus! The people are the slaves of their representatives, the representatives of their chiefs, and the chiefs of a conscienceless machine! And that is the last word of governmental science! Oh, divine spirit of man, in what ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... speak. "Watson, you can unlock the door up there now, and we'll proceed to the Earl's usual place of business and disburse unto him his tenth stolen cuff-button. You fooled me all right yesterday morning, Tooter, but,—by the brainless cranium of Barnabas Letstrayed, I've certainly got the ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... to evoke gentle feeling or generous action. She had confounded the few genuine admirers, who, infatuated with her beauty, endowed her with all heavenly graces, awaiting only the awakening hand of their love, with the heartless or brainless fellows who were not particular about heavenly graces, provided a girl had a fine figure ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... is terribly true. In devising brainless amusements; in pursuing them with enormous vigor, and taking them with eager seriousness, our English people are the wonder of the world. They always were. And it is just as well; for otherwise their sensuality would become morbid and destroy them. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... determined to make merry. But, heigh-ho! the day of Maypoles was over and gone. From the beginning the jollity and laughter were forced, and the new era of perpetual spring festival soon became an era of brainless indecency. Even the wit of the Restoration was bitter, acid, sardonic (as Charles's own death-bed apology for being an unconscionable time a-dying). Generally it was ill-tempered, and employed to inflict pain. And there was not even wit in most of the plays. It is hard to see what even the worst ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... You see, Rosalind spent the afternoon with me yesterday, and I felt suddenly that it wasn't for me to be stuck up about her—what am I too but the pampered female idler, taking good things without earning them? It made me shudder. Hence this fit of blues. The pampered, lazy, brainless animal—it is such a terrific sight when in human form. Rosalind talked about Nan, Pamela. In her horrible way—you know. Hinting that she isn't alone in Rome, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... picked up parading on the marble terraces of the vulgar rich, and the former—Heaven knows where! along with his cynicism and his slang. Now the one, travelling salesman of blighting corrosive laughter, and the other, brainless ambassador of Fashion, their mission to kill among us love and labour, the first by persiflage, the second by display,—they have brought to us, even here in our peaceful sunny corner, the two pests, the saddest in the world, the jest which insists on being funny at any cost, and the cry ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... sun Stands all unconscious of the mischief done; Still the red beacon pours its evening rays For the lost pilot with as full a blaze,— Nay, shines, all radiance, o'er the scattered fleet Of gulls and boobies brainless at its feet. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... you do it? do it quick!" The Slacker's skull is very thick. It never penetrates the gray, What Uncle Sammy, has to say. "I want you NOW!" Oh, what a Mutt. The words fall on a brainless nut. ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... must head 'em off. Run for your life! We must get between the brainless creatures and the cliff ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... could not help imagining the sort of appearance she would make there; and the thought even was a momentary clog upon his tongue. How he used to despise these people! Especially he had despised the young men as brainless cowards in regard to their views of women and conduct toward them. All that was changed. He fancied now that they, on the contrary, would despise him, if only they could be aware of the lingering sense he entertained of his being ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her own better than the inexperienced girl of nineteen, whose native wit and downright honesty of purpose were more than equal to all the diplomacy of thrust and parry to be gained by living in society. Her stepmother, who was apparently as good-natured as she seemed brainless, was prepared to be gushing, but that was nipped in the bud by the way Dawn extended her pretty, firm hand with the dimpling wrist and knuckles and exquisitely ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... for woman suffrage which bases it upon a fancied grouping of women with the vile and brainless element in the country, appears to me to be at once the weakest and the meanest of all. When the United States Government invited its woman citizens to share in making the Columbian Exposition the most wondrous pageant of any age, they responded from every town and hamlet by sending of ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... city revolves around two brainless, goggle-eyed beasts, imported at much expense from the slopes of Fuji-yama. The care that is lavished on those heathen monsters passes belief. Maids are employed to carry them up and down stairs, and men ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... pretty, brainless madcap. When the abbe preached she laughed, and when he was angry with her she would give him a hug, drawing him to her heart, while he sought unconsciously to release himself from this embrace which nevertheless filled him with ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... anything, Little Brick," he said, "at least tell me what you think: and don't be too learned; remember I'm only a brainless fellow." ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... speed, And in my doom the fate of all I read; A certain doom, which nature's self must feel When the dread sentence checks the mundane wheel. Go! court the smiles of Hope, ye thoughtless crew! Her fairy scenes disclose an ample view To brainless men. But Wisdom o'er the field Casts her keen glance, and lifts her beamy shield To meet the point of Fate, that flies afar, And with stern vigilance expects the war. Perhaps in vain my admonitions fall, Yet still the Muse repeats the solemn call; Nor ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... confirm the doubt in Tommy's mind. Spirits were not very high at the mess just then. Nearly all the women had left for the Hills, and the increasing heat was beginning to make life a burden. The younger officers did their best to be cheerful, and one of them, Bertie Oakes, a merry, brainless youngster, even proposed an impromptu dance to enliven the proceedings. But he did not find many supporters. Men were tired after the polo. Colonel Mansfield and Major Burton were deeply engrossed with some news that had been brought by Barnes of the Police, and no one mustered energy ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... it devotes itself steadfastly to this end, and abjures extravagant aims. The genius, on the other hand, is at bottom a monstrum per excessum; just as, conversely, the passionate, violent and unintelligent man, the brainless barbarian, is a ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... personal belongings. Jean had pressed the first wind-flowers of the season between the pages where she had done her last scribbling, and these were crumpled and two petals broken, so she knew that the book had been opened carelessly and perhaps read with that same brainless laughter. ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... use fusees All grow by slow degrees Brainless as chimpanzees, Meagre as lizards; Go mad, and beat their wives; Plunge (after shocking lives) Razors and carving knives ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... "Foolish mob! brainless mob! swinish mob!" cried the stranger, when he at length stood beside the cart upon which the monster was still rending its hapless victim; "whither are ye running, and pressing, and crowding, and what are ye come to see? Know ye not that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... assumed the airs and attitude of exclusives, and would not associate with the rest. Every passion and habit of civilized, is represented in savage life. A perfect democracy, in any country and state of society, is a perfect lie, and a leveller is a brainless fool. There is also an aristocracy in crime and in virtue, in demons and in angels. The slaves are clad variously. Haj Ibrahim tried to give every one of his a blanket or barracan, more or less large. Besides this, the females had a short chemise, and a dark-blue ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... sleep that first night under the ledge of the dried waterfall. And all of the next day was only a haze to him now. They must have moved on, though he could remember nothing, save Hume's odd behavior—dull-eyed silence while stumbling on as a brainless servio-robot, incoherent speech wherein all the words came fast, running together unintelligibly. ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... entirely new. And so the absorbing, quickening, creative efficacy of Shakespeare's genius is best seen in this, that, taking the Drama as it came to his hand, a thing of unsouled forms and lack-lustre eyes, all brainless and meaningless, he at once put a spirit into it, tempered its elements in the proportions of truth, informed its shapes with grace and virtue, and made it all alive, a breathing, speaking, operative power. Thus his work naturally linked in with the whole past; and in his hands ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... avoid both the one and the other. For the zealot is a man who not only defends his own right of worship, wherein he hath justice, but wishes to impose upon the consciences of others, by which he falls into the very error against which he fights. The mere brainless scoffer is, on the other hand, lower than the beast of the field, since he lacks the animal's ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... been placed in the cells behind the council hall; she knew nothing of Dolores's last-minute decision that had taken them with her. She knew nothing as to who or how many were left in the camp; but she knew, she had terrible and ever-present proof in that moaning, groping, brainless thing that was Sancho, that her mistress had shown a leaning toward the strangers at the expense of her own people, and that she herself might expect no mercy if ever caught. And with the low animal cunning that served her for intellect she knew her ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... trouble in the very air—ominous portents of a storm whose dull, grim growling down the horizon could be heard only too clearly by those who did not wilfully close their ears, grin fatuous complacence, and bleat like brainless sheep: "All's well!" ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... second invitation. Obviously, unless some brainless young fool was trying to be humorous, there was no time to spare for words. He sprang inside, and Devar cried to ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... lagged in answer loth to render up My precontract, and loth by brainless war To cleave the rift of difference deeper yet; Till one of those two brothers, half aside And fingering at the hair about his lip, To prick us on to combat 'Like to like! The woman's garment hid the woman's heart.' ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... peasants laughed at this merry jest, and they quickly followed his lead, as brainless sheep will follow the one that scrambles through a gap. Soon they were all joyously stamping and dancing in what had so lately been a pellucid pool. The water-lilies and blue forget-me-nots were trodden down, the fish that had their homes under ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin, They graze and wallow, breed and sleep; And oft some brainless devil enters in, And drives them ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... "some brainless lad, Some scion of ancient Tories, Bob Acres, sent to Oxford ad Emolliendos mores, Meant but to drain the festive glass And win the athlete's pewter!" There you are wrong: this person was That ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley |
