"Insipidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of young ladies: and we must be on our guard lest any school ideals of study and bookishness should actually increase this deficiency. Any one, mistress or girl, who makes good education to be associated with dulness and boredom and insipidity is again a traitor to the cause ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... in melancholy contrast to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at last saddened into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit of the past had not only something of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There was so little of Herculaneum: only a few hundred yards square are exhumed, and we counted the houses easily on the fingers of one hand, leaving the thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with its flagging ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... of ridicule: her shape was neither good nor bad: her countenance bore the appearance of the greatest insipidity, and her complexion was the same all over; with two little hollow eyes, adorned with white eye-lashes, as long as one's finger. With these attractions she placed herself in ambuscade to surprise unwary hearts; but she might have done so in vain, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... manner. Harrington, the gay "godson" of Queen Elizabeth, is not always unlike Ariosto; but when not in good spirits he becomes as dull as if her majesty had frowned on him. Rose was a man of wit, and a scholar; yet he has undoubtedly turned the ease and animation of his original into inversion and insipidity. And Wiffen, though elegant and even poetical, did an unfortunate thing for Tasso, when he gave an additional line and a number of paraphrastic thoughts to a stanza already tending to the superfluous. Fairfax himself, who, upon the whole, and with regard to a work of any length, is the best metrical ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Oracles and prophecy never acquired the importance in Italy which they obtained in Greece, and never were able to exercise a serious control over private or public life. But on the other hand the Latin religion sank into an incredible insipidity and dulness, and early became shrivelled into an anxious and dreary round of ceremonies. The god of the Italian was, as we have already said, above all things an instrument for helping him to the attainment of very substantial ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... you appear in my eyes an object of contempt.— I feel myself every way disposed and determined to hate you. Believe me, I never had an intention to offer you my hand. Our last conversation has left a tedious insipidity, which has by no means given me the most exalted idea of your character; your temper would make me extremely unhappy, and if we are united, I shall experience nothing but the hatred of my parents, added to their everlasting dis- pleasure in living with you. I have, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... anyone cry even a little; and instead of keeping us out of bed, it sends us there—or would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action. Macaulay, who confesses its absurdity and insipidity, says that no reader, probably, ever thought it dull. "The story, whatever its value may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no digressions, or unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every sentence carries the action forward. The excitement is constantly ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Partenopeus, and I also think that he was a better story-teller; but I do not think that the latter was a bad story-teller; and I can read him with plenty of interest. So I can most of his fellows, no one of whom, I think, ever quite approaches the insipidity of their worst English imitators. The knights do not weary me with their exploits, and I confess that I am hyperbolical enough to like reading and thinking as well as talking of the ladies very much. They are of various sorts; but they are generally lovable. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... more owing to the fastidiousness of my caprice than the delicacy of my taste; but I am so often tired, disgusted and hurt with insipidity, affectation, and pride of mankind, that when I meet with a person "after my own heart," I positively feel what an orthodox Protestant would call a species of idolatry, which acts on my fancy like inspiration; and ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... fair, but the noble cast of her head and features prevented the insipidity which sometimes attaches to fair beauties. Her clear blue eye, which sat enshrined beneath a graceful eyebrow of brown, sufficiently marked to give expression to the forehead, seemed capable to kindle as well as to melt, to command as well ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... Massena. It is all they can do to keep their sabres in they sheaths when they meet. And then he knows our weak points. Savary's thirst for money, Cambaceres's vanity, Duroc's bluntness, Berthier's foolishness, Maret's insipidity, Talleyrand's mania for speculation, they are all so many tools in his hand. I do not know what my own greatest weakness may be, but I am sure that he does, and ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of living trees," he seemed to see the possibility of satisfaction at last. For here there was a perfect love and self-sacrifice, outwardly expressed with a mystic grace better than the Greek blitheness, and a new beauty which contrasted brightly with the Roman insipidity. It was the humanism of Christianity that so satisfied him, standing as it did for the fullness of life, in spite of all its readiness for sacrifice. And it was effective too, for it seemed to be doing rapidly what the best paganism was doing very slowly—attaining, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... quite the exception to find among any Persian walnuts growing on the Atlantic Coast or the Pacific Coast or in the middle of the country walnuts that are free from this tendency to astringency, to insipidity, and to toughness. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... explained to me once that being found out and punished added the same zest to their pleasures that cayenne pepper does to their diet; a little too much of it stings, but just the right quantity relieves the insipidity and adds to the interest; and then there is the element of uncertainty, which has a charm of its own: they never know whether they will 'catch it hot' or not! When they are found out they always confess everything with a frankness ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... composition; but the misfortune is, that there are passages in all poems, that can neither be pathetic nor sublime; and that, on these occasions, a neglect of the embellishments of language is very apt to produce absolute meanness and insipidity. The language of passion, indeed, can scarcely be deficient in elevation; and when an author is wanting in that particular, he may commonly be presumed to have failed in the truth, as well as in the dignity of his ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... been unconsciously revealing her nature to the sagacious matron, who felt the girl, if won, would not become a pretty toy, soon wearying her son by insipidity of character. "I know better," the lady thought, "than to agree with brother and sister that Louise is merely wilful and perverse." Feeling that she was incapable of controlling her son, she would be glad to delegate this task to the one who had the most influence ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... greasy impasto betray the neighbourhood of the tenebrosi. When, towards the end of the seventeenth century, Gregorio Lazzarini set himself to shake off these influences, he went to the opposite extreme. Although a beautiful designer, he becomes cold and flat in colour, with a coldness and insipidity, indeed, that take us by surprise, appearing in a country where the taste for luminous and brilliant tints was so strongly rooted. The student of Venetian painting, who wishes to fill up the hiatus which lies between the Golden Age and the revival of ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... heroic sorrows of the world. There is no page of history, however dark, there is no beautiful old tale, however tragic, which does not impart some strength and some distinction to the awakening mind. It is possible to overrate the superlative merits of insipidity as a mental and moral force in the ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... enjoyments. Our ennui was often delightfully relieved by the diversity of character as developed in our little community; for we had, if we may so speak, the salt, the pepper, and the vinegar of human dispositions, sprinkled throughout the party, which not only took from the cold insipidity of our confinement, but gave to it a rich and pleasant relish. Our host's cellar and larder happened to be well stored, while the house was, in all other respects, an excellent one; so, what with the produce of the former, and the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... it. The public remained cold, and, what was far worse, I remained cold myself. I thought over this singular result, and wondered how it was that music which, as a part of the operas for which it was written, had seemed so full of soul, now faded into insipidity when transplanted to the soil of other dramatic situations. I found the answer in the question. It was because I had transplanted my music from its native soil, that its beauty had flown. Then it burst upon my mind that the libretto is the father of the opera, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... of the feelings that gives rise to sentimentality, as, when the tongue is disordered, we are always trying it. The cure of that insipidity is to direct upon it the energy of an objective earnestness, a current of positive faith and love. No negative treatment, of indifference or of contempt, can avail. Sentimentality, frozen under the ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... pyrotechny—that we are as blissfully ignorant of all that relates to the science of government as that of gastronomy—and have ever since our boyhood preferred the solid consistency of gingerbread to the crisp insipidity of parliament. The candidates of whom we write were no would-be senators—no sprouting Ciceros or embryo Demosthenes'—they were no aspirants for the grand honour of representing the honest and independent stocks and stones of some ancient rotten borough, or, what is about the same thing, the enlightened ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... without that seeking for virile energy which too often spoils the most charming qualities. The sentiment is discreet without losing its intensity in order to attract public notice. The painting of Mme. Henriette Browne is at an equal distance from grandeur and insipidity, from power and affectation, and gathers from the just balance of her nature some effects of taste and charm of which a parvenu ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... and familiar events can be expected from a private correspondence; no reflexions but such as they excite can be found there; yet whoever turns away disgusted by the insipidity with which this, and I suppose every correspondence must naturally and almost necessarily begin—will here be likely to lose some genuine pleasure, and some useful knowledge of what our heroic Milton was himself contented ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... superseded, out-of-date. This herd has turned with much greater zest to the science of language: here in this wide expanse of virgin soil, where even the most mediocre gifts can be turned to account, and where a kind of insipidity and dullness is even looked upon as decided talent, with the novelty and uncertainty of methods and the constant danger of making fantastic mistakes—here, where dull regimental routine and discipline ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche |
