"Thick-skinned" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is any) belongs to the kind playfully described by Sir Lambert Playfair as 'salsolaceous,' that is to say, in plainer English, it consists of plants like the glass-wort and the kali-weed, which are commonly burnt to make soda. These fleshy weeds resemble the cactuses in being succulent and thick-skinned but they differ from them in their curious ability to live upon very salt and soda-laden water. All through the great African desert region, in fact, most of the water is more or less brackish; 'bitter lakes' are common, and gypsum ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... model of concentration and energy. Even where it is a case of obtuseness to other civilisations, at least as high but of a different type, the verdict cannot be wholly unfavourable. The Kingdom of Earth is to the thick-skinned, and bad manners have a distinct vital value. A man, too sensitive to the rights and the charms of others, is in grave danger of futility. Either he will become a dilettante, which is the French way, or he will take to drink and mystical nihilism, a career very popular in Russian fiction. ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... so ignorantly unconscious of doing anything offensive by such gratification of his curiosity, that Robert hardly knew whether to laugh or be angry. Nimrod's thick-skinned sensibilities would have cared little for either. He lounged about, whittling sticks, chewing tobacco, and asking questions, until Andy's stentorian call ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... When I passed the parting with Tilly that night I gave her the word that I was going to be around for a week or so, and that I wanted to see more of her. Not thick-skinned, her kind, when it came to showing like and dislike, and she looked her pleasure for the honest girl she was. Ay, a striking lass, and I didn't wonder that Chief George was taken ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... declared Ralph, seating himself at her side on the greensward, "or if you had varnished it over with politeness, then you would probably have failed to produce any effect and I should not have been burdened with that heavy debt of gratitude which I now owe you. I was a pretty thick-skinned animal in those days, Bertha. You said the right word at the right moment; you gave me a bold and a good piece of advice, which my own ingenuity would never have suggested to me. I will not thank you, because, in so grave a case as this, spoken thanks sound like a mere ...
— A Good-For-Nothing - 1876 • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... "Blood is thicker than water," we proclaim to one another across the sea; "and we can therefore afford to be as rude to one another as we please." This principle suits the Briton admirably, because he belongs to the elder and more thick-skinned branch of the clan. But it bears hardly upon a young, self-conscious, and adolescent nation, which has not yet "found" itself as a whole; and which, though its native genius and genuine promise carry it far, still experiences ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... development of imperialism, but who were unhampered by the restrictive influences of those who had sought perfection. To organize and administer the new industrial-financial-commercial regime, the leaders must be shrewd, ingenious, quick-witted, thick-skinned, unscrupulous, hard-headed, and avaricious; yet daring, dominating, and gifted with keen prevision and vivid imagination. These qualities had not been bred under any of the Mediterranean civilizations, or that of Central Europe in the Middle Ages, which had inherited so much therefrom. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... is why pigs like to roll in the mud once in awhile, just as you sometimes see a circus elephant scatter dust over his back, to drive away the flies. And even such a thick-skinned animal as a rhinoceros likes to plaster himself with mud ...
— Squinty the Comical Pig - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum
... endowments wherein they so far surpass and excel Man; as first for their unparalleled beauty, by the charm whereof they tyrannize over the greatest of tyrants; for what is it but too great a smatch of wisdom that makes men so tawny and thick-skinned, so rough and prickly-bearded, like an emblem of winter or old age, while women have such dainty, smooth cheeks, such a low, gentle voice, and so pure a complexion, as if Nature had drawn them for a standing pattern of all symmetry and comeliness? Besides, what greater or juster aim and ambition ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard |
