"Undistinguished" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... degrees, that is, of degrees of height and of breadth, cannot be illustrated by examples from visible objects, because the least things are not visible to the eyes, and the greatest things which are visible seem undistinguished into degrees; consequently this matter does not allow of demonstration otherwise than by universals. And since angels are in wisdom from universals, and from that in knowledge of particulars, it is allowed to bring forward ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... these, says he, who lived according to the divine word within them, and which word was in all men, were Christians." Hence also, since the introduction of Christianity, many of our own countrymen have been Quakers, though undistinguished by the exterior marks of dress or language. Among these we may reckon the great and venerable Milton. His works are full of the sentiments of[32] Quakerism. And hence, in other countries and in other ages, there have been men, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... He had prepared for the event; indeed the tedium of his confinement had been much relieved by the composition of lofty and heart-stirring addresses, in which he, the noble cavalier, laid his precious self and fortune at the feet of this undistinguished, but rich ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... own people wouldn't train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of enquiry into Mexico. There apparently she had really ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... answered Father Brown. "I want you to find out; I ask it as a favour. He went down there"—and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder in one of his undistinguished gestures—"and can't have passed three lamp-posts yet. I only want ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... flattered and cajoled and bribed. She was convinced that even to be called upon by Lady Beach-Mandarin is no light privilege for these new commercial people, and so she made no secret of her intention of decorating the hall of his large but undistinguished house in Putney, with her redeeming pasteboard. She appealed to the instances of Venice and Florence to show that "such men as you, Sir Isaac," who control commerce and industry, have always been the guardians and patrons ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... could not apply the thematic system to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their singularity to their senselessness. He could produce neither a thorough music drama nor a charming opera. But with all this, and worse, Meyerbeer had some ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... find employment on the Orderly Room staff, or among the scouts and signallers. The handy are absorbed into the transport, or become machine-gunners. The sedentary take post as cooks, or tailors, or officers' servants. The waster hews wood and draws water and empties swill-tubs. The great, mediocre, undistinguished majority merely go to stiffen the rank and file, and right nobly they do it. Each ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... excitement there has been among the non-combatant community; what handshaking; what embracing; what fervent delight! This unique life is to end; we are to become reasonably clean and quite ordinary mortals again, lost among the world's population of fifteen hundred millions—undistinguished, unknown—that is, if the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... "Tahoma," proposed by the Rotary Club of Seattle, would be a justifiable compromise, and satisfy nearly everybody. Its adoption would free our national map from one more of its meaningless names—the name, in this case, of an undistinguished foreign naval officer whose only connection with our history is the fact that he fought against us during the American Revolution. Incidentally, it would also free me from the need of an apology for using the hybrid "Rainier-Tacoma"! ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... if a vindictive feeling mingled with their joy. The most deeply injured of all who had survived the evil times was absent. Lady Russell, while her friends were crowding the galleries of Whitehall, remained in her retreat, thinking of one who, if he had been still living, would have held no undistinguished place in the ceremonies of that great day. But her daughter, who had a few months before become the wife of Lord Cavendish, was presented to the royal pair by his mother the Countess of Devonshire. A letter is still extant in which the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... recording these medieval clerks, the undistinguished writers, 'de quibus,' Boccaccio said, 'nil curandum est,' were it not that they show how the memory at least of the classical pastoral survived amid the ruins of ancient learning, and so serve to lead up to one last spasmodic manifestation of the kind in certain poems which else appear ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... signs of mortal agony, though appearing in the distance not larger than a spider dependent at the extremity of his invisible thread, while the remaining form descended from its elevated situation, and regained with all speed an undistinguished place among the crowd. This termination of the tragic scene drew forth of course a squall from Mrs. Dutton, and Jeanie, with instinctive curiosity, turned her head in ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... into this undistinguished and plebeian mediocrity that the Marshall children were introduced when ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... then Ellen was all the woman I had." He caught himself up swiftly after that; it was seldom even to his partner that anything escaped him in reference to the interior life of dreams which had gone on in him, quite happily behind his undistinguished exterior. "But somehow it hasn't seemed to come out anywhere. I've done my duty ... and when I'm dead and Ellen's dead, where is it? After all, ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... Barnard. At one time I disbelieved the story, (which possibly may have been long known to the public,) on the ground that even George III. would not have differed so widely from princes in general as to leave a brother of his own, however unaspiring, wholly undistinguished by public honors. But having since ascertained that a naval officer, well known to my own family, and to a naval brother of my own in particular, by assistance rendered to him repeatedly when a midshipman in changing his ship, was undoubtedly an illegitimate son of George III., ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... rue de Dunkerque stands the Hotel Railleux. It is a tall and narrow house, somewhat dirty and entirely undistinguished; there is nothing to recommend it save perhaps an air of privacy, a certain insignificance that wedges it between the surrounding buildings in a manner tempting to one ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... said hopefully, trying to look small and undistinguished. "They could just have ... not noticed me. Okay?" He gave the pilot his ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... newspaper. My dear, dear brother, how you would work hard if you only knew what a prize success in life might give you. Little as I have seen of her, I could guess that she will never bestow a thought on an undistinguished man. Come down for one day, and tell me if ever, in all your ambition, you had such a goal before ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Matthew shows that St. Joseph was of Davidic descent. Again, the Jews would say that in any case the Messiah would not be likely to be connected with a humble carpenter and his folk. The evangelist's reply is that David himself was descended from comparatively undistinguished men and from women who were despised. Thus St. Matthew meets both points ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... whole career of the brilliant Themistocles he had a persistent opponent, Aristides, a man, like him, born of undistinguished parents, but who by moral strength and innate power of intellect won the esteem and admiration of his fellow-citizens. He became the leader of the aristocratic section of the people, as Themistocles did of the democratic, and for years the city was divided between ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... been laid aside on entering the saloon, as was the custom of the Romans in their own families, or among private friends, hung on the back of an armed chair; of ample size and fine material, but undistinguished by the marks of senatorial or equestrian rank. Such was the aspect, such the bearing of the youth, who might be safely deemed the girl's permitted suitor, from his whole air and manner, as he listened to the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... insurrection among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else. In Homer, for instance, it can be seen pretty clearly that a "good" man is simply a man of imposing, active individuality[2]; a "bad" man is an inefficient, undistinguished man—probably, too, like Thersites, ugly. It is, in fact, an absolutely aristocratic age—an age in which he who rules is thereby proven the "best." And from its nature it must be an age very heartily engaged in something; usually fighting whoever ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... and for a moment running abreast in the pursuit of honour. I believe that his disappointment at this crisis damped his ardour. Unfortunately, at that period there was no classical Tripos; so that if a person did not obtain the classical medal, he was thrown back among the totally undistinguished; and it was not allowable to become a candidate for the classical medal, unless you had taken a respectable degree in mathematics. Coleridge had not the least taste for these, and here his case was hopeless; so that he despaired ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... and this motley throng Will all have passed away, And the rich and the poor and the old and the young Will be undistinguished clay. And lips that laugh and lips that moan, Shall in silence alike be sealed, And some will lie under stately stone, And some in ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves, in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the art of chemistry, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... are her sons till they've learned to betray; Undistinguished they live, if they shame not their sires; And the torch that would light them thro' dignity's way Must be caught from the pile ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... was well cut, well made, and completely undistinguished. It was a standard suit. White piping on the V of the vest added a flavor of law and learning. His shoes were black laced boots, good boots, honest boots, standard boots, extraordinarily uninteresting boots. The only frivolity was in his purple knitted scarf. With considerable ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... months with Brandywine & Plummer might weigh as that) but with a knowledge of the world and a social position which she had found to be fairly marketable. That Madame Dinard would have accepted an unknown and undistinguished applicant for work at a salary of fifteen dollars a week she did not for an instant imagine. This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of ironic humour, represented the exact value in open market of her ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... printing a sermon, that, whereas the queasy stomach of this generation will not bear a discourse long enough to make a separate volume, those religious and godly-minded children (those Samuels, if I may call them so) of the brain must at first be buried in an undistinguished heap, and then get such resurrection as is vouchsafed to them, mummy-wrapped with a score of others in a cheap binding, with no other mark of distinction than the word 'Miscellaneous' printed upon the back. Far be it from me to claim any credit for the quite unexpected popularity which I am ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... it is in reality a mere plaything. In the northern part of the town, on a little hillock, stands the third fort, called el Castillo del Rosario, which is furnished with six pieces of cannon. The churches of Valparaiso are exceedingly plain and simple, undistinguished either for architecture ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... one of a row of tawdry modern buildings, the lower floors of which were utilized as shops—an undistinguished sort of place, in an undistinguished street. They climbed upstairs and wandered through two or three rooms, all alike save that one of them had a balcony; square, white-washed rooms, not very clean, and inadequately furnished with ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... silence, all in order stand, And mighty folios first, a lordly band; Then quartos their well-order'd ranks maintain, And light octavos fill a spacious plain: See yonder, ranged in more frequent rows, A humbler band of duodecimos; While undistinguished trifles swell the scene, The last new ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... convey what Gray's ploughman is achieving for one evening, but not what the rude forefathers have achieved for eternity. From the ploughman and the simple annals of the poor the poem diverges to reproach the proud and great for their disregard of undistinguished merit, and moves on to praise of the sequestered life, and to an epitaph applicable either to a "poeta ignotus" or to Gray himself. The epitaph with its trembling hope transforms the poem into something like a personal yet universal requiem; and for one villager—perhaps for himself—Gray ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... How could they have? They were made by machines for undistinguished millions." She broke off this discussion. "I am eager for a run through the park. Won't you go? Hugh is my engineer. Reckless as he looks, I find him quite reliable as a tinker, and you know the auto is still in ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... he, though undistinguished from the crowd By wealth or dignity, who dwells secure Where man, by nature fierce, has laid aside His fierceness, having learnt, though slow to learn The manners and the arts of civil life. His wants, indeed, are ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... culminated in 1874, and in 1875 the ceremony was held in the Divinity School. But the noise is as prevalent as ever, and it must be confessed that undergraduates' wit has suffered severely from the feminine infusion. However, our visitors, distinguished and undistinguished alike, appreciate the disorder, and it certainly has plenty of precedent for it in all stages of ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... Episcopal, or Baptist creed, whether it had a chancel or altar, or painted windows? Whether the pews had doors to them and were cushioned or not? Whether the minister wore a gown and bands, or plain suit of black, or was undistinguished in his dress? Will it not suffice if I tell you, as the very belief of my soul, that it was a christian house, that there were seats for all, that things were well intended and decently ordered, and that with a hymn sung with such purity of heart that its praises ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... statement which he ever made was given in December, 1859, to Mr. Fell, who had interrogated him with an eye "to the possibilities of his being an available candidate for the presidency in 1860:" "My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families,—second families, perhaps I should say. My mother ... was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now remain in Adams, some others in Macon, counties, Illinois. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky, about ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... the company at the upper table, "Sir Peter Laurie was one, and Mr. Lockhart was not one: for he sat among the undistinguished at a side table." Our Court guest also sat at a side table though he pleads guilty to "foul" means—"that of displacing an engine-turned and satine-ed card, which had been deposited therein, as the worthy locum tenens and representative of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... equivalent). The neo-Gaul is an innovator and this is his vice. It is a byproduct of originality and a symptom of a restless desire for change. The realist who makes a poem, not on his lady's eyebrows but her intestines, is a good current example. The novelist who shovels undistinguished humanity, just because it is human, into his book is another. The versifier who twists and breaks his rhythm solely in order to get new sounds is a third. A fourth is the stylist who writes in disjointed ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... slip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way. Recollect that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who practise it the greater will be the chance of someone's reaching perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin gowns to ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... 1880 was a delightful time. As the condemned highwayman said to the chaplain who was exhorting him to repentance for his life of adventure on the road—"You dog, it was delicious." It was all so new. One emerged (like Herbert Gladstone) from the obscurity of College rooms or from the undistinguished herd of London ball-goers, or from the stables and stubbles of a country home, and became, all in a moment, a Personage. For the first time in one's life one found that people—grown-up, sensible, vote-possessing people—wished to know one's opinions, and gave heed to one's words. For the first ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... east wind sobs and sighs, And drowns the turret bell, Whose sad note, undistinguished, dies ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... wood blocks and so on, many elementary solid forms. It is matter of regret that in common language we have no easy, convenient words for many of these forms, and instead of being learnt easily and naturally in play, they are left undistinguished, and have to be studied later under circumstances of forbidding technicality. It would be quite easy to teach the child in an incidental way to distinguish cube, cylinder, cone, sphere (or ball), prolate spheroid (which might be called "egg"), oblate spheroid (which might be called "squatty ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... and merciless, and very irritating to him; and this doubtless had much to do with it. He lies buried in the garden of his home, without a stone to mark the spot. It is a reproach to the people of Georgia that her most eminent son should be neglected to sleep in an undistinguished grave. But this neglect does not extend alone to Mr. Crawford. I believe, of all her distinguished men, James A. Meriwether is the only one whose grave has been honored with a monumental stone by the State. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... he found relief in an early developed taste for reading. In 1818 the family moved to a lonely part of Maine, where in roaming the lonely woods he gained a liking for solitude as well as for nature. He returned to Salem in 1819 to prepare for Bowdoin College, which he entered in 1821. After an undistinguished course he went back to his native town, whither ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... any colour that he liked, the spots where Englishmen have fought, and English blood has been poured forth, and the treasure of England squandered, scarcely a country, scarcely a province of the vast expanse of the habitable globe would be thus undistinguished. ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... find a dress that a lady of fashion would choose except among the imported models, for which store prices are as a rule higher than those asked by the greatest dressmakers. Evening clothes are still usually unbuyable by the over-fastidious, except for a certain flapper type (and an undistinguished one at that!), and the ultra-smart woman is still obliged to go to the private importers for her debutante daughter's ball-dresses as well as her own—or ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... 12, 1809, in Hardin county, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside in Adams and others in Macon county, Illinois. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham county, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... well known, thought she, and he may meet with acquaintances every where. However, by the attention of Charles, she passed the day with a very tolerable proportion of pleasure. Their arrival at Albany was undistinguished by any remarkable event, though Julia looked in vain through the darkness of the night, in quest of the fertile meadows and desert islands which Anna had mentioned in her letter. Even the river ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... step forward upon the soft, pulpy leads. Even then he hesitated before he finally committed himself. About his appearance little was remarkable save the general air of determination which gave character to his undistinguished features. He was something above the medium height, broad-set, and with rather more thick black hair than he knew how to arrange advantageously. He wore a shirt which was somewhat frayed, and an indifferent tie; his boots were ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the excellences, of Mr. Wordsworth's published poems. The first characteristic, though only an occasional defect, is the inconstancy of style; the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity to a style not only unimpassioned, but undistinguished. He sinks too often, too abruptly, into the language of prose. The second defect is a certain matter-of-factness in some of his poems, consisting in a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representations ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... So Calhoun listened politely until he found an undistinguished medical man who wanted some special information about gene-selection as practised halfway across the galaxy. He invited that man to the Med Ship, where he supplied the information not hitherto available. He saw his guest's eyes shine a little with that joyous awe a man feels when he finds out something ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... a more impressive instance of the contrast, familiar to biographers, between the apparent insignificance and the real importance of their hero in undistinguished youth. To any one considering Wordsworth as he then was,—a rough and somewhat stubborn young man, who, in nearly thirty years of life, had seemed alternately to idle without grace and to study without advantage,— it might well have seemed incredible that he could have anything ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... copper, he raised up one of the stirrups with the other hand, so as to make it catch a nail higher up. The same operation he performed on behalf of the other leg, and so on alternately. And thus he climbed, nail by nail, step by step, and stirrup by stirrup, till his starting-point was undistinguished from the golden surface, and the spire had dwindled in his embrace till he could clasp ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... them practically non-existent they might find solace in sluggish and secure content. But even the smallest circle of being touches continually the periphery of wider spheres. The air is freighted with echoes of undistinguished sounds. Powers, illimitable, absolute, uncomprehended, seem to hold an inimical sway over their lives and of these the most dreaded is the benign law, framed for their protection, spreading above them an unperceived, unimagined aegis. Thus there ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... him the meanest rill, the rugged mountain, the barren waste, the rudest fragment of barbaric history, spoke the language of elevation, harmony and hope. The circle, of which he was the beloved centre, was composed of men equally sincere, resolute and hopeful; there was not one of them undistinguished. Some of them had now the first literary distinction. The character of each was remarkable for some distinctive and bold feature of originality. I, of course, exclude myself from this description. I know not to what circumstance ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... heir, fallen into the hands of the Jews. On the fortunate demise of the young gentleman who had brought it to this untimely end, it was put up for sale with all its contents. And Sir Morton Pippitt,—a rich colonial, whose forebears were entirely undistinguished, but who had made a large fortune by a bone-melting business, which converted the hoofs, horns and (considering that some years ago it had been a mere roofless ruin, and that the people had been compelled to walk or ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... children—children make the mirth and the adornment of their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries. 'Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them.' The stray bastard is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of any general belief in its crushing superiority, but because it was extremely difficult to pitch on any other candidate to whom to pin ones faith. Peradventure II was the favourite, not in the sense of being a popular fancy, but by virtue of a lack of confidence in any one of his rather undistinguished rivals. The brains of clubland were much exercised in seeking out possible merit where none was very obvious to the naked intelligence, and the house-party at Lady Susan's was possessed by the same uncertainty and irresolution that infected ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... lingering in the South courting the young widow of Sir John Grey, usually known by her maiden name as Elizabeth Woodville. His marriage to her gave offence to his noble supporters, who disdained to acknowledge a queen of birth so undistinguished; and their ill-will was increased when they found that Edward distributed amongst his wife's kindred estates and preferments which they had hoped to gain for themselves. The queen's father became Earl Rivers and Lord Constable, and her brothers and ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... of undistinguished Colonials and others of British race from all regions of the earth, who annually visit these shores on business or for pleasure or some other object, how many there must be who come with some such ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... that might claim Triumphant laurels and immortal fame, Confused in crowds of gallant actions lie, And troops of heroes undistinguished lie." ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... through some emerging world, 40 Reeking and dank from out the slime, whose ooze Shall slumber o'er the wreck of this, until The salt morass subside into a sphere Beneath the sun, and be the monument, The sole and undistinguished sepulchre, Of yet quick myriads of all life? How much Breath will be stilled at once! All beauteous world! So young, so marked out for destruction, I With a cleft heart look on thee day by day, And night by night, thy numbered days and nights. 50 I cannot save thee, cannot save even ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... speech, and effective, even against the best Athenian opponents. He was modest, unambitious, patriotic, intellectual, contented with poverty, generous, and disinterested. When the Cadmea was taken, he was undistinguished, and his rare merits were only known to Pelopidas and his friends. He was among the first to join the revolutionists, and was placed by Pelopidas among the organizers ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... is very unscientific; for even in the spinal cord, which is more easily studied, we do not find such separation between the widely distinct functions of sensibility and motility. Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish the course of the motor fibres, which to the most careful inspection are ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... edition of Rogers's poems. You have there a sky blazing with sunbeams; but they all begin a long way from the sun, and they are accounted for by a mass of dense clouds surrounding the orb itself. Turn to the 7th page. Behind the old oak, where the sun is supposed to be, you have only a blaze of undistinguished light; but up on the left, over the edge of the cloud, on its dark side, the sunbeam. Turn to page 192,—blazing rays again, but all beginning where the clouds do, not one can you trace to the sun; and observe how carefully the long shadow on ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... river goes wandering on its way." He was speaking French and she followed him easily now, her eyes beginning to fling out again their natural sunny beams of interest. "I was born there twenty-six years ago and haven't done much of anything since. You see before you, Mademoiselle, a very undistinguished young man, who has signally failed to accomplish the dream of his boyhood, which was to be a great artist like Raphael or Angelo. Instead of being famous I am but a poor Lieutenant in ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... house at Esher gave its welcome not merely to men and women of distinction; the humble undistinguished were made joyous guests there, whether commonplace or counting among the hopeful. Their hostess knew how to shelter the sensitively silent at table, if they were unable to take encouragement and join the flow. Their faces at least responded to her bright look ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... us be ready for the moment when Barbara, rushing between the combatants, receives in her own bosom the blade intended for ——, etc. But of course not enough blade to endanger the happy ending. So there you are. A placid, undistinguished tale, that may be commended as nourishment or soporific according to the taste and fancy of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... Hanson, the famed engineer, no task was impossible. But quite a few things were impossible to that engineer's obscure and unimportant nephew, the computer technician and generally undistinguished man who had been christened Dave. They'd gotten the right man for the name, all right. But the wrong man for ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... any that are useless and unnecessary? If I offer myself to you because I think we have a fair chance of being happy together, and because by your help I may get for both of us a good place and a not undistinguished name, why ask me to feign raptures and counterfeit romance, in which neither of us believe? Do you want me to come wooing in a Prince Prettyman's dress from the masquerade warehouse, and to pay you compliments like ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fury of domestic dissension. This was followed immediately by a general attack upon the monuments and remains of antiquity throughout all France. The sepulchres of the great of past ages, of the barons and generals of the feudal ages, of the paladins, and of the crusaders, were involved in one undistinguished ruin. It seemed as if the glories of antiquity were forgotten, or sought to be buried in oblivion. The tomb of Du Gueselin shared the same fate as that of Louis XIV. The skulls of monarchs and heroes were ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... into "the Corn," another youth—a pedestrian, and very different—saluted the Warden. He wore a black jacket, rusty and amorphous. His trousers were too short, and he himself was too short: almost a dwarf. His face was as plain as his gait was undistinguished. He ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... represented one, as it were, is forgotten, or rather gets remembered. Of course, the first glimpse is the landscape under lightning as it were. But afterwards isn't it surely like the alphabet to a child; what was first a queer angular scrawl becomes A, and is always ever after A, undistinguished, half-forgotten, yet standing at last for goodness knows what real wonderful things—or for just the dry bones of soulless words? Is that it?' She stole a sidelong glance into his brooding face, leaning her head on ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... of pedagogic eloquence and Latin culture at the service of a mind childish rather than undistinguished, and limited in its notions of attack and defence to the defiant attitude of schoolboys. Not an idea, not a happy turn of phrase, or a telling hit: a storm of declamation that leaves us bored. After a dose of this unexhilarating reading one is attempted ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... of one who, while he is himself shrouded in darkness, surveys another who chances to have taken his stand in the full light of day. You from your darkness can with ease form an opinion as to what I am doing in my not undistinguished position before all the world; but your position is so abject, so obscure, and so withdrawn from the light of publicity that you are by ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... least equal to that of any other European country, and though it is at least probable that some of the greatest achievements of literature, French in language, are English in nationality, the vernacular should for long have been a little scanty and a little undistinguished in its yield. Periods of moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never periods of extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself had (as has been said) been distinctly ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... d'aventures in octosyllabic couplet, who probably took his heterogeneous materials wherever he found them; "did not invent much" (as Thackeray says of Smollett), but treated whatever he did treat in a singularly light and pleasant manner, not indeed free from the somewhat undistinguished fluency to which this "light and lewed" couplet, as Chaucer calls it, is liable, and showing no strong grasp either of character or of plot, but on the whole a very agreeable writer, and a quite capital example of the better class of trouvere, far above the improvisatore ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... has its effect, and there is a wonderful difference between the radiant beauty of the form produced by the work of a true artist, perfect alike in expression and execution, and the comparatively dull and undistinguished-looking one which represents the effort of the wooden and mechanical player. Anything like inaccuracy in rendering naturally leaves a corresponding defect in the form, so that the exact character of the performance shows itself just as clearly to the ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... character to be met with, and the mental atmosphere which surrounded him was one of keen interest in life. Lincoln eventually stands out as a surprising figure from among the other lawyers and little politicians of Illinois, as any great man does from any crowd, but some tribute is due to the undistinguished and historically uninteresting men whose generous appreciation gave rapid way to the poor, queer youth, and ultimately pushed him into a greater ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... Bible begins with the account of the Priestly Code of the creation of the world. In the beginning is chaos; darkness, water, brooding spirit, which engenders life, and fertilises the dead mass. The primal stuff contains in itself all beings, as yet undistinguished: from it proceeds step by step the ordered world; by a process of unmixing, first of all by separating out the great elements. The chaotic primal gloom yields to the contrast of light and darkness; the primal water is separated by the vault ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... no suburbs to Guildford; to-day the suburbs grow. Pewley Hill, south-east of the town, which old pictures of Guildford show you bare downland, is hardly so much spotted as hidden by undistinguished villas and dreary brick. Perhaps it would please Cobbett as well as it pleased him ninety years ago. Pewley Hill in his day stood naked to the wind, except for the semaphore and its buildings, and Cobbett deeply hated the semaphore. To us, who have the telephone and telegram, there seems ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the Masters of letters that have adorned and elevated the speech of our race Dr. Johnson is in many ways the most lovable. The son of a poor bookseller in Lichfield {40} with an uncouth figure and an undistinguished countenance, he rose by the massive force of his character and the tireless persistence of his industry to an unchallenged supremacy in the literary world of his age, displaying in his whole life the truth ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... been laughed at, but she never knew it; she was treated as a bore, but she never cared. She had nothing in the world but the clothes on her back, and when she should go down into the grave she would leave nothing behind her but her grotesque, undistinguished, pathetic little name. And yet people said that women were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested! While Miss Birdseye stood there, asking Mrs. Farrinder if she wouldn't say something, Olive Chancellor tenderly fastened a small battered brooch which ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told, while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day in Boston at a tobacconist's, where a certain brand of cigars was recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. "Ah, then I must ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his look and sign upon the vulgar crowd at the lower end of the apartment; but instead of instantly returning to wait on her Majesty, he wrapped his cloak around him, and mixing with the crowd, stood in some degree an undistinguished spectator of the progress of ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... and hostess might be pardoned for being a little too well satisfied with themselves and with their last new bibelot. The Fothergill dinners were like all other dinners given by the Fothergills of society. They were costly, utterly undistinguished, and invariably graced by the presence of certain guests who seemed to have been called in out of the street at the last moment. Van der Roet's Japanese menus were curious, and at times inimical to digestion, but the personality of the host was charming. As to Sir John Oglethorpe, the question ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... thus the quiet-coloured eve Smiles to leave To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey Melt away— That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb Till ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... young man's character was a high and abstracted ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformed to hope, and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty that, obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway, though not, perhaps, while he was treading it. But when posterity should gaze ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from another. Friends tortured themselves in vain, to find friends, in the huge mass of slain,—fathers to recognize their sons. The mournful gratification of bending over the lifeless bodies of dear relations and gazing with intense anxiety on their pallid features, was denied them. Undistinguished, though not unmarked, all were alike consigned to the silent grave, amid sighs of sorrow and denunciations ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... black marble tomb, What memorial sad appears.'— 'Undistinguished it lies in the chancel's gloom, No ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... especially claimed his interest. The men were nice but undistinguished—athletic schoolmasters, doctors snatching a holiday, good fellows all; the women, equally various—the clever, the would-be-fast, the dare-to-be-dull, the women "who understood," and the usual pack of jolly dancing girls and "flappers." And Hibbert, with his forty odd years of thick experience ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... disappeared, the one by the door for the Usher's desk, the one by the Library for the Master. The Modern Language Room opened into it. There were two doors, one the main entrance chiefly used by the boys, the other smaller and undistinguished for the Masters only. It led into the Library and into a Tower, where the School bell was. The Library was not very big but a long narrow room, and inset in the wall was a fire-proof safe, for the better preservation ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... supreme confidence in common men that was the keynote to the wonderful power of Dickens in making characters from those who were in a world sense undistinguished. On this position Chesterton lays great stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the Divine image in Man that makes the cynic ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... affairs? Be this as it may, we know that in 1580, Spenser, then in his twenty-seventh year, accompanied Lord Grey De Wilton into Ireland as secretary; and that he had been there before, in some official capacity not undistinguished, is evidenced by the fact, that the Lord Justice, previously to his arrival, speaks of him as "having many ways deserved some consideration from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... easy it is to misjudge your so-called 'common man'! That fat, undistinguished-looking Briton in the corner of the omnibus is as likely as not Mr. So-and-So, the distinguished poet; and who but those with the divining-rod of a kind heart know what refined sensibility and nobility of character may lurk under an ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... music room, Van Kuyp read a volume of verse. He did not hear his wife enter. It pained her when she saw his serious face with its undistinguished features and dogged expression. No genius this, was her hasty verdict, as she quickly went to him and put a hand on his head. It was her hand now that was hot. He raised eyes, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... him: Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves' opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their support had been withheld from her through the period when ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... connection between men and women to be regulated by the State, in respect both of the persons and of the limit of age within which they may associate, but the children as soon as they are born are to be carried off to a common nursery, there to be reared together, undistinguished by the mothers, who will suckle indifferently any infant that might happen to be assigned to them for the purpose. Here, as in other instances, Plato goes far beyond the limits set by the current sentiment of the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... quiet-coloured eve Smiles to leave 50 To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray Melt away— That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... search of objects of more stirring interest. The ordinary traveler, who has no time to dive very deep beneath the surface of human life, is not satisfied to find things nearly as he finds them at home; streets, shops, and houses undistinguished by any peculiarity save the inconveniences and oddities of age; people every where around him who dress like all other civilized people, and possess the standard virtues and weaknesses of humanity; ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... of a junior and comparatively undistinguished branch of a very old and noted family. His branch was termed the Worminghurst Shelleys; and it is only quite lately[1] that the affiliation of this branch to the more eminent and senior stock of the Michelgrove Shelleys has passed from the condition of a probable ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... chapter; but possibly they were only 'disciples' in the wider sense, and not of the Apostolic group at all. Nobody can tell. What does it matter? The lesson to be gathered from their presence in this group is one that most of us may very well take to heart. There is a place for commonplace, undistinguished people, whose names are not worth repeating in any record; there is a place for us one- talented folk, in Christ's Church, and we, too, have a share in the manifestation of His love. We do not need to be brilliant, we do not need to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... a prominent part. The remaining theatres, the Nuovo, the Carlini, and others, are about the size of those in the Leopold- and Josephstadt at Vienna, and can accommodate about 800 spectators. Their exteriors and interiors are alike undistinguished; but in some of them the singing and playing are very creditable. In one of these theatres we are obliged to descend instead of to ascend to reach the pit and the first tier ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... the lowly brave, who bled While cheerly following where the Mighty led—[309] Who sleep beneath the undistinguished sod Where happier comrades in their triumph trod, To us bequeath—'tis all their fate allows— The sireless offspring and the lonely spouse: She on high Albyn's dusky hills may raise The tearful eye in melancholy gaze, Or view, while shadowy auguries disclose The Highland Seer's anticipated woes, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... dark-browed boy of about seventeen. The muster roll gave his name as Isaac Franks, the simple record holding no promise of the day when the Jewish boy, a distinguished veteran of the Revolution, should entertain President Washington as his guest. Today young Franks stood undistinguished among the other eager patriots and the future president was only the leader of an army of untrained "rebels", knowing full well that a traitor's death awaited him if his campaign ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... I knew what she was as well as if I had seen her. I knew she was well enough; there were girls like her in Madame Beck's school—phlegmatics—pale, slow, inert, but kind- natured, neutral of evil, undistinguished ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... question presents itself—How shall we know him at sight? If you continue in your belief as to his character—that he is to be a king as Herod was—of course you will keep on until you meet a man clothed in purple and with a sceptre. On the other hand, he I look for will be one poor, humble, undistinguished—a man in appearance as other men; and the sign by which I will know him will be never so simple. He will offer to show me and all mankind the way to the eternal life; the beautiful pure Life ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... neighborhood, there is another equally contemptible Brook, making towards Oder, and turning the so-called Krebsmuhle, which became still more famous to the whole European Public twenty years hence. KREBS-MUHLE (Crab-Mill), as yet quite undistinguished among Mills; belonging to a dusty individual called Miller Arnold, with a dusty Son of his own for Miller's Lad: was it at work this day? Or had the terrible sound ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to see everything very accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and rather handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall and erect, with an air free, brave, and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... Spartan in the station. It rotated fast enough to give weight, but even on the outer skin that was only one-half Earth gravity. A couple of silent Martians prepared undistinguished meals and did housework in the quarters. There were no films or other organized recreation, though Lancaster was told that the forbidden sector included a ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... or, in exchange for her liberty and that of her two slaves, to remit 50 captives, and, failing to do either, the Sultan and his suite were to be deprived of their dignities and treated as common slaves, to work in the galleys, and to be undistinguished among the ordinary prisoners. On these conditions, the Princess left, and forwarded 50 slaves, and one more—a Spaniard, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... of the will is the first step that takes a human being out of the crowd. Charmian had suffered because she was in the crowd, undistinguished, lost like a violet in a prairie abloom with thousands of violets. Something in Algeria, something perhaps in Susan Fleet, had put into her a resolve, unacknowledged even to herself. She had returned to England, meaning to marry Claude Heath, meaning ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep. Meditation, avaunt! Respected (tho' unknown) Sir,—Out of the abundant store of your immutable condescension graciously deign to pardon the bold assurance and presumptuous liberty of an animated mass of undistinguished dust, whose fragile composition is most miraculously composed of congenial atoms so promiscuously concentred as to personify in an abstracted degree the beauteous form of man, to convey by proxy to your brilliant opthalmic organs the sincere ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... Fregellae and of the fact that the passion for the franchise was the most indubitable sign of the loyalty of the town, the government ordered that the walls of the surrendered city should be razed and that the town should become a mere open village undistinguished by any civic privilege.[489] A portion of its territory was during the next year employed for the foundation of the citizen colony of Fabrateria.[490] The new settlement was the typical Roman garrison in a disaffected country. But it proved the weakness of the present regime ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... France, the most famous French warrior of his age, was born of an ancient but undistinguished family, at the castle of La Motte-Broon, near Rennes, about 1314. The date is doubtful, the authorities varying between 1311 and 1324. The name is spelt in various ways in contemporary records, e.g., Claquin, Klesquin, Guescquin, Glayaquin, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... should be delighted to join you," said the girl, "if you could consent to be accompanied by such undistinguished climbers. Let me introduce ourselves. This is my cousin, Sir Ernest Scrivener. This is my brother, Lord ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... pleasant and bitter, and you can see that he has selected the pleasant and cut out the others, partly because of his loyalty and humour, and partly, no doubt, in deference to the prejudices of censorship. And he writes his selection of printable remarks in a very agreeable and not undistinguished idiom, pointing the narrative with reflections sane and sage enough. He has also made some water-colour notes (here reproduced in colour) of things seen; not remarkable, but adequate to convey an impression. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... it may appear a business of less consequence to look after remedies for the others. For there are certain things which are usually said about poverty; and also certain statements ordinarily applied to retired and undistinguished life. There are particular treatises on banishment, on the ruin of one's country, on slavery, on weakness, on blindness, and on every incident that can come under the name of an evil. The Greeks ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... yes, costume could make a crowd something other than the mass of sooty colour—dark without depth—and the multiplication of undignified forms that fill the streets, and demonstrate, and meet, and listen to the speaker. For the undistinguished are very important by their numbers. These are they who make the look of the artificial world. They are man generalized; as units they inevitably lack something of interest; all the more they have cumulative effect. It would be well if we could persuade the ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... them, but when they have gone their faces remain in my memory. I seem to see them thirty years hence, that honest, faithful, straightforward face of the youth, transformed into the rigid image of an eminently-worthy and wholly-undistinguished citizen, and the radiant, meaningless girl a stout and careful Mrs. Grundy with a band of children around her. Yet the memory of to-day will still perhaps ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... father and saw an old man, a man who for him had always been old, generally harsh, often truculent, and seldom indulgent. He saw an ugly, undistinguished, and somewhat vulgar man (far less dignified, for instance, than Big James); a man who had his way by force and scarcely ever by argument; a man whose arguments for or against a given course were simply pitiable, if not despicable. He sometimes indeed thought that there must be ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... and "thou'd" by the meanest of his subjects, who never took their hats off when they came into his presence; and as singular for a Government to be without one priest in it, and for a people to be without arms, either offensive or defensive; for a body of citizens to be absolutely undistinguished but by the public employments, and for neighbours not to entertain the least jealousy one against ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... a native of , in the United States of America. My ancestors migrated from England in the reign of Charles II.; and my grandfather was not undistinguished in the War of Independence. My family, therefore, enjoyed a somewhat high social position in right of birth; and being also opulent, they were considered disqualified for the public service. My father once ran for Congress, but was signally defeated ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... to noon before the river boat turned a bend and steamed up to the wharf at Kusiak. The place was an undistinguished little log town that rambled back from the river up the hill in a hit-or-miss fashion. Its main street ran a tortuous course parallel ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... business heart, behold the marching clubs—those sinister, ephemeral organizations which on demand of the mayor had cropped out into existence—great companies of the unheralded, the dull, the undistinguished—clerks, working-men, small business men, and minor scions of religion or morality; all tramping to and fro of an evening, after working-hours, assembling in cheap halls and party club-houses, and drilling ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... concrete, it had no worldly, graspable implications, and his general contempt was not less but greater. He wished to bring a final justification to his isolation rather than lose himself in the wide, undistinguished surge of living. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to sing.' This compliment, which Shakespeare turns to splendid account in Sonnet cvi., recurs constantly in contemporary sonnets of adulation. {140a} Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as 'my best-best lov'd.' Campion told Lord Walden, the Earl of Suffolk's undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love, 'the admired virtues' of ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... the only proper course of action was to go at once to Police Headquarters and make a frank statement of the case with its attendant circumstances. True, we were undistinguished citizens, with neither pull nor influence, but surely respectability must count for something, even as against charges of admitted theft and suspected murder. If we owned up now we should be subjected, doubtless, to more or less annoyance growing out of the affair, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... might be queen so long as he was Duke of Omnium. Their revenues were about the same, with the exception, that the duke's were his own, and he could do what he liked with them. This remembrance did not unfrequently present itself to the duke's mind. In person, he was a plain, thin man, tall, but undistinguished in appearance, except that there was a gleam of pride in his eye which seemed every moment to be saying, "I am the Duke of Omnium." He was unmarried, and, if report said true, a great debauchee; but if so he had always kept his debaucheries ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... lodger must have lived somewhere during his forty-odd years of life. She did not even know if Mr. Sleuth had any brothers or sisters; friends she knew he had none. But, however odd and eccentric he was, he had evidently, or so she supposed, led a quiet, undistinguished ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... after the event we cannot help wondering why the story was not earlier put in book form; for in its delineation of the character of an adventurer it is as great as VANITY FAIR, while for the local colour of history, if I may put it so, it is no undistinguished precursor of ESMOND. ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reporters was entrenched in the front seats, and those who were to be called on to give evidence occupied chairs to one side of the table behind which the coroner sat, while the jury, in double row, with plastered hair and a spurious ease of manner, flanked him on the other side. An undistinguished public filled the rest of the space, and listened, in an awed silence, to the opening solemnities. The newspaper men, well used to these, muttered among themselves. Those of them who knew Trent by sight assured the rest that he ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... engaged that day on foot, resolving to show his army that he meant to share every fortune with them, and he was slain in the thickest of the engagement; and as Edward had issued orders not to give any quarter, a great and undistinguished slaughter was made in the pursuit. There fell about one thousand five hundred on the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... circumnavigating Africa, discovering Great Britain, and trading with India, ten centuries before Christ, had no equals on the ocean until the time of the Portuguese discoveries, twenty-five centuries after. The Arabs alone, of the seven Semitic families, remained undistinguished and unknown till the days of Mohammed. Their claim of being descended from Abraham is confirmed by the unerring evidence of language. The Arabic roots are, nine tenths of them, identical with the Hebrew; and a similarity of ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... mackintosh with its yellow velveteen collar turned high up, and one of those modest round hats to which she was addicted. For then you were aware only of the pale-gold hair fluffing round her school-mistress eye-glasses, her gentle air of respectability, and her undistinguished littleness. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... variety of discordant sounds, from their elevated situation. Growling of bears, grunting of hogs, braying of donkeys, gobbling of turkeys, hissing of geese, the catcall, and the loud shrill whistle, were heard in one mingling concatenation of excellent imitation and undistinguished variety: During which, Tom led the way to the upper Boxes, where upon arriving, he was evidently disappointed at not meeting the party who had been seen occupying a seat on the left side of the House, besides having sacrificed a front seat, to be now compelled to take one at the very ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... "Thou hast, O foremost of Brahmanas, said that Jiva-soul is indestructible and truly undistinguished from the Supreme Soul. This, however, is difficult to understand. It behoveth thee to once more discourse on this topic to me. I have heard discourses on this subject from Jaigishavya, Aista, Devala, the regenerate sage Parasara, the intelligent Varshaganya, Bhrigu, Panchasikha Kapila, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... often well bestowed, is yet oftener bestowed without any desert whatever; and that title to admiration and respect, which has died with ancestry, patriotism, and suffering in the cause of freedom, is transferred from the illustrious dead to the undistinguished living. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... was not remarkable. The pipe was not picturesque. The scissors were the most ordinary of scissors. The copy paper was quite undistinguished in appearance. The lead pencils had the most untemperamental ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... certain things in Romance itself. Nor do I think that there is the slightest difficulty in showing that every form of novel-writing which we have been surveying in this book—that the work of every one of those distinguished or undistinguished writers who have been, with or without regret, declined—is still essentially Romantic. It is Romantic in its inflexible resolution to choose subjects for itself and not according to rule; Romantic in its wise or unwise individuality ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... encouraging things for all who speculate upon human possibility to consider the multitude of men in the last three centuries who have been content to live laborious, unprofitable, and for the most part quite undistinguished lives in the service of knowledge that has transformed the world. Some names indeed stand out by virtue of gigantic or significant achievement, such names as Bacon, Newton, Volta, Darwin, Faraday, Joule; but these are ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... nearer home, the words in Carlyle seem electrified into an energy of lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved; whilst the words in Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished elements in a general effect. But the first class of writers have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... New Writer's first series shows that, in his degree, he is one of the poetical forces of the time. Of the school of poetry of which Horace is the highest master, he is a not undistinguished ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... fresh, with substance yet in them, Egyptians chiefly, these—so long last their embalming drugs. But to know one from another was no easy task; all are so like when the bones are bared; yet with pains and long scrutiny we could make them out. They lay pell-mell in undistinguished heaps, with none of their earthly beauties left. With all those anatomies piled together as like as could be, eyes glaring ghastly and vacant, teeth gleaming bare, I knew not how to tell Thersites from Nireus the beauty, beggar Irus from the Phaeacian king, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... circumstance that lay between him and his heart's dearest wish. The Commodore's inherent reverence for birth and breeding, and his comparative indifference to brain, was one of them. The obstinate pride of Allan's undistinguished and ambitious self ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... wanders over the awful ruins of others. . . . Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.—GOLDSMITH: The Bee, No. iv. (1759.) A ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... was a tall, sinewy young Englishman, with ruddy hair and beard, grave blue eyes, and an unmistakable air of good breeding. He wore a blue flannel shirt and high boots like Clarence's, yet somehow he made Clarence look a little rough and undistinguished. He was quiet in speech, reserved in manner, and seemed depressed and under a cloud; but Clover liked his face at once. He looked both ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... a violent outcry was raised against him, and although it was first heard with amazement, it soon became general, The Prince was laid under the ban of several successive popes, and the name of Machiavelli passed into a proverb of infamy. His bones lay undistinguished for nearly two centuries, when a monument was erected to his memory in the church of Santa Croce, through the influence of an ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I can only present the player to you exceptionally in this wise—that he follows a peculiar and precarious vocation, a vocation very rarely affording the means of accumulating money—that that vocation must, from the nature of things, have in it many undistinguished men and women to one distinguished one—that it is not a vocation the exerciser of which can profit by the labours of others, but in which he must earn every loaf of his bread in his own person, with the ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens |
