"Unsatisfying" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... variable conditions, be the most economical of installation or the most efficient of operation. The dominant feature of the task is an endeavor to find a compromise between efficiency and capital outlay. The result is a series of choices between unsatisfying alternatives, a number of which are usually found to have been wrong upon further extension ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... music in the last act; the "Good Friday music" is divine; the last scene is gorgeously led up to; and the music of it, considered only as music, is unsurpassable. But heard at the end of a drama so gigantically planned as "Parsifal," it is unsatisfying and disappointing. It is to me as if the "Ring" had closed on the music of Neid-hoehle with the squabblings of Alberich and Mime. The powers that make for evil and destruction have won; one knows ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... appearance of a god who says a few lines of either exhortation or consolation or reconciliation, which, after the strain and stress of the action itself, strikes some people as rather stilted and formal, or as rather flat and somehow unsatisfying. Worse still, there are in many of the scenes long dialogues, in which the actors wrangle with each other, and in which the action does not advance so quickly as we wish. Or again, instead of beginning with the action, and having our curiosity excited bit by bit about the plot, at the outset ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... are in question; and for mankind generally, though possibly not for an exceptional man like Huxley, an impotent suspension of judgment on such issues as a future life or the Being of God is both unsatisfying and demoralizing. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... for any less costly homes it costs too much. It is expensive in its first outlay and it demands constantly the greatest care and the highest skill. Our ordinary American life is too busy for it unless the ground is quite handed over to the hired professional and openly betrays itself as that very unsatisfying ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... Lady, I doubt not, more sentiment and suggestion of love than a conservatory full of them in January. And this suggestion, leavened as it is with the inconstancy of nature, stimulated by the promises which are so often like the peach-blossom of the Judas-tree, unsatisfying by reason of its vague possibilities, differs so essentially from the more limited and attainable and home-like emotion born of quiet intercourse by the winter fireside, that I do not wonder the Young Lady feels as if some spell had been broken by the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Gabriel's did not dissipate the constraint and disappointment left upon the company by Uncle Sylvester's unsatisfying performance and early withdrawal, and they separated soon after, Kitty and Marie being glad to escape upstairs together. On the landing they met two of the Irish housemaids in a state of agitated exhaustion. It appeared that the "sthrange gintleman" had requested that his bed be remade ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... said Hitt, turning to Haynerd. "And we knew it, of course. But we have let our confidence slip. This steam-calliope age reflects the human-mind struggle for something other than its own unsatisfying ideas. It turns to thrills; it expresses its restlessness and dissatisfaction with itself by futurist and cubist art, so-called; by the rattle and vibration of machinery; by flaring billboards that insult every sense of the artistic; and by the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... those who complain that Hobbema was a poor colourist. True, he used little besides grays and a peculiar green, which seemed especially to please him; but since that colouring belonged to the subjects he chose, one cannot complain on the ground that what he did was unsatisfying. For lack of knowledge about him we can think of him as a man of moods, sad, desolate ones at that; because his work is too extreme and uniform in its character for us to believe his ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... as I that, unless you are a near-millionaire, you cannot possibly keep up with the many and various changes demanded by current fashion. Then why worry yourself by trying? Why spend your small income upon the unattainable, or upon that which, even if you could attain it, you would find unsatisfying and incomplete? ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... or thou dost load With cowardice and crime the groaning land, A pomp-fed king. Look to thy wretched self! 245 Ay, art thou not the veriest slave that e'er Crawled on the loathing earth? Are not thy days Days of unsatisfying listlessness? Dost thou not cry, ere night's long rack is o'er, "When will the morning come?" Is not thy youth 250 A vain and feverish dream of sensualism? Thy manhood blighted with unripe disease? Are not thy views of unregretted death Drear, comfortless, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... remained at Sairmeuse. They would have had lovely children playing around them! He would not be condemned to this continual warfare—to this hollow, unsatisfying, restless life. ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... George Eliot would do well to begin with The Mill on the Floss, her finest work, which is full of humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an analysis of soul in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpassed. Yet the end is cruel and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own religious creed. Next read Adam Bede, one of the saddest books in all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most humorous characters in ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... priest leads us round. There does not seem to be any one special shrine with a central figure for us to see; perhaps there is one, but it is not shown to foreigners. It is all vague and rather meaningless, and the carving and decoration are unsatisfying. After a while, as there does not seem to be anything more forthcoming, we drop a few coins into a bowl held out to us and prepare to go. Just as we reach the door another strange being in a peaked ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... not much bigotry in the west, for organized religion was unknown in Europe: practices might be forbidden as immoral or anti-social but such expressions as contrary to the Bible or Koran had no equivalent. Old worships were felt to be unsatisfying: new ones were freely adopted: mysteries were relished. There was no invasion, nothing that suggested foreign conquest or alarmed national jealousy, but the way was open to ideas, though they ran some risk of suffering transformation ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... of gaiety such as the older woman revelled in was quite unsatisfying to her daughter. In consequence the girl was really lonely. She had not yet found an outlet for her desire to be of some use in the world, or to fill the void left by the loss ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... attempted to describe; and every one is aware that the results of overstrained energies are feebleness and lassitude—want of nourishment might likewise have something to do with it. During my sojourn in the dingle, my food had been of the simplest and most unsatisfying description, by no means calculated to support the exertion which the labour I had been engaged upon required; it had consisted of coarse oaten cakes, and hard cheese, and for beverage I had been indebted to a neighbouring pit, in which, in the heat ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... thought was possible for the future. At the Gold Exchange Bank the weary accountants were making ineffective efforts to complete Thursday's business. That toilful midnight, at the close of the last great passion-day of the bullion-worshippers, will be ever memorable for its anxieties and unsatisfying anguish. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... "Life" it is difficult with the data at hand to say anything very definite. While dogmatism however is dangerous indefiniteness is unsatisfying. True, we cannot trace the genealogy of the present version beyond middle of the sixteenth century, but its references to ancient monuments existing at date of its compilation show it to be many centuries older. Its language proves little or nothing, for, being a ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... form might most easily escape the notice of search parties and still be tough enough to live a long time without renewal. Another factor slipped into his musings: mere hope of escape was unsatisfying after the outburst that had defined his fuming ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... since it unbosomed itself four years before, and now I felt like one to whom a friend has made some sorrowing confession of crime long past, and who has basely deserted him in consequence. The old memories of Jo. Dunfer, his fragmentary revelation, and the unsatisfying explanatory note by the headstone, came back with singular distinctness. I wondered what had become of Jo., and—I turned sharply round and asked my prisoner. He was intently watching his cattle, and ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... on the fence of the field where he had first seen Pocahontas, and went over his former experience of love. What a miserable thing it had been, at best! How feverish, vapory and unsatisfying! What a wretched fiasco his marriage had proved! And yet he had loved his wife! Her beauty was of a type that insures its possessor love of a certain sort—not the best, but strong enough to stand the ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... hungry still. Again, then, let us use this dark background to throw forward another scene. See, even now, "above the sun" Him who is the Head and perfect Exponent of the creation called the new. Is there any law of constant unsatisfying circuit in Him? Nay, indeed, every sight we get of Him is new; each revelation of Himself perfectly satisfies, and yet ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... the thought undisturbed because contented; so that all but the scheming mind becomes lapped in sleep, and the mind itself lives distinct and active as a dream,—a dream, not vague nor confused nor unsatisfying, but endowed with more than the clearness, the precision, the vigour, of ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I find in the Alhambra something unsatisfying; for many an inferior piece of architecture has set my mind a-working so that I have dreamed charming dreams, or seen vividly the life of other times. But here, I know not why, my imagination helps me scarcely at all. The existence led within these gorgeous walls is too remote; ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... dreamed of doing brave deeds for her, of saving her from terrible dangers. At first her vague, fleeting kisses thrilled him, but as the weeks went by and his passion grew, he found them strangely unsatisfying. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... differ much then,' said Fausta, 'in what we think of human life. I hold the highest lot to be unsatisfying. You admit all are so, but have shown me that there is a nearer approach to an equality of happiness than I had supposed, though evil weighs upon all. How the mind longs and struggles to penetrate the ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... cowboys in the streets, and vistas such as she had dreamed of shimmering in the afternoon sun, awakened an erstwhile slumbering desire for a draught of the real Romance of the West, heretofore only enjoyed in unsatisfying sips as she read of the West and ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... priest, found it an unsatisfying portion, and, doubtless influenced by its failure, has resigned and turned his energies ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... exhibiting in his cups the real cosmopolitan feelings which inspired him—the feelings of most old soldiers of fortune. They start probably with some vague notions of seeking honour and glory, but, finding the objects at which they aim thoroughly unsatisfying, they in most cases become intensely selfish, and think only how they can make themselves most comfortable under any circumstances in which they are placed, or how they can secure the largest amount of plunder. This was the last time I saw Colonel Pinchard, but I heard that he married ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... resent, to wound and take the nonsense out of those about him, will, at all events, preclude the possibility of his being passed over as a factor not to be considered. If to charm and bestow gives the sense of power, to thwart and humiliate may be found not wholly unsatisfying. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... bounds which seem to him to be grown so narrow, but which he was told were safe? Now that Stephen was settled, it was open to him to return to Saint Elizabeth's College, but the young soul within him revolted against the repetition of what had become to him unsatisfying, unless illumined by the brightness he ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... followed the negro attendant into a luxurious compartment, in which, seated in a big leather-covered chair, was Miss Benham. She motioned Carson to another chair, and in the conversation that followed Miss Benham received a comprehensive estimate of Trevison from Carson's viewpoint. It seemed unsatisfying to her—Carson's commendation did not appear ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... arid places; [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 185-207.] the drainage of wet regions; the fuller utilization of the carrying power of water to relieve the costlier use of wheels. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 164.] Making the escaping, unsatisfying stream of Sisyphus turn the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... Tanganyika. Though it was not true that he had been murdered, it was true that he was half-starved. The want of other food compelled him to subsist to a large extent on African maize, the most tasteless and unsatisfying of food. It never produced the feeling of sufficiency, and it would set him to dream of dinners he had once eaten, though dreaming was not his habit, except when he was ill. Against his will, the thought of delicious feasts would come upon him, making ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie |
