"Witless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... High-spirited youth and witless wealth a-lust for strange new pleasures turned from the long strain of conflict to indulgence in endless orgies of extravagance like nothing ever witnessed by a world long since surfeited with contemplation of weird excesses: ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... prophesying a certainty of victory, and dissuading them from accepting the amnesty offered by Monmouth. "All could not avail," says Mr. Law, himself a presbyterian minister, "with McCargill, Kidd, Douglas, and other witless men amongst them, to hearken to any proposals of peace. Among others that Douglas, sitting on his horse, and preaching to the confused multitude, told them that they would come to terms with them, and like a drone was always droning on ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and it was a curiously protected and hidden place, sheltered and quiet, with its one small crop of cider apples dropping ungathered to the ground, and unharvested there, except by hurrying black ants and sticky, witless little snails. ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... little flush of pride in thinking of the success of her Belvedere, discerned in herself a vast superiority over every one about her. No one guessed that a little girl, supposed to be a witless goose, had simply made up her mind to get a closer view of ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... mouth half open, like a witless man, I saw our couch, I saw our quiet room, Its shadows heaving by the fire-light gloom; And o'er my lips a subtle feeling ran, 10 All o'er my lips a soft and breeze-like feeling— I know not what—but had the same ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... loud abuse, The coarse, unfeeling, witless jest, The threat obscene, the oath profuse, And all that ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... fall of Napoleon! Now my story of this marvellous ignorance on the part of the poor monks is one upon which (though depending on my own testimony) I look “with considerable suspicion.” It is quite true (how silly it would be to invent anything so witless!), and yet I think I could satisfy the mind of a “reasonable man” that it is false. Many of the older monks must have been in Europe at the time when the Italy and the Spain from which they came were in act of taking their French lessons, or had parted so lately ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... beautifully fluted rims are of regular and uniform height, and all are equally filled with clear, still water. A great number of these basins are said to have been destroyed by an ax in the hands of a poor witless creature for the gratification of a burst of temper, and a magnificent stalagmitic column, too heavy for one man to lift, lay detached and broken, in proof that his body did not share ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... fructification, and such fruit is ostentatiously displayed. The male produces its fruit not as does the female, clinging closely and compact to the stem, but dangling dangerously from the end of the panicles—an example of witless paternal pride. This fruit of monstrous birth does not as a rule develop to average dimensions, and it is generally woodeny of texture and bitter as to flavour, but ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... practices condemned in the modern literary prize-ring. He calls Salmasius a poor grammarian, a pragmatical coxcomb, a silly little scholar, a mercenary advocate, a loggerhead, a hare-brained blunderbuss, a witless brawler, a mongrel cur; he reproaches him with the domestic tyranny put upon him by that barking she-wolf, his wife, and winds up with an elaborate comparison (not wholly unfamiliar to modern methods of controversy) between Salmasius and Judas. With his nameless opponent in the Divorce quarrel ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... optics, these behold The images of some peculiar things With brighter hues resplendent, and portray'd With features nobler far than e'er adorn'd Their genuine objects. Hence the fever'd heart Pants with delirious hope for tinsel charms; Hence oft obtrusive on the eye of scorn, Untimely zeal her witless pride betrays! 160 And serious manhood from the towering aim Of wisdom, stoops to emulate the boast Of childish toil. Behold yon mystic form Bedeck'd with feathers, insects, weeds, and shells! Not with intenser view the Samian sage Bent his fix'd eye ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... (as before). Ha! (making an entry in his note-book). And they laugh at a witless joke! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... and happiness were it not that the devil cannot suffer it. He must divide hearts and alienate love, allowing no one to take pleasure in another. He who is illustrious, of noble birth, or has power or riches, feels bound to despise others as silly geese or witless ducks. ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... There was a witless vanity about my friend that sat on him almost like a virtue. He made parade of his crafts less, I could see, because he thought much of them, than because he wanted to keep himself on an equality with me. In the same way, as I hinted before, he never, in all the time of our wanderings after, ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... the swathe better there than any where else," they reply. "Witless now is Njal," says Hallgerda, "though he knows how to give counsel on ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... my very bones. I knew her foot: you cannot hear a step For forty-year, and mistake it, though the spring's Gone out of it, and it's turned to a shuffle, it's still The same footfall. Why didn't she answer me? She chattered enough, before she went—such havers! Words tumbling from her lips in a witless jumble. Contrary, to the last, she wouldn't answer: But crept away, like a wounded pheasant, to die Alone. She's gone before me, after all— And she, so hale; while I was crutched and crippled. I haven't looked on her face ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... moral laxity are among his favourite themes. "He who abhors truth and hates the right, careers to hell and directs his course to the abyss: for many a man builds walls and palaces with the goods of others and yet the witless world says that he is on the right path, because he is clever and prosperous. As silver is refined in the fire, so the patient poor are purified under grievous oppression: and with what splendour the shameless rich man ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... you may find in the great entrance-room of the Louvre, filled with the luxurious orfevrerie of the sixteenth century, types perfect and innumerable: Satyrs carved in serpentine, Gorgons platted in gold, Furies with eyes of ruby, Scyllas with scales of pearl; infinitely worthless toil, infinitely witless wickedness; pleasure satiated into idiocy, passion provoked into madness, no object of thought, or sight, or fancy, but horror, mutilation, distortion, corruption, agony of war, insolence of disgrace, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... early Institute years it was easy, as in some places it still is, for stunt night to be no more than clowning, witless and cheap; but there is a distinct tendency to exercise the imagination ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... came betimes, and, with his wife, witnessed the play from the large stage boxes of the second tier, two thrown into one, and profusely draped with the national flag. The acts and scenes of the piece—one of those singularly witless compositions which have at the least the merit of giving entire relief to an audience engaged in mental action or business excitements and cares during the day, as it makes not the slightest call on ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... and Dactyl. Now Spond was the greatest and heaviest of the wolfhounds; Anap, rightly Anapaest, was a slender and swift greyhound; and whereas he found this pastime of names good sport he carried it further. Thus it came to pass that the witless creatures who shared his loneliness were reminders of many pleasant things. One of a pair of fleet bloodhounds which were ever leashed together was named Nich, and the other Syn, in memory that he had been betrothed on the festival of Saint Nicodemus and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... while delivered defenceless to the tender mercies of people without any fineness either of feeling or mind, unable to understand her misery, grossly curious, mistaking her manner for disdain, her silent shrinking for pride. The wife of the "odious person" was witless and fatuously conceited. Of the two girls of the house one was pious and the other a romp; both were coarse-minded—if they may be credited with any mind at all. The rather numerous men of the family were dense and grumpy, or dense and jocose. None in ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... extravagances he cursed out, too witless to see that this same hero of his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whose life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary for making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in some ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... Malfort? Roxalana is as much my companion when I admire her on the stage from my seat in the pit. There are times when my wife seems no nearer to me than a beautiful picture. If I sit in a corner, and listen to her pretty babble about the last fan she bought at the Middle Exchange, or the last witless comedy she saw at the King's Theatre, is that companionship, think you? I may be charmed to-day—as I was charmed ten years ago—with the silvery sweetness of her voice, with the graceful turn of her head, the white roundness of her throat. At least I am constant. ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... tell thee how I love thee best, And all my thoughts of thee shall be confess'd And none withheld, not e'en the witless one Which late I harbor'd when the mounting sun Burst from a cloud,—the moon a mile away, As if in hiding from the lord of day,— As if, at times, the moon were like thyself, And fear'd the semblance of ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... a new and complex sensation. Uncle Charles had grown so witless that he could no longer be sent out on errands and the disorder in settling in the new house left Stephen freer than he had been in Blackrock. In the beginning he contented himself with circling timidly round the neighbouring square or, at most, going half way down ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... prayers were scant, my offerings few, While witless wisdom fool'd my mind; But now I trim my sails anew, And trace the course I left behind. For lo! the Sire of heaven on high, By whose fierce bolts the clouds are riven, To-day through an unclouded sky His thundering ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... the fate of the lost sheep was so plain, as to admit of no misinterpretation of the meaning of the witless speaker. Animals of that class were of the last importance to the comfort of the settlers, and there was not probably one within hearing of Whittal Ring, that was at all ignorant of the import of his words. Indeed, the loud chuckle and the open and deriding manner with which the lad ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... said, In homely jest; "—the Past alone he heeds! Honours those Jewish times as he were a Jew, And Christ were neither Jew nor northern man! He has no ear for this poor Present Hour, Which wanders up and down the centuries, Like beggar-boy roaming the wintry streets, With witless hand held out to passers-by; And yet God made the voice of its many cries. Mine be the work that comes first to my hand! The lever set, I grasp and heave withal. I love where I live, and let my labour flow Into the ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... the candles had hardened properly, the mold was either held over the fire, or thrust in hot water half a minute, then the candles withdrawn by help of the reeds. They were cooled a bit, to save the softened outside, then nubbed of surplus wick, and laid in a dish outside. Careless or witless molders, by laying candles still soft upon the pile, ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... Word of his defiance of Whitburn had gotten around among the faculty—Whitburn might have his secretary scared witless in his office, but not gossipless outside it—though it hadn't seemed to have leaked down to the students yet. Handley, the Latin professor, managed to waylay him in a hallway, a hallway Handley didn't ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... desire, and if an equal flame Move one and the other sex, who warmly press To that soft end of love (their goal the same) Which to the witless crowd seems rank excess; Say why shall woman — merit scathe or blame, Though lovers, one or more, she may caress; While man to sin with whom he will is free, And meets with ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... these were when no man did them know, Yet have from wisest ages hidden been: And later times things more unknown shall show. Why then should witless man so much misween That nothing is but that which he hath seen? What if within the moon's fair shining sphere, What if in every other star unseen, Of other worlds he happily should hear, He wonder would much more; yet such to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... spot on the map and a meaning in the dull souls of its inhabitants, and here, within half an hour's train travel of the Lord Mayor's Mansion and the golden vaults of the Bank of England, transpired on the sweltering night of which I write, one of the most witless and appalling tragedies of the present war. Forever memorable in the hitherto colorless calendar of Walthamstow will be this tragedy in ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... turned her face towards her niece. It was a kindly face, but infinitely sad and lined with more cares than fall to the lot of most women of her age. The ingratitude of sons, the death of daughters, the poor troubled husband, old and witless in the King Charles ground-floor suite, weeping for his lost eyesight or sitting smiling mirthlessly over his violin, had marked her. But in spite of all she had kept the cult ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... head. Our conversation was desultory as to topics, but animated as to manner. I had never witnessed M. Van Praet more alive to social disquisition. We talked of books, of pictures, and of antiquities... and I happened, with the same witless simplicity which had pinned the portrait of King John over my seat at dinner, to mention that volume, of almost unparalleled rarity, ycleped the Fables of Pfister, printed at Bamberg in 1461:—which they had recently RESTORED to the Wolfenbuttel ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... difference an' my defeat, I'm witless enough to keep goin' on to school, whereas I should have returned homeward an' cast myse'f upon my parents as a sacred trust. Of course, when I'm in school I don't go impartin' my troubles to the other chil'en; I emyoolates the heroism of the Spartan boy who stands to be eat by ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... the marriage of St. Catherine," observed his visiter, stepping through the casement, "I wish I could break all marriages as easily; and as to the motive, your honour, I did not like to wait quietly, and see a pistol-ball walk towards my witless pate, to convince, by its effects thereupon, the unbelieving world that Robin Hays had brains. As to the domestics, the doors were locked, and they, I do believe, (craving your pardon, sir,) too drunk to open them. As to the wall, it's somewhat straight and slippery; but what signifies a wall ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... the Muses together with sweet voice in antiphonal chant replying, sing of the imperishable gifts of the Gods, and the sufferings of men, all that they endure from the hands of the undying Gods, lives witless and helpless, men unavailing to find remede for death or buckler against old age. Then the fair-tressed Graces and boon Hours, and Harmonia, and Hebe, and Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, dance, holding each by the wrist the other's hand, while among them ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... say it! I, who had been so witless to let this come upon us! Moa's weapon prodded me. Her voice hissed at me with all the venom of a reptile enraged. "So that was your game, Gregg Haljan! And I was so graceless to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... can talk right good sense to his fellows, shall no sooner turn him around to a woman, than he shall begin to chatter the veriest nonsense? It doth seem me, that a man never thinks of any woman but the lowest quality. He counts her loving, if you will; but alway foolish, frothy, witless. He'll take every one of you for that make of woman, till he find the contrary. Oh, these men! ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... to advance, but with the lessening of her fear and the gradual clearing of her mind she felt that she would not much longer be witless. ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... for further words—then he gave it up, choked out a deep, strong oath, and departed for good. Afterward I saw him several times below during the trip; but he was cold—would not look at me. Idiot, if he had not been in such a sweat to play his witless practical joke upon me, in the beginning, I would have persuaded his thoughts into some other direction, and saved him from committing that wanton and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the cross was made upon the chair whereon she had sat in a neighbor's house, her visits were not unwelcome, and in the manor-house, as in the cabin of the woodman, La Corriveau was received, consulted, rewarded, and oftener thanked than cursed, by her witless dupes. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... he mused, as he noticed this brilliant and singular decoration, "an emblem of the fraternity, I suppose, meaning ... what? Salvation and Immortality? Alas, they are poor, witless builders on shifting sand if they place any hope or reliance on those two empty words, signifying nothing! Do they, can they honestly believe in God, I wonder? or are they only acting the usual worn-out comedy of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... KING. Yet to die were witless, When Death, who with his fatal finger taps At princely doors, as freely as he gives His summons to the serf, may at this instant Have sealed the only life that throws a shade Between us ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... approaching, the Regent's power seemed on the point of slipping from him; Marshal Villeroy, aged, witless, and tactless, irritated at the elevation of Dubois, always suspicious of the Regent's intentions towards the young king, burst out violently against the minister, and displayed towards the Regent an offensive distrust. "One morning," says ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the dramatist's privilege of connecting various threads of action in one plot, disregarding chronology, and hazarding an ethical solution of motives which mere fidelity to fact hardly warrants. He shows us Vittoria married to Camillo, a low-born and witless fool, whose only merit consists in being nephew to the Cardinal Monticelso, afterwards Pope Paul IV.[9] Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, loves Vittoria, and she suggests to him that, for the furtherance of their amours, his wife, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... time, Of incest born and by the chances thrown A tainted alien on a ravished throne, Gapes the foul flatteries of a fawning train, And fatuous mock'ries, which themselves disdain, A fancied monarch, but the witless sport Of adulation, and a practiced court, Vaunts to his broad realms and Timour-like proclaims Illusive titles of barbaric names, Cheats his own nature, and now generous grown,[18] Dispenses souls and empires not his own, Draws the ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... or depreciation. Having proved in his boyhood, at Fontarabia, and in his maturity: at Muhlberg, that he could exhibit heroism and headlong courage; when necessary, he could afford to look with contempt upon the witless gibes which his enemies had occasionally perpetrated at his expense. Conscious of holding his armies in his hand, by the power of an unrivalled discipline, and the magic of a name illustrated by a hundred triumphs, he, could bear with patience and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... humbugged and easily diverted. Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing a limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way—"muddling along"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very urgently, that mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions decoyed them, that they took the very gift of life itself with a spiritless lassitude, hoarding it, being rather anxious not to ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... mild; And other streams which wind their various course, Till in the sea their weary wanderings end, By natural bent directed. Absent sole Was Inachus;—deep in his gloomy cave Dark hidden, with his tears he swells his floods. He, wretched sire, his Ioe's loss bewails; Witless if living air she still enjoys, Or with the shades she dwells; and no where found He dreads the worst, and thinks her not to be. The beauteous damsel from her father's banks Jove saw returning, and, "O, maid!" exclaim'd, "Worthy of Jove, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... was a rustle overhead. She fancied that a squirrel could not have climbed more swiftly; for, glancing up, she discovered the witless youth already upon the projecting branch, moving toward its slender tips, which swayed beneath his weight, threatening instant breakage. Below him roared the rapids, hurrying to dash over the great dam not many ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... laughed again. "I would be witless could I not figure this! He is a young man, and so handsome he has frightened you with the little Jetta! Is that it, Perona? ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... bleaching bones to and fro on that distant beach. I say that this dismal omen damped the spirit of us all. But nothing in this world can long dishearten the brave; we soon grow lighter, and, marching along in the crowd, blackguard effectively the witty or witless dogs that crack jokes at us and forebode hard ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... priest and friar,— Gilt claws of tyrant brutes,—who lie for hire, Preaching that God delights in this disgrace. Look well, ye brainless folk! Do fathers hold Their children slaves to serfs? Do sheep obey The witless ram? Why make a beast your king? If there are no archangels, let your fold Be governed by the sense of all: why stray From men to worship ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... was Labour his own bond slave; Hope That never set the pains against the prize; Idleness halting with his weary clog, And poor misguided Shame and witless Fear And simple Pleasure foraging ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... loved his mother with a fundamental, generous, undistinguishing love. Only he always forgot what he was going to do. He was much more sensitive than Maria, more shy and reluctant. But his shyness, his sensitiveness only made him more aimless and awkward, a tiresome clown, slack and uncontrolled, witless. All day long his mother shouted and shrilled and scolded at him, or hit him angrily. He did not mind, he came up like a cork, warm and roguish and curiously appealing. She loved him with a fierce protective love, grounded on pain. There was such a split, a contrariety ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... Chigwell, though we hear nothing of his exploits in these capacities. However, he must have been a familiar figure to the villagers as he stood in his little desk on the Sunday, giving out the psalms and leading the singing, because when in the rifled and dismantled Maypole he appeals to the poor witless old Willet as to whether he ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... Saviour! I'd die a saint! Win heaven for her by prayers, and build great minsters, Chantries, and hospitals for her; wipe out By mighty deeds our race's guilt and shame— But thus, poor witless orphan! [Weeps.] ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... without bud or flower, herd or herdsman, church or cottage, to the shadowed horizon, looming dark as the twilight deepened, was in sympathy with the gloom which had come upon me as Martin Hall ceased to speak. I had thought the man a fool and witless, flighty in purpose and shallow in thought, and yet he seemed to speak of great mysteries—and of death. In one moment the jester's cloak fell from him, and I saw the mail beneath. He had made a great impression upon me, but I concealed it from him, and replied jauntily ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... than the morning's birth And lovelier than all smiles that may be smiled Save only of little children undefiled, Sweet, perfect, witless of their own dear worth, Live rose of love, mute melody of mirth, Glad as a bird is when the woods are mild, Adorable as is nothing save a child, Hails with wide eyes and lips his life on earth, His lovely life with all its heaven to be. And whoso reads the name inscribed or hears Feels ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... down to an ancient and now brushy bark-peeling near by for blackberries. But the creature that most infests these backwoods is the porcupine. He is as stupid and indifferent as the skunk; his broad, blunt nose points a witless head. They are great gnawers, and will gnaw your house down if you do not look out. Of a summer evening they will walk coolly into your open door if not prevented. The most annoying animal to the camper-out ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... picture to lose any, even of the smallest parts or most trivial hues which bear a part in the great impression made by the reality. The difference between the drawing of the architect and artist[13] ought never to be, as it now commonly is, the difference between lifeless formality and witless license; it ought to be between giving the mere lines and measures of a building, and giving those lines and measures with the impression and soul of it besides. All artists should be ashamed of themselves when they find ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... witless, worthless children, O ye senseless, useless maidens, O ye wisdom-lacking heroes, Cannot play this harp of magic, Cannot touch the notes of concord! Give to me this thing of beauty, Hither bring the harp of fish-bones, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... thing just witless, accidentally cruel perhaps, but not malignant? Or is it wise, and merely refusing to pamper us? Is there somewhere in the immensities some responsive kindliness, some faint hope of toleration and assistance, something sensibly on our side ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... returned his wife. "Once a witless fool, always a witless fool!" and giving free rein to her vexation and ill-temper she continued to upbraid her husband until his anger also was stirred, and he had wellnigh made a second bid and wished himself ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... spoke he was one instant all faith and the next all despair. One moment he was filled with his unworthiness and wonder that so noble a creature as a woman should bend her heart and lips from her heaven down to his earth. The next he could not conceive any man should be such a witless ass as to stake his happiness on the steadiness of so manifest a weathercock as a woman's favour. It was all very strange talk; it opened to me, just as when a fog lifts and rolls down again, a momentary vision of a world of colours ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... at the window looking out, And the rain came down like silken strings That Swithin's day. Each gutter and spout Babbled unchecked in the busy way Of witless things: Nothing to read, nothing to see Seemed in that room for her and me ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... accommodations, and that the rich could best afford to be bounteous? If in all these spacious mansions there was no little nook for him, if out of their luxuries not a blanket or crust could be spared, what could he hope from the poor? You see, he was not altogether witless, if he was a—Fessenden's. Another proof: At whatever house he applied, he never committed the vulgarity of a detour to the back-entrance, but advanced straight, with bold and confident port, to the front-door. The reason of which was equally simple and clear: Front-doors ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and springing upward to a perch, upon which he hung until he got balance for another leap. I followed the animal, knowing him wiser in such matters than I. From time to time Orivie urged me to ride and when I refused gave me the knowing look bestowed upon the witless, the glance of the asylum-keeper upon the lunatic who thinks himself ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... open, but she still beheld, Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep: There was a painful change, that nigh expelled The blisses of her dream so pure and deep. At which fair Madeline began to weep, And moan forth witless words with many a sigh While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep; Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye, Fearing to move or ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... (I once knew something of the matter), Just fifty bardlings take the trouble, To be my tuneful worship's double. Fine similies that nothing fit, Joe Miller's, that must pass for wit; The dull, dry, brain-besieging jokes, The humour that no laugh provokes— The nameless, worthless, witless rancours, The rage that souls of scribblers cankers— (Administer'd in gall go thick, It makes even Sunday critic's sick!) Disgust my passion, fill my place, And snatch my prize before ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... other writings. He bids his children to be careful how they offend princes, and, offence being given, never to flatter themselves that it has been pardoned; to live joyfully as long as they can, for men are for the most part worn out by care; never to take a wife from a witless stock or one tainted with hereditary disease; to refrain from deliberating when the mind is disturbed; to learn how to be worsted and suffer loss; and to trust a school-master to teach children, but not to feed ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... the dog, and the witless sheep, Are bound to come home, for the snow will be deep. The mother is pickling a scornful word To throw at the head of the elder lad, Hugh; But talkative Jamie, as gay as a bird, Will have nothing beaten save snow from his shoe. He has fire in his eyes, he has curls on ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... stair railings to prevent himself from falling. As for his health, he had abominable headaches and dizziness. All on a sudden he was seized with acute pains in his arms and legs; he turned pale; was obliged to sit down, and remained on a chair witless for hours; indeed, after one such attack, his arm remained paralyzed for the whole day. He took to his bed several times; he rolled himself up and hid himself under the sheet, breathing hard and continuously like a suffering ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... for Greeks, So on their dumb immensity he wreaks His vengeance, driving in the press with shout Of "Aias! Aias!" hurtling, carving out A way with mighty swordstroke, cut and thrust, And makes a shambles in his witless lust; And in the midst, bloodshot, with blank wild eyes Stands frothing at the lips, and after lies All reeking in his madman's battlefield, And sleeps nightlong. But with the dawn's revealed The pity of his ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... confusion. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy and I found ourselves with the children upon our largest wagon; that was absolutely all the protection to be had. It would have gone down like a house of cards if that heaving sea of destruction had turned our way. I was scared witless. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy knelt among the children praying with white lips. I stood up watching the terrible scene. The men hastily set the horses free. There was no time to mount them and ride to safety with so many little children, and as there was nothing to tie them to ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... that we are sometimes circumspect, And hold ourselves in witless ways deterred: One thwacking made me seriously reflect; A SECOND turned the cream of love to curd: Most surely that profession I reject Before the fear of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mystery of woe, And in a book he sought to give the clue; The people read, and saw that it was so, And read again — then came the Man Who Knew, Saying: "Ye witless ones! this book is vile: It hath not got the rudiments ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... “The witless are under the protection of God,” stammered a flat-cheeked Usbeg in broken Hindi. “They foretell ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling |
