"Vapid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the speeches of Follett has been made; none will ever be attempted; no speech he delivered is read, except perchance as part of an interesting trial, and essential to its story, and then the language is felt to be poor, the cadences without music, and the composition vapid and spiritless; although, if studied with a view to the secrets of forensic success, with a 'learned spirit of human dealing,' in connexion with the facts developed and the difficulties encountered, will supply abundant materials for ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... who doth foster Ancona and reedy Cnidos, Amathus and Golgos, and Dyrrhachium, Adriatic tavern, accept and acknowledge this vow if it lack not grace nor charm. But meantime, hence with ye to the flames, crammed with boorish speech and vapid, Annals of ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... in the soaked and clinging silk of her bathing dress, she had an alluring lissomness of line and curve. If her face did match her beauty of body she would have rather more than one woman's share of Life's gifts, he philosophized, and by Nature's law of compensation she would probably be vapid and insipid ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... whole controversy, and for some time afterward, the press was burdened with replies, ponderous and pithy, lurid and vapid, vitriolic and unctuous, but in the main bearing the inevitable characteristics of pleas for inherited opinions stimulated by ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... conclusion,—just like your tea, which, though excellent hyson, is necessarily weaker and more insipid in the last cup. Now, as I think the one is by no means improved by the luscious lump of half-dissolved sugar usually found at the bottom of it, so I am of opinion that a history, growing already vapid, is but dully crutched up by a detail of circumstances which every reader must have anticipated, even though the author exhaust on them every flowery epithet in ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... London beaux not one had apartments more elegant than Sir Robert Volney.[3] It was one of the man's vanities to play the part of a fop, to disguise his restless force and eager brain beneath the vapid punctilios of a man of fashion. There were few suspected that his reckless gayety was but a mask to hide a weary, unsatisfied heart, and that this smiling debonair gentleman with the biting wit was in truth the least happy of men. Long he had played his chosen role. ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... Circle inclosing the central point, and itself traced between two parallel lines, a figure purely Kabalistic, these persons have added the superimposed Bible, and even reared on that the ladder with three or nine rounds, and then given a vapid interpretation of the whole, so profoundly absurd as actually ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Pagans did well enough; I cordially admire the refinement of their minds; but it has been reserved for a Christian country to attain this extreme, this quintessence, this absolute of poignancy. You will understand how vapid are all amusements to a man who has acquired a taste for this one. The game we play," he continued, "is one of extreme simplicity. A full pack—but I perceive you are about to see the thing in progress. Will you lend me the help of your arm? I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and common-place, these only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope, nor ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Theodora. 'I know how vain, and vapid, and weary everything seems, as if the sap of life was gone, but if we are content to remain in the wilderness, it begins to blossom at last, ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... research, highly creditable to the industry, good sense, and benevolence of its author. Of the "Travels" of Mr. Christian Curwen we hardly know what to say. He is bold and honest in his politics, a great enemy to abuses, vapid in his levity and pleasantry, and infinitely too much inclined to declaim upon commonplace topics of morality and benevolence. But, with these drawbacks, the book is not ill-written, and may be advantageously read by those who are desirous of information upon ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... came in: a vicar-general of the diocese of Paris, two canons, two former mayors of Paris, and one of the ladies who distributed the charities of Notre-Dame. No cards were played; but the conversation was gay, without being vapid. ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... if the lady has a day. Were not ladies able to deny themselves to callers there would be no time in crowded cities for any sort of work, or repose, or leisure for self- improvement. For, with the many idle people who seek to rid themselves of the pain and penalty of their own vapid society by calling and making somebody else entertain them, with the wandering book-agents and beggars, or with even the overflow of society, a lady would find her existence muddled away by the poorest and most abject of occupations—that of receiving a number of inconsiderate, and ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... LADY LOUISA,—This accompanies Harold the Dauntless. I thought once I should have made it something clever, but it turned vapid upon my imagination; and I finished it at last with hurry and impatience. Nobody knows, that has not tried the feverish trade of poetry, how much it depends upon mood and whim. I {p.139} don't wonder, that, in dismissing all the other deities of Paganism, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... for a time, he was lost to public sight. But I know that he went through the usual contest. Rejected manuscripts poured back into his room. Polite, but unaccommodating Editors, found that they had no use for vapid imitations of ADDISON, or feeble parodies of CHARLES LAMB. Literary appreciations, that were to have sent the ball of fame spinning up the hill of criticism, grew frowsy and dog's-eared with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... lyre withal; neither mother nor brother, nor any other kind familiar face, to look upon his gentleness in love, or to sympathize with his affections, unapprehended, unappreciated: so—while Mrs. Tracy was the showy, gay, and vapid thing she ever had been, and Julian the same impetuous mother's son which his very nurse could say she knew him—Charles grew up a shy and silent youth, necessarily reserved, for lack of some one to understand him; necessarily chilled, for want ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the man; and he conjures up no tragic figure that is not stuffed with sawdust and tricked out in the rags of the green-room. Fortunately, there is scant opportunity for idle tears in Tristram Shandy.... Yet no occasion is lost.... Yorick's death is false alike to nature and art. The vapid emotion is properly matched with commonness of expression, and the bad taste is none the more readily excused by the suggestion of self-defence. Even the humour of My Uncle Toby is something: degraded by the oft-quoted platitude: 'Go, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... talk which was thoroughly vapid and insincere, the spoken being false, and the unspoken, true. Sanine sat silently listening to this mute but sincere conversation, as expressed by faces, hands, feet and tremulous accents. Lida was unhappy, ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... Author's Farce. Miss Matthews is a new and remarkable study of the femme entretenue, to parallel which, as in the case of Lady Bellaston, we must go to Balzac; Mrs. James, again, is an excellent example of that vapid and colourless nonentity, the "person of condition." Mrs. Bennet, although apparently more contradictory and less intelligible, is nevertheless true to her past history and present environments; while her husband, the sergeant, with ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... countries of a vast continent, and encounter everywhere certain forms, identical, inevitable, exasperating by their repetition! How esthetics would gain by more simplicity! Instead of this luxury in job lots, all these decorations, pretentious but vapid from iteration, we should have an infinite variety; happy improvisations would strike our eyes, the unexpected in a thousand forms would rejoice our hearts, and we should rediscover the secret of impressing on a drapery ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Did he suppose she cared for such vapid nonsense? What surprised and hurt her was that he so utterly ignored the question at issue. Did he, a professed Christian of many years' standing, see no impropriety in this manner of quoting the very words of the Lord himself! or hadn't he sufficient ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... the rugged declivities of Cithaeron, the Greeks were tolerably safe from the Persian cavalry, save only the Megarians, who, to the number of three thousand, were posted along the plain, and were on all sides charged by that agile and vapid cavalry. Thus pressed, the Megarians sent to Pausanias for assistance. The Spartan beheld the air darkened with shafts and arrows, and knew that his heavy-armed warriors were ill adapted to act against horse. He in vain endeavoured to arouse those about him by appeals to ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I say that I, a plain, prosaic lieutenant in the republican service have done the incredible things here set out for the love of a woman—for a chimera in female shape; for a pale, vapid ghost of woman-loveliness? At times I tell myself I dare not: that you will laugh, and cast me aside as a fabricator; and then again I pick up my pen and collect the scattered pages, for I MUST write ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... not vapid; she is not shallow," said Martin. "I shall like to watch, and mark how she will work her way without help. If the storm were not of snow, but of fire—such as came refreshingly down on the cities of the plain—she would go through ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... inevitable fate of creatures who must die, in the order of nature, like successive growths of flowers, and whose souls were too feeble to rank with gods and climb into Olympus. That man should cease from his substantial life on the bright earth and subside into sunless Hades, a vapid form, with nerveless limbs and faint voice, a ghostly vision bemoaning his existence with idle lamentation, or busying himself with the misty mockeries of his former pursuits, was melancholy enough; but it was his natural destiny, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... looking out at a dreary world. Even the lovers by the elm tree did not quicken her pulse. Scarcely more did they interest her than her vapid adventure with Ahab Wright. All romantic adventure, personal or vicarious, was as ashes on her lips. But emotion was not all dead in her. As she gazed at Lila and Kenyon, Margaret wondered if her husband could see the pair. Her first ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... average pietist with holy horror; nevertheless I believe that (granting the premises) these conclusions are both logically and theologically defensible. The Divinity of my fancied paradise resembles in no way the vapid conceptions of Fra Angelico, or the Quartier St. Sulpice. His physical aspect, at least, would be better represented by some Praxitilean demigod or Flandrin's ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... East, the children of St. Anthony, were a long-lived sect, rivalling the many-wintered crow in longevity. Yet their lives were vapid monotonies, only long in months and years. They were devoid of vivid sensations, and vegetated merely. Milk-eaters were, in the days of Homer, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... between the prophet who has been on the mountain top, and the people who are waiting at its foot for his message. The dreams of beauty that formed themselves in the mind of the blind poet become flat and vapid when he embodies them in the well-worn names of Helen and Venus. The truths of God that he strove in his last years, as he says, 'to have written in the book of the people,' left those unkindled whose ears were ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... about human life, but he goes farther; he is cynical about his own wealth. And that brings me to my quarrel with you, Mr. Moreton. How could you let your brother spend his beautiful vigorous youth as a parasite to Cord's vapid son? Was that ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... that he who for twenty years had sacrificed his repose, lavished his fortune, and risked his life, for the public cause, now aimed at absolute dominion, or coveted a despotism which all his actions prove him to have abhorred? Defeated bigotry has put forward such vapid accusations. He has been also held responsible for the early cruelties which, it is notorious, he used every means to avert, and frequently punished. But while these revolting acts can only be viewed in the light of reprisals against the bloodiest persecution ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... no more time, he told himself, in foolish spiritualistic seances with his own shadow. He had too much before him, and too short a time in which to do it. His troubles, when he came to face them, would be realities, and not a train of vapid and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Bores, think to retrieve your characters by coming into my house and sitting mute for two hours. Heaven forbid that your blood should be found on my skirts! but I believe I shall kill you, if you do. The only reason why I have not laid violent hands on you heretofore is that your vapid talk has operated as a wire to conduct my electricity to the receptive and kindly earth; but if you intrude upon my magnetisms without any such life-preserver, your future in this world is not worth a crossed six-pence. Your silence would break the reed that your talk ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... showed Bijou various attentions, which she accepted with very pronounced satisfaction. It was with Miss Price now that Mr. Ramsay rode and walked and talked,—Miss Price, whose free-and-easiness, vapid chatter, artificiality, and sentimentalism contrasted unpleasantly with Bijou's frankness and sincerity. By this course each confirmed the other in the impression of untrustworthiness and flirtatiousness both had received, and they ought to have been perfectly satisfied ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... full, I daresay we shall meet some one we know at the table d'hote to-day. It is extraordinary that the only travellers we have encountered, since we left Paris, have been one horribly vapid Englishman and wife whom we dropped at Basle, one boring Englishman whom we found (and, thank God, left) at Geneva, and two English maiden ladies, whom we found sitting on a rock (with parasols) the day before yesterday, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... Hebrew Werther mourns the loss, not of his mistress—that would not have been in consonance with the spirit of the ghetto—but of his wife and his three children. The elegy came near being a popular poem. Its vapid sentimentality and its affected and exaggerated style were to exercise a baneful influence upon the following generations. It is the tribute paid by Hebrew literature to the diseased spirit of ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... low murmurs of Nan's beautifully modulated voice in his ears, he found his anger slowly rising, not against any one in particular, but against the vulgar ostentation in which these people moved and the vapid assumption of superiority with which they evidently looked ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... apt to be stiff, vapid and obscure, from the often irreconcilably different nature of languages, from local customs, and from allusions to circumstances over which time has drawn a veil. In attempting to put the most admired and interesting of Horace's Odes into English Verse, I have taken ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... Colonna; that deeply interesting enigma the Princess Lucretia; and the gentle Flora. He thought with disgust of the impending dissipation of an University, which could only be an exaggeration of their coarse frolics at school. It seemed rather vapid this mighty Cambridge, over which they had so often talked in the playing fields of Eton, with such anticipations of its vast and absorbing interest. And those University honours that once were the great object of his aspirations, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... idea that the people would prefer to see him as their representative living in a style consistent with the changes in manners and customs introduced by national prosperity, affording thereby an example of correct and elevating stewardship of reasonable wealth, by way of contrast to vapid society doings, came to him as an ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... most arrogant, self-opinionated, self-complacent, vapid piece of humanity in this town or any other town. She irritates me to the point of impoliteness. She never sees that people don't want her. ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... many changes were made,—I will not speak at present. Nor indeed afterwards, except on good chance rising;—the new Academy, with its Perpetual First President, being nothing like so sublime an object now, to readers and me, as it then was to itself and Perpetual President and Royal Patron! Vapid Formey is Perpetual Secretary; more power to him, as the Irish say. Poor Goldstick Pollnitz is an Honorary Member;—absent at this time in Baireuth, where those giggling Marwitzes of Wilhelmina's have been ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and prosperity which had been matured under the Bengal conquerors and of the rise of the Malabar marauders, whose ceaseless forays and incursions eventually reduced authority to feebleness and the island to desolation. The vapid biography of the royal imbeciles who filled the throne from the third to the thirteenth century scarcely embodies an incident of sufficient interest to diversify the monotonous repetition of temples founded and dagobas repaired, of tanks constructed ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... come in was The Evening New Yorker, the most vapid of all the local prints, catering chiefly to the uptown and shopping element. Its heading half-crossed the page proclaiming "Guest of Yachtsman Shoots Down Thugs." Nowhere in the article did it appear that Banneker had any connection with the newspaper world. He was ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... come to consider my present condition, I have doubts as to my complete sanity. Here am I, in a little, semi-fashionable French seaside place, away from my books and my comforts and my habits, as much interested in its vapid distractions as if the universe held no other pursuits worth the attention of a rational man. And I have been here a ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... it;' it is the jest of the family till they have all grown up. But this he can bear, because his noble mind recognises its own greatness; he regards his jeering brethren in the same light as the philosophic writer beholds 'the vapid and irreflective reader.' When they tell him they 'can't make head or tail of his blessed poetry,' he comforts himself with the reflection of the great German (which he has read in a translation) that the clearest handwriting cannot be read by twilight. It is when his literary talents ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... sparing hand, she had then been mistress of the occasion. She had had her own way, and in stinting herself had found her own reward. But now—the tea had no flavour now that it was made in the kitchen and brought to her, cold and vapid, by a man in livery whom she half feared to keep waiting while she ministered to her ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... treatise on the French philosophers of the present century, in which the vapid charlatanism of M. Cousin is satisfactorily dealt with; a history of English literature in five volumes; a humorous book on Paris; three volumes upon the general theory of art; and two volumes of travels in Italy; besides a considerable ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... In Vapid he was truly excellent and delivered the epilogue with a force and humour which merited and indeed received three successive rounds of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... virgin novel proved a rank failure. The man could do nothing sustained. He was essentially a person of brilliant flashes. The book, called, as you may remember, "The Shadow and the Substance," was a tour de force in vapid writing, and it almost severed his literary jugular vein. All the reviewers, delighted with a chance to play upon his title, said it contained far more shadow ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... eggs," said the president. "It can't be otherwise. They've been busy up in a little room in Petticoat Court all the afternoon, and the men have been getting as much as fifteen shillings a head!" Moggs was not consoled, but he did make his speech. It was poor and vapid;—but still there was just enough of manhood left in him for that. As soon as his speech had been spoken he escaped up to London by the night mail train. Westmacott also spoke; but announcement was made on behalf ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... atrocious. We may call the stories in the other group realistic, because the subject-matter is contemporary life in Paris and the provinces, and because in them Flaubert indulges his hatred for mediocrity—for the humdrum existence of the country doctor, the apothecary, the insipid clerk, the vapid sentimental woman, and the charlatans of science. But as a matter of fact, ALL his books are essentially constructed on the same theory: all are just as "realistic" ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... friend, and prompts them to employ all their resources to beguile it. I have been thanked by worldly mothers, in country houses, with something like a touch of nature, for being so good to their boys—'I am so afraid they must have been troublesome to you,'—when they have not only saved me from vapid hard gabble and slanderous gossip, but let in a little breath of paradise as well. I often accept an invitation with reference to the children I shall see. 'To meet Lord and Lady D——, and Mrs. G——, ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... published in June 1809, and greatly added to the celebrity of their authoress. "Almeria" is the best, and full of admirable pictures of character. In all, the object is to depict the vapid and useless existence of those who live only for society. Sometimes the moralising becomes tiresome. "Vraiment Miss Edgeworth est digne de l'enthousiasme, mais elle se perd dans votre triste utilite," said Madame de Stael to M. Dumont when she had read the Tales. ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... throws. Hail, sleep, restorer of the tortured mind, Balm of the soul, and friend to human kind! The toils and tumults of our earthly scene Subside, and melt into thy sway serene. Life's sweetest cup, with purest blessings fraught, Were, without thee, a vapid joyless thought! My fellow captives all thy pleasures taste; Their fears, their sorrows, all in sleep are past; } Oh! be it peaceful still, for this may be the last! } Now, borne in vision to those airy plains } Where fancy undisturb'd ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... right of his possessions, to the exclusive control of human affairs. The most that I should expect from them, were all the facts published to-morrow, would be the secret assent of the wise and good, the expressed censure of the vapid and ignorant (a pretty numerous clan, by the way), the surprise of the mercenary and the demagogue, and the secret satisfaction of the few who will come after me, and who may feel an interest in my conduct or my name. I have openly predicted bad ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... sheer release of control must have been in Charles Lamb's mind when he wrote to Coleridge about the "pure happiness" of being insane. "Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so." ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... dissertation on Roast Pig, and by whose aid "for the first time in our lives we tested crackling" The post bakery yielded admirable bread; and for vegetables and fruit we had very poor sweet potatoes, and (in their season) an unlimited supply of the largest blackberries. For beverage, we had the vapid milk of that region, in which, if you let it stand, the water sinks instead of the cream's rising; and the delicious sugar-cane syrup, which we had brought from Florida, and which we drank at all hours. Old Floridians say that no one is justified in drinking whiskey, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... in; and the examiners assembled to adjudge the prize. The first vessel was unsealed. Its odour was such that the judges, without tasting it, pronounced unanimous condemnation. The next was opened: it had a villainous taste of clay. The third was sour and vapid. They proceeded from one cask of execrable liquor to another, till at length, in absolute nausea, they gave ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is older. One in the Berlin Gallery[158] has been painted, and no final judgment can be passed until the more recent accretions of oil-colour have been removed. But the whole conception is weakly and vapid. The brown eyes, the nicely rouged cheeks, the mincing look, and the affectation of the pose make a genteel page-boy of him, and all suggest a later imitation—about 1470 perhaps—and contemporary with the somewhat analogous though better rendering in the Louvre.[159] The ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... on the internal page A clearer picture of the age. His age, you say? But ah, not so! In his lone isle of long ago, A royal Lady of Shalott, Sea-sundered, he beholds it not; He only hears it far away. The stress of equatorial day He suffers; he records the while The vapid annals of the isle; Slaves bring him praise of his renown, Or cackle of the palm-tree town; The rarer ship and the rare boat He marks; and only hears remote, Where thrones and fortunes rise and reel, The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Even when the toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down with still older pricked election Port; then the acid of the wine made some amends for the want of anything piquant in the wit. But when his Grace gave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuff which had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts, the drug made up of the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so wofully of the cork and of the cask, and of everything except the honest old lamp, and when that sad draught had ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... his vivid lines assume The garb and dignity of ancient Rome.— Let college verse-men trite conceits express, Trick'd out in splendid shreds of Virgil's dress; From playful Ovid cull the tinsel phrase, And vapid notions hitch in pilfer'd lays: Then with mosaick art the piece combine, And boast the glitter of each dulcet line: Johnson adventur'd boldly to transfuse His vigorous sense into the Latian muse; Aspir'd to shine by unreflected light, And with a Roman's ardour think and write. He felt ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... that Charles was not the author. 'My reading progresses with or without fixed hope. I struggled through the "Eikon Basilike" yesterday; one of the paltriest pieces of vapid, shovel-hatted, clear-starched, immaculate falsity and cant I have ever read. It is to me an amazement how any mortal could ever have taken that for a genuine book of King Charles's. Nothing but a surpliced Pharisee, sitting at his ease ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... Almighty God and to the souls of men?' But, as Aumerle says, Pusey is not in the House of Commons. An attack on Temple will be highly unpopular. We have sounded opinion in various quarters, and we receive the unanimous reply—'Have nothing to do with it.' There is a feeling in the clubs, too, that vapid, colourless orthodoxy is not wanted in England. Healthy disagreement within limits suits us. The question is, then: Ought I to go against this strong tide and ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... a scornful voice; 'they come to see Sara, and I hate them so, flimsy stuck-up creatures, with their white ties and absurd little moustaches. Each one is more stupid and vapid than the other. And Sara must think so too; for she smiles on ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... something sordid, ugly, disgusting, breaks the spell. On the Promenade des Anglais sewage greets the eye as well as the nose. Not vicious women and poor little dolls alone, but cruel and weak faces, shifty and vapid faces, self-centered and morose faces, leech faces, pig faces, of well-tailored men—you watch them pass, you remember what you have seen at the tables, in near-by Monte Carlo, and the utter depravity of your race frightens you. Except clothes and jewels ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... Shrew. Cowley and Crashaw furnished instances of conceits; Waller, Young, and Hayley of frigidity; and Darwin of affectation. "What beaux and beauties crowd the gaudy groves, And woo and win their vegetable loves"— a phrase adopted—"vapid vegetable loves"—by the Laureate ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... she had not heard of the Celebrity's ignoble escape. As the meal proceeded it was easy to mark that her eye now and again fell across his empty chair, and glanced inquiringly towards the door. I made up my mind that I would not be the bearer of evil news, and so did Farrar, so we kept up a vapid small-talk with Mr. Trevor on the condition of trade in the West. Miss Trevor, however, in some way came to suspect that we could account for that vacant seat. At last she fixed her eye inquiringly on ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... The conversation was vapid and conventional—remarks about the opera and its performers—even the heat of the weather was mentioned. Lothair had come, and he had nothing to say. Mrs. Campian seemed much interested in the performance; so, if he had had any thing to say, there was no opportunity ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... the group behind him: vapid expressions of regret, scorching condolence, pitying oaths; then the voice of a newcomer, a newspaper correspondent, asking Bowers if they conceded ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of the little country girl (whose very introduction into the romance the author had looked upon with misgivings) had afforded the first gleam of natural, refreshing, wholesome interest—in fact, the only relief to all that was vapid, irrational, and unreal—which the combined action of the characters in his romance had succeeded in producing. But the enchantress who had effected this, so far from being the most unadulterated product of his own brain and genius, was the only one of all his dramatis personae ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... it equally so to them. He aimed at no ornament: the beauty of his writings consisted in their perspicuity and strength. A verbal critic might discover inaccuracies in his compositions, but the man of sense would find in them nothing unmeaning—- nothing useless—nothing vapid. He was not a turner of fine periods—he was not a fine writer—but he wrote with strength, precision, and lucidity; and his compositions, even where they failed to produce conviction, could never be read without creating respect for the masculine ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... Palled, is vapid, past its time of excellence; palled wine, is wine that has lost its ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... crisp, to preserve their beauty. For the look alone, they had better not be boiled at all, and almost as well for the purpose of food, as in such a crude state they are scarcely digestible by the strongest stomach. On the other hand, when overboiled they become vapid, and in a state similar to decay, in which they afford no sweet purifying juices to the stomach, but load it with a mass of mere feculent matter. The same may be said of many other vegetables, their utility being too often sacrificed to appearance, and sent to table in ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... alone in her restlessness. It is curious to note what diverse causes produce the same effects. Cora Arthur was restless, very restless. The fruit of her labor was in her hands, but it was vapid, tasteless, unsatisfying. What her soul clamored for, was the opera, the contact of kindred spirits, the rush and whirl, the smoke and champagne, and giddiness of the city; the card-won gold, and painted ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... involved in characteristic difficulties. The pastor, it may easily be supposed, was not popular with the rising generation. He had, as he confesses with his usual candour, 'a constitution in many respects peculiarly unhappy, attended with flaccid solids; vapid, sizy, and scarce fluids; and a low tide of spirits; often occasioning a kind of childish weakness and contemptibleness of speech, presence and demeanour; with a disagreeable dulness and stiffness, much unfitting me for conversation, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... is a sense of perplexed, delicious colour: tones of miraculous subtlety seem to be flowing into an enchanted pool and chasing one another there. From this pool emerge gradually forms which appear sometimes vaporous and sometimes tentative, but never vapid and never woolly. When we have realized that the pool of colour is, in fact, a design of extraordinary originality and perfect coherence our aesthetic appreciation is at its height. And not until this excitement begins to flag ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... laid a heavy hand upon her arm before she could interfere with Otobu's attentions to the young man. At first, as she turned toward the ape-man, her face reflected only mad rage, but almost instantly this changed into the vapid smile with which Smith-Oldwick was already familiar and her slim fingers commenced their soft ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Madeline, 'that vapid swarthy creature in the widow's cap, who looked as though her clothes had been stuck on her back with a pitchfork!' The signora never allowed any woman ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... had been a failure, and he knew it. On going back to the sacristy the Reverend Golightly congratulated him with a simper and a vapid smile. The canon was more honest but more vain. He mingled lofty advice with gentle reproof. Mr. Storm had taken his task too lightly. Better if he had written his sermon and read it. Whatever might serve for the country, congregations in London—at All Saints' especially—expected ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... heart of a Frenchman like Brillat-Savarin. For the cookery we meet in the hotels of the great European cities, though it may be based on French traditions, is not the genuine thing, but a bastard, cosmopolitan growth, the same everywhere, and generally vapid and uninteresting. French cookery of the grand school suffers by being associated with such commonplace achievements. It is noted in the following pages how rarely English people on their travels penetrate where true Italian cookery may be tasted, wherefore it ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... so that the highest poetry of these people becomes, in the very process of utterance, the finest music; while the utterance of base sentiments, or of fustian, becomes, by the very nature of the language, discordant, or at best vapid and unmelodious. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... old fraud asleep again. And to-morrow he'll print half a column of vapid reminiscence and call it criticism. It's a wonder his paper stands for him. Because he once heard ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... who have completed the arrangement of the Fair, have studiously avoided preceding it with noisy and demonstrative babblings, which are so often the vapid precursors of promises as empty as those who make them; therefore, in some quarters, our Fair has been overlooked. It is not, we think, a presumptuous interpretation of this great movement, to say, that the voice of God now seems to utter "Speak ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... lived in Italy and Greece as a student, concerned especially with the old civilisations; I read little but Greek and Latin. That brought me out of the track I had laboriously made for myself I often thought with disgust of the kind of work I had been doing; my novels seemed vapid stuff so wretchedly and shallowly modern. If I had had the means, I should have devoted myself to the life of a scholar. That, I quite believe, is my natural life; it's only the influence of recent circumstances that has made me a writer of novels. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... in corresponding terms, though declining to withdraw its charges. The whole world of contemporary journalism is arraigned for its subserviency to popular prejudices. The 'Record' is lashed for its religious rancour, and the 'Reasoner' for its vapid version of popular infidelity, though it is contemptuously preferred, in point of spirit, to the 'Record.' Fitzjames flies occasionally at higher game. The 'Times,' if he is to be believed, is conspicuous for the trick of spinning empty verbiage out of vapid popular commonplaces, and, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... been asleep. Now she stretched luxuriously beneath the crisp white sheet that the vapid August heat decreed. From memory to memory her dream-fogged mind drifted, and to the yet-to-be. It was good to remember, and to imagine, and to ...
— Moment of Truth • Basil Eugene Wells
... The sedentary stretch their lazy length When custom bids, but no refreshment find, For none they need: the languid eye, the cheek Deserted of its bloom, the flaccid, shrunk, And withered muscle, and the vapid soul, Reproach their owner with that love of rest To which he forfeits even the rest he loves. Not such the alert and active. Measure life By its true worth, the comforts it affords, And theirs alone seems worthy of the name Good health, and, its associate in the most, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... fatal moment had not yet arrived! Then he bade Sporus begin to sing his funeral song, and begged some one to show him how to die. Even his own intense shame at his cowardice was an insufficient stimulus, and he whiled away the time in vapid epigrams and pompous quotations. The sound of horses' hoofs then broke on his ears, and, venting one more Greek quotation, he held the dagger to his throat. It was driven home by Epaphroditus, one of his literary slaves. At this moment the centurion ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... will add, seems to me to have admired Shakespeare more heartily and intelligently than ninety-nine out of a hundred modern supporters of Shakespeare societies; though these gentlemen are never happier than when depreciating English eighteenth-century critics to exalt vapid German philosophising. Fielding's favourite play seems from his quotations to ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... for Archbishop Ireland, and he said, frankly, that he should be glad to see the red hat go to him. The lady's husband was appointed to a foreign Embassy, and they were both soon thrown into an Ultramontane atmosphere, where clerical intrigues had long furnished one of the chief amusements of a vapid and corrupt Court. The lady, who, of course, could not have realized the impropriety, made known the President's regard for Archbishop Ireland. She even had letters to herself beginning "Dear Maria," to prove the intimate terms on which ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... "Very true," says Vapid, "but this will regulate itself."—Will it, indeed? Be good enough to tell me how! All the potent individual agencies now affecting it are attached by self-interest to the wrong side. The Capitalists, the Employers, the Exporters, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Mirror, and The Family Lyceum. Many of these lived only a year or two, yet they show a desire among the people for a native literature, however crude and sentimental it might be. During this period also came the evanescent "Annual," a species of vapid literature borrowed from Germany through England. Upon the centre-table, near the case of stuffed birds, you could find The Token or The Pearl. Perhaps the giver had preferred The Casket or The Western Souvenir. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... when it is first generated, and also some air-bubbles; but though it was suffered to stand a long time in this situation, it still retained its peculiar taste; but when it had stood all night pretty near the fire, the water was become quite vapid, and had deposited a filmy kind of matter, of which I had often collected a considerable quantity from the trough in which jars containing this air had stood. This I suppose to be a precipitate of the metal, by the solution of which the nitrous air was generated. I have not given so much ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... turn my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with, a gloomy kind of envy; for while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid,—comparatively so. Excuse this selfish digression. Your "Monody" [3] is so superlatively excellent that I can only wish it perfect, which I can't help feeling it is not quite. Indulge me in a few conjectures; ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... precieux and the precieuses, for such was the name given to these gentlemen and ladies who set up for wits, and thought they displayed exquisite taste, refined ideas, fastidious judgment, and consummate and critical discrimination, whilst they only uttered vapid and blatant nonsense. What other language can be used when we find that they called the sun l'aimable eclairant le plus beau du monde, l'epoux de la nature, and that when speaking of an old gentleman with grey hair, they said, not as ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... of life must be sometimes diversified, and the vacuities of conversation sometimes supplied. We rejoice in the reflection that we have stores of novelty yet unexhausted, which may be opened when repletion shall call for change, and gratifications yet untasted, by which life, when it shall become vapid or bitter, may be restored to its former sweetness and sprightliness, and again irritate the appetite, and again sparkle in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... wholly lacking in their sisters of to-day. A young girl's charm is her freshness, and if she persists in coating her face with powder and rouge that freshness vanishes, and one sees merely rows of vapid little doll-like faces, all absolutely alike, and all equally artificial and devoid of expression. These present skimpy draperies cause one to reflect that Nature has not lavished broadcast the gift of good feet and neat ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... flour, soap and water, tied round with rags and twine. The tea kettle and gun barrel are to be kept continually wet by means of swabs and sea water, to cool and condense the steam. This distilled water is at first vapid and nauseous, both to the taste and the stomach; but by standing open for some time, especially if agitated in contact with air, or by pumping air through it, as is commonly done to sweeten putrid water, this unpleasant and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... imaginative a turn of mind to leave facts in their native nakedness, but this tendency of his is too apparent to need pointing out. What betrays him is the wonderful family likeness of his portraits, a kind of vapid esprit, not distantly related to silliness, with which the limner endows his unfortunate sitters, Chopin as well as Liszt and Tausig. Indeed, the portraits compared with the originals are like Dresden china figures compared with Greek statuary. It seems to me also very improbable ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... rewrote a story, "What Happened at Mendocino." What happened to the story does not appear. He went to church generally, and some of the sermons were good and others "vapid and trite." Once in a while he goes to a dance, but not to his great satisfaction. He didn't dance particularly well. He tells of a Christmas dinner that he helped his sister to prepare. Something made him dissatisfied ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... which he published separately, was a Secular Ode on the Revolution in 1688. It was formal and vapid; but sufficed to shew that time, though it had checked "the lyric rapture," had left him his ardour in the cause of freedom. Like the two leaders of the opposite parties, Pitt and Fox, he hailed with glad voice the dawn of French liberty. It was only for the gifted ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... love with Lola, the "Baby-Talk Lady," a vapid little flirt. To woo her in a manner worthy of himself (and of her) he steals his father's evening clothes. When his wooings become a nuisance to the neighborhood, his mother steals them back, and has them let ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... last book, the last play; not saloon conversation; but theirs—talk in which neither you nor any one of your condition could really join. To us there would seem nothing at all in that conversation, vapid and subjectless; to them it means much. We have not been through the same circumstances: our day has been differently spent, and the same words have therefore a varying value. Certain it is, that it is conversation that takes men to the public-house. Had ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... based upon personalities. Her mind has not been fed and nurtured from day to day with beautiful and noble thoughts, with history and science and general knowledge. She may be amiable. She may have personal beauty. But you find her empty and vapid, and you weary of her, in spite of the very best intentions of being interested. How different the woman who, in spite of social exactions, and even of accumulating domestic duties, and of the time-consuming tax of dress, still keeps her mind fresh and growing, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... could so little keep company. But as little they with her. Their enjoyment was not more foreign to her than the causes which moved it were strange. Merry?—she might like to be merry; but she could sooner laugh with the North wind than with one of those vapid faces, or with any face that she could not trust. Conversation might be pleasant,—but it must be something different from the noisy cross-fire of nonsense that was going on in one quarter, or the profitless barter of nothings that was kept up on the ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... and far be it from me to detract from the praise due to her efforts to achieve and maintain her independence. The successes of their fathers, however, over the small irregular Turkish levies to which they were opposed, do not warrant the present population in indulging in the vapid boastings too often heard, of their ability to drive the Turks to Constantinople, were they permitted so to do. In a word, they forget that they owe their present position, not to their own prowess, but to foreign intervention; without which the province ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... to know nothing of Lord Lufton, for you say that it is very dangerous for young ladies to know young gentlemen. But I do know enough of him to understand that he ought not to like such a girl as Griselda Grantly. He ought to know that she is a mere automaton, cold, lifeless, spiritless, and even vapid. There is, I believe, nothing in her mentally, whatever may be her moral excellences. To me she is more absolutely like a statue than any other human being I ever saw. To sit still and be admired is all that she desires; and if she cannot ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... this reading, but the reverse. The poet's state of mind was too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his Laras. But while Byron was exactly what ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.) |
