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More "Dunce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "I don't want to have no harm, Please come, Ben, an' break the charm." Did I break that charm?—oh, well, There's some things I must n't tell. I remember, afterwhile, Her a-sayin' with a smile: "Oh, you quit,—you sassy dunce, You jest caught me whistlin' once." Ev'ry sence that when I hear Some one whistlin' kinder clear, I most break my neck to see Ef it 's Susy; but, dear me, I jest find I 've b'en to chase Some blamed boy about the place. Dad 's b'en noticin' my way, An' last night I heerd him ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... our intellectual superiors; and as the virtues are solely the product of education—a rogue being only a dunce considered from another point of view—they are our moral superiors likewise. Why should they not be? It is a land not of log and pine-board schoolhouses grudgingly erected and containing schools supported by such niggardly tax levies as a sparse and hard-handed population will consent to pay, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... clock,— Just the hour of the Earthquake shock! —What do you think the parson found, When he got up and stared around? The poor old chaise in a heap or mound, As if it had been to the mill and ground! You see, of course, if you're not a dunce, How it went to pieces all at once,— All at once, and nothing first,— Just as bubbles do when ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 'There is my dunce of a classmate has found his way into Congress, and is living amid the perpetual excitement of intellectual minds, while I am cooped up in an ignorant country parish, obliged to be at the beck ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... pocketed it, and returned by the next stage to college. This prank only moved the Squire to mirth, when he heard of it. He knew that Hugh was a lad of spirit,—that in scholarship he was by no means a dunce; and as long as there was no positive tendency to vice, he thought but lightly of his boyish peccadilloes. But it was impossible for such irregularities to continue, and after a while Mr. Kinloch yielded to his step-son's request and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... pained at this. She is troubled to find that her boy takes so little interest in so useful a work, and even, perhaps, scolds him, and threatens him for not loving study. "If you don't learn to read," she says to him, in a tone of irritation and displeasure, "you will grow up a dunce, and every body will laugh at you, and you will be ashamed ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... and died in 1308), were Realists, and the Scotists were as Realists opposed to the Nominalists, who, as followers of Thomas Aquinas, were called Thomists. Abuse, in later time, of the followers of Duns gave its present sense to the word Dunce.] ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... to be fools, it were better that they were fools in little matters than in great; dulness, turned up with temerity, is a livery all the worse for the facings; and the most tremendous of all things is a magnanimous dunce. ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... English History, and this is your French Grammar; and here is a Geography Book, and here is a History of Rome. Now read attentively, and do not let your thoughts wander; and be very careful not to dogs-ear the leaves: that always looks like a dunce. And mind you sit upright,' added she, looking back, as she left the room in obedience to ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... at the grounds, when you've seen the parade, How delicious it is to drink pink lemonade; And look at the elephant twirling his trunk, And laugh at the capers cut by the monk; Watch the old clown who is acting a dunce, And try hard to see three rings going at once; Gaze at the ringmaster cracking his whip, And watch the tight-rope artist skip. I saw that circus, Yes Sirree! Saw ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... remarking upon the Rape of the Lock, it seems was sufficient to raise that gentleman's resentment, who was never celebrated for forgiving. Many years after, Mr. Pope took his revenge, by stigmatizing him as a dunce, in his usual keen spirit of satire: There had arisen some quarrel between Gildon and Dennis, upon which, Mr. Pope in his Dunciad, B. iii. has the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... foes. Pope replied in a manly but self-defensive style. He is said about this time to have in his walks carried arms, and had a large dog as his protector; but none of the dunces had courage enough to assail him. Dennis, who was no dunce, might have ventured on it—but he had become miserably infirm, poor, and blind; and Pope had heaped coals of fire on his head, by contributing a Prologue to a play which was acted for ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... my foot and crush it out of existence; its novelty shall not avail (with me at least) to save its ugliness from annihilation. If I thought otherwise, I admit that a round dozen of vultures would be none too many for the liver of a dunce who could not see that ugliness was ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... have the advantage; or at least they think so; for they would not change with those who have them not, were they to gain by the bargain the most robust body that the most selfish coxcomb, or the heaviest dunce extant, ever boasted. For instance, would you now, my lord, at this moment change altogether with Major Benson, or Captain Williamson, or even our friend, 'Eh, really now, "pon honour"—would you!—I'm ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... forgotten that. Why, how will he know where to call. I fear I have made a mistake. A man who is as big a dunce as that can be of ...
— Oscar the Detective - Or, Dudie Dunne, The Exquisite Detective • Harlan Page Halsey
... smart scale. All told, there were not more than fifty on hand—and accounted for—by ten o'clock. A good many had come in costume—as zanies, Pantaloons, witches, Pierrots, Columbines, clowns and simples. For those who wore evening dress the hostess had provided a store of dunce caps and dominos of gay colours. Nearly everybody present already knew nearly everybody else. There were only five or six guests from out of town, and of these Mme. Josephine Ybanca, wife of the great South American diplomat, and Miss Evelyn Ballister, sister of the distinguished Western ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... standing there Maurits suddenly says to Anne-Marie: "What a dunce I am! I am quite forgetting to speak to Uncle about ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... twists the thread around his ugly spindle once, 4 Snaps off the last bit of the life of that Imperial dunce. But Lachesis, her hair adorned, her tresses neatly bound, Pierian laurel on her locks, her brows with garlands crowned, Plucks me from out the snowy wool new threads as white as snow, Which handled with a happy touch change colour as they go, Not common ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca
... between the eighteenth century classicists and such poets as Wordsworth [Footnote: See the Prelude.] and Burns, but it is by no means stilled at present. Yeats [Footnote: See The Scholar.] and Vachel Lindsay [Footnote: See The Master of the Dance. The hero is a dunce in school.] have written poetry showing the persistence of the quarrel. Though the acrimony of the disputants varies, accordingly as the tone of the poet is predominantly thoughtful or emotional, one does not find any poet of the last century who denies the superiority of poetic ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... might a poet or a philosopher. There is no certainty in speculation, for by this experiment it has been proved, that the bulls-eye in the stable window, in falling is as fragile as the palace's clearest pane of crystal. Who would have thought it? A dunce, that no one would have branded for having brains, has from a mere tumble given up the ghost. Bury him, bury him; I am sorry for it, but cannot howl," and at these last words a howl was heard from below, and soon ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... idlest boys, who, growing bolder with impunity, waxed louder and more daring—eating apples under the master's eye, pinching each other in sport or malice, and cutting their autographs in the very legs of his desk. The puzzled dunce, who stood beside it to say his lesson out of book, looked no longer at the ceiling for forgotten words, but drew closer to the master's elbow and boldly cast his eyes upon the page. If the master did chance to rouse himself and seem alive ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... numbers, even now, rival those of the Buffalo in its palmiest days. I never feel that I am truly back on the open range till I hear their call and see the Prairie-dogs once more upon their mounds. As you travel up the Yellowstone Valley from Livingstone to Gardiner you may note in abundance this "dunce of the plains." The "dog-towns" are frequent along the railway, and at each of the many burrows you see from one to six of the inmates. As you come near Gardiner there is a steady rise of the country, and somewhere near the edge of the Park the elevation ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... a paper? Well, it's nothing very new To be writing yards of drivel for a tidy little screw; You are young and educated, and a clever chap you are, But you'll never run a paper like the CAMBAROORA STAR. Though in point of education I am nothing but a dunce, I myself — you mayn't believe it — helped to run a paper once With a chap on Cambaroora, by the name of Charlie Brown, And I'll tell you all about it if you'll ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... you will let me, with the mass of readers, have clearer wits than the dunces—then why should I not know what you are as soon as, or sooner than Bavius, &c.—unless a dunce has a good nose, or a natural instinct ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... to their pleasure, and of which alone they are aware. The cleverness of a man who can paint fruit that tempts urchins impresses them; but the artist who feels, and tries to express, the soul of fruit and flowers they take for an incompetent dunce ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... as I knows on," drawled the old fellow, laughing until his old head seemed ready to topple from his shoulders. "No blood relation, any how, sir. You see, my wife's cousin's aunt's husband's brother Jerry was a cousin to Nicodemus Dunce, who, if I don't disremember, was related in some way to Isacker Pete's wife's sister, and she was this ere man's niece, or somethin' o' that sort, but we ain't blood ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... windows. There was music going on; Phoebe, no doubt, for Ursula could not play so well as that, and the house looked full and cheerful. He had a cheerful home, there was no doubt of that. Young Copperhead, though he was a dunce, felt it, and showed an appreciation of better things in his determination not to leave the house where he had been so happy. Mr. May felt an amiable friendliness stealing over him for ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... disparaged in the hearing of the young, without injury. What would be the natural effect of the following sentence, which I quote from a late well-written religious homily? "The pedagogue and his dunce may exercise their wits correctly enough, in the way of grammatical analysis, on some splendid argument, or burst of eloquence, or thrilling descant, or poetic rapture, to the strain and soul of which not a fibre ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... cries Booth, "is it possible you should do me so much unmerited honour, and I should be dunce enough not ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... so stupid in school that nothing but his previous good character saved him from a flogging. The day before the Feast of St. Nicholas (which was a holiday) the schoolmaster dismissed him with the severe inquiry, if he meant to be a dunce all his life? and Friedrich went home with two sentences ringing in ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... will belong to that hapless race of men, whose misfortune it is to have understanding. Henceforth let no man care to learn, or care to be more than worldly-wise; for certainly in higher matters to be ignorant and slothful, to be a common steadfast dunce, will be the only pleasant life, and ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... of faculty or proficiency, how a lad should be classed and what he should read, but of calendar years. As if a shoemaker should fit his last to the age instead of the foot. Such an age, such a study. Gottfried is a genius, and Hans is a dunce; but Gottfried and Hans were both born in 1646; consequently, now, in 1654, they are both equally fit for the Smaller Catechism. Leibnitz was ready for Latin long before the time allotted to that study in the Nicolai-Schule, but the system ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... once. After all, there is nothing like a letter. Who does not remember the first letter received in one's childish days, written in a fair round text for childish eyes, or perhaps even printed by the kind and painstaking correspondent for the little dunce of a recipient. Who has not slept with such a letter carefully hoarded away under the pillow, that morning's first light might give positive assurance of the actual existence of our treasure. Nor is the little urchin the only glad supporter of ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... the multiplication of books by transcription unnecessary, much just, though at times unjust criticism. A German writer has said, that the man of genius takes his notes on a slip of paper, he of good abilities on a half-page, while the dunce must fill a whole sheet. Now the reverse would be quite as true in many cases. For though thoughtless writing may be little more than wasted labor, yet there is nothing that can fix more steadily thoughts and facts in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... they approached the Sultan, Burton began addressing him, not in Arabic, but in the Zanzibar patois. The Sultan, after some conversation, turned to Badger, who, poor man, not being conversant with the patois, could only stand still in the dunce's cap which Burton, as it were, had clapped on him and look extremely foolish; while the bystanders nodded to each other and said, "Look at that fellow. He can't say two words. He's a fraud." Burton revelled in Badger's ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... younger than himself, had always been his counsellor and friend, and had also materially assisted in giving him the amount of knowledge he possessed in reading and writing. Had it not been for her, he confessed that he would have remained a sad dunce. ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... the village. I well remember the first morning he entered our school. He was then about twelve years of age; but, owing to his carelessness and inattention, he had made but slight progress in study. I learned afterwards that he had so long borne the names of "dunce" and "blockhead" in the school he attended in his own village, that he supposed himself to be really such, and made up his mind that it was useless for him to try to be anything else: and I think when our teacher first called him up for examination he was inclined to be of the same opinion. ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... with the same joyless severity under which their fathers and mothers had suffered. For spelling 'lamb' without the final b, Ivy Nancarrow underwent the punishment invariably meted out for such errors—mounted the dunce's bench, and wore the dunce's cap; nor did 'Thaniel Langmaid's knuckles escape the ruler when he dropped a blot upon his copy, 'Comparisons are Odious'—a proposition of which he understood the meaning not at all. The cane and the birch-rod on Mrs. Butson's ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... instead Of telling me at once That this was not the house!" he said. "There, that'll do—be off to bed! Don't gape like that, you dunce!" ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... carry this, that he may be more welcome to you, he says. Were it to be sent unsealed, the characters we write in would be Hebrew to the dunce. I desire you to return it; and I'll give you a copy of it upon demand; for I intend to keep it by me, as a guard against the infection of your company, which might otherwise, perhaps, some time hence, be apt to weaken the impressions I always desire to have of ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... added to the record of Pope's work but the revised "Dunciad," in which, to gratify an increased antipathy, he displaced its old hero, Theobald, in favor of Colley Cibber, who, whatever his faults, was certainly not a typical dunce. Toward the close of his life those infirmities at which Wycherley had hinted in his youth grew upon him, and he became almost entirely dependent upon nurses. He had not, to use De Quincey's words, drawn that supreme prize ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... time there lived an old couple who had three sons; the two elder were clever, but the third was a regular dunce. The clever sons were very fond of their mother, gave her good clothes, and always spoke pleasantly to her; but the youngest was always getting in her way, and she had no patience with him. Now, one day it was announced in the village that the King ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... opportunity, other than an equality that is relative, were to be maintained in the sphere of education, a clever boy who had learned to speak German in a year would have to be coerced into idleness until every dunce among his classmates could speak it as well as he; and a similar process would be repeated in after-life. This policy, as has been pointed out already, is, even if wasteful, not ruinous in the sphere of ordinary labour—a fact which shows how wide the ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... to me notable fellows, and as true cods as ever pissed. The one has rose-nobles, I say fine and weighty ones; the other would gladly have some too. The one knows something; the other's no dunce. The one loves the better sort of men; the other's beloved by 'em. The one is an old cunning fox; the other with tongue and pen, tooth and nail, falls foul on the ancient orators and philosophers, and barks at them ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... bigger and heavier in person every minute when he is being catechised by Polly! Asked by her if he knows any stories, and compelled to answer, "No! What a dunce you must be, mustn't you?" says Polly. Frightened nearly out of his wits at the dinner-table, when they are feasting together, by her getting on her feet upon her chair to reward him with a kiss, and then toppling forward among the dishes—he himself crying out in dismay, "Gracious ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... understand a lesson; and he always made it so clear that it was a pleasure to learn. Sometimes a boy would ask a foolish question, which would make the rest laugh; but then Mr. Harrison would say it was better to be laughed at for trying to learn, than to grow up a dunce. ...
— Aunt Fanny's Story-Book for Little Boys and Girls • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... of heroes and kings, was a lone, friendless mariner on the main, only true to his origin in the sea-life that he led. But so it has been, and forever will be. What yeoman shall swear that he is not descended from Alfred? what dunce, that he is not sprung of old Homer? King Noah, God bless him! fathered us all. Then hold up your heads, oh ye Helots, blood potential flows through your veins. All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Shipman, and there's charity,' says Iky, 'but my mother sewed happiness on my waist this morning.' Did you ever hear of such a dunce as that kid?" concluded ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... world I've travelled to and fro, How many folks about me—above me and below— Might make this life more happy, if old as well as young Would bear in mind the maxim which bids them hold their tongue. Hold your tongue—hold your tongue—you'll ne'er be thought a dunce: Hold your tongue and think twice before you loose it once: Hold your tongue—for quiet folks are oft reputed wise: Hold your tongue, but open wide ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... their force. Our minds by frivolous discourse We strengthen and embellish, "Let us be wise," said Plato once, When talking nonsense—"yonder dunce For ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... approaching next, confess'd, That in his heart he loved a jest: A wag he was, he needs must own, And could not let a dunce alone: Sometimes his friend he would not spare, And might perhaps be too severe: But yet the worst that could be said, He was a wit both born and bred; And, if it be a sin and shame, Nature alone must bear the blame: ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... both "in the flower of their youth," and both Arcadians, both equal in setting a theme for song or capping it epigrammatically; but as Arcadia was the least intellectual part of Greece, an "Arcadian" came to signify a dunce, and hence "Arcades ambo" ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... convince me of it, and said I was only prevented from becoming a complete convert by one or two prejudices. He knows no more about it than a pikestaff. Why then does he make so much ridiculous fuss about it? It is not that he has got this one idea in his head, but that he has got no other. A dunce may talk on the subject of the Kantean philosophy with great impunity: if he opened his lips on any other he might be found out. A French lady who had married an Englishman who said little, excused him by saying, 'He is always ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... that shot at a frog, B was a Butcher—he had a big dog, C was a Captain all covered with lace, D was a Dunce with a ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... this term is equivalent to "dunce," but it was originally employed as a law term. It is a Latin word, and literally translated means, "we do not know." In former days when a grand jury considered that a bill or indictment was not supported ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... were Adalbert Zwyny, a Bohemian violinist, who taught the piano, and Joseph Elsner, a violinist, organist and theorist. "From Zwyny and Elsner even the greatest dunce must learn something," he is quoted as saying. Neither of these men attempted to hamper his free growth by rigid technical restraints. Their guidance left him master of his own genius, at liberty ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... worth one thousand two hundred pounds, and left only one son called Clement. All his rarities, secret manuscripts, of what quality soever, Dr. Napper of Lindford in Buckinghamshire had, who had been a long time his scholar; and of whom Forman was used to say he would be a dunce: yet in continuance of time he proved a singular astrologer and physician. Sir Richard now living, I believe, has all those rarities in possession, which were Forman's, being kinsman and heir unto Dr. Napper. (His son Thomas Napper, Esq.; most generously gave most of these manuscripts ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... believe me, For all were quite ready to fall at his feet." "Indeed, you are wrong," said the Lily-belle proudly, "I cared nothing for him; he called on me once, And would have come often, no doubt, if I'd asked him, But though he was handsome, I thought him a dunce." ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... task, my little man, Is very hard to get? Will it make it any easier For you to sit and fret? Then wouldn't it he wiser Than waiting like a dunce, To go to work in earnest, And learn ...
— New National First Reader • Charles J. Barnes, et al.
... boy was dull or quite adverse to knowledge, he Was set an imposition or corrected with a switch: Far different our practice is, who reign by Methodology And guide the dunce by precepts learnt from Landon or from Fitch: 'Twas difficult by rule of thumb to check unseemly merriment, To make your class their pastor treat with proper due regard— 'Tis easy quite for specialists in Juvenile Temperament, Who know the books on ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... wandering, CHARLIE, I'm wandering. 'Oliday form is my text. Last year it was Parry and Switzerland; 'ardly know where to go next. I should much like to try Monty Carlo, and 'ave a fair flutter for once, But I fear it won't run to it, pardner; my boss is the dashdest old dunce. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... whole boy,—are taking the place too long monopolized by the "three R's." There was need of it. It had seemed sometimes as if, in our anxiety lest he should not get enough, we were in danger of stuffing the boy to the point of making a hopeless dunce of him. It is a higher function of the school to teach principles than to impart facts merely. Teaching the boy municipal politics and a thousand other things to make a good citizen of him, instead of so filling him with love of his country and pride in its traditions that ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... hand bright and early—Tommy Green and Johnny Stout, Humpty Dumpty and Little Bo-peep, Jack and Jill, Little Boy Blue in a brand-new suit of clothes, and Goldilocks with her yellow hair flying in the wind, Tom, the Piper's son, and poor Simple Simon, the dunce of the school, with many others that we have known and loved—and all brought baskets filled with good things for ...
— Harper's Young People, May 4, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... with being faithless to his paternal duty, and called him a thoughtless booby. Instead of turning the ungrateful rascal out of the house, he, the dunce, had given him hopes of becoming her poor, dazzled, innocent daughter's husband. During the ensuing weeks, Senora Petra prepared Coello many bad days and still worse nights; but the painter persisted in his resolution to give Isabella to Ulrich, if in a year and a half ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... he particularly shone in, were Sir Martin Marrall, Gomez in the Spanish Friar, Sir Nicolas Cully in Love in a Tub, Barnaby Brittle in the Wanton Wife, Sir Davy Dunce in the Soldier's Fortune, Sosia in Amphytrion, &c. &c. To tell you how he acted them, is beyond the reach of criticism: but to tell you what effect his action had upon the spectator, is not impossible: this then is all you will expect from me, and hence I must leave you ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... between the horns of a dilemma. Either our young chieftain must be a dunce, or we are rearing the Clever Woman ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not his own by finessing and trick, He cast off his friends, as a huntsman his pack, For he knew when he pleas'd he could whistle them back. Of praise a mere glutton, he swallow'd what came, And the puff of a dunce he mistook it for fame; 110 Till his relish grown callous, almost to disease, Who pepper'd the highest was surest to please. But let us be candid, and speak out our mind, If dunces applauded, he paid ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... the retreating figure. "His mother is a fine woman," he explained to the stranger. "Has charge of costumes and assists in makeup. That dunce is with her on a few days vacation from ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... the clown who made Jimmy laugh. He was a little man with a tall, pointed white felt hat like a dunce's cap; he wore the usual clown's dress, and generally kept his hands in his pockets as if he ...
— The Little Clown • Thomas Cobb
... but, at the same time, exhibited such a bashful appearance and uncouth address, that his mother despaired of ever seeing him improved into any degree of polite behaviour. On the other hand, Fathom, who was in point of learning a mere dunce, became, even in his childhood, remarkable among the ladies for his genteel deportment and vivacity; they admired the proficiency he made under the directions of his dancing-master, the air with which he performed his obeisance at his entrance and exit; and were ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... by finessing and trick; He cast off his friends, as a huntsman his pack, For he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back. Of praise a mere glutton, he swallowed what came; And the puff of a dunce, he mistook it for fame; Till his relish grown callous, almost to disease, Who peppered the highest was surest to please. But let us be candid, and speak out our mind: If dunces applauded, he paid them in kind. Ye Kenricks, ye Kellys, and Woodfalls so grave, ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... a match piped up with a tiny voice, "Your splendid scheme I like. I agree with all your principles and so I, too, will strike!" Suiting the action to the word, the silly little dunce Clambered down from his matchsafe and excitedly struck at once. He lost his head, and he ran around among the fireworks dry, And he cried, "Hurrah for the fireworks' strike! Hurrah for ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... dunce," Ned said, "you'll get a bullet into your anatomy if you don't be more careful. Now, you boys go on down the road toward Gatun," he added, turning to the others, "and make all the noise you want to. I'll go up to the old temple and see what is going on there. ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... ho!" he cried, "I'm in, if that fight's free; So here I come-ye knavish cowards three!" "For me," PELLEAS cried, "the fight she means," And charging, knocked them into smithereens. Now called she other knights, and cried out, "Once Again go bind and bring me here that dunce!" And when he heard, he let himself ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... Lilly White, the dunce of the school, had hers written by the beginning of study hours. It covered three pages of foolscap paper, and had at least the merit of being written on only ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... are a bigger dunce than you seem; but," added Fred, turning toward the Shawanoe, "have you seen ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... landlord. "Was that the vice president? Here, Dick! build a fire in the best room. Put everything in tiptop order, Sally. What a dunce I was to turn Mr. Jefferson away! He shall have all the rooms in the house, and the ladies' parlor, too, I'll go right round to the Planters' and ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... that results in head-ache. My dearest, Fate has been very good to me, and I love my profession of letters. I am sure that of all educational processes there is none better than book-making; and the man who begins by making books must be a dolt, dunce, and dunderhead, if he do not end by writing them. So you may yet hope to see the morning that shall make your Valentine famous—for a fortnight. What man can hope to be famous for more than a fortnight in such a railroad ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... occurred during this interval. Dodi had learned to write. What joy when the little dunce made his first attempt with chalk on a board: the letters are dictated to him—"write l and o, and then pronounce them both together." He was surprised that that meant lo (Hungarian for horse), and yet he had not ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... to his comrades, in clear disgust, "the stupid dunce thinks those fellows belong to us and we to them, just because we all wear the same sort of flying clothes! Did you ever ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... contrived to send his two sons to a penny-a-week school in the neighbourhood. Jabez, the elder, took delight in learning, and made great progress in his lessons; but Samuel, the younger, was a dunce, notoriously given to mischief and playing truant. When about eight years old he was put to manual labour, earning three-halfpence a day as a buddle-boy at a tin mine. At ten he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and while in this employment he endured ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... Hohenlinden, Lochiel, etc., should have been at the very top of the tree. Somehow he wants audacity, fears the public, and, what is worse, fears the shadow of his own reputation. He is a great corrector too, which succeeds as ill in composition as in education. Many a clever boy is flogged into a dunce, and many an original composition corrected into mediocrity. Yet Tom Campbell ought to have done a great deal more. His youthful promise was great. John Leyden introduced me to him. They afterwards quarrelled. When I repeated ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... I might be dead, then? That makes it worse, still. I was never in the slightest danger. I was only just a—dunce." ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... next few years, except to say that I went to college, where I was shunned by all, though never alone: was a dunce, and plucked twice. Perhaps it was I who shunned others, for had I not society in the constant presence of my Familiar? I was of course a dunce, for my brain was never steady enough to carry me over ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... were given us by M. Rossi, the minister of Pius IX. But Greek and Latin, and hours spent over an exercise or a translation with a fat dictionary to keep me company! Oh, mercy on me! From the scholastic point of view I was simply a DUNCE, nothing but a dunce. Yet I managed to scramble one prize—the shabbiest of them all—the second for Latin versions in the seventh class! I was presented with my reward at the prize distribution, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... sparred for points. When Miss Monckton undertook to refute his statements as to the shallowness of Sterne by declaring that "Tristram Shandy" affected her to tears, Johnson rolled himself into contortions, made an exasperating grimace, and replied, "Why, dearest, that is because you are a dunce!" Afterward, when reproached for the remark, he replied, "Madam, if I had thought so, I surely would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... put it on, "It is plain to the veriest dunce That every beauty Will feel it her duty To yield to its glamour at once. They will see that I'm freely gold-laced In a uniform handsome and chaste" - But the peripatetics Of long-haired aesthetics, Are very much more to ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... say my lesson, and Mr. Garland will think I'm a dunce," said he to himself, with a ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... he put it down on the table. "And she's no dunce, either." He went on to tell of the trap he had fallen into. "I'm dying with impatience to get her and Roseleaf together. They'd ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... would either remain true to their political faith and lose their economic support, or they would cling to their economic master and be utterly unable to do the slightest good. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... on his breast, he stood awhile, looking all around him with closed lips and lowering brow; then he walked slowly on, his eyes fixed on the ground, and muttered to himself—"The heir to this property is little better than a dunce; and they tell me I have talents and learning, and I have taken to my heart the maxim, 'Knowledge is power.' And yet, with all my struggles, will knowledge ever place me on the same level as that on which this dunce is born? I don't wonder that the poor should hate the rich. But of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the cynical; And revised the judgments we once held true In various ways that are strange and new. For instance, the other day there came To see me, the same yet not the same, A former office boy, whom once I wholly misread as a Cockney dunce, Who only cared for music-hall tunes— And who went and 'listed in the Dragoons. His khaki was much the worse for wear, Soiled and crumpled and needing repair, And he hadn't unlearned since his office days His gruff laconic turn of phrase. So I had to drag it out by degrees That he ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... cheery, young wife, very fond of her husband, and very proud of her baby; a good housewife, who delighted in making the house snug and cozy for John, when he came home after his day's work. She called him "a dear old darling of a dunce," or "her little goosie." She sheltered Edward Plummer in her cottage for a time, and got into trouble; but the marriage of Edward with May Fielding cleared up the mystery, and John loved his little ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... unpromising as its meridian day was bright; and that in the year 1759, he who, in less than thirty years afterwards, held senates enchained by his eloquence and audiences fascinated by his wit, was, by common consent both of parent and preceptor, pronounced to be "a most impenetrable dunce." ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... Moempelgard. This prince had been so pampered by his mother, Anne de Coligny, that he reached the age of twelve years without having learned to read or write. When the over-tender mother died, the boy's father, Duke George, took his dunce-son's education in hand; but this gentleman was peculiar in his notions of the training of young minds. French and German he deemed unnecessary trivialities, and the Christian religion a banality. Instead of these prosaic lessons the boy was instructed in the Arabic, Hebrew, ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... hair, and made striking by a pair of those long-lashed eyes that are always brown. And in character he was the most remarkable. Though two years our senior, he deliberately lagged behind the boys of his own age, and remained the oldest member of our form. Thoughtless masters called him a dunce, but abler ones knew him to be only idle. And Pennybet cared little for either opinion. He had schemed to remain in a low form; and that was enough. It was better to be a field-marshal among the "kids" than a ranker among his peers. Like Satan, for whom he probably felt a certain ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... And if any one admire it or take pleasure in it, he does so, not from reason, but from something within him which his reason, in so far as he has any, necessarily disapproves: so that he is rather to be laughed at as a dunce than preached to as a sinner; though perhaps this latter should be ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... "'Do? Art thou a dunce, Morgan? Without doubt, at the end of that cave is a way up into the castle; and though the passage be too narrow for all my troop, three men and a captain will suffice to lay faggots and light them at the ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left, a tall scalped mountain... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... was heard, They couldn't spell a word: They put an "i" in burly, and they put a "u" in bird! So, according to the rule, They must study after school, Or by and by they'll have to sit upon the dunce's stool. ...
— The Nursery, No. 103, July, 1875. Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... desperate, but at last I would come up smiling, calm in the faith that my life was deeper, richer for the experience, and that yours was, too. Or if it proved that yours was not, I should be amused at the shallowness of the Claire that was, for having been so simple a dunce as to imagine that you were worth while. I should thank you for teaching the present Claire to forsake that shallow one, and should find you a rung on my ladder ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... in two ways, for Defoe's ears were not clipped, though he was condemned to stand in the pillory; and there can hardly be a greater incongruity conceived than there is between our idea of a dunce and the energetic, shifty, wide-awake Defoe,—though for that matter a scholar like Bentley and a wit like Colley Cibber are as much out of place in the poet's ill-natured catalogue. Defoe angrily resented the taunts of the university men and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... go back and study. No going out to play for you this morning. Jane Mason, you're the biggest dunce in school." ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... impossible for a girl like Kitty Malone not to be popular; and the other girls valued her, and thought themselves highly privileged to be in the same class with her, dunce as she was. ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... of you, my good dunce, to confide such high thoughts to you," said the young man, who was at that moment having his feet rubbed with a soft brush ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... was still running wild in his happy banishment from school; Jenny, alias Trapper, was running wild with him whenever she could persuade the dear old lady who played the part of governess to her to forego her tales of ill-learnt lessons. A sad dunce was busy Mr. Gregory allowing his merry little daughter to grow up ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... "Dunce," cried Milady, "dunce! who dares to answer for another man, when the wisest, when those most after God's own heart, hesitate to answer for themselves, and who ranges himself on the side of the strongest and the most fortunate, to crush the ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... or Wivil (1330-1375), was, by Walsingham's account, not merely destitute of learning, but so deformed and ugly, "it is hard to say whether he was more dunce or dwarf, more unlearned or unhandsome," that had the Pope seen him he would never have endorsed his appointment. He was a militant bishop, and in 1355 instituted a suit against William de Montacute, and sent his champion clothed ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... Kit, just leave that stick alone; Come, drop it now at once; Of all the cats I ever knew You are the greatest dunce." ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... 'The Harp,' &c., 'this unparalleled work of human energy.' At p. 315, he calls it 'this stupendous work;' and lower down on the same page he says—'I was turned out of school at the age of fifteen for a dunce or blockhead, because I would not stuff into my memory all the nonsense of erudition and learning; and if future ages should discover the unparalleled energies of genius in this work, it will prove my most important doctrine—that the powers of the human mind must be developed ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... mother to New York shortly; but as "that dear old dunce" was the worst of all possible sailors, it would be necessary to wait for the largest of all possible steamers, and as the largest steamers sailed from Liverpool, and Ellan was so near to that port, perhaps I would not mind . . ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... "I was a plumb dunce for placing any dependence on those dogs," replied the Emergency man, as soon as his surprise and anger would permit him to speak. "I might have known that they would not pay the slightest attention to Percival ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... (and I was once A slight observer in a modest way), And so may every one except a dunce, That ladies in their youth a little gay, Besides their knowledge of the World, and sense Of the sad consequence of going astray, Are wiser in their warnings 'gainst the woe Which the mere passionless ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... grew up he clearly showed in what direction his interest lay. At school he was something of a dunce at his lessons, but let him but have a pencil and paper and his mind was wide awake at once. Every spare moment he spent making sketches on the walls of ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... but for your welfare," answers Mime, "I was sunk in thought as to how I should instruct you in a thing of great importance." "You were sunk quite under the seat," laughs Siegfried; "what of great importance did you discover there?" "I there learned fear for your sake, that I might teach it to you, dunce." "What about fear?" Siegfried asks. "You know nothing about it, and you are thinking of going from the woods out into the world? Of what use to you would be the strongest sword, if you had no knowledge of fear?... Into ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... chivalrous,—kind, and patient, and hard-working,—but stupid where women are concerned. Indispensable and delightful as they are in real life,—pleasant and comfortable as women actually find them,—not one in ten thousand but makes a dunce of himself the moment he opens his mouth to theorize about women. Besides, they have "an axe to grind." The pretty things they inculcate—slippers, and coffee, and care, and courtesy—ought indeed to be done, but the others ought not to be left undone. And to the former women seldom need to be exhorted. ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Tartar features, rather flat nose, rather high-cheek bones, yet the ensemble not positively ugly; tolerably good complexion. So much for person. As to mind, deplorably ignorant and ill-informed: incapable of writing or speaking correctly even German, her native tongue, a dunce in French, and her attempts at learning English a mere farce, yet she has been at school twelve years; but as she invariably gets her exercises, of every description, done by a fellow pupil, and reads her lessons ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... not put that in. The girl could not be so selfish as to take advantage of his over-generous impulse. She must understand that his time belonged to the ages and the race, not to the momentary perplexities of a high school dunce.... At the worst it would be only five minutes here and there—say ten minutes a week; forty minutes a month. No, no! He would not ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Santo boy, the dunce of the party, was set down at home, and the Banks Islanders were again found pleasant, honest, and courteous, thinking, as it appeared afterwards, that the white men were the departed spirits of deceased friends. A walk inland at Vanua Lava disclosed pretty villages nestling under banyan ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... horses — that she may visit her friends in comfort. I give her my family bible — that she may live above the ill tempers and sorrows of life. I give my son Peter a hornbook — for I am afraid he will always be a dunce. ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... day Fanny Hutton Her last dress has put on; Her fine lessons forgotten, She died, as the dunce died: And prim Betsy Chambers, Decay'd in her members, No longer remembers Things, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... at various books and was precociously brilliant in Latin. On the contrary, he was absolutely incapable of construing two Greek words, showed no aptitude for living languages and promptly proved himself a dunce when obliged to master the elements ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... but you have not seen the grandest one yet! Go with me to-day to St. Paul's and hear the charity children sing." So we went, and I saw the "head cynic of literature," the "hater of humanity," as a critical dunce in the Times once called him, hiding his bowed face, wet with tears, while his whole frame shook with emotion, as the children of poverty rose to pour out their anthems of praise. Afterwards he wrote in one of his books this passage, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... schoolmaster does not compel his scholars to learn: he only scolds and punishes them if they do not, which is quite a different thing, the net effect being that the school prisoners need not learn unless they like. Nay, it is sometimes remarked that the school dunce—meaning the one who does not like—often turns out well afterwards, as if idleness were a sign of ability and character. A much more sensible explanation is that the so-called dunces are not exhausted before they ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... cried, scratching at the fragments. "This is it. Dunce that I am not to have guessed it! Look, there is a layer of paper embedded in the wax. Look, he cut the seal out, smeared hot wax on the false packet, pressed in the seal, and curled the new wax over the ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... ere ever he came to your house or felt my ferule-end. He is of the dream nature and he will be what he will be. I can no more fashion him to the common standard than I can make the fir-tree like unto the juniper. I've had many a curious student yonder, wild and tame, dunce and genius, but this one baffles me. He was a while up in the glen school, they tell me, and he learned there such rudiments as he has, but what he knows best was never learned anywhere but as the tinkler learns—by the roadside and in ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguae: in English—illiterate, a dunce, a ninny.' ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... about Diddy and the Fair, but the Master saw what he had done. "Come here, Larry McQueen, and bring your slate," he said. "Sure, I'll teach you better manners. Get up on this stool now, and show yourself." He put a large paper dunce-cap on Larry's head, and made him sit up on a ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... how it seethes again and glows! Go in and comfort her, thou dunce! Where such a dolt no outlet sees or knows, He thinks he's reached the end at once. None but the brave deserve the fair! Thou hast had devil enough to make a decent show of. For all the world a devil in despair Is just the insipidest thing I ...
— Faust • Goethe
... did not stay, Various as the chameleon that she bore; Now a grand monarch with a crown of hay, Now mendicant in silks and golden ore: A statesman, now equipp'd to chase the boar, Or cowled monk, lean, feeble, and unfed; A clown-like lord, or swain of courtly lore; Now scribbling dunce, in sacred laurel clad, Or papal father now, in ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... himself; and with a view to erecting it, these marbles are being dragged to Montepulciano; but I doubt whether we shall contrive to get them up there. The roads are too bad." "But," cried I, "do you believe that man was a poet—that dunce who had no science, nay, nor knowledge either? who only rose above the heads of men by vanity and doltishness?" "I don't know," he answered, "nor did I ever hear tell, while he was alive, about his being ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... young yet to go to sea, but when you are old enough you cannot perhaps do better. The sea requires people of sense more than any other, and yet some persons send the dunce of the family on board ship, and then are surprised that he does not get on. You shall now go back to the friends who have taken care of you, and who seem good people. We must find somebody to whom you may go when you wish to get some more learning, and I ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... capital plan. You see he will be on his guard, and we must be very cunning. To-morrow is exhibition day, and he will have on his best dark-green jacket, and Frank and I are to sit one on each side of him. You see he is really a dunce about every thing but playing tricks; and, when he is asked a question, he will be scared out of his senses, and not know what to say. Now Frank is going to pretend to help him, while I write Dunce in large letters on the stupid fellow's back. John will ...
— Conscience • Eliza Lee Follen
... I went to routs and dances, Ah, how fine they were, and how Different from the dubious prances That the young indulge in now; There I first encountered Kitty, Told the girl I was a dunce, But implored her to have pity, And she said she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... it was chiefly around myself that the disputes raged. Though beginning only with some trifle, they would soon go on to God knows what. Frequently, even I myself did not know to what they related. Anything and everything would enter into them, for my father would say that I was an utter dunce at the French language; that the head mistress of my school was a stupid, common sort of women who cared nothing for morals; that he (my father) had not yet succeeded in obtaining another post; that Lamonde's "Grammar" was a wretched ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... impression, I felt quite at ease, and thankful to my Father in heaven for excusing me. But the next united supplication, I felt that I must unite with them in kneeling, and while one tried to pull me up by the arm, with saying "I'd be a little dunce if I was in thy place," the other sister pinched the other arm, "Now, Laura Smith, be a little Methodist, will thee? I'd be ashamed if I was thee; every body will make fun of thee." But I kept my position and made no reply, but secretly prayed for strength in my great weakness. But my fears were ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... the crew needs especial remark, Though he looked an incredible dunce: He had just one idea—but, that one being "Snark," The good Bellman ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... me all at once, 175 This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left, a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the least alike; so that what at first sight seems to be death, if you view it narrowly may prove to be life; and so the contrary. What appears beautiful may chance to be deformed; what wealthy, a very beggar; what infamous, praiseworthy; what learned, a dunce; what lusty, feeble; what jocund, sad; what noble, base; what lucky, unfortunate; what friendly, an enemy; and what healthful, noisome. In short, view the inside of these Sileni, and you'll find them quite other than what ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, "But are ye sure he's not a dunce?" Why, really one might ask the same thing in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's not a dunce? There is, in this world, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... don't set up for being reasonable: men who have to pay away money that they haven't got for their extravagant sons, aren't likely to be reasonable. There's two things you've gone and done which put me beside myself, when I think of them: you've turned out next door to a dunce at college, when your poor mother thought so much of you—and when you might have pleased and gratified her so if you chose—and, well! I won't say what the ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... when I came in his way, or so much as cursed my ugly face, though it was easy to see that he didn't over-like me. When I was six years old I was sent to the village school, where I was soon booked for a dunce, because the master found it impossible to teach me either to read or write. Before I had been at school two years, however, I had beaten boys four years older than myself, and could fling a stone with my left hand (for if I am right-eyed I am left-handed) higher and farther than any one ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye, where the master took "infinite delight" in strapping him. "It keeps me warm and makes you grow," he used to say. And the stripes were not altogether wasted, for the dunce, though still very "raw," made progress with his studies. It was known, moreover, that he was going to sea, always a ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys; and in his case the glory was not altogether future, it wore a present form when he came driving to Rye behind four horses in the same carriage ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... grace We see HERR WERTHER of the story In all the pomp of woodcut glory. His worth is first made duly known, By having his sad features shown At ev'ry fair the country round; In ev'ry alehouse too they're found. His stick is pointed by each dunce "The ball would reach his brain at once!" And each says, o'er his beer and bread: "Thank Heav'n that ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... very word which Michael Angelo uses of Perugino. Behold, the Christians despising the Dunce Greeks, as the Infidel modernists despise the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... not a dunce," she replied. "I can talk French and German, and do arithmetic, and play the organ. Father used to teach me these things. I can learn at Tredowen very well. I hope that my friends ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Dunciad[247]. While he was talking loudly in praise of those lines, one of the company[248] ventured to say, 'Too fine for such a poem:—a poem on what?' JOHNSON, (with a disdainful look,) 'Why, on dunces. It was worth while being a dunce then. Ah, Sir, hadst thou lived in those days! It is not worth while being a dunce now, when there are no wits[249].' Bickerstaff observed, as a peculiar circumstance, that Pope's fame was higher when he was alive than it was then[250]. Johnson said, his Pastorals ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... a farmer's lad, ten years old, tall and stout for his age, and able to do a great many more things than some city boys of fourteen. He could ride and drive, keep the stable in order, and even handle a plough. Nor was he a dunce; for, thanks to an evening school, which some of his Sunday teachers had opened in the village, he had learned to read and write very fairly. He had a comfortable place at farmer Jolly's; but there was ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... rest in the sand; one grave-stone would mock them all. But once the family brain expanded to a hat, and that survived the race. I am the Quaker who respects his hat, the Cardinal who is crowned with it; yes, and the dunce who must ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... have written the letter I now hold in answer to mine, —would your ideas, your language have been the same,—had some one whispered in your ear (what may prove true), Mademoiselle O. d'Este M. has six millions and does intend to have a dunce ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... prudently and strongly." Says the "Havamal": "A fool thinks he knows everything if he sits snug in his little corner; but he is at a loss for words if the people put to him a question." Elsewhere it is said: "Arch dunce is he who can speak nought, for that is the mark of a fool." And the sum of all this teaching about the tongue is that men should never speak without good reason, and then should speak to ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... had any trash to spare by way of exchange. It cannot therefore be considered as a miracle, notwithstanding the extraordinary care and expense which his friends bestowed upon his education, that he always continued a blockhead, and was such a perfect dunce at eleven years of age, that instead of being able to read and write as a young gentleman ought to do, he could scarcely tell his letters. He was equally remarkable for his selfishness; for if he had twenty cheesecakes in his box, or his pockets full of oranges and apples, he would sooner have ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... without the fear that had kept her silent before her father—the fear of bearing tales and making bad things worse. He appeared to accept the idea that he had taken her over and made her, as he said, his particular lark; he quite agreed also that he was an awful fraud and an idle beast and a sorry dunce. And he never said a word to her against her mother—he only remained dumb and discouraged in the face of her ladyship's own overtopping earnestness. There were occasions when he even spoke as if he had wrenched his little charge from the ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... Mr. Underwood, 'I thought myself a prodigiously fine fellow—with my arms full of prizes at Harrow, and my Trinity scholarship—and could just, in the plenitude of my presumption, extend a little conceited patronage to that unlucky dunce, Tom Underwood, the lag of every form, and thankful for a high stool at old Kedge's. And now my children view a cold fowl as an unprecedented monster, while his might, I imagine, revel in 'pates ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ought to have known; I mean, it's very natural," I faltered and stuttered, thinking what a dunce I had been not to understand that both hers and Lord Ralles's letters had been only a pretext to get away from the rest ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... lessons, the schoolmaster allowed him to sit beside his brother and sister. When he was tired of sitting, tradition has it that the little fellow used to amuse himself by getting up and standing in the corner to which the school culprits were sent. Here he duly put on the dunce's cap which he had seen them wear, and which bore the inscription, "For my ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... of the Dunciad, the note upon this very question about the orthography of Shakspeare's name, as also upon the other great question about the title of the immortal Satire, Whether it ought not to have been the Dunceiade, seeing that Dunce, its great author and progenitor, cannot possibly dispense with the letter e. Meantime we must remark, that the first three of Mr. Campbell's variations are mere caprices of the press; as is Shagspere; or, more probably, this last euphonious variety arose out of the gross clownish pronunciation ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the nation itself was not both half-witted and a thoughtless, ignorant dunce in all matters relating to such a trifle (Heaven forgive us!) as its prisons, would be taken to the light not plunged into darkness; would not be shut up alone with their no-minds to accumulate the stupidity that has undone them, but forced into collision with better understandings; ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... that was hurt. Had she taken the teasing of the meaner girls in a wiser spirit, she knew they would not have sent her the dunce cap. They continued to tease her because they knew they ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... abuse; And since you ne'er provoked their spite, Depend upon 't, their judgment's right. But if you blab, you are undone: Consider what a risk you run: You lose your credit all at once; The town will mark you for a dunce; The vilest doggrel Grub Street sends Will pass for yours with foes and friends; And you must bear the whole disgrace, Till some fresh blockhead ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... by the side of Moliere, who died long before him. He was born July 8th, 1621, at Chateau Thierry. His father was keeper of the royal domains. While young, La Fontaine gave no promise of his after distinction. His teachers declared him to be a dunce. His father, who seems to have been an admirer of poetry, persuaded him to attempt to write verses, but he could not make a rhyme. Seeing at nineteen that he could not make a poet of his son, the old man resolved to make a priest of him. After eighteen months of trial the young man ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... old a boy was dull or quite adverse to knowledge, he Was set an imposition or corrected with a switch: Far different our practice is, who reign by Methodology And guide the dunce by precepts learnt from Landon or from Fitch: 'Twas difficult by rule of thumb to check unseemly merriment, To make your class their pastor treat with proper due regard— 'Tis easy quite for specialists ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... History, and this is your French Grammar; and here is a Geography Book, and here is a History of Rome. Now read attentively, and do not let your thoughts wander; and be very careful not to dogs-ear the leaves: that always looks like a dunce. And mind you sit upright,' added she, looking back, as she left the room in obedience to a ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... text. Last year it was Parry and Switzerland; 'ardly know where to go next. I should much like to try Monty Carlo, and 'ave a fair flutter for once, But I fear it won't run to it, pardner; my boss is the dashdest old dunce. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... "bridge" over which the "evolutionist" may pass, if he will, without wearing either the dunce's cap or the ass's ears. It spans the chasm between the anthropoid ape and man as no other bridge can span it. Across this bridge is flung the living garment of God, and how grandly, yet reverently and humbly, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... successive villages of the same district. Daniel, from the first, was a thing of inconsistencies; his life proceeded as if by fits and starts. At school, for a while, he lay dormant: at the age of seven he could not read, and had acquired the reputation of a perfect dunce. But 'all at once,' says his biographer, 'the rind which enclosed his spirit started asunder;' and Daniel became the prodigy of the school! His good father determined to make a learned man of him: ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... brood in us 45 To split and divide into heads multitudinous, While charms that surprise (it can ne'er be denied us) Sprout forth from each head, like the ears from King Midas. Were a genius of rank, like a commonplace dunce, Compell'd to drive on to the main point at once, 50 What a plentiful vintage of initiations[342:3] Would Noble Lords lose in your Lordship's orations. My fancy transports me! As mute as a mouse, And as fleet as a pigeon, I'm borne to the house Where all those who are Lords, from father to son, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... formula worked successfully the child was declared educated in the same way that pork which has been successfully treated by the proper processes is declared to be pickled. If the formula did not work the child was not educated. He sat in school with a dunce-cap upon his head, or else played hookey and spent his hours in fishing, swimming ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... When British bards begin t' immortalize? 'Who lasts a century can have no flaw, I hold that wit a classic, good in law.' Suppose he wants a year, will you compound? And shall we deem him ancient, right and sound, Or damn to all eternity at once, At ninety-nine, a modern and a dunce? 'We shall not quarrel for a year or two; By courtesy of England, he may do.' Then, by the rule that made the horse-tail bare, I pluck out year by year, as hair by hair, And melt down ancients like a heap of snow: While you, to measure merits, look in Stowe, And estimating ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... characteristic phrase was his remark to Miss Monckton. She had declared, in opposition to one of Johnson's prejudices, that Sterne's writings were pathetic: "I am sure," she said, "they have affected me." "Why," said Johnson, smiling and rolling himself about, "that is because, dearest, you are a dunce!" When she mentioned this to him some time afterwards he replied: "Madam, if I had thought so, I certainly should not have said it." The truth could not be ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... shock! —What do you think the parson found, When he got up and stared around? The poor old chaise in a heap or mound, As if it had been to the mill and ground! You see, of course, if you're not a dunce, How it went to pieces all at once,— All at once, and nothing first,— Just as bubbles do when ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... enough, but was still in the way, As dunces still are, let them be where they may; Indeed, they appear to come into existence 240 To impede other folks with their awkward assistance; If you set up a dunce on the very North pole All alone with himself, I believe, on my soul, He'd manage to get betwixt somebody's shins, And pitch him down bodily, all in his sins, To the grave polar bears sitting round on the ice, All shortening their ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... like me in this, any more than in bodily favour; he was keen of wit and quick of memory; he was quick in learning, yet as modest as he was clever, for he never sought in any way to lord it over me because I, poor dunce, was not of such nimble parts ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... I'll warrant she'll not be a dunce with Purcell. And you must admit, doctor, that your George Frederick Handel is much ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... schoolhouse. Master Crawford kept a "blab" school. The "scholars," as he called his pupils, studied their lessons out loud. The louder they shouted, the better he liked it. If a scholar didn't know his lesson, he had to stand in the corner with a long pointed cap on his head. This was called a dunce cap. ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... shriek, in rushed the household, headed by the physician, and closely followed by the companion, with the hired nurses. Methought that the doctor looked on this wreck of mortality with grim satisfaction. "I knew it," said he, slowly; "and Doctor Phillimore is nothing more than a solemn dunce. I told him that she would not survive to be subjected to the consultation of the morrow. And how happens it," said he, turning fiercely to the companion and the nurses, "that my patient was thus left alone ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... have his own way, Yet I'm happy to say They quarrel, if ever, but seldom. Though competent quite To maintain their own right, And even to fight, Yet peace to their bosom is welcome. Both go to school, And learn by rule That in neither a dunce we may find; Both read and spell And like it well; Thus with pleasure is profit combined. One's eyes are black, The other's blue; They both have honest hearts and true, And love each other dearly: ...
— The Kings and Queens of England with Other Poems • Mary Ann H. T. Bigelow
... my little man, Is very hard to get? Will it make it any easier For you to sit and fret? Then wouldn't it he wiser Than waiting like a dunce, To go to work in earnest, And learn ...
— New National First Reader • Charles J. Barnes, et al.
... for fame! "March to the field—knock out a Mounseer's brains "And pick the scoundrel's pocket for your pains. "Come Humphrey come! thou art a lad of spirit! "Rise to a halbert—as I did—by merit! "Would'st thou believe it? even I was once "As thou art now, a plough-boy and a dunce; "But Courage rais'd me to my rank. How now boy! "Shall Hero Humphrey still be Numps the plough-boy? "A proper shaped young fellow! tall and straight! "Why thou wert made for glory! five feet eight! "The road to riches ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... playing "odd or even" under the master's eye; eating apples openly and without rebuke; pinching each other in sport or malice, without the least reserve; and cutting their initials in the very legs of his desk. The puzzled dunce, who stood beside it to say his lesson "off the book," looked no longer at the ceiling for forgotten words, but drew closer to the master's elbow, and boldly cast his eye upon the page; the wag of the little troop squinted and made grimaces (at the smallest ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... TOMMY (indignantly)—"Any dunce would know that. If it's milk that's spilled all you have to do is to call the cat an' she'll lick it up cleaner'n anything. But this ain't milk, an' mother'll do the lickin', ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... pardon—I ought to have known; I mean, it's very natural," I faltered and stuttered, thinking what a dunce I had been not to understand that both hers and Lord Ralles's letters had been only a pretext to get away from the ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... fly, didn't jump With flapping arms from stake or stump, Or spreading the tail 5 Of his coat for a sail, Take a soaring leap from post or rail, And wonder why He couldn't fly, And flap and flutter and wish and try— 10 If ever you knew a country dunce Who didn't try that as often as once— All I can say is, that's a sign He never would do ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... which were given us by M. Rossi, the minister of Pius IX. But Greek and Latin, and hours spent over an exercise or a translation with a fat dictionary to keep me company! Oh, mercy on me! From the scholastic point of view I was simply a DUNCE, nothing but a dunce. Yet I managed to scramble one prize—the shabbiest of them all—the second for Latin versions in the seventh class! I was presented with my reward at the prize distribution, to the tune of "Vive Henri IV." Vive ce roi vaillant, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... "Shoot, you dunce, shoot before he gets up to you!" shouted Will. "If he gets one swipe at you with that paw, you'll land out in the Gulf of Alaska! Fill him ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... virtually has to wait until the others have caught him up. Similarly, if equality of opportunity, other than an equality that is relative, were to be maintained in the sphere of education, a clever boy who had learned to speak German in a year would have to be coerced into idleness until every dunce among his classmates could speak it as well as he; and a similar process would be repeated in after-life. This policy, as has been pointed out already, is, even if wasteful, not ruinous in the sphere of ordinary labour—a ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... nowadays this term is equivalent to "dunce," but it was originally employed as a law term. It is a Latin word, and literally translated means, "we do not know." In former days when a grand jury considered that a bill or indictment was not supported by sufficient ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... writer:[19] and—as not a defect but a consequence of the quality just attributed to them—they do not quite carry the reader along with them in that singular fashion which distinguishes the others. But no one save a dunce can find them dull: and their variety is astonishing when one remembers that the writer was, for great part of his life, a kind of recluse. He touches almost everything except love (one wonders whether there were any unpublished, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... occupied with Dora, who, sitting on Harold's knee, seemed to expect her full rescue from all grievances, and was terribly disappointed to find that he had no power to remove her from her durance in the London school-room, where she was plainly the dunce and the black sheep, a misery to herself and all concerned, hating everyone and disliked by all. To the little maiden of the Bush, only half tamed as yet, the London school-room and walks in the park were penance in themselves, and the company of ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cutting down a hill, where scores of people are working together, the absurd and adventitious distinctions of society do not intrude. The capitalist and his agents are looking for the greatest amount of labor or the largest income in money from their investments, and they do not promote a dunce to a station where he will destroy raw material or slacken industry because of his name, or birth, or family connections. The obscurest and humblest person has a fair field for competition. That he ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... of haze in Copley Fielding's fine drawing of "Folkstone Cliff." There is an affected absence of effect in his "Arundel Castle"—the blues and yellows are not in harmony—and all has an uncomfortable, unsubstantial look. Eliza Sharpe's "Little Dunce" is a delightful drawing. It is only the old dame that can ever be angry with a little dunce—and she puts on more than half her anger; and this is a glorious little dunce, that we would not see good for the world—the triumph of nature over tuition. This charming little creature ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... does not remember the first letter received in one's childish days, written in a fair round text for childish eyes, or perhaps even printed by the kind and painstaking correspondent for the little dunce of a recipient. Who has not slept with such a letter carefully hoarded away under the pillow, that morning's first light might give positive assurance of the actual existence of our treasure. Nor is the little urchin the only glad supporter of our admirable ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... degrees, pride sways the soul? (For though in all, not equally, she reigns,) Awake to knowledge, and attend my strains. Ye doctors! hear the doctrine I disclose, As true, as if't were writ in dullest prose; As if a letter'd dunce had said, "'Tis right," And imprimatur usher'd it to light. Ambition, in the truly noble mind, With sister virtue is for ever join'd; As in fam'd Lucrece, who, with equal dread, From guilt, and shame, by her last conduct, fled: Her virtue long ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... wretches! Earth-born, groveling dolts! Begone! nor dare reply to my just wrath! Never behold me more! or if you stay Let not a sigh, a shrug, a stoop betray What poor, weak, miserable men you are. Not as I—I am a God! Look, dunce! I tread or leap beneath ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... 'You little dunce. Why, what we call a stafell without the household furniture. So you will find a wedding dress and all kinds of dresses and garments without number awaiting you, for I ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... the descendant of heroes and kings, was a lone, friendless mariner on the main, only true to his origin in the sea-life that he led. But so it has been, and forever will be. What yeoman shall swear that he is not descended from Alfred? what dunce, that he is not sprung of old Homer? King Noah, God bless him! fathered us all. Then hold up your heads, oh ye Helots, blood potential flows through your veins. All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... his Jacket of Flame, The Fryer he pull'd off his Cowle; The Devil took him for a Dunce of the Game, And the Fryer took him for a Fool: He piqu'd, and repiqu'd so oft, that at last, He swore by the Jolly fat Nuns; If Cards came no better than those that are past, Oh! oh! I shall ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... and there's charity,' says Iky, 'but my mother sewed happiness on my waist this morning.' Did you ever hear of such a dunce as that kid?" ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... of Sterne's writings were very pathetick. Johnson bluntly denied it. 'I am sure (said she) they have affected me.' 'Why (said Johnson, smiling, and rolling himself about,) that is, because, dearest, you're a dunce[350].' When she some time afterwards mentioned this to him, he said with equal truth and politeness; 'Madam, if I had thought so, I certainly should not ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... still greater obstacles to social contacts. The idiot and the imbecile are obviously debarred from normal communication with their intelligent associates. The "dunce" was isolated by village ridicule and contempt long before the term "moron" was coined, or the feeble-minded segregated in institutions and colonies. The individual with the highest native endowments, the genius, and the talented ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... transcendental curve, perfectly drawn, may work upon his gentler mood. I happen to have in my portfolio the very thing to please him. Fortune serves me well in this special circumstance. Among my boys, there is one who, though a regular dunce at everything else, is a first rate hand with the square, the compass and the drawing pen: a deft-fingered numskull, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... those who have feeling minds, pain and pleasure altogether computed, have the advantage; or at least they think so; for they would not change with those who have them not, were they to gain by the bargain the most robust body that the most selfish coxcomb, or the heaviest dunce extant, ever boasted. For instance, would you now, my lord, at this moment change altogether with Major Benson, or Captain Williamson, or even our friend, 'Eh, really now, "pon honour"—would you!—I'm glad ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... Clement. All his rarities, secret manuscripts, of what quality soever, Dr. Napper of Lindford in Buckinghamshire had, who had been a long time his scholar; and of whom Forman was used to say he would be a dunce: yet in continuance of time he proved a singular astrologer and physician. Sir Richard now living, I believe, has all those rarities in possession, which were Forman's, being kinsman and heir unto Dr. Napper. (His son Thomas Napper, Esq.; ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... pleasure to learn. Sometimes a boy would ask a foolish question, which would make the rest laugh; but then Mr. Harrison would say it was better to be laughed at for trying to learn, than to grow up a dunce. ...
— The Apple Dumpling and Other Stories for Young Boys and Girls • Unknown
... masters in fencing and dancing, and my Lord Castlewood's chaplain, the Reverend Mr. Sampson, having come hither to drink the waters, has been so good as to take a vacant room at my lodging. Mr. S. breakfasts with me, and we read together of a morning—he saying that I am not quite such a dunce as I used to appear at home. We have read in Mr. Rapin's History, Dr. Barrow's Sermons, and, for amusement, Shakspeare, Mr. Pope's Homer, and (in French) the translation of an Arabian Work of Tales, very diverting. Several men of learning ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sons,—the elder a dunce, the younger, Lycophron (or wolf-heart), a youth of noble nature and fine intellect. He sent them on a visit to Proclus, their mother's father, and from him the boys learned, what they had not known before, that their father was ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... place too long monopolized by the "three R's." There was need of it. It had seemed sometimes as if, in our anxiety lest he should not get enough, we were in danger of stuffing the boy to the point of making a hopeless dunce of him. It is a higher function of the school to teach principles than to impart facts merely. Teaching the boy municipal politics and a thousand other things to make a good citizen of him, instead of so filling him with love of his country and pride in its traditions that he is bound to take the ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... rock, At half past nine by the meet'n'-house clock,— Just the hour of the Earthquake shock! What do you think the parson found, When he got up and stared around? The poor old chaise in a heap or mound, As if it had been to the mill and ground! You see, of course, if you 're not a dunce, How it went to pieces all at once,— All at once, and nothing first,— Just as bubbles ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... tales and making bad things worse. He appeared to accept the idea that he had taken her over and made her, as he said, his particular lark; he quite agreed also that he was an awful fraud and an idle beast and a sorry dunce. And he never said a word to her against her mother—he only remained dumb and discouraged in the face of her ladyship's own overtopping earnestness. There were occasions when he even spoke as if he had wrenched his little charge from the arms of ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... of the crew needs especial remark, Though he looked an incredible dunce: He had just one idea—but, that one being "Snark," The good Bellman engaged him ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... entirely, so she is, it 'ud cost his heirs and succissors betther nor ten pounds to have him out as soon as the other. Get along, man, and take half a year at dogmatical theology: go and read your Dens, you poor dunce, you!" ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... Marilla," she groaned. "I'm sure I'll never be able to make head or tail of it. There is no scope for imagination in it at all. Mr. Phillips says I'm the worst dunce he ever saw at it. And Gil—I mean some of the others are so smart at it. It is extremely ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... existence; its novelty shall not avail (with me at least) to save its ugliness from annihilation. If I thought otherwise, I admit that a round dozen of vultures would be none too many for the liver of a dunce who could not see that ugliness was ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... that I am dunce enough to mistake your feelings towards Mademoiselle—they may be read in your face at this moment. Of course I do not presume to hazard a conjecture as to those of Mademoiselle towards yourself. But when I met her not long since at the house of Duplessis, with whose ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... large-hearted, and chivalrous,—kind, and patient, and hard-working,—but stupid where women are concerned. Indispensable and delightful as they are in real life, pleasant and comfortable as women actually find them, not one in ten thousand but makes a dunce of himself the moment he opens his mouth to theorize about women. Besides, they have an axe to grind. The pretty things they inculcate—slippers, and coffee, and care, and courtesy—ought indeed to be done, but the others ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... That in his heart he loved a jest: A wag he was, he needs must own, And could not let a dunce alone: Sometimes his friend he would not spare, And might perhaps be too severe: But yet the worst that could be said, He was a wit both born and bred; And, if it be a sin and shame, Nature alone must bear the blame: One fault he has, is sorry for't, His ears are half a foot too short; Which ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... venerable university (where my instructors were wise and worthy); and I am now so old, that I may say, without any great exhibition of vanity, that I have always kept well up among my school- and college-companions: but that blockhead kept me steadily at the bottom of my class, and kept a frightful dunce at the top of it, by his peculiar system. I have observed (let me say) that masters and professors who are stupid themselves have a great preference for stupid fellows, and like to keep down clever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... into seven or eight volumes to make it palatable. For we are told that a young Cantab, who, when asked if he had read Clarissa, replied, "D—-n it, I would not read it through to save my life," was set down as an incurable dunce. And that a lady reading to her maid, whilst she curled her hair, the seventh volume of Clarissa, the poor girl let fall such a shower of tears that they wetted her mistress's head so much, she had to send her out of the room ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... "You've been a dunce, Boy. Why didn't you get busy at the island last summer, after all your talk about adoration? You could have got her. I don't believe ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... not stay, Various as the chameleon that she bore; Now a grand monarch with a crown of hay, Now mendicant in silks and golden ore: A statesman, now equipp'd to chase the boar, Or cowled monk, lean, feeble, and unfed; A clown-like lord, or swain of courtly lore; Now scribbling dunce, in sacred laurel clad, Or papal father now, in ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... beginning only with some trifle, they would soon go on to God knows what. Frequently, even I myself did not know to what they related. Anything and everything would enter into them, for my father would say that I was an utter dunce at the French language; that the head mistress of my school was a stupid, common sort of women who cared nothing for morals; that he (my father) had not yet succeeded in obtaining another post; that Lamonde's "Grammar" was a wretched book—even a worse one than ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Sir Walter Scott at the University of Edinburgh, was 'The Greek Dunce.' Both of these great men, to their sorrow and loss, absolutely and totally declined to learn Greek. 'But what the reason was why I hated the Greek language, while I was taught it, being a child, I do not yet understand.' ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... irrepressible passion. Alfieri was fifty; he was tormented by gout; his health was rapidly sinking; but the sense of weakness only made him more resolute to finish the work which (however mistakenly) he thought it his duty to leave completed; more determined that, having lived for so many years a dunce, he would go down to the grave cleansed of the stain of ignorance, having read and appreciated as much of the great writers of antiquity as any man who had had a well-trained youth, a studious manhood. Soon after his great illness (which, I believe, changed ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... choice patron bless each gray goose quill! May ev'ry Bavius have his Bufo still! So, when a Statesman wants a day's defence, Or Envy holds a whole week's war with Sense, 250 Or simple pride for flatt'ry makes demands, May dunce by dunce be whistled off my hands! Blest be the Great! for those they take away. And those they left me; for they left me Gay; Left me to see neglected Genius bloom, 255 Neglected die, and tell it on his tomb: Of all thy blameless life the sole return My Verse, and Queenb'ry ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... realized what he was undertaking. What if the bottle was false! What if he should fail! Would not his head be dangling from the ropes of the scaffold, to be hailed by the multitude as the remains of a blockhead, a dunce, and a fool? The coffin was opened. With these meditations in his mind, Juan tremblingly uncorked his bottle of violet liquid, and held it under the nose of the princess. He held the bottle there for some time, but she gave no signs of life. An hour longer, still ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... and passion prone, without a rhyme, Inane and madlike was he many a time, His outer self, forsooth, fine may have been, But one wild, howling waste his mind within: Addled his brain that nothing he could see; A dunce! to read essays so loth to be! Perverse in bearing, in temper wayward; For human censure he had no regard. When rich, wealth to enjoy he knew not how; When poor, to poverty he could not bow. Alas! what utter waste of lustrous grace! To state, to family what a disgrace! Of ne'er-do-wells below he ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... interruption;—all of which tendencies are augmented by the power of the imagination, the vivid character of the whole range of thought, including what is disagreeable. This applies, in various degrees, to every step in the long scale of mental power, from the veriest dunce to the greatest genius that ever lived. Therefore the nearer anyone is, either from a subjective or from an objective point of view, to one of those sources of suffering in human life, the farther he is from the other. And so a man's natural bent ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Nash, from the top of his wit looking down upon simple creatures, calleth Gabriel Harvey a dunce, a foole, an ideot, a dolt, a goose cap, an asse, and so forth; for some of the residue is not to be spoken but with his owne mannerly mouth; but he should have shewed particularlie which wordes in my letters were the wordes of a dunce; which sentences the sentences of a foole; which arguments ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... modified my conceit. I was always the dunce of the party—the smallest child knew more of woodcraft than I did, and had something to tell of everything. Seeing Oogahnahbayah, a small eagle-hawk, flying over, they would say, 'He eats the emu eggs.' He flies over where the ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... a plucky thing to do, I daresay, but it didn't help him much with Skeats that day, for he never spared him a bit, as he did not take the excuse that had been offered him, and he blundered and floundered worse than ever, so that Curtis, the biggest dunce in the class, answered for him, and took ...
— That Scholarship Boy • Emma Leslie
... of the Wise and Good Are seen, far off, and rarely understood. The world's a father to a Dunce unknown, And much he thrives, for Dulness! he's thy own. No hackney brethren e'er condemn him twice; He fears no enemies, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... string with your teeth, and fire our new gun? If I could, you might be the Artillery all to yourself, and it would be capital fun. You wag your tail at that, do you? You would like it a great deal better? But I can't bear you to be such a dunce, when you look so wise; and yet I don't believe you'll ever learn a letter. Aunt Jemima is going to make me a new cocked hat out of the next old newspaper, for I want to have a review; But the newspaper after that, Papa Poodle, must be kept to make ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... have intelligence. But I'm a 'dunce with wits.' I know what I ought to do but I don't do it. I think that I have brains enough to write, I am sure I have imagination enough to paint, I have strength enough when I am well to"—she laughed,—"scrub floors. But I don't ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... her arms with a saintly embrace, thanks you for your advice, and loves you the more for it; she wishes to be beholden to you for everything, even for her intellect; she may be a dunce, but, what is better than saying fine things, she knows how to do them! But she desires also to be your pride! It is not a question of taste in dress, of elegance and beauty; she wishes to make you proud of her ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... his school days, "How to be a Dunce," and although in mature life he was "on the side of his masters" and grateful to them "that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes," he ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... bounteously and boundlesly infused; thou sometimes secretary to Pierce Pennylesse and master of his requests, ingenious, ingenuous, fluent, facetious T. Nash, from whose aboundant pen hony flow'd to thy friends, and mortall aconite to thy enemies; thou that madest the doctor a flat dunce[298] ... sharpest satyre, luculent poet, elegant orator, get leave for thy ghost to come from her abiding and to dwell with ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... by a paradox. Goldsmith was great in spite of his weaknesses, Boswell by reason of his; if he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. He was a dunce, a parasite, a coxcomb, a Paul Pry, had a quick observation, a retentive memory, and accordingly—he has become immortal! Alas for the paucity of such immortals under so common circumstances; their number should be legion! That ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... on me all at once, 175 This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left, a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... other boys. At last Patience saw her brother. Oh, dear, how disgraced she felt! Peregrine had not learned his lesson well, because he had looked out of the window. He had not recited well, so Mistress Endicott had put the dunce's cap on his head and he stood in a corner where all could ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... Fanny Hutton Her last dress has put on; Her fine lessons forgotten, She died, as the dunce died: And prim Betsy Chambers, Decay'd in her members, No longer remembers Things, as ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... had coincided with the announcement of midnight, made, with maddening deliberation, by Mrs. Mangan's cuckoo-clock. The usual delirium of cracker-head-dresses had befallen the company. Larry, decorated with a dunce's cap, placed upon his yellow head by a jovial matron, found himself fated, by a final effort of penalising fancy on the part of another matron, to select "a young lady," to conduct her to the topmost step of the staircase, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... who clever was found. D was a dunce, and Harlequin bound, E was soon formed with the aid of a child, F in a frolic ...
— Funny Alphabet - Uncle Franks' Series • Edward P. Cogger
... by poor Oliver's appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who had once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him, and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though he should be persuaded that the fool, or the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they with theirs.... It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... a notable dunce at the parson's school, while Lenny Fairfield was the pride and boast of it; therefore Mr. Stirn was naturally, and almost justifiably, ill-disposed towards Lenny Fairfield, who had appropriated to himself the praises which Mr. Stirn had designed ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... might be raised by "education" to the normal stature of the human mind. It fired Godwin himself with a zeal for education. "Folly," said Helvetius, "is factitious." "Nature," said Godwin, "never made a dunce." The failures of education are due primarily to the teacher's error in substituting compulsion for persuasion and despotism for encouragement. The excellences and defects of the human character are not due to occult causes beyond the reach of ingenuity to modify or correct, nor are ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... high shelf; and beside them a motley collection of peg-tops, balls, kites, fishing-lines, marbles, half-eaten apples, and other confiscated property of idle urchins. Displayed on hooks upon the wall in all their terrors, were the cane and ruler; and near them, on a small shelf of its own, the dunce's cap, made of old newspapers and decorated with glaring wafers of the largest size. But, the great ornaments of the walls were certain moral sentences fairly copied in good round text, and well-worked sums in simple addition ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... upon the parade ground, by day and by night, he was made to feel that he belonged to an inferior and despised race, and that no excellence of deportment, diligence in study, or rank in his class could entitle him to the recognition accorded to every white dunce and rowdy. Yet with rare strength of character he persevered, and when, having maintained the standing of No. fifty in a class of seventy-six, he received his well-earned diploma, there was a round of ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... are to be fools, I would rather they were fools in little matters than in great; dulness turned up with temerity is a livery all the worse for the facings; and the most tremendous of all things is the magnanimity of the dunce. ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... salvation. The reviewer must review. But what, it may be asked, moves any follower of the Muses to satirise a scribbler? He seems to go out of his way to do so; for verse has naturally better associations. But the personal aggression on the wit by the dunce, may fairly instigate the wit to flay the dunce. Now he finds the object of his satire in the way. The fact is, that Dryden's poem and Pope's were both moved in this way. The grew out of personal quarrels. Are they on that account to be blamed? Not if the dunces, by them ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... with eager eyes. 'I see!' cried Tom, 'I see! You go and seek another mouse, And leave this mouse to me.' 'Indeed, I won't!' cried Jack at once; 'You surely take me for a dunce! ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... Church to-day: I am acquainted with about thirty in the drawing-room, and I am so proud I make all the Lords come up to me; one passes half an hour pleasant enough. We had a dunce to preach before the queen to-day, which often happens. Windsor is a delicious situation, but the town is scoundrel. The Duke of Hamilton would needs be witty, and hold up my train as I walked upstairs. It is an ill circumstance ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... Dr. Johnson, who was then in his sixty-ninth year, was willing to write the Lives to order. He added, indeed, three or four names to the list which had been given him; but he made no protest, and contented himself, as he told Boswell, in saying that a man was a dunce when he thought ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... oath? Can he leave all his wrongs to the future, and carry his heart in his cheek? Can he do an hour's work in a minute, and live on a sixpence a week? Can he courteously talk to an equal, and brow-beat an impudent dunce? Can he keep things in apple-pie order, and do half-a-dozen at once? Can he press all the springs of knowledge, with quick and reliable touch? And be sure that he knows how much to know, and knows how not to know too much? Does he know how ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... isles, by preparing a "Guide to Conversation," that for utility and correctness of idiom surpasses all previous attempts of the same kind. With it in one hand, and a bagful of Napoleons or Zecchini in the other, the biggest dunce in London—nay, even a schoolmaster—may travel from Boulogne to Naples and back, with the utmost satisfaction to himself, and with substantial profit to the people of these barbarous climes. The following is a specimen of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... inability and ill looks of my advocate, than to my cause. Again, thou art deprived of the force men of our cast give to arguments; for she won't let thee swear!-Art, moreover, a very heavy, thoughtless fellow; tolerable only at a second rebound; a horrid dunce at the impromptu. These, encountering with such a lady, are great disadvantages.—And still a greater is thy balancing, (as thou dost at present,) between old rakery and new reformation; since this ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... the Stoics' account was in the forenoon (for example) the worst man in the world is in the afternoon the best of men; and he that falls asleep a very sot, dunce, miscreant, and brute, nay, by Jove, a slave and a beggar to boot, rises up the same day a prince, a rich and a happy man, and (which is yet more) a continent, just, determined, and unprepossessed person;—not by shooting forth out of a young and tender body a downy beard or the sprouting ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... always had to smile when he saw the villagers tumbling through their doorways. They couldn't have done anything that would have suited him better. Had there been a single one among the prairie dogs that wasn't a dunce he would have run away from his hole, outside the village, to hide somewhere until Benny Badger left ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... poultry — that she may always keep a good table. I give her my new carriage and horses — that she may visit her friends in comfort. I give her my family bible — that she may live above the ill tempers and sorrows of life. I give my son Peter a hornbook — for I am afraid he will always be a dunce. ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... "hark to that lovely rascal in the cart, yonder—hark to him; Galen was an ass and Hippocrates a dunce beside this ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... of ideas would permit; but, unlike my brother, who was at this time at school, and whose rapid progress in every branch of instruction astonished and delighted his preceptors, I took no pleasure in books, whose use, indeed, I could scarcely comprehend, and bade fair to be as arrant a dunce as ever brought the blush of shame into the cheeks of anxious ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... and rendered the public less willing and less apt to be bullied or blackguarded out of its senses. Were Hazlitt alive now, and called, by any miserable scribbler in the "Athenaeum" or "Spectator," a dunce, he could laugh in his face; instead of retiring as he did, perhaps hunger-bitten, to bleed out his heart's blood in secret. Were Shelley now called in "Blackwood" a madman, and Keats a mannikin, they would be as much disturbed ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Ignoramus.— N. ignoramus, dunce; wooden spoon; no scholar. [insulting terms for ignorant person: see also imbecility 499, folly 501] moron, imbecile, idiot; fool, jerk, nincompoop, asshole [vulgar]. [person with superficial knowledge] dilettante, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... and the fire shot roaring out of the window after him, too late to eat him, and the crowd cheered the fireman and me, I did feel warm about the waistcoat, and, for the first time this ever so long, life seemed not quite ended. I felt there was a little bit of good left, that even a poor dunce like me could do, and she could approve—if she can look down and see me, as I hope ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... up to, inasmuch as they form part of previous roles, but the teeth and hair, the upright position, the power of speech, though all tolerably familiar, give him more trouble—for he is very stupid—a regular dunce in fact. Then comes his newer and more complex environment, and this puzzles him—arrests his attention—whereon consciousness springs into existence, as a spark from a ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the truth that the God of truth and integrity never left Himself without a witness. Our own literature also is scattered full of the Flatterer and his too willing dupes. "Of praise a mere glutton," says Goldsmith of David Garrick, "he swallowed what came. The puff of a dunce he mistook it for fame." "Delicious essence," exclaims Sterne, "how refreshing thou art to poor human nature! How sweetly dost thou mix with the blood, and help it through the most difficult and tortuous passages to the heart." "He that slanders me," says Cowper, ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... prosody; for although I'm not so sharp at my Latin as I was, still I couldn't use ignarus, as you see, without fairly committing myself as a scholar; and indeed, if I went to that, it would surely be the first time I have been mistaken for a dunce." ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... you received the Holy Spirit by the Law. As long as you were servants of the Law, you never received the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever heard of the Holy Ghost being given to anybody, be he doctor or dunce, as a result of the preaching of the Law. In your own case, you have not only learned the Law by heart, you have labored with all your might to perform it. You most of all should have received the Holy Ghost by the ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he, for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
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