|
|
|
More "Stupid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gifted, can boast of. During his sojourn in Spain he performed many eminent services for the government which employed him; services which, I believe, it had sufficient discernment to see, and gratitude to reward. He had to encounter, however, the full brunt of the low and stupid malignity of the party who, shortly after the time of which I am speaking, usurped the management of the affairs of Spain. This party, whose foolish manoeuvres he was continually discomfiting, feared and hated him as its evil genius, taking every ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... is full of practical lessons;] Some people, however, never outgrow the child's notion of history as merely a mass of pretty anecdotes or stupid annals, without any practical bearing upon our own every-day life. There could not be a greater mistake. Very little has happened in the past which has not some immediate practical lessons for us; and when we study ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... not call it stupid, my lad; but with so many real difficulties we must not make imaginary ones. Why, Mark, this voyage is making a man of you—self-reliant, business-like, and strong. When we get ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... his rule, and a very good rule it is; but he naturally likes to be the first to look at it," said Mrs. Gresley, with a great exercise of patience. She had heard Hester was clever, but she found her very stupid. Everything had ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... a broken bit of sandwich in one's mouth, just because some German fellow, some fat, stupid man a few miles away, looses off a bit of steel in search of the bodies of men with whom he has ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... asleep where I lay, and was awakened by the policeman. There I sat, recalled mercilessly to life and misery. My first feeling was of stupid amazement at finding myself in the open air; but this was quickly replaced by a bitter despondency, I was near crying with sorrow at being still alive. It had rained whilst I slept, and my clothes were soaked through and through, and I felt a damp ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... Muriel!" Jean protested. "You've done for her anyway. But you're wrong in thinking her stupid. She only comes to The Rigs when she isn't occupied with smart friends and is rather dull—I don't see her in her more exalted moments; but I assure you, after she has done talking about 'the County,' and after the full blast of 'dear Lady Tweedie' is over, she is a very ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... it does. Don't tell me! When things get into a silly stupid mess with me I just shut the door and say every swear word I know until I feel better. That's one advantage of living in a hollow in the desert. You needn't even bother to shut the door!... You can shout your ruffled feelings to the kopjes, and I suppose they echo the words back to you. How ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... with the same stupid stare. "Do?" says he. And with that his eye fell on the body, and "O!" he cries out, with his hand to his brow, as if he had never remembered; and, turning from me, made off towards the house of Durrisdeer ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are, and how—I wish I had your undoubting spirit! I'll think it over; I'd like to believe as you do. But I don't, now; I don't, indeed. It isn't this war alone; though this seems peculiarly wanton and needless; but it's every war—so stupid; it makes me sick. Why shouldn't this thing have ...
— Different Girls • Various
... him under water; he had recourse to the same expedient, and thrust his fingers into its eyes with such violence that it again quitted him; and when it rose, flounced about on the surface of the water as if stupid, and then swam down the middle of the river. Isaaco proceeded to the other side, bleeding very much. As soon as the canoe returned I went over, and found him very much lacerated. The wound on the left thigh was ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... of his troubles and trials during the prosecution of this telegraphic work— troubles from men of pretended science, from selfish men, from stupid men—all chronicled by him without the slightest bitterness against any human being, yet with a quaint humor which made ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... This must be horribly stupid stuff to you, Fairfax: therefore pay me in my own coin; be as dull as you sometimes know how, and bid me ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... perdere gli uomini perle femminelle."[38] If the Black party furnished types for the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's hell, the White party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel nor be faithful, but "were for themselves"; and whoever it may be who is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... his guests might see his savage power. On reaching home I found Kahala standing like a culprit before my door. She would not admit, what I suspected, that Meri had induced her to run away; but said she was very happy in my house until yester-evening, when Rozaro's sister told her she was very stupid living with the Mzungu all alone, and told her to run away; which she did, taking the direction of N'yamasore's, until some officers finding her, and noticing beads on her neck, and her hair cut, according to the common court fashion, in slopes from a point in the forehead to the breadth ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Laura, you are prejudiced. You must not listen to those stupid servants and their vile exaggerations. Miss Reinhart is very good and very useful to me. I cannot send her away as I would dismiss a ...
— My Mother's Rival - Everyday Life Library No. 4 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... what we can do, of course," said Harry. "It isn't very far. We'll leave our bags here at the school, and make packs of the things we need. And then we'll ride in on our bicycles. We were stupid not to think of ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... so stupid? Stupid? It was easy! He had wanted to be stupid! And how could the Mr. Eumenes-or-otherwise have used such obvious giveaway names? It was a measure of their contempt for the humans around them and of their own grim wit. Look at all the double entendres the salesman had ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... suspicion, the matador has a serious work before him. The bull is always regarded from this objective standpoint. The more power of reason the brute has, the worse opinion the Spaniard has of him. A stupid creature who rushes blindly on the sword of the matador is an animal after his own heart. But if there be one into whose brute brain some glimmer of the awful truth has come,—and this sometimes happens,—if he feels the solemn question at issue between ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... on one of the great Atlantic steamers, not knowing any of the other passengers, kept very much to themselves; he usually reading aloud to his wife, and she occupied in some needle work; for this, they were commented upon, and not very favorably, and generally were called the "stupid couple." Little did these same passengers know the true character of that gentleman and lady. An incident that occurred on board soon proved the bravery and heroism of the one, and the gentleness and self-sacrifice of the other. The captain ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... returned fiercely. "He is a coward, too, and never goes for our crowd; but takes boys like Jamie Lyman, stupid, shabby little milksops that don't dare stand up to him. It isn't their fault that they are dunces, and he ought to know it. ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... stooped to the meannesses of commerce, but made themselves famous by martial deeds. "Never," thus argued the chieftain, "had those brave men enervated their bodies and debased their minds by labours fit only for beasts or stupid drudges. Should not the generous blood which flowed in their veins still animate the brave Frasers to deeds ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... from home to the cities or to foreign lands, in search of the work and influence not to be secured at home. The strongest go, and the dull remain. All, this is reversed at Oberammergau. Only the native citizen takes part in the play. Those who are stupid or vicious are excluded from it. Not to take part in the play is to have no reason for remaining in Oberammergau. To be chosen for an important part is the highest honor the people know. So the influences at work retain the best and exclude the others. ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... descent and went the length of the drawing-room through a silence which somewhat awed me. I couldn't help wishing that one could ever get that kind of attention in a concert-hall. In the music-room Stein insisted upon arranging things for me. I must say that he was neither awkward nor stupid, not so wooden as most rich men who rent singers. I was properly affable. One has, under such circumstances, to be either gracious or pouty. Either you have to stand and sulk, like an old-fashioned German ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... anticipated, proceeded in almost unbroken silence. It was very dull indeed, she thought, not half so nice as when Richard was there, and in her pet at Arthur's coolness and silence, she made so many blunders that at last throwing pencil and paper across the room, she declared herself too stupid for ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... happy—temperately so. Perhaps that's the only degree of happiness I shall ever know. Of course, when I was younger I thought I should get to some sort of a place where I could stand in swimming glory and rejoice forever, but I see now how stupid I was to think anything of the sort. I hoped to escape the commonplace by reaching some beatitude, but now I have found that nothing really is commonplace. It only seems so when you aren't understanding enough to get at the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... having a lovely time in such a charming place. We have been to Saratoga. It was stupid enough to send your ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... again; ten times; fifty times; one hundred times if necessary to thoroughly impress their full meaning upon your intellect. Study them; practice them; teach them; sing them to all the world. Take them for your everlasting motto and you will have no need for all the stupid theories ever created by man. "Eradicate selfishness from all human beings and ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... in submission to the lyre; and the judgment and decision of the sacred mountain pleases them all. Yet it is blamed, and is called unjust by the voice of Midas alone. But the Delian {God} does not allow his stupid ears to retain their human shape: but draws them out to a {great} length, and he fills them with grey hairs, and makes them unsteady at the lower part, and gives them the power of moving. The rest {of his body} is that of a man; in one part alone is he condemned {to ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... have brought to bear, and your skill in marshalling them and throwing them on the enemy; it is also extremely clear as far as I have gone, but very hard to fully appreciate. Somehow it reads very different from the MS., and I often fancy I must have been very stupid not to have more fully followed it in MS. Lyell told me of his criticisms. I did not appreciate them all, and there are many little matters I hope one day to talk over with you. I saw a highly flattering notice in the 'English Churchman,' short and not at all entering into discussion, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... out, "Ho, hop!" and immediately a voice from the woods near by answered, "ho, hop!" Being surprised at this, he called out, "who be you?" The voice answered, "who be you." Charles thought this very strange, and cried out "you're a stupid fellow," and "stupid fellow," was the reply from ...
— The Pearl Box - Containing One Hundred Beautiful Stories for Young People • "A Pastor"
... Their valves and pulses were all right. They could play the game without the slightest danger of any inconvenient result;—of any inconvenient result, that is, as regarded their own feelings. Blind people cannot see and stupid people cannot understand—and it might be that Mr Dobbs Broughton, being both blind and stupid in such matters, might perceive something of the playing of the game and not know that it was ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... the intrigue against Sparta. He can dupe stupid people like the Thebans, or the Peloponnesians; warning therefore is necessary. To the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... across people who are, on my honor, too stupid by half," cried Derville. "They don't deserve to be Christians! Be humane, generous, philanthropical, and a lawyer, and you are bound to be cheated! There is a piece of business that will ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... a stupid young woman; his very indifference told her all that she needed to know. She tore her eyes from the confused jumble of gesticulating men and restive steeds to look sharply at Chip. He met her eyes squarely for an instant, and the horror oozed from her and left only amused ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... write and read German in the very quickest way ever found out, though he does not know a single letter of the alphabet, can in a short time get enough here to cast up his own accounts and read; and if any one be too stupid to learn, as I have taught him nothing so will I charge him nothing, be he who he may, burgher or apprentice, woman or girl; whoever comes in, he will be faithfully taught for a small sum, but the young boys and girls after the Ember weeks, as the ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... the child were a calf! I'm sure and certain that the extreme dulness of young people of the present day is entirely owing to vaccination—it imbues them with a very stupid portion of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... are going to sermonize me, the moment is ill chosen," replied the lieutenant, sulkily. "I know perfectly that I have done a stupid thing, and am in for a lecture from my papa. I do not wish to hear from another what I must ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... Don't be stupid, Dick. Of course he hasn't said a word; I believe he's engaged to somebody; I thought so from something he said a little while ago. The idea of me marrying a ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... Hawthorne came home this afternoon, he said he met on the other side the children of the Industrial School just landed. He saw them face to face, and he said their faces were uncomely to the last degree. He said he never imagined such faces,—so irredeemably stupid and homely. I do not think I have realized the sin of the Old World in any way so much as in a few faces I saw in Liverpool. It made me shiver and contract to look at them,—so haggard, so without hope or faith, or any sign of humanity. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... stupid old hippo, who usually wanted nothing more than his grub and his bath, lumbered around looking for further trouble. He found it; he interfered between the wild asses and the zebras, and soon the whole bunch, both sides, were bombarding him with ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... "Stupid! Don't you see, Mamma mustn't know I have one, and so no one else must, either. Honestly, you're the only one within the charmed circle up to now. Listen! I've taken a studio in MacDougall alley under the name of Mary Allen. No one must know but what a real Mary ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... go," she said, "if I'm to get any dinner before the theatre. I would have liked to stay, and put my poor little understudy on, so as to give her a chance. She's a nice little girl—not half stupid, and really keen to learn and to work. But I can't. I'm in honour bound to appear to-night. You see, it's our second century—the first one we could not observe, because it came at the end of January just in the general mourning—so there's an awful to-do and tomasha to-night, souvenir programmes ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... lapsed. Of whom, chief leader to do battle, comes That Heraclitus, famous for dark speech Among the silly, not the serious Greeks Who search for truth. For dolts are ever prone That to bewonder and adore which hides Beneath distorted words, holding that true Which sweetly tickles in their stupid ears, Or which is rouged in finely finished phrase. For how, I ask, can things so varied be, If formed of fire, single and pure? No whit 'Twould help for fire to be condensed or thinned, If all the parts of fire did still preserve But fire's own nature, seen before in ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... the station-master's office," the latter continued, "and tried to persuade them to let me ride in the guard's van of your special, but he made a stupid fuss about it, so I thought I'd better come to you. Can I beg a seat in your compartment, or anywhere in the train, ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... after reading pages about it in the papers and hearing people speak of Dinard as Mohammedans whisper sacredly of Mecca, is like meeting celebrities. You wonder what under the sun—what in the world—how in the name of Heaven such ugly, stupid, uninteresting, heavy, dull, and insufferably ordinary persons are allowed to become famous by an overruling and beneficent Providence! I have met many celebrities, and I have been to Dinard. I have had ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... has there been such imbecility displayed in waging it as we have contrived to display in our attacks on the enemies of the Union. It used to be supposed that Austria was the slowest and the most stupid of military countries; but America has got ahead of Austria in the art of doing nothing—or worse than nothing—with myriads of men and millions of money. We stand before the world a people to whom military success seems seldom possible, and, when possible, rarely useful. If we win a victory, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... very big and blubbering, show a person to be credulous, foolish, dull and stupid, and apt to be enticed to anything. Lips of a different size denote a person to be discreet, secret in all things, judicious and of a good wit, but somewhat hasty. To have lips, well coloured and more thin than thick, shows a person to be good-humoured in all things and more easily persuaded ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... it's all the same,' went on Ella, with an impatient shrug of her shoulder. 'But nobody did. There were no geniuses except Columbus, and he thought, "People are stupid not to go to America, but I will show them the way." What did he go ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... one of the altars. The tufts of red feathers are at the feet, and rolls of cloth at the head. After this, for a quarter of an hour or more the chief priest addresses it, and pretends to give the message it is to convey to the world of spirits. The surrounding populace look on with stupid amazement, no one knowing whose turn it may be next to be slaughtered as a sacrifice ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... you please, Miss Louisa," Sissy pleaded, "I am—Oh so stupid! All through school hours I make mistakes. To-day for instance, Mr. M'Choakumchild was explaining ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... to be right when he said, "See, my son, how little wisdom it requires to govern States,"—that is, Men! That so many millions of persons, each with a profound assurance that he is possessed of an exalted sagacity, should concur in the ascendancy of a few inferior intellects, according to a few stupid, prosy, matter-of-fact rules as old as the hills, is a phenomenon very discreditable to the spirit and energy of the aggregate human species! It creates no surprise that one sensible watch-dog should ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rests upon the illusion that sensual pleasures possess a positive or real value. Accordingly, future need and misery is the price at which the spendthrift purchases pleasures that are empty, fleeting, and often no more than imaginary; or else feeds his vain, stupid self-conceit on the bows and scrapes of parasites who laugh at him in secret, or on the gaze of the mob and those who envy his magnificence. We should, therefore, shun the spendthrift as though he had the plague, and on discovering his vice break with ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... were read there; English laws were obeyed there; English habits were cultivated, often at the expense of American comfort. And yet it was the fashion among orators to speak of the English as a worn-out, stupid and enslaved people. He was a thoughtful man and all this had perplexed him;—so that he had obtained leave from his State and from Congress to be absent during a part of a short Session, and had come ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... years ago that this part of the country was seized by the British without bloodshed, and the foolish and dissolute King Theebaw was made prisoner for his stupid insolence, and deported, with his two wives, to India, where they are still spending their days in retirement. Upper Burma has, however, put on new beauty and prosperity since the British have taken it over; and the people are abundantly satisfied with the new regime. Mandalay ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... soldier seemed an angel of mercy, as the hope of rescue sprang up again in her heart. But he is coming near, and she must not let the chance slip. How should she hail him? In what words make known her peril? She felt stupid, just when she needed her readiest wit. He was almost abreast the vessel before Dexie found her voice, and then in frightened tones ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... his mind the memory of a quaint scene in the Soudan. A soldier had been nearly hacked in two by a broad-bladed Arab spear. For one instant the man felt no pain. Looking down, he saw that his life-blood was going from him. The stupid bewilderment on his face was so intensely comic that both Dick and Torpenhow, still panting and unstrung from a fight for life, had roared with laughter, in which the man seemed as if he would join, but, as his lips parted in a sheepish grin, the agony of death came upon him, and he ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... "I had a stupid sort of idea that you were mixed up in the business somehow. I thought so even before I saw the sketch, because I couldn't understand whom else she could have been looking for at the dock. It's ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... You are angry, and when you are angry you are stupid. I carried that girl in my arms when she was a baby! I have watched over her ever since. A wench! Not one of your own daughters has a heart so white. If Vittorio is so great a coward as to listen to their talk I'll ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and to be unable to understand the meaning of religious ceremonies. Merker, who observed him secretly during the early days which he spent in jail, declared that he was "in all respects like a child." Meyer, of the school at Ansbach, found him "idle, stupid, and vain." Dr. Osterhausen found a deviation from the normal in the shape of his legs, which made walking difficult, but Caspar never ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... chests Containing ingots, bags of dollars, coins (Not of old victors, all whose heads and crests Weigh not the thin ore where their visage shines,[lg] But) of fine unclipped gold, where dully rests Some likeness, which the glittering cirque confines, Of modern, reigning, sterling, stupid stamp!— Yes! ready money is ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... conveyed this lyric to Thomson, "gravel me to death: I have not that command of the language that I have of my native tongue. I have been at 'Duncan Gray,' to dress it in English, but all I can do is deplorably stupid. For instance:"] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... unversed in Common-sense. His nature was more calm and normal than Shaftesbury's, but in their intellectual conclusions they were not dissimilar. The views about the common people which Sir William Berkeley expressed with stupid brutality, they stated with punctual elegance. They were well mated for the purpose in hand, and they performed it with due deliberation and sobriety. It was not until five years after the grant was made that the constitution was written and sealed. It achieved an ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... Robin would bring some stupid thing from Zennor," she would say, and she would scowl at Cherry until the girl grew quite nervous. She tried to get as far away from the old woman as she could, but, as Cherry said, the old soul seemed ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... say the flats are in the right of it," said her husband, when she denounced their stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a Christian home. "But I'm not so sure that we are, either. I've been thinking about that home business ever since my sensibilities were dragged—in a coupe—through that tenement-house street. Of course, no child born and brought up in such a place as that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... calumniators have dared to say that he rejoiced at an event, which, even considered apart from its political relations, caused him to lose a conquest which had cost him so much, and France so much blood and expense. Other miserable wretches, still more stupid and more infamous, have even gone so far as to fabricate and spread abroad the report that the First Consul had himself ordered the assassination of his companion in arms, whom he had placed in his own position at the head of the army ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the Bold, was one of those who could see beyond his time, and who became almost prophetically wise; that is to say, he was fond of tracing causes onwards to their probable effects, to the amusement of the humorous, the amazement of the stupid, and the horrification of the few who, even in those days of turmoil, trembled at the idea of "change"! Everything, therefore, that came under his observation claimed and obtained his earnest attention, and was treated with a species of inductive philosophy that would ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the United States. Sir, I deny that there is an acknowledged departure, or any departure at all, from the neutral policy of the country. What do we mean by our neutral policy? Not, I suppose, a blind and stupid indifference to whatever is passing around us; not a total disregard to approaching events, or approaching evils, till they meet us full in the face. Nor do we mean, by our neutral policy, that ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... they want the reward of those who work well. The hope of mankind—what is it? That some day the Over-man may come, that some day the inferior, the weak and the bestial may be subdued or eliminated. Subdued if not eliminated. The world is no place for the bad, the stupid, the enervated. Their duty—it's a fine duty too!—is to die. The death of the failure! That is the path by which the beast rose to manhood, by which man goes ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... that she would move on. Nearly all the busy people of the Exhibition called her either Aunty or Grandma at once, and made little pleasures for her as best they could. She was a delightful contrast to the indifferent, stupid crowd that drifted along, with eyes fixed at the same level, and seeing, even on that level, nothing for fifty feet at a time. "What be you making here, dear?" Betsey Lane would ask joyfully, and the most perfunctory guardian ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Persia bids Athens proffer slaves'-tribute, water and earth; Razed to the ground is Eretria—but Athens, shall Athens sink, Drop into dust and die—the flower of Hellas utterly die, Die with the wide world spitting at Sparta, the stupid, the stander-by? Answer me quick, what help, what hand do you stretch o'er destruction's brink? How—when? No care for my limbs!—there's lightning in all and some— Fresh and fit your message to bear, ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... titled chief. Various sick and wounded officers died in consequence of not having been removed in sufficient time to the Bosphorus, or to such other quarters as were not only possible, but convenient, had it not been for the heartless and stupid routine by which the heads of departments, at home and abroad, civil and military, were guided. It was the more remarkable that so few officers died in the camp in proportion to the men who perished, as the proportions were reversed in combat. The facts were, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Philosophers of Violence want, is it? Well, you will not get it. My father, the Amphib King, will not be so stupid as to ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... ugly and freckledy and small And have a little stubby nose that's not a nose at all; You may be bad at spelling and you may be worse at sums, You may have stupid fingers that your Nanna says are thumbs, And lots of things you look for you may never, never find, But if you love the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... simpler, instead of explaining, to take the book itself out to him and let him have wisdom at its very source, administering it in doses while he worked. I quite recognise that this must be annoying, and only my anxiety not to lose a whole year through some stupid mistake has given me the courage to do it. I laugh sometimes behind the book at his disgusted face, and wish we could be photographed, so that I may be reminded in twenty years' time, when the garden is a ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... come along, and scenting something good to eat, proceed to fill up on the dosed stuff. It seems pretty hard to take advantage of a weakness that they appear to have in common with the other branch of the two-legged family, don't it? But every time they get so stupid that they stagger all around, and seem to lose all fear of mankind. Then one of the watchers will step out, take hold of a monkey's hand, and lead a whole string of them away, each trying to support the others. And so they ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... own position, Horsley cites numerous passages from the ante-Nicene fathers. He contends that in the famous passage of Tertullian on which Priestley had laid so much stress, Tertullian meant by 'idiotae,' not the general body of unlearned Christians, but some stupid people who could not accept the great mystery which was generally accepted by the Church. He shows that the Jews in Christ's time did believe in a Trinity, and expected the Second Person to come as their Messiah. He maintains that when Athanasius spoke of Jews who held the simple humanity ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... cream-of-tartar and the result is internal riot. "And a leetle spice to kill the bitter of the taste ought to work all right," he soliloquized. Then he remembered Chance. Loring had left to oversee the establishment of an outlying camp. The Mexican who assisted Sundown seemed stupid and sullen. Sundown found excuse to enter his bedroom, where he hastily scrawled a note to Corliss. Later he tied the note to the inside of the dog's collar. The next thing was to get Chance started on the road to ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... prosecutor to proceed, hoping that as the latter was also a man, he, too, might feel inclined to smoke or dine, and show some mercy on the rest. But the public prosecutor showed mercy neither to himself nor to any one else. He was very stupid by nature, but, besides this, he had had the misfortune of finishing school with a gold medal and of receiving a reward for his essay on "Servitude" when studying Roman Law at the University, and was therefore self-confident and self-satisfied in the highest degree (his success ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... your train should be allowed to wander till all were safe within these gates, for I well knew that, did but a whisper of my humble invitation and your gracious acceptance of the same reach Treves, it might be misconstrued; and although some sturdy fellows would be true, and beat their stupid heads against these walls, the rest would scatter like a sheaf of arrows suddenly unloosed, and seek the strongest arm upraised in the melee sure to follow. Against your army, leaderless, I would ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... paid the full penalty of her stupid acquiescence in the rule of Disraeli and Salisbury; and it will cost her yet far more than she paid for the results of Tory infamy and Whig senility in the "Alabama" business, for she has enemies to deal with who are far ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... Personnel's own midgit-idgit," she replied. "The machine says if anybody is left out, it's not its fault, that it would only be because we stupid humans forgot to inform ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... pleasantly, having no need, as a mere passer-by, to do otherwise, but if I had been obliged to have dealings with them, I should have begun by distrusting them outright. The man was of the common sort of ale-house keeper, ugly, beery, and stupid, and old enough to be the father of his wife, as I call her on account of the wedding ring on her finger. She was, for the place and post, a complete surprise, being a jaunty, townish, garish woman, dressed in decayed finery. He would have slit my throat for a groat, she for a grudge. They ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... know people, Uncle Rod, or am I so dull and stupid that I misunderstand? Men are such a puzzle—all except you, you darling dear—and if you were young and not my uncle, even you might be as much of a puzzle ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... all a satisfactory way on board. The master had died before the ship reached the Cape: the first officer, Mr Gregson, who had now charge, was obstinate and self-opinionated when sober, and he was very frequently intoxicated; the second was a stupid fellow and no navigator; and both were jealous of the third, who was a superior, intelligent young man, and in numerous ways they did their utmost to annoy him. This accounted for the good ship, the Kangaroo, being very much out of her proper course, which was far to the southward ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... still in the studio; for, her troubles over, Bessie's good spirits had returned, and she had persuaded Hugh to give her a sitting in order that she might satisfy a long-cherished desire to paint his portrait. "But what can you make out of my stupid phiz?" ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... folk could. My fader give it me, and his fader give it him, but now who shall I give it to? Poor Martha hab no child, no relation, nobody. All round I see black man very bad man. Black woman very stupid woman. Nobody worthy of the stone. And so I say, Here is Massa Jephson who write books and fight for coloured folk—he must be good man, and he shall have it though he is white man, and nebber can know what it mean or where it came from." Here the old woman fumbled in the chamois ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... say, and then you shall tell me whether you approve of it. You not only came up to, but far surpassed, my most sanguine expectations, and I saw therefore no reason to alter my original intentions. But it is stupid work for a man to wait till all the best days of his life are passed, without funds sufficient to render him independent, to feel all his energies cramped, his talents dwarfed, and his brightest aspirations checked, by a servile dependence on the will and ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... he replied slowly, with contracted brow, "you are giving me much to think about. I fear I have been as stupid as I have been bad. My whole life ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... rhetoric of his race, he revealed his ambitions. He was writing a novel which he hoped would make his name. He was under the influence of Zola, and he had set his scene in Paris. He told Philip the story at length. To Philip it seemed crude and stupid; the naive obscenity—c'est la vie, mon cher, c'est la vie, he cried—the naive obscenity served only to emphasise the conventionality of the anecdote. He had written for two years, amid incredible hardships, denying himself all the pleasures ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Fontange was a stupid little creature, but she had a very good heart. She was very red-haired, but, beautiful as an ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... the bottom of the trench with a bullet through his helmet and through his brain. The young officer in command of the listening-post cursed softly. "I'm forever warning the men not to expose themselves," he said irritatedly, "but they forget it the next minute. They're nothing but stupid children." He spoke in much the same tone of annoyance he might have used if the man had been a clumsy servant who had broken a valuable dish. Then he went into the tiny dugout where the telephone was, and rang up the trench commander, and asked him to send out a bearer, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... yourself; for, really, you are putting forward the most improbable facts without any proof whatever. It's easy enough to say that I stole the notes. And how were you to know that they were here at all? Who brought them here? Why should the murderer choose this flat to hide them in? It's all so stupid, so illogical and absurd!... Give us your proofs, sir ... one ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... with passengers, whose cries and terror augmented the general confusion. Some, struck with a kind of stupor, and clinging convulsively to the shrouds, awaited their doom in a state of stupid insensibility. Others wrung their hands in despair, or rolled upon the deck uttering horrible imprecations. Here, women knelt down to pray; there, others hid their faces in their hands, that they might not see the awful approach of death. A young mother, pale ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... said Bessie. "Mamma has pretty things in the drawing- room, but she keeps them out of the way; and everything here is so dull and stupid!" and the little girl ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that odious little flirt, Baby Blake, a young damsel that hawked her tender affections about at the beck and call of every male biped who might for the moment be enthralled by her charms! It was like his cool impudence. And then, again, his asking me his stupid, inane questions, as if I cared what man, and how many. Lizzie Dangler or any other girl might have "in tow," as he called it. Idiot! I declare to you I positively hated Horner at that moment, inoffensive and harmless ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sense of fairness and vexed him with his cowardly devil of impatience, which kicked at a simply stupid common man, and behaved to a lordly offender, smelling rascal, civilly. Just as her father would have—treated the matter, she said: 'Are we sorry for what has happened, Chillon?' The man had gone, the injustice ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... should be borne with an unaffected heart. O amiable one, if thou abstainest, in even a slight measure, from doing what is agreeable to your wives and children, thou shalt then know who is whose and why so and for what. They that are highly stupid and they that are masters of their souls enjoy happiness here. They however, that occupy an intermediate place suffer misery. This, O Yudhishthira, is what Senajit of great wisdom said, that person who was conversant with what is good or bad in this world, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... noodle story is a droll, or comic story, that follows the fortunes of very simple or stupid characters. There are many noodle stories among the favorites of the folk, and the three immediately following are among the best known. This version of "The Three Sillies" was collected from oral tradition in Suffolk, England. In the original the dangerous tool was an ax, but the collector ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... presenting great variations in climate and in the kind and quality of their soils. Among the Indians upon these several reservations there exist the most marked differences in natural traits and disposition and in their progress toward civilization. While some are lazy, vicious, and stupid, others are industrious, peaceful, and intelligent; while a portion of them are self-supporting and independent, and have so far advanced in civilization that they make their own laws, administered through officers of their own choice, and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... common in the most polished nations and it is common among savage tribes. Profound philosophers have argued in favor of it; poets have sung the objects of this sort of love in their tender and passionate compositions, and these compositions have always been the delight of posterity. What stupid or unfeeling reader can read without emotion that beautiful eclogue of Virgil where Corydon sighs his hopeless love for the beautiful Alexis? The most passionate ode of Horace is that one in which he complains ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... civilization stunted, repressed; he comprehends everything, the honor of the galleys, patriotism, virtue, the malice of a vulgar crime, or the fine astuteness of elegant wickedness. Another is resigned, a perfect mimer, but stupid. All have slight yearnings after order and work, but they are pushed back into their mire by society, which makes no inquiry as to what there may be of great men, poets, intrepid souls, and splendid organizations ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... Collie disappeared beyond the crest of the hill, the colt, who had watched them with absurdly stupid intensity, lowered his head and nibbled indifferently at the grass along the edge of the spring-hole fence. He approached the break and sniffed at the props and network of branches. This was interesting! And a very carelessly constructed piece of fence, indeed! He would ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homewards; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out tomorrow's work; and we riding onward, high abode them, like a whirl-wind. It was amusing, too, when we had dined, and rattled down a steep pass, having no other motive power than the weight of the carriages ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... that in which we undertake to do it—and shutting them in prison for it, ill treating them and killing them; and whether it is laudable and worthy of a man and a Christian to preach for a salary to the people not Christianity, but superstitions which one knows to be stupid and pernicious; and whether it is laudable and worthy of a man to rob his neighbor for his gratification of what he wants to satisfy his simplest needs, as the great landowners do; or to force him to exhausting labor ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... adventures in the army were so much enjoyed. We have only to repeat that there are few better stories for boys than these of Mr. Adams'. Always bright and even sparkling with animation, the story never drags; there are no stupid tasks or tiresome descriptions; the boys whose characters are drawn are real boys, impulsive, with superabundant animal life, and the heroes are manly, generous, healthy ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... mean, it is more a kind of horrid bear-play? But oh, to think of our Jack cutting off a piece of a man's ear! It almost spoils the beautiful other part of it. No, nothing can spoil that. Dear, delightful, stupid, glorious old Jack! I always knew he had genius. When shall ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... large —the questions, I mean, what is going on in Europe, the literature, the reforms, the politics. I get a wider view when I stand off—at home. I suppose it is more concentrated here. And, oh dear, I'm so stupid! Everybody is so alert in little things, so quick to turn a compliment, and say a bright thing. While I am getting ready to say what I really think about Browning, for instance, he is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of lemons, sitting astride on casks, drinking out of the best punch-bowls, eating the great cheese, smoking sacred pipes, etc. etc.; John Willet, fallen backward in his chair, regarding them with a stupid horror, and quite alone among them, with none of The ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... Mr. Harper's seizure, he had stayed behind in the dining-room, drunk himself stupid, and slept himself sober—or partly so. They say drink is a great unfolder of truth; if so, the old lawyer's sharp face betrayed that, in spite of all his past civility, he had not the kindest feeling in the ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... you mean quicker progress?" he asked, so naively that she concluded he was a trifle stupid. The best-looking ones were ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... and the preceding we spent at the Scala. The opera was stupid, and Madame Bellochi, who is the present primadonna, appeared to me harsh and ungraceful, when compared to Fodor. The new ballet however, amply indemnified us for the disappointment. Our Italian friends ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... give me back the days again, When we have wander'd free, And stole the dew from every flower, The fruit from every tree; The friends I loved they will not come, They've all deserted me; They sit at home and toast their toes, Look stupid and sip tea. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sound rattled in the newcomer's throat, and his chin dropped with stupid amazement. For a long moment he stared at her, his pupils dilating and contracting in a strangely fascinating way, and his body beginning slowly to rock from side to side as it had done in the thicket across the road. But just now she was meeting his gaze with a look ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... before the event, had been made dismal by the croaking of Iokanaans, and there was a definite defaitiste party among the intelligentsia. But among the people in general, if there was not optimism, there was at least a sort of resigned indifference, and so things went ahead in the old stupid Spanish way and the structure of society, despite a few gestures of liberalism, remained as it had been for generations. In Spain, of course, there is always a Kulturkampf, as there is in Italy, but during these years it was quiescent. ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... paid Richard a second visit, in company with Miss Pendexter. He was a great deal worse; he lay emaciated, exhausted, and stupid. The issue was doubtful. Gertrude immediately pushed forward to M——, a larger town than her own, sought out a professional nurse, and arranged with him to relieve the old woman from the farm, who was worn out with her vigilance. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... perished. You cannot teach your little goblin-faced boy who sits under the bridge the philosophy of the Hindu ascetic until you have fed and vitalised him, and stretched his poor withered imagination across the fair fields of youth's summer years. Believe me, the humanitarian's calling seems stupid from your point of view because you are born five hundred years before your time. When the Hull-House principles have abolished the poor and the rich, and have transplanted the whole human race far and wide over the hills and valleys of this earth, ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... tunnel, Uma keeping tight hold of me, opened my lantern and lit the match. The first length of it burned like a spill of paper, and I stood stupid, watching it burn, and thinking we were going aloft with Tiapolo, which was none of my views. The second took to a better rate, though faster than I cared about; and at that I got my wits again, hauled ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fact that one has no taste for worldly things, but only for heavenly things. Hence this belongs not to worldly but to Divine wisdom, as Gregory declares (Moral. x, 49). Sometimes however it is the result of a man's being simply stupid about everything, as may be seen in idiots, who do not discern what is injurious to them, and this belongs to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... regarding the majority of his kind as sagacious, or even more so than they are, and knowing much, or more than they do,—as is the case with well-disposed people,—Bracciolini, who was far from being of a benevolent nature, fell into the very opposite extreme, of looking upon men as remarkably stupid and ignorant. Nothing is more common than meeting in his works with contemptuous disparagements of his kind; he scoffs at human nature for its deficiency of understanding; he does not hesitate decrying its want of thought, as in his ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... Carthaginian, who had raised in arms against Rome first all the west and then all the east, and whose schemes perhaps had been only frustrated by infamous aristocratic policy in the former case, and by stupid court policy in the latter. Antiochus had been obliged to bind himself in the treaty of peace to deliver up Hannibal; but the latter had escaped, first to Crete, then to Bithynia,(8) and now lived at the court of Prusias ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... make it all the worse by being stupid," cried the girl petulantly. "Why can't you be nice, as you used to be before you got this silly ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... one, Bally Dean, tall, bony, and green As green corn in the milk, stood fast at the foot— Stood day after day, as if he'd been put A soldier on guard there did poor Bally Dean. And stupid! God made him so stupid I doubt— But I guess God who made us ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... very kindly, though you found me so stupid and without influence, [4] but you likewise aided in many ways for my worthless sake my mother and sister. And now, since I have not been able to repay you even the one myriadth part of that kindness and pity in which you enveloped me—pity great ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... character) descriptive of the Paris Salon: "There was a Manet or two, a Moreau and a dozen excellent landscapes, but the rest represented the apotheosis of mediocrity. The pictures which Gerome, Cabanel, Bouguereau, and the acolytes of these pastry-cooks exposed were stupid and sterile as church doors." This required courage in 1888. One wonders where Kenyon Cox was at the time! Give this book ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Africa. Somewhat of its present, perhaps, we know, but of its past little. Open an illustrated geography and compare the 'Type of the African Negro,' the bluish-black fellow of the protuberant lips, the flattened nose, the stupid expression and the short curly hair, with the tall bronze figures from Dark Africa with which we have of late become familiar, their almost fine-cut features, slightly arched nose, long hair, etc., and you have an example of the problems pressing for ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... explained with an assumed whimper, "and poor Hans is about distracted. He is afraid to go peddling alone with his secret writ large in both Dutch and English on his foolish face. I have told him I will go lame or no lame. Fortunately he is hard of hearing and stupid as an owl in broad daylight. You might be less like me than you are, and Hans would not know. We have much to be thankful ...
— Then Marched the Brave • Harriet T. Comstock
... spirit, his transcendent, fiery thoughts, his ardent will, his high calling. Govinda knew: he would not become a common Brahman, not a lazy official in charge of offerings; not a greedy merchant with magic spells; not a vain, vacuous speaker; not a mean, deceitful priest; and also not a decent, stupid sheep in the herd of the many. No, and he, Govinda, as well did not want to become one of those, not one of those tens of thousands of Brahmans. He wanted to follow Siddhartha, the beloved, the splendid. And in days to come, when ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... still she would not be dismayed. The letters were hers, were they not? They had been stolen from her, he had no right title to them who had purchased only the picture which had served as their hiding-place. By all means, let him keep that stupid canvas; he could hardly refuse to let her have her letters, not if she pleaded her prettiest. And even if he should prove ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... "I understand. Precious stupid of me to talk like that and make a fuss about being off duty for a few days, when you're in for it for weeks. But I say, you know, you are a lot better. Old Morton ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... the occurrence of the inexplicable gallery, I did not reason at all. I stood there, stupid, before the apparition—so pale and so beautiful—of Mademoiselle Stangerson. She was clad in a dressing-gown of dreamy white. One might have taken her to be a ghost—a lovely phantom. Her father took her in his arms and kissed her passionately, as ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... voracious maw! Still, I have never yet been willing to destroy a bird, because of its fondness for bees; and I advise all lovers of bees to have nothing to do with such foolish practices. Unless we can check among our people, the stupid, as well as inhuman custom of destroying so wantonly, on any pretence, and often on none at all, the insectivorous birds, we shall soon, not only be deprived of their aerial melody, among the leafy branches, but shall lament ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... Thomas forty pound, and is therefore under his thumb, forthwith refused the company license to play in Stratford guildhall, inn-yard, or common. And at that the master-player threw his glove into Master Stubbes's face, and called Sir Thomas a stupid old bell-wether, and Stratford burgesses silly sheep for following wherever he chose ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... to discredit this statement. He argues that Malalas tells foolish stories about other matters, and, therefore, is not to be believed here; but so simple a piece of information may well be correctly conveyed by a writer who elsewhere may record stupid traditions. [109:2] If the narrative of foolish stories and fabulous traditions is to exclude belief in everything else stated by those who relate them, the whole of the Fathers are disposed of at one fell swoop, for they all do so. Dr. Lightfoot also assert that the theory ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... pardons," said he humbly; "but you will, I am sure, forgive me when I tell you that I was stupid enough to mistake you for the fugitive Englishman, whom the gens-d'armes are in pursuit of. How ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... encouragement to come out openly on his side. They were Germans who lay on Burgoyne's left and Burgoyne sent Colonel Baum, an efficient officer, with five or six hundred men to attack the New Englanders and bring in the supplies. It was a stupid blunder to send Germans among a people specially incensed against the use of these mercenaries. There was no surprise. Many professing loyalists, seemingly eager to take the oath of allegiance, met and delayed Baum. When near Bennington he found in front of him a force barring the way ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... their utmost quickness and perfection—suppose him likewise, if you please, nimble and active, nay, give him riches, honors, authority, power, glory—now, I say, should this person, who is in possession of all these, be unjust, intemperate, timid, stupid, or an idiot—could you hesitate to call such a one miserable? What, then, are those goods in the possession of which you may be very miserable? Let us see if a happy life is not made up of parts of the same nature, as a heap implies a quantity of grain of the same ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... her knitting and went to meet her, and Elizabeth was pleased and flattered by her protegee's complaints and welcomes. "I thought you would never send me a message or a letter," almost sobbed Denas. "I never hoped you would come. O Elizabeth, how I have longed to see you! Life is so stupid when I cannot ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... silent for a minute, looking straight at the prisoner. Father Milon stood impassive, with the stupid look of the peasant, his eyes lowered as though he were talking to the priest. Just one thing betrayed an uneasy mind; he was continually swallowing his saliva, with a visible effort, as though his ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... my ribbon of the Legion. Ah, my Djack, it belongs more rightly to you, who would not let me go alone to Nivelle that dreadful day. Why do they not give you the cross? They must be very stupid in Paris. ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... appointment; the queen of my heart met me; I saw her calm, pure, serene. And here I must confess that I have always thought that Othello was not only stupid, but showed very bad taste. Only a man who is half a Negro could behave so: indeed Shakespeare felt this when he called his play 'The Moor of Venice.' The sight of the woman we love is such a balm to the heart that it must dispel anguish, doubt, ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... stolidity, the Indian is not so stupid as to be misled by talk like this. With a full knowledge of the situation— forced upon him by various events—the badinage of the brilliant militario does not for a moment blind him. Circumstances have given ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... sending for Dr. Graham after all he had had to vex him. It must have been quite a long while after, so soundly had Plume slept, when she bent over him and said something was amiss and Mr. Doty was at the front door waiting for him to come down. He felt oddly numb and heavy and stupid as he hastily dressed, but Doty's tidings, that Mullins had been stabbed on post, pulled him together, as it were, and, merely running back to his room for his canvas shoes, he was speedily at the scene. ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... hounds from the plantation house followed hard on my track. I managed, by some tall running, to come in a few feet ahead, and bolted into the shanty without warning or formality, slamming the door behind me to keep out the dogs. A great stupid negro was standing before the fire, his hands and face buried in fresh pork and hoe-cake, which he was making poor work at eating. His broad, fat countenance glistened with an unguent distilled partly from ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... joined a party of pleasure-seekers and we visited some spot made sacred by tender associations I became stupid, went off by myself, looked gloomily at the trees and bushes as though I would like to crush them under my feet. Upon my return I would ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... could I be so stupid? But it is two long years since I laid eyes on Bond Street. A humbler person, plain Mrs. Barclay, sends out my gowns. What do you think, dear Miss Percy, shall I look provincial, second-rate, amongst all ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... the great issue of that day. The majority of the Parliament, both Lords and Commons,—sustained by King George III., one of the most narrow-minded, obstinate, and stupid princes who ever reigned in England; who believed in an absolute jurisdiction over the colonies as an integral part of the empire, and was bent not only in enforcing this jurisdiction, but also resorted to the most offensive and impolitic measures ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... editor for the Queen's taxes, could get nothing out of our respected friend, but "Ride a cock-horse to Bamberry Cross!" If taxgatherers were not at once the most vindictive and the most stupid of men (it is said Sir ROBERT has ordered them to be very carnivorous this Christmas), the fellow would never have called in a broker to alarm our excellent coadjutor, but would at once have seen that the genius of the Athenaeum was taking his turn in Buckingham Palace, singing a nursery canzonetta ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... had been sitting, "don't you remember old Betty? They all said in the village you'd be too proud to look on your grandmother's grave; but you're not, I see. Well, that's good—that's good. We had a funeral last week, and the vault of the old earl was broken in. The stupid sexton stuck his pick in amongst the old bricks, and so the great man's skull came tumbling out, and rolled beside the skull of Job Martin, the old cobbler; and the sexton laid them both on the edge of the ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... has distended the bladder beyond its power of resistance and a rupture occurs, allowing the urine to escape into the cavity of the abdomen. Then dullness increases; the animal lies down most of his time; he becomes stupid and sometimes drowsy, with reddish-brown congestion of the lining membrane of the eyelids; pressure on the abdomen causes pain, flinching, and perhaps groaning, and the lowest part of the belly fluctuates more and more as the escaping urine accumulates ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... stagger ashore as they might. His arm seemed still to sustain that elastic weight, and a voice haunted his ear with the words, "A pair of disappointed lovers, I suppose"; and still more awkward and stupid he felt his own part in the affair to be; though at the same time he was not without some obscure resentment of the young girl's mistake as an intrusion ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... said of a great author, or a great actress, that they are very stupid people in private. But he was a fool that said so. Tell me your company, and I'll tell you your manners. In conversation, as in other things, the action and reaction should bear a certain proportion to each other.—Authors ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... was wondering where I'd heard your name before, when your sister happened to say you were Captain Rainham," said the big man. "How stupid of me—of course, I met Harran at my club this week, and he told me about you." He held out his hand, and took Bob's warmly; then he turned to his daughter. "Norah, it's lucky that we have made friends with ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... themselves; which we too have to ask, and answer. This wild man felt it to be of infinite moment; all other things of no moment whatever in comparison. The jargon of argumentative Greek Sects, vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routine of Arab Idolatry: there was no answer in these. A Hero, as I repeat, has this first distinction, which indeed we may call first and last, the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism, that he looks through the ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... English and the Germans; those of the Belgians were with the French. Moreover, the Dutch were inclined to act oppressively toward the Belgians, and this disposition was made the more irksome by the fact that King William was a dull, stupid, narrow and very obstinate sovereign, who thought that to have a request made of him was reason sufficient ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... themselves for a time raised above the daily cares, the troubles, and the sorrows of life. As the drama, with the arts which are subservient to it, may, from neglect and the mutual contempt of artists and the public, so far degenerate, as to become nothing better than a trivial and stupid amusement, and even a downright waste of time, we conceive that we are attempting something more than a passing entertainment, if we propose to enter on a consideration of the works produced by the most distinguished ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... and stupid fellow and, never doubting the fox, hied him off to the lake. Sure enough the water had once more frozen over, but, finding a hole, he thrust in his tail and rammed it through, and sat down to wait till ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... we flattered ourselves at the time) that Mr Jarman was the cause of all this state of things, let me tell him he is as stupid as we ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... any book they were reading, but it mattered little more what it was, for even a stupid book served as well as another to set their own fountains flowing. That afternoon Joan was reading from one partly written, partly compiled, in the beginning of the century, somewhat before its time in England. It might have been the work of an imitator at once ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... The stupid man opened his lips a little, and stood staring at her with hungry eyes, wondering if it were really possible that she did not hear the pounding of his heart; and then his teeth clicked, and ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... ever in her remembrance, devoutly wished that he would rouse himself, and make some conversation. She did all she could, in the way of supplying the guest with eatables, and making little remarks upon them, to fill up awkward pauses; but she was conscious she was being stupid; and even when she thought of a good thing to say, the reflection that it must needs be shouted aloud made her pause until the available moment had gone by. It was some relief that Bressant ate well, and seemed ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... implie such a life and spirit, you must acknowledge the same to be also in the most stupid of all living creatures, even the fishes (whose soul is but as salt to keep them from stinking, as Philo speaks) for they are said to be nishmat chayim chap. 1. v. 20. 21. See 1 Cor. chap. 15, v. 45, 46. In brief therefore, that which in Platonisme is nous, is in Scripture ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... Spectator said wittily, ought to be practised in sober sadness by old folks: when he was dull, he declared it was by design. So far, to be sure, we ought to observe it, as not to affect more spirits than we possess. To be purposely stupid, would be forbidding our correspondents to continue the intercourse; and I am so happy in enjoying the honour of your lordship's friendship, that I will be content (if you can be so) with my natural inanity, without studying ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... fuming, and saying a lot of hard things, as though some of the stupid acts of the army of supers nearly drove him distracted. By degrees he managed to whip his forces into the shape he wanted before he gave the warning signal that the fun was ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... note. bizarria bravery. blanco white. blancura whiteness. blandir to brandish. blando soft, smooth. blanquear to whiten, whitewash. blanquecino whitish. blasfemar to blaspheme. blasfemia blasphemy. bobo stupid, silly. boca mouth. bola ball, globe. boleta soldier's billet. bolsillo pocket, purse. bondadoso kindly. Bonifacio Boniface. bonito pretty. boqueron m. anchovy. boquete m. gap, narrow entrance. bordar to embroider. bordo ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... the shadow of a mourner falling upon a person would make him sick. Amongst the Kurnai of Victoria novices at initiation were cautioned not to let a woman's shadow fall across them, as this would make them thin, lazy, and stupid. An Australian native is said to have once nearly died of fright because the shadow of his mother-in-law fell on his legs as he lay asleep under a tree. The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... cry; a loss of consciousness, a moment of rigidity, and violent convulsions follow. There is foaming at the mouth, the eyes are rolled up, and the tongue or lips are often bitten. When the fit is over the patient remains in a dazed, stupid state for some time. It is a mistake to struggle with such patients, or to hold them down and keep them quiet. It ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... always; and He shows her what is best,' said the child, looking at him wistfully. Again he thought of his pious prayerful mother. She might have spoken through the childish lips. He closed his books, remarking that they were stupid. Jay gave him her hand to walk up and down the deck. He had never made it a custom to consult God, or refer to Him in matters of daily life, though theoretically he acknowledged His pervading sovereignty. To procure the guidance of Infinite Wisdom would be well worth a prayer. ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... supposed to be. Education, as you have heard, I had none; and all the little scenes of life I had passed through had been full of dangers and desperate circumstances; but I was either so young or so stupid, that I escaped the grief and anxiety of them, for want of having a sense of their tendency ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... what hornet's nest your stupid people have blundered? How much d'ye think their lives are worth, just now? Not a brass farthing if the breeze fails me for another twenty-four hours. You may well open your eyes. It is so! And it may be too late now, while I am arguing with ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... I found that out from the porter, though the blessed old buffer can't speak anything but his French gibberish. 'Madame?' I said, bawling into his stupid old ear. 'Mossoo and Madame Hostin? comprenny?' and he says, 'Ya-ase,' and then bursts out laughing, and looks as proud as a hen that's just laid a hegg—' Ya-ase, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... match to light a cigarette, but I had none, and said that I also wanted one. In a few minutes she brought me a match, and then she recommenced her tireless weaving of six vile words into hundreds of stupid sentences. ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... lady," said that functionary, as Dorothy entered. "That stupid old horse of his threw him against a tree, and we cannot find Sir Benedict anywhere; the poor father is bleeding to death. He's dying, my lady, dying; what will the baron ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... Don't be so stupid. We must be near the shore. I don't believe there would be a shallow place like that ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... corporation, from the Rio Grande to the capital; but the National line between the capital and Vera Cruz is not able to make use of this greater safeguard and economical air-brake, because a lot of stupid, ignorant ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... when did you bathe the more quietly; when did you perform your exercises the more at your leisure; in short, which life would you rather wish to live—your present, or the former? I could swear there is no one so stupid and insensible as not to deplore his miseries, in proportion as he is the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... to most, that wine and much flesh-eating make the body indeed strong and lusty, but the mind weak and feeble. And that I may not offend the wrestlers, I will make use of examples out of my own country. The Athenians are wont to call us Boeotians gross, senseless, and stupid fellows, for no other reason but our over-much eating; by Pindar we are called hogs, for the same reason. Menander the comedian calls us "fellows with long jaws." It is observed also that, according to ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... a special place in my heart for those poor little creatures who figure in circuses and shows, or elsewhere, as "infant prodigies." Heaven help such little folk! It was an unkind fate that did not make them commonplace, stupid, happy girls and boys like our own Fannys and Charleys and Harrys. Poor little waifs, that never know any babyhood or childhood—sad human midges, that flutter for a moment in the glare of the gaslights, ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... in the labors of the field, cultivating sorgho, a kind of millet which forms the chief basis of their diet; and the most stupid expressions of astonishment ensued as the Victoria sped past like a meteor. That evening the balloon halted about forty miles from Yola, and ahead of it, but in the distance, rose the two sharp cones of ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... but comes not to the heart. One self-approving hour whole years outweighs Of stupid starers and of loud huzzas; And more true joy Marcellus exil'd feels Than Caesar with a senate at his heels. In parts superior what advantage lies? Tell (for you can) what is it to be wise? 'T is but to know how little can be known; To see all ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... henchman, Red Roy—"this would not have happened. Who could have thought that a man of your years could have suffered himself to be fooled by a boy, and to bring me tales that this insolent upstart was a poor stupid lout! By Heavens! to be thus badly served is enough to make ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... old eagles would become alarmed and suspicious, and we would fail in capturing them. The rope, such as it was, held me all right, and landed near the nest. The young birds were so gorged with the flesh of the mountain lamb that they were very stupid, and hardly stirred. I set to work as speedily as possible to arrange the snares, so that the eagles would step into them. As they were all constructed on the running noose principle we knew that they would quickly tighten around ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... years I have heard it applied only to the discharged invalided pensioners of the army. On a late Queen's birthday review on the Green, the boys and girls were in ecstasies at seeing the "old fogies" dressed out in new suits. It is very often spoken derisively to a thick-headed stupid person, but which cannot ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... he had assumed the innocent air of a rustic, and tried to make himself appear as stupid as he could. The two men in the red car were no longer calling, for they had seen that the boy on the road showed no ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... Leslies, but they had been long since sold. The vicarage, still in their gift, might be worth a little more than L100 a year. The present incumbent had nothing else to live upon. He was a good man, and not originally a stupid one; but penury and the anxious cares for wife and family, combined with what may be called solitary confinement for the cultivated mind, when, amidst the two legged creatures round, it sees no other cultivated mind with which it ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... been known to make his home in a hole dug by Benny Badger. And, though they never took the trouble to thank him for saving them work, they often chuckled about his odd way of having fun, and remarked among themselves that Benny must be a stupid fellow. ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... was not cool enough to reflect that it was waste of trouble to try to choose his words, since if Lucia accepted him she would for ever think them eloquent; and if she refused him, would be certain to consider them stupid. She, on the other hand, was in unusually high spirits. It had occurred to her that Lady Dighton, who seemed to know everybody, would probably know Percy. She had begun already to lay deep plans for finding out if this ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... covers the smooth slope of the approach. You enter your hotel through mahogany revolving doors. A colossal Flora stands by the lift at the foot of the big staircase. Unaware that this is no festival of flowers, the poor stupid thing leans forward, smiling, and holds out her garland to the wounded as they are carried past. Nobody takes any notice of her. The great hall of the hotel has been stripped bare. All draperies ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... the waiter, Hesden," said his mother, reprovingly, "and raise her head. Don't you see that Miss Ainslie cannot drink lying there. I never saw you so stupid, my son. I shall have to grow worse again soon to keep you from getting out ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... different in precision and power from what they purposed to rely on. But the combination of patient and careful industry, with the courage and divination of genius, in doing what none had done before, makes it equally stupid and idle to impeach ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... at table with stupid hands and evasive eyes. Little Johnny, who was, as Polly put it, "as sharp as mustard," was prompt to note his ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... melancholy, disappointed, angry stung to the soul by calumnies as stupid as they were venomous, and already afflicted with a painful and lingering disease, which his friends attributed to poison administered by command of the master whom he had so faithfully served—determined, if possible, to afford the consolation ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... This awful pride! But listen, Mariana, listen to me," she added, suddenly changing her tone. She wanted to draw Mariana nearer to herself, but the latter stepped back a pace. "Ecoutez-moi, je vous en conjure! After all, I am not so old nor so stupid that it should be impossible for us to understand each other! Je ne suis pas une encroutee. I was even considered a republican as a girl.. no less than you. Listen, I won't pretend that I ever had any motherly feeling towards ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... given to long consultations behind the woodshed. When they were permitted to visit Mr. Kincaid at the jail, they tried mysteriously to convey assurance of absolute secrecy, but succeeded only in appearing stupid, frivolous and unsympathetic. Nevertheless their concern was very real. Bobby in especial brooded over the affair to the exclusion of all other interests. The Flobert rifle was laid away, the printing press gathered ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... his free arm violently—even the Gladstone bag swung to and fro; he punctuated his sentences with sharp, angry nods of the head, insisting and protesting and insisting, while the other, saying much less, maintained his damnable stupid disdainful grin. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... levelled, and a noble bridge now spans its rapid waters. It has seen the destruction of two log-bridges, but this new, substantial, imposing structure bids fair to stand from generation to generation. The Indian regards it with stupid wonder: he is no mechanic; his simple canoe of birch bark is his only notion of communication from one shore to another. The towns-people and country settlers view it with pride and satisfaction, as a means of commerce ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... I were only well, how I would beat that stupid boy!" exclaimed the king, in a loud, menacing voice. "Hacke, have the kindness to beat ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Would they ever, ever, reach the top? And when they should, there would be another hamlet in a valley, another bridge, more stupid people who could not speak English, more villages, more bends in the road, still other ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Thank God, I belong to a race that is full of primitive instincts! Poor old England still barges in whenever there is a fight going on, and gets her head knocked, and goes on fighting just the same, and never knows that she is heroic, but blunders on—simple-hearted, stupid, sublime! ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... am not in a talking humour," she answered. "My head aches, and I shall be glad to get to bed. It was a stupid, humdrum evening" ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... great satisfaction. I said nothing, feeling half stupid with amazement, for the man apparently told it in the full conviction that it was true, while the other listeners appeared to accept every word of it with the most implicit faith. I began to feel very melancholy, for evidently they expected something from me now, and what to ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... Pauline cheerfully. "One of the very nicest girls I ever knew was a maid Mother had the last year of her dear life. I loved that girl, Aunt Olivia, and I correspond with her. She writes letters that are ten times more clever and entertaining than those stupid epistles Clarisse Gray sends me—and Clarisse Gray is a rich man's daughter and is being educated ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... poacher turned gamekeeper. A few months ago, as leader of the Labour Party, he was instant in criticism of the ineptitutes of Government officials. This afternoon, upon his old friend, Mr. TYSON WILSON, venturing to refer to the "stupid decisions" of the Board of Trade, Mr. WARDLE was down on him in a moment. With the air of one who had been born and brought up in Whitehall Gardens, he replied, "Stupid decisions are not made by the Board ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... "Am I unusually stupid, or are you rapt, beyond the realm of reason and mid-day common sense? Pray what is the fascination? It is neither so vast, nor so picturesque as the Colosseum. There, one expects to hear the roar of the beasts springing on their human prey; the ring of steel on steel, when the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... "Another stupid!" said Rose. "Two beautiful and accomplished ladies go to church and give respectability to two of the wild tribe of the West, by marrying them, and they forget it in a ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... have knocked me down with a feather," Mrs. Archer said afterward to an intimate friend. "I never should have suspected that such a quiet, stupid man as he was would fall in love in that ridiculous kind of a way. Good gracious! how indignant old Mrs. Rutherford will be! and I shall be blamed for the whole affair, no doubt. I wish John had never brought the man here—I never did like him; and then, too, it is so provoking ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... do," hastily exclaimed Pao-yue. "You stupid thing! gently a bit; is it likely you've never seen any one put one on before? let me do ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Whether we are by nature a more stupid people than the Dutch? And yet whether these things are sufficiently considered ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... Roseville, "has not only the best command of language herself, but she gives language to other people. Dinner parties, usually so stupid, are, at her house, quite delightful. I have actually seen English people look happy, and one or two ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Brunswick, could find nothing wrong in Trenck's cell except the false window frame. The cut chains, though examined, somehow escaped detection, from which we gather either that the officials were very careless, or the carpenter very stupid. Perhaps both may have been the case, for as the Seven Years' War (against Austria) was at this time raging, sentinels and officers were frequently changed, and prison discipline insensibly relaxed. Had this not been so, Trenck could never have been able ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... quite harmless, and only asks to be let alone and allowed to browse on gum-leaves. Its flesh is uneatable except by an aboriginal or a victim to famine. Its fur is difficult to manipulate, as it will not lie flat, so the koala should have been left in peace. But its confiding and somewhat stupid nature, and the senseless desire of small boys and "children of larger growth" to kill something wild just for the sake of killing, has led to the koala being almost exterminated in many places. Now it is protected by the ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... from Ottawa. He would pat the head of the big dog that was always at his heels, throw a coin on the counter, slip his change in his pocket and go out again, as if time had mattered, when, as she knew perfectly well, he really hadn't much to do. The poor fellow, she decided, was really stupid, in spite of ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... forward on his face. His hands were numb, dead. He lay supported by his elbows, his eyes gazing blankly at the unlit fire. Five minutes passed; he did not rise. He seemed dazed, stupid, terror-stricken. Five more minutes passed. He did not move. He seemed to stiffen, to grow rigid, and ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... a boy of quick receptivity as far as books were concerned, and therefore was no favourite with Mr Malison, he was not by any means a common or a stupid boy. His own eyes could teach him more than books could, for he had a very quick observation of things about him, both in what is commonly called nature and in humanity. He knew all the birds, all their habits, and all ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... men behind him, Captain Fitzgerald the other. The most ammunition anyone had, by the way, was a hundred and ten rounds. There was some very stiff fighting for a few minutes, the natives having the best of the position; indeed they might have wiped us out but for their stupid habit of firing on the run, as they charged. Wilson ordered us to retire down the vlei; some hundred yards further on we came to an ant-heap and took our second position on that, and held it for some time. Wilson jumped on the top of the ant-heap and shouted—"Every ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... be as stupid as being shut up here in this dreary old nursery—I mean dungeon," said Ginevra. "And now that our cruel gaoler has refused to let us have the small solace of—of a—" she could not find any more imposing word—"doll to play with, I think the time has come ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... breath; in the sudden wind-thrills; In the startled wild beasts that bore oft, each with eye sidling still Though averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and chill {330} That rose heavily as I approached them, made stupid with awe: E'en the serpent that slid away silent—he felt the new law. The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers; The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine-bowers: And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... of purpose to crystallize her, she cannot absorb even the gravest of warnings; not from unwillingness or stupid obstinacy, but from sheer inability to grasp any novelty. That her beloved master and mistress—either or both—should not have the best of everything and plenty of it is, at this advanced stage in her career, unthinkable. Even though she read it in print she would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... she repeated, bending her head down. "That's nothing. My father is a stupid, coarse man—my brother also—and a drunkard, besides. My oldest sister—unhappy, wretched thing—married a man much older than herself, very rich, a bore and greedy. But my mother I am sorry for! She's a simple woman like you, a beaten-down, frightened creature, so tiny, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... glass blown, Giusippe?" inquired Jean, as they went across the yard. "I hate to ask stupid questions, but you see I do ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... of the United States. A member of Congress, Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, who was sentenced in the Fall of that year to a fine of $1,000 and four months in jail for writing of the President and Senate, that his message to Congress in 1797 was a bullying speech, which the Senate in a stupid answer had echoed with more servility than ever Geo. III. experienced from either house of parliament, served his time and paid the fine, but for the amount of the latter he was ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... "This stupid insistence upon confining me to manual labor. I'm the single member on Ragnarok of the Athena Planning Board and surely you can see that this bumbling confusion of these people"—Bemmon indicated the hurrying, laboring men, women and children ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... each, containing in all two hundred and seventeen stanzas, octave measure. But I will permit no curtailments.... You shan't make canticles of my cantos. The poem will please, if it is lively; if it is stupid, it will fail; but I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing. If you please, you may publish anonymously; it will perhaps be better; but I will battle my way against them all, like ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... dear Hench, you make no distinctions. I've been talking about the boy's people and his bringing up and the way he acts, whereupon you fly off on a tangent and coolly conclude things about the boy himself. It is not only unkind, but stupid." ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... "How stupid of me!" she said. "I never thought of your mother before; she is the very person. I will meet you to-morrow morning here, Florence, and then you can tell me what you decide. It will be all the better for you if you are wise: all the worse ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... are getting tired and stupid, Ben," said Mrs. Garth, accustomed to these obstructive arguments from her male offspring. Having finished her pies, she moved towards the clothes-horse, and said, "Come here and tell me the story I told you on ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... bored, irritable, or accessory to a hideous pleasantry? Does our fate depend on the happy solution of some petty enigma or childish conundrum, even as our salvation, in most of the so-called revealed religious, is settled by a blind and stupid cast of the die? Is all the liberty that we are granted reduced to the reading of a more or less ingenious riddle? Can the great soul of the universe be the soul of a ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... very tall, strong, and brave, was rather stupid. He seldom spoke, but he was always ready to fight, and the last to retreat. Menelaus was weak of body, but as brave as the best, or more brave, for he had a keen sense of honour, and would attempt what he had not the strength to do. Diomede and ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang
... the Populists have been advocates of reforms when they could not be accomplished, but when the first ray of light appeared and the people were looking with expectancy and with anxiety for relief, the party was not equal to the occasion; that it was stupid; it was blind; it kept 'the middle of the road,' and ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... by me said as how he must ha' bin taken when the bad news came from India. Another looks so savage, that amost everybody asks him why he don't have it out and done with it! Another werry savage sojer looked at me as much as to say, "What are you staring at, Stupid?" which wasn't at all perlite. Professor HUXLEY, I am told, is a werry great man, and so he most suttenly seems for to think by the looks on him, and ain't he jist got a lot of big books for to read! I was surprised ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... had passed from the stupid to the delirious stage of her fever; and all that night, as he woke or dozed in his little closet close beside his mother's door, poor Teddy's heart ached to hear the wild tones of entreaty, of terror, or of anger, proving to his mind that the delicate child he already loved ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... possible would never make a painter, and that what the old Roman proverb said of the poet, "Non fit sed nascitur poeta," is equally applicable to the painter. I tried it for a short time, at Hanover, but my master told me I was the most awkward and stupid pupil he ever had, and advised me to cut the concern, and I followed his advice; nor am I sorry that I did so, as I should never have been able to draw well, and should have only been discontented, and given it up in disgust. We have, however, two officers ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... chipping of steel on flint, and caught a glimpse of a face. As its lips blew on the tinder this face vanished and reappeared, and at length grew steady in the blue light of the sulphur match. It was not the face, however, on which my eyes rested in a stupid wonder, but the collar below it—the scarlet collar and ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... explain? . . . Well, I must tell you. You must forgive me somehow! I tried—don't look at me while I say it—I have tried to interfere with YOU. I tried to make a friend of you; and then when you came to Cambridge, I saw I had claimed too much; that your place was not with such as myself—the old, stupid, battered generation, fit for nothing but worrying along. I saw you were young, and needed youth about you. God forgive me for my selfish plans. I wanted to keep your friendship for myself, and when I saw you were attracted elsewhere, I was jealous—horribly, vilely ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... These vain presidents were seen turning their looks from a man who imposed so strongly upon their pride, and who annihilated their arrogance in the place even whence they drew it, and rendered them stupid by regards they could ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... "Mamma has pretty things in the drawing- room, but she keeps them out of the way; and everything here is so dull and stupid!" and the little girl gave ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... you wish me good evening, you stupid jackass! Do you suppose I have travelled five and twenty miles for the pleasure of wishing you good evening? Who's ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... of all is the attitude which we often take up of resenting the love that would reveal our ruin. It is stupid of the ox to kick against its driver's goad; but that is wise in comparison with the action of the man who is angry with God because He warns that departure from Him is ruin. Many of us treat Christianity as if ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... she used, "I'm that stupid and awkward that I can't do nothing," or that still worse thing, "I suppose I can do anything I want to," Juliet replied modestly, "I will try to do what ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... place."[62] {302} There is a Heaven this side of Heaven and there is as certainly a Hell this side of Hell. The most impressive expression of this truth is given in one of his Sermons: "All misery arises out of ourselves. It is a most gross mistake, and men are of dull and stupid spirits who think that the state which we call Hell is an incommodious place only; and that God by His sovereignty throws men therein. Hell ariseth out of a man's self. And Hell's fewel is the guilt of a man's conscience. It is impossible that any ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... bad white fellow, sar—he try kill Maori, but Maori too much not kill, sar. Jacky Fishook stupid fellow, sar—not know Maori—but Maori throw spear—yes." And there and then the muscular lithe figure was drawn up like a statue; the beady eye glaring straight forward, the arm poised as though to hurl a javelin. It was quite enough—I knew ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... "desolate places," I would be there; if bare-footed she had to beg from door to door, rest assured, mother, that an Aylwin would hold the wallet—would leave the whole Aylwin brood, their rank, their money, and their stupid, vulgar British pride, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... it, the carelessness and obstinacy with which the greater part of the people had fostered it, its progress. This was the substance of what she said; but she did not speak of the best efforts as being her own, nor did she call the people stupid ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... the actors I have mentioned, come the confidants, a dull and stupid set, of whom one only deserves mention, not as an actor, but as an author. This is DUVAL. He has written that pretty comic opera, entitled Le Prisonnier, as well as Maison a vendre, and several drames, among which we must not forget Le Lovelace Francais, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... and compare it with the vulgar daubs even of John Kemble's time. Some of the scenes by Stanfield, Roberts, Grieve, and Pugh, are "perfect pictures." Yet the language of the stage is at a stand, and insipid comedy, dull tragedy, and stupid farce are more abundant than before the "march ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... The elephant is stupid when it comes to learning how to use tools. So are all other species except our own. Isn't it strange? A tool, in the most primitive sense, is any object, lying around, that can obviously be used as an instrument for this or that purpose. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... washed and scrubbed as well as I could; but it was so dirty and so sticky! Ugh! And it was done on purpose, too; that's the worst of it; and the nasty things have got into my clothes and my hair and all over me! That stupid young gentleman did it just to frighten whoever came and found them there! I know ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... full of practical lessons;] Some people, however, never outgrow the child's notion of history as merely a mass of pretty anecdotes or stupid annals, without any practical bearing upon our own every-day life. There could not be a greater mistake. Very little has happened in the past which has not some immediate practical lessons for us; and when we study history ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... out with his fork, 'once overrun by soldiers - trespassers every man of 'em - and laid waste by fire and sword. He, he, he! The idea of any man exposing himself, voluntarily, to fire and sword! Stupid, wasteful, positively ridiculous; you laugh at your fellow- creatures, you know, when you think of it! But take this smiling country as it stands. Think of the laws appertaining to real property; to the bequest and devise of real property; ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... one, and a locus poenitentiae is thus given to the embryo—an opportunity of correcting the experience of one parent by that of the other. And this is what the more intelligent embryos may be supposed to do; for there would seem little reason to doubt that there are clever embryos and stupid embryos, with better or worse memories, as the case may be, of how they dealt with their protoplasm before, and better or worse able to see how they can do better now; and that embryos differ as widely in intellectual and moral ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... farm, that would be enough of itself to make him stop where he is, and brave it out. Whereas you, sir, are known to be cautious and careful, and farseeing and discreet." He might have added: And cowardly and obstinate, and narrow-minded and inflated by stupid self-esteem. But respect for his employer had blindfolded the clerk's observation for many a long year past. If one man may be born with the heart of a lion, another man may be born with the mind of a mule. Dennis's master was one of ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... farmhouses. Naturally Georgie soon began to talk about, and take an interest—as girls will do—in the young gentlemen of the town, and who was and who was not eligible. As for the loud-voiced young farmers, with their slouching walk, their ill-fitting clothes, and stupid talk about cows and wheat, they were intolerable. A banker's clerk at least—nothing could be thought of under a clerk in the local banks; of course, his salary was not high, but then his 'position.' The retail grocers and bakers and such people ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... qualifications for Yoga is "right notion" "Right notion" means that the thought shall correspond with the outside truth; that a man shall he fundamentally true, so that his thought corresponds to fact; unless there is truth in a man, Yoga is for him impossible. Missing the point, illogical, stupid, making the important, unimportant and vice versa. Lastly, instability: which makes Yoga impossible, and even a small amount of which makes Yoga futile; the unstable man cannot be ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... Mime, delighted with himself, readily replies: "Nothung is the name of a notable sword.... The fragments of it are preserved by a wise smith, for he knows that with the Wotan-sword alone an intrepid stupid boy, Siegfried, shall destroy the dragon." He rubs his hands in goblin glee. "Am I, dwarf, in the second instance still to retain my head?" Wanderer, with a laugh for his antics, felicitates him: ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... was stiff and stupid: Margaret Pillsbury's parties always are—no dancing, no cards. Mr. Falconer was the only man there who could say anything." This was Gertrude's defence, given with some confusion, and with more of doggedness than defiance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... were most promising. It was growing in population and in wealth and in the institutions of a Christian commonwealth. The territory was divided into parishes for the work of church and clergy. The stupid obstinacy of the king, against the remonstrances of the Company, perpetrated the crime of sending out a hundred convicts into the young community, extorting from Captain Smith the protest that this ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... "Thou dull stupid man, who art not stricken with the idea of a God, whose will is self-efficient, and who alone can act immediately on an immaterial soul, come and behold some sensible proofs of that infinite power, of which metaphysical proofs can give thee no idea! And thou, proud insolent man! go aboard the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... she whispered. "He's certain to come then. But if I—were to die first—then tell him—I'm sorry for him. They keep saying: 'Don't talk—don't talk!' Isn't it stupid? As if I should have any other chance! There'll be no more talking after to-night! Make everybody come, please—I want to see them all. When you're dying you're freer than any other time—nobody wants you to do things, nobody cares what you say.... He promised me I should do what ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed skirt and canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now she lay across the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby pumps, very feminine, utterly cowed. She lifted her head in stupid terror. Her hair was in tousled strings and her face was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... which was most popular he would have accepted and backed. But he said, "Io non voglio perdere gli uomini perle femminelle."[38] If the Black party furnished types for the grosser or fiercer forms of wickedness in the poet's hell, the White party surely were the originals of that picture of stupid and cowardly selfishness, in the miserable crowd who moan and are buffeted in the vestibule of the Pit, mingled with the angels who dared neither to rebel nor be faithful, but "were for themselves"; and whoever it may be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... you since your sisters were at the Argyle Rooms, [8] which they liked extremely, but where they had small opportunity of exhibiting their new steps. There was first an Operetta, then a supper, and afterwards an attempt at a dance; but the stupid English voted it not ton, and there were only about fifteen couples who ventured to defy this opinion—Marianne and Mr Macdonald one of them. Anne remained a spectator. As the dancing did not seem to be approved, Mr Greville said, for the future there should ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... years ago, during a storm at sea, a stupid sea-captain ordered his passengers to go below in the hold of the vessel. Then he covered up the hold, so that no fresh air could enter. When the storm was over he opened the hold, and found that seventy human beings had died for want of ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... huge crop of Pomeroy paragon chestnuts on my trees this year. No blight near me, as thank heaven the farmers around me are too stupid to plant chestnut trees and in fact no farmer ever planted a nut tree with two exceptions within 20 miles of me. But one farmer by name of Anderson planted a mile of black walnuts along the roadside 75 years ago. These trees are loaded with nuts and boys just now and they reach ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... think; you may tie a stone to a bed-cord and not get soundings in some of 'em. The country boys will tell you they have no bottom, but that only means that they are mighty deep; and so a good many stagnant, stupid-seeming people are a great deal deeper than the length of your intellectual walking-stick, I can tell you. There are hidden springs that keep the little pond-holes full when the mountain brooks are all dried up. You poets ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... reading Glover's Leonidas, Wilkie's Epigoniad, Lamartine's Pilgrimage, Barlow's Columbiad, Tuckerman's Sicily, and Griswold's Curiosities, I am willing to confess, therefore, that I now felt a little stupid. I made effort to arouse myself by frequent aid of Lafitte, and all failing, I betook myself to a stray newspaper in despair. Having carefully perused the column of "Houses to let," and the column of "Dogs lost," and then the columns of "Wives and apprentices runaway," I attacked with great ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... he said, when Wanda and he were safely seated in the Austrian railway carriage. "They all know. Look at their stupid, perturbed faces. We have slipped across the frontier before they have decided whether they are standing on their heads or their heels. Ah! what a thing it is to have a smile ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... with weeds so high that we can't see the turn of the path. Now, my case—I'm telling you my story after all—my case is a typical one of the artistic sort. I wrote prose, verse, and dissipated with true poetic regularity. It was after reading Nietzsche that I decided to quit my stupid, sinful ways. Yes, you may smile! It was Nietzsche who converted me. I left the old crowd, the old life in Paris, went to Brittany, studied new rhythms, new forms, studied the moon; and then people began to touch their foreheads knowingly. I was suspected simply because I did not want to turn ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Chinese Communist diplomat in Berne, Switzerland, happened to see it and, one night at a dinner party, he said mockingly: "This stupid American general in Jerusalem is obviously ignorant of the world. Otherwise, he would realize that no nation on earth loves gambling so much as the Chinese. Anyone who knows the Orient ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... unacquainted with the particulars of the courier, &c., but only said that the King, his master, had assured him that he should invest you with that order, as his Brother(88) had desired he would, and that it should be done avec toute la pompe et eclat dont la chose fut susceptible. He is a stupid ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... English were the people who had crucified our Saviour. To complicate matters again, the Chevalier de St. George (of whom there is no recollection except that he was anonymous, both as a prince, and as a man) sent his son, the fifth remove in stupidity, of the most stupid line of monarchs (not even excepting the Georges) that ever wore crowns, to stir up an insurrection among the most obtuse race of people that ever wore, or went without, breeches. A war between France and England followed the descent of the Pretender. A war ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... me stupid for leaving on the table the little bit of paper I was to enclose. This comes of being in love at the fag-end of a letter of business. You know you say they will not chime together. I had got you by the fire-side with the ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... unknown to me ... I earnestly hope they will wait. The Germans are a slow people; but they will move in time. Every German I see believes this.... 'We without them cannot be made perfect,' seems to me the clue to European oppressions. While stupid barbarism exists in masses, it will be the tool of tyranny against the more educated and ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... am sure," said Bluebell, the tears rushing to her eyes, "I wish you had never come. I have been miserable ever since I took that stupid walk, which you prevented my ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... but I'm too stupid to think of anything better. This is a terrible place; but I suppose you must be here till you grow strong enough to walk or ride. We shall have to bring you food and things as ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... me; and the start of surprise and consternation which escaped the stranger when he first saw me confirmed me in the impression. But a moment later I doubted; so natural was the posture into which the man fell, and so stupid the look of inquiry which he turned first on me and then on Maignan. As he stood before me, shifting his feet and staring about him in vacant wonder, I began to think that I had made a mistake; and, clearly, either I had done so or this young man was possessed of talents and a power of controlling ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... said Grant calmly, "the great new trade of the Organizer of Repartee. This fat old gentleman lying on the ground strikes you, as I have no doubt, as very stupid and very rich. Let me clear his character. He is, like ourselves, very clever and very poor. He is also not really at all fat; all that is stuffing. He is not particularly old, and his name is not Cholmondeliegh. He ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... last believe, O stupid British, German, and French patriots, what the Socialists have been telling you for so many years: that your Union Jacks and tricolours and Imperial Eagles ("where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered") are ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... am like this sometimes. It's awfully silly, but I can't help it. Some rotten trifle sets me off, and then I can't stop myself. I begin to go over all my worst luck.—Doesn't it occur to you there's no earthly good in standing? It obliges me to talk loud, and it's stupid to take all Barnes Common into our confidence. Thanks; that's very nice of you.—Well, you see when I'm like his, the flood-gates of memory are opened—which sounds pretty enough, but the prettiness is strictly limited to the sound for most of us, at least as far as my experience goes. The water ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... down. This isn't enough for these long years. I had so many things to say to you." She hesitated and cried, "Why are we so stupid now—now when ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... greatly shocked at such an imputation, for his conscience is still too timid for so flagrant a crime. He merely follows the golden maxim of 'caveat emptor', and, like the petty shopkeeper, thinks he is justified in cheating those who are too stupid to look after their own interests, and too ignorant or too feeble to ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... Stupid! A swamper from one of the worst rat holes in the port. Like as not that youngster would have had his brains kicked out in a brawl, or been fried to a crisp when some drunk got wild with a blaster, before the year was out. He'd done him a real kindness, given him a chance at a future less ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... republic must be restored, new ships built and old ones refitted; in the meantime, as did Richelieu or Mazarin, rebellion against the British government must be roused and supported among malcontents everywhere within the borders of Great Britain, especially in Ireland. Such was the stupid plan of the Directory: two well-worn expedients, both discredited as often as tried. To the territorial readjustment of Europe, Prussia, though momentarily checked, was already pivotal; but the first efforts of French diplomacy at Berlin resulted in a flat refusal to go farther than ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... there a few times more, if only to break it off gently," he reflected, "and I want to see old Rainham. It is stupid of me not to have written to him—yes, stupid! Wonder if he has heard? I mustn't give him up, at any rate. We'll—we'll ask him to dinner, and all that sort of thing. And what the deuce am I going to send to the Academy? Thank goodness, I have enough Swiss sketches to work up for the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Jack-in-the-box which had just sprung up into view, others like ignorant, but superstitious, people who had unexpectedly come upon a shrine by the wayside. One or two seemed disposed to laugh nervously, as the very stupid laugh at anything they see for the first time. But fear seized them. They refrained convulsively and shambled on to the gangway, looking sideways, like fowls, and holding their rugs awkwardly to their breasts with their ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... correctness of that vote? The law admitting those territories passed without any proviso. Is there a slave, or will there ever be one, in either of those territories? Why, there is not a man in the United States so stupid as not to see, at this moment, that such a thing was wholly unnecessary, and that it was only calculated to irritate and to offend. I am not one who is disposed to create irritation, or give offence among brethren, or to break up fraternal friendship, without cause. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... it often said of a great author, or a great actress, that they are very stupid people in private. But he was a fool that said so. Tell me your company, and I'll tell you your manners. In conversation, as in other things, the action and reaction should bear a certain proportion to each other.—Authors may, in some sense, be looked ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... refrain from complaining at the inconveniences and sufferings endured in time of sickness. He succeeded in inspiring his Daughters of the Visitation with his spirit, teaching them that true Christian patience, which is neither apathy nor insensibility, nor the dull stupid endurance of the Stoics; but a sweet and reasonable submission to the Will of God, coupled with cheerful obedience to the physician whom He commands us to honour, and a grateful acceptance of the ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... me. How stupid I had been! I could scarcely retain an outward exhibition of my great joy. Why had I forgotten the great difference in the length of Martian and Earthly years! The ten Earth years I had spent upon Barsoom had encompassed ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... could not see her, and the dog's loud bark had prevented his hearing her coaxing call; so when Beki was quiet and stood still, Orion whistled to him. The obedient and watchful beast, ran back, wagging his tail; and his master, greeting him as "a stupid old cat-hunter," let him spring over his arm, hugged the creature and then pushed him off again in play. Then he closed the door and went into the apartments leading ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... on cloudy winter days From dawn to dusk and I soap heads, Shave them and powder them and speak Indifferent words, stupid, foolish. Most heads are completely shut, They sleep limply. And others read again And look slowly through long lids, As though they had sucked everything dry. Still others open the red cracks of their mouths wide And tell jokes. For my part, I smile courteously. ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... tortures and death, but the shafts of ridicule, and sneers of contempt. "Trials of cruel mocking," now exercise the faith and patience of the saints. Religion, the dignity and hope of man, hath become the sport of stupid infidels! The jest of sorry witlings! These hissings of the serpent are ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... loggerheaded, inapt, doltish, beetle-headed, blockish, sluggish; apathetic, unfeeling, insensate, callous; blunt, obtuse, dulled, pointless; dim, faint; tedious, uninteresting, prosaic, stupid, wearisome, jejune, depressing; lifeless, torpid, slow, inactive; matte, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Stupid little Picklepip Allowed the subtle hint to slip— Maundered on about the ship That he did not chance to own; Told this grievance o'er and o'er, Knowing that she knew before; Told her how he dwelt alone. Lady Minnow, for reply, Cut ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... saw how hurt she was at not being met, and he insisted on taking her home, she chattered and snickered hysterically at his most stupid remarks. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... of theory and sentiment, did I love my fellows any better than the average of mankind. I sought those who were congenial to me, and had no pleasure in the company of the common and the ignorant. I liked clever people. I gave them my best, but I had nothing to bestow upon the dull and stupid. How many times have I borne the society of inferior people with ungracious tolerance, and hastened from them with undisguised relief? How often when dealing with the poor and ignorant in the exercise of conventional ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... morning when I called Miss —— a nice person, "Don't say nice, child, 'tis a bad word." Once I said to Dr. Johnson, "Sir, that is a very nice person." "A nice person," he replied; "what does that mean? Elegant is now the fashionable term, but it will go out, and I see this stupid nice is to succeed to it. What does nice mean? Look in my Dictionary; you will see it means ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... governor and the captain arrived on board the Mayflower they found Jones too stupid with liquor to listen to any plans, and too short-handed when he had been made to understand to carry them out with half the dispatch the ardent spirit of Standish prompted, so that all they effected was to have two of the larger pieces ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... and were as stupid as possible. At all events, he had heard nothing, seen nothing. Then I took it into my head that the Vicomte had taken her away. And—and—I can't tell you what I thought, but did not like to go to the Vicomte. I knew if she was in his room, that he would not like any one ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... deeper than you think; you may tie a stone to a bed-cord and not get soundings in some of 'em. The country boys will tell you they have no bottom, but that only means that they are mighty deep; and so a good many stagnant, stupid-seeming people are a great deal deeper than the length of your intellectual walking-stick, I can tell you. There are hidden springs that keep the little pond-holes full when the mountain brooks are all dried up. You poets ought to ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles, and admire my clothes, and wish her little Jane was old enough to run to school with me, and flatter me on the beauty of my hair and eyes and complexion, in such a way that very few children would have been so stupid as not to have seen through it. Could you not have said something to discourage the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... to ourselves with no one to bother us, with no chaperone, or chaperone's husband either, which is generally worse. Why is it, my dear," he asked gayly, in a tone that he considered affectionate and husbandly, "that the attractive chaperones are always handicapped by such stupid husbands, and vice versa?" ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Patti. Well, that sort of thing don't answer in the long run. It is all very well to have love without money; but money without love is another matter. Mr. Hidehart turned out worse than the Colonel; for he was stupid, vulgar, and mean. And she was so nice, so delicate, so bright, so intellectual! Oh, what hours of bitter regret, what biting of lips, what flushes of shame, what heart-shocks that stopped the life-blood, and—well, truth must out—what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... weather, and to transport me from place to place without fatigue.' But the man who asks him for that fine blue ribbon would say, if he had the courage and the honesty to speak as he feels, 'I am vain, and it will give me great satisfaction to see people look at me, as I pass, with an eye of stupid admiration, and make way for me; I wish, when I enter a room, to produce an effect, and to excite the attention of those who may, perhaps, laugh at me when I am gone; I wish to be called Monseigneur by the multitude.' Is not all this mere empty air? In scarcely any country will this ribbon ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... the company. I've seen him in a' moods in these jaunts, grave and gay, daft and serious, sober and drunk—(this, however, even in our wildest rambles, was but rare)—but drunk or sober, he was aye the gentleman. He looked excessively heavy and stupid when he was fou, but he was never out o' gude humor." After this, we are not surprised to hear that Scott's father told him disgustedly that he was better fitted to be a fiddling peddler, a "gangrel scrape-gut," than a respectable attorney. As a matter of fact, however, behind the mad pranks ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... one did make very much, and yet she was one of the sweetest, dearest, quietest, little creatures that ever made glad a man's fireside. She was exquisitely pretty, always in good humour, never stupid, self-denying to a fault, and yet she was generally in the background. She would seldom come forward of her own will, but was contented to sit behind her teapot and hear Mackinnon do his roaring. He was certainly much given to what the world at Rome called ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... The prodigious stupid bigotry of the people also was irksome to me; I thought there was something in it very sordid. The entire empire the priests have over both the souls and bodies of the people, gave me a specimen of that meanness of spirit, which is nowhere ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... blow that stunned all words, it smote my stupid, wandering mind that all I had to speak and smile to, all I cared to please and serve, the only one left to admire and love, lay here in my weak arms quite dead. And in the anguish of my sobbing, little things came home to me, a thousand little things that showed how quietly ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... hand-straps, no leg-locks, nor any contrivance confining the trunk or limbs or any of the muscles, is now in use. The coercion-chairs (forty in number) have been altogether removed from the walls.... Several patients formerly consigned to them, silent and stupid, and sinking into fatuity, may now be seen cheerfully moving about the walls or airing-courts; and there can be no question that they have been happily set free from a thraldom, of which one constant and lamentable consequence was ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... "has a man of action—of brutal action in the eyes of universal prejudice—more magnificently glorified the spirituality of war. Mechanics—abominable mechanics—takes possession of the world, crushing it under its stupid and irresistible wheels. By the action of newly discovered and improved appliances the science of war assumes vast proportions as a means of destruction. Yet here, amid the din of this upset modern world we find a brain sufficiently master of its own thoughts as not to permit itself ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... 'smile through the tears of the storm.' Of this kind of thing there are no less than nine pages: and we can so far venture an opinion in their favour, that they look very like Macpherson; and we are positive they are pretty nearly as stupid and tiresome. ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the Imagination. Such an Impression as this gives an immediate Ambition to deserve, in order to please. This Cause and Effect are beautifully described by Mr. Dryden in the Fable of Cymon and Iphigenia. After he has represented Cymon so stupid, that ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... with the face of Chiquita constantly before her and the pangs of jealousy gnawing at her heart? How stupid to have imagined her to be one of those bovine women with large liquid eyes who, figuratively speaking, pass the major portion of their lives standing knee-deep in a pond, gazing stolidly out upon the world; a fat brown wench upon whose ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... yourself. Bella said it was—ex—something, and the word is in the spelling-book, but I never can remember the long words. Oh, I just wish I was fifteen and wasn't going to school any more. And then there's keeping company and getting married, and having your setting out. School seems stupid. There were two boys who wanted to come home with me, but mother said Ben must. Then I wished—well, I wished he was in college. He wants to go. Father says Mr. Leverett has infected ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... uncontrollable and constant in effect, adapted to the circumstances of the special life of the race in question. It is this curious instinctive adaptation—which is so intelligent when it carries out its proper task, so stupid and incapable when diverted to some other purpose—that has deceived so many scientists and philosophers by its insidious ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... simply crude," she said earnestly. "I was feeling reckless and I wrote recklessly. I knew she would disapprove and I wrote foolishly. It was the echo of her own stupid talk. I said that I did not love her brother but that I had no scruples whatever in ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... laughed the Nix. "When I go home and relate my adventures, no dwarfs pranks will be named again!" But when Bess looked into the pail, he was the same slimy, stupid-looking worm as before. She dared not return to the lake for more water—"for," said she, "I should be as much beaten for being late as for bringing short measure, and have the labour to boot." So she took up her burden again, and the Nix began his dance afresh, and ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... ago, during a storm at sea, a stupid sea-captain ordered his passengers to go below in the hold of the vessel. Then he covered up the hold, so that no fresh air could enter. When the storm was over he opened the hold, and found that seventy human beings had died for want ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... which smote with impartial hand the poor private and his titled chief. Various sick and wounded officers died in consequence of not having been removed in sufficient time to the Bosphorus, or to such other quarters as were not only possible, but convenient, had it not been for the heartless and stupid routine by which the heads of departments, at home and abroad, civil and military, were guided. It was the more remarkable that so few officers died in the camp in proportion to the men who perished, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that. I don't want to be found here. Besides, it's useless. In five minutes a clot of blood will have covered the lacerated brain, and I shall lose consciousness again. Stupid, isn't it?" ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... friend Mr. Brooke as a companion, who was likewise attended by a sampan and crew he had taken with him to Sarawak from Singapore. His coxswain, Seboo, we shall all long remember: he was civil only to his master, and, I believe, brave while in his company. He was a stupid-looking and powerfully-built sort of savage, always praying, eating, smiling, or sleeping. When going into action, he always went down on his knees to pray, holding his loaded musket before him. He was, however, a curious character, and afforded us great amusement—took ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... hope I haven't grown too stout for my habit. What are you going to wear, Rob? The blue cloth? You are perfectly irresistible in that! Do wear that rakish-looking soft hat with the scarf; it's wonderfully becoming, if it isn't quite so correct; and I'm sure Richard Kendrick won't take us to any stupid fashionable hotel. He'll arrange an outdoor affair, I'm confident, with the Kendrick chef to prepare it and the Kendrick servants to see that it is served. Oh, it's such a glorious June day! ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... of all animals are developed by their struggle for existence. The harder the struggle, the more their intelligence. Our skunk and porcupine are very stupid because they do not have to take thought about their own safety; Nature has done that ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... the money. Seems to me, Rufe, you're blamed stupid this morning. Why, you've only to take one look at that young ruffian's face to see the wickedness wrote there. He oughter be in prison this very minute, and he'll soon be there—take my word ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... field near Sagua, and had murdered them and then brought their bodies in a cart to that town, and had paid the local photographer to take a picture of them and of himself and his body guard. He claimed that he had killed the Cubans in open battle, but was so stupid as to forget to first remove the ropes with which he had bound them before he shot them. The photographs told the story without any aid from the letter press, and it must have told it to a great many people, judging from the number who spoke of it. It seemed as if, ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... succeeded in wringing forth a tear; but I did not think it was decreed that at my age I should really make love to a Russian serf, however charming. So off they went to the railway station, leaving me in a very dull, stupid, melancholy mood. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... professing to treat the garrison with the utmost kindness. They were answered, that they must deem the garrison to be still more brutally fools than themselves, to expect that they would place any confidence in the proposals of wretches who had already manifested such base and stupid treachery. They were bidden to fire on, for that their waste of powder and lead gave the garrison little uneasiness, and were assured that they could not hope the surrender of the place, while there was a man left within it. On the morning of the ninth day from the commencement of the siege, after ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... him, sir," said George, turning red in accordance with that inveterate and stupid habit ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... that he did not reply to the man even by a look. "Now, my lads, now: one, two, three, and a —-." Obedient to the call of the officer, with a simultaneous jerk at the sail, the holdfast of the stupid peasant was plucked from his cracking fingers; he fell back with a loud shriek from the yard, struck midway on the main rigging, and thence bounding far to leeward in the sea, disappeared, and for ever, amid the white ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the book itself out to him and let him have wisdom at its very source, administering it in doses while he worked. I quite recognise that this must be annoying, and only my anxiety not to lose a whole year through some stupid mistake has given me the courage to do it. I laugh sometimes behind the book at his disgusted face, and wish we could be photographed, so that I may be reminded in twenty years' time, when the garden is a bower of loveliness and I learned in all its ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... of Birkin's talk, and of Gudrun's penetrating being, he had lost entirely that mechanical certainty that had been his triumph. Sometimes spasms of hatred came over him, against Birkin and Gudrun and that whole set. He wanted to go back to the dullest conservatism, to the most stupid of conventional people. He wanted to revert to the strictest Toryism. But the desire did not last long enough to carry him ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Banion was anxious as he lightly shook the shoulder of the prone man, half afraid that he, too, had died. Stupid in sleep, the scout sprang up, rifle ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... conquered was delegated in trust to the Rajah of Pontiana. The Sambas rajah has forcibly taken possession of a part of it. Sultan Kassim, of Pontiana, governed this district during his father's lifetime. On his accession to the musnud, five years ago, he placed a half-brother there, a stupid fellow, about twenty-five years of age. This man, about eight months ago, was trying to establish his independence, which he found he could not maintain. It has the same trade as Pontiana, but the regulations of the sultan do not admit ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... back to his seat, Silver added to me in a confidential whisper that was very flattering, as I thought, "He's quite an honest man, Tom Morgan, on'y stupid. And now," he ran on again, aloud, "let's see—Black Dog? No, I don't know the name, not I. Yet I kind of think I've—yes, I've seen the swab. He used to come here with a blind ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the most tremendous editions of their books you can imagine. I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week, occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to this and that and the other ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of England on the other tack; and while a few tall pintas, Milton or Pen, still sailed a lonely course by the stars and their own private compass, the cock-boat, Pepys, must go about with the majority among "the stupid starers and the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... awoke, I found the Indians wrapped in their blankets, and lying asleep all around me. The excitement of the night had passed off, and brought its corresponding depression. They were very docile and stupid, and it was with some difficulty I could arouse them for the duties of the day. I asked several of them what had become of the Sioux prisoners, but could get no other answer than, “Guess him ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... passage anywhere in a straight line. After 500 m. of anxious travelling we encountered more rapids and troublesome eddies. We had by that time got accustomed to the danger, and even felt travelling dull and stupid when we came to a few ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... He had not fired his musket a single time. He saw nothing to shoot at, and he saw no use shooting until he did have something to shoot at. It was terrible to see men dead and wounded, but the fight itself was stupid—blundering through a jungle, bullets zipping about, and the Spaniards too far away and invisible. He ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... The tedious hours, and ne'er indulged in song; Ye first seducers of my easy heart, Who promised knowledge ye could not impart; Ye dull deluders, truth's destructive foes; Ye sons of fiction, clad in stupid prose; Ye treacherous leaders, who, yourselves in doubt, Light up false fires, and send us far about;- Still may yon spider round your pages spin, Subtile and slow, her emblematic gin! Buried in dust and lost in silence, dwell, Most potent, grave, and reverend friends—farewell! ...
— The Library • George Crabbe
... even though, as being a youth, he be partially under its influence. He shrinks from a vague subject, as spontaneously as a slovenly mind takes to it; and he will often show at disadvantage, and seem ignorant and stupid, from seeing more and knowing more, and having a clearer perception of things than another has. I recollect once hearing such a young man, in the course of an examination, asked very absurdly what 'his ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... to Madame Hulot's heart. She came out of her room and ran to her daughter, taking her in her arms, and asking her those questions, stupid with grief, which ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... "nice boy" about this amazing young woman, who might have been eighteen. Hamilton had repudiated the very suggestion of being a "nice boy." But he felt himself blushing, groping for words, saying stupid things, supplying every requisite of the "nice boy" as if he were acting the part. Her chaperon bore her away presently, and he was left with a radiant impression of corn-silk hair and a complexion that justified Bouguereau's mother-of-pearl flesh tints. And when she ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... you were not burdened with a certain degree of culture. An artist must be an idiot. The only perfect ones are the sculptors; then come the landscape painters; then painters in general; after them the writers. The critics are not at all stupid; and the really intelligent men never ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... How should you, you are of their kidney—you're only half a man. Thank God that my mother was of the people! I'd have died to have gone smirking through life with a brick for a heart and milk and water in my veins! Of all the stupid pieces of brutality I ever heard of, this is the most ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... twinkling up her eyes, and rubbing them with her knuckles as if she were crying. 'You barbarous wretch, taking Phoebe to feast on strawberries and cream with Miss Charlecote, and leaving poor me to poke in that stupid drawing-room, with nothing to do but to count the scollops ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a very proper thing that the service of the dogs should always be recognized promptly, that they be given their share of the spoils and that they be praised for their courage and fidelity. This makes them better hunters. Stupid men who drive off their dogs from the quarry, defer their rewards, and grudge them praise, kill the spirit of the chase within them and spoil ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... bony protuberance of variable size. He well describes the peculiarities of this protuberance; he attended also to the effects of the modified shape of the brain on the intellect of these birds, and disputes Pallas' statement that they are stupid. He then expressly remarks that he never observed this protuberance in male fowls. Hence there can be no doubt that this extraordinary character in the skulls of Polish fowls was formerly in Germany confined to the female sex, but has now been transferred to the males, and has thus ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... plan of using elephants was adopted, the guns were drawn by bullocks; but one elephant can easily draw a load which it would take thirty bullocks to move. The elephants are very tractable and clever, while the oxen are stupid, ill tempered, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 28, May 20, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... is as nothing. It rests upon the illusion that sensual pleasures possess a positive or real value. Accordingly, future need and misery is the price at which the spendthrift purchases pleasures that are empty, fleeting, and often no more than imaginary; or else feeds his vain, stupid self-conceit on the bows and scrapes of parasites who laugh at him in secret, or on the gaze of the mob and those who envy his magnificence. We should, therefore, shun the spendthrift as though he had the plague, and on discovering his ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... wind is foul, which it now most certainly is, for I am writing anything but "Newton Forster," and which will account for this rambling, stupid chapter, made up of odds and ends, strung together like what we call "skewer pieces" on board of a man-of-war; when the wind is foul, as I said before, I have, however, a way of going a-head by getting ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... but he could think of no means of getting rid of his guest, for it would have been useless to have told him what he thought, so he determined that little by little he would behave in such a way that, if the young man were not too stupid, he would see that his frequent visits were far ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... happen to know that the game is not worth the candle. The wasp gets into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam into him. IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they want to enjoy gin—because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too big a price for it. That they never find happiness—that they don't even know how to look for it—is proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do. Their discordant colours are cries of pain. Look at the brick villas ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... days' experience of life, the boy had already learned one great truth: that every man is exactly what he looks. The face always reveals or betrays. And in this face, wild with the wildness of storms and skies, there was nothing but the stupid innocence of one of ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... Me, stupid as an idiot, that has to try a thing a thousand times before he can do it, and then never knows how he does it, that at last does it well. We have to educate ourselves through the pretentious claims of intellect, into the humble accuracy of instinct, and we end at last by ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... went on, clear to the saloon; and there they found him,—there he lay, perfectly stupid, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... says Vee. "I think gambling is just plain stupid. I mean some sort of legitimate ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... hastily exclaimed Pao-yue. "You stupid thing! gently a bit; is it likely you've never seen any one put one on before? let me do ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... while her shrewd, light-grey eyes took him in with a cool stare that was humorously observant without being aggressive. "We heard how shamefully my husband abused your good-nature. Really, it was too bad of him to ask a busy man like you to put aside his work and go and spend a whole day at that stupid auction!" ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... so successful in the choir of the cathedral at Spoleto, where he undertook; to paint scenes from the life of the Virgin. Yet those who have not examined these frescoes, ruinous in their decay and spoiled by stupid restoration, can form no just notion of the latent capacity of this great master. The whole of the half-dome above the tribune is filled with, a "Coronation of Madonna." A circular rainbow surrounds both her and Christ. She is kneeling with fiery rays around her, glorified ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... coming away therefrom at five-fifteen. Punctuated by the barking of the terrier clerk, all this took time, during which there passed through Felix many thoughts. Here was a man who had done a wicked, because an antisocial, act; the sort of act no sane person could defend; an act so barbarous, stupid, and unnatural that the very beasts of the field would turn noses away from it! How was it, then, that he himself could not feel incensed? Was it that in habitually delving into the motives of men's actions ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was ordered to the seaside, then I went on a visit to some friends and didn't get back to Sutton till Christmas. We had a lot of stupid people staying with us. I couldn't do any work while they were in the house. When they left I began a picture, but I tried too difficult subjects and got into trouble with my drawing. You said I'd never succeed. I often ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... conferences, that I could scarce refrain expressing it. Probably it was visible enough, for he said, as if apologising for coming up, that so to do was the only regale their toils allowed them. He then regretted that it was a stupid day, and, with all his old civility about me and my time, declared he was always sorry to see me there when nothing worth attention was going ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... sequentur, naturally flowing, I take to import the Fitness and Propriety of Expression. I also gather from hence, that there is a very easy and natural Connexion between these two, and these same Antiquaries of OURS, must be either very dull and stupid Animals, or a strange kind of cross-gran'd and perverse Fellows, to be always putting a Force upon Nature, and running out of a plain Road. He must either insinuate that they are indeed such, or that Horace's Observation ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... future, ahead of his countrymen, ahead even of those who assumed to be the mentors of his people, and he must learn, as does every noble soul that labors "to make the bounds of freedom wider yet," the bitter lesson that nine-tenths, if not all, the woes that afflict humanity spring from man's own stupid selfishness, that the wresting of the scepter from the tyrant is often the least of the task, that the bondman comes to love his bonds—like Chillon's prisoner, his very chains and he grow friends,—but that the struggle for human freedom must go on, at whatever cost, in ever-widening circles, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... sympathy. I thought that you were in need of such. For I had heard, to my horror, how great your annoyance must be, and B.'s account confirmed my impression that you were deeply annoyed and grieved by ingratitude, faithlessness, and even treachery. Suddenly, however, I felt quite stupid, and all I intended to say to you appeared to me trivial and superfluous. I could think of nothing better than to copy out for you a few fragments of my last work. They are not the really important things, for those can be understood only in their larger ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... said the lady, "are not man and wife the same flesh and spirit? Ivan Mironoff, are you trifling? Lock up these boys instantly; put them in separate rooms—on bread and water, to expel this stupid idea of theirs. Let Father Garasim give them a penance on order that they may repent before ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... sorry that, amongst all the verses you have sent me, you should have forgotten what you commend the most, Les trois exclamations. I hope you will bring them with you. Voltaire's are intolerably stupid, and not above the level of officers in garrison. Some of M. de Pezay's are very pretty, though there is too much of them; and in truth I had seen them before. Those on Madame de la Vali'ere pretty too, but one is a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... natural manner she has; how much pleasanter than the minanderies of the young ladies in the ball-rooms" (and here he recalled to himself some instances of what he could not help seeing was the artful simplicity of Miss Blanche, and some of the stupid graces of other young ladies in the polite world); "who could have thought that such a pretty rose could grow in a porter's lodge, or bloom in that dismal old flower-pot of a Shepherd's Inn? So she learns to sing from old Bows? If her singing voice is as sweet as her speaking voice, it must be ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with him, only the record of a frank, open bearing, and unfailing active kindness. "Setting aside his heroism," wrote Dr. Scott after Trafalgar, "when I think what an affectionate, fascinating little fellow he was, how dignified and pure his mind, how kind and condescending his manners, I become stupid with grief for what I have lost." "He is so cheerful and pleasant," wrote the public secretary, Mr. Scott, "that it is a happiness to be about his hand." Dr. Gillespie notes "his noble frankness of manners, freedom from vain ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... It is the worst kind of policy to be constantly blaming, chiding them, and positively cruel, bordering on criminality even, to suggest to them that they are mentally deficient or peculiar, that they are stupid and dull, and that they will probably never amount to anything ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Sally dear. Major Roper was a stupid old man, and evidently took more than was good for him." Intoxicants are often of great service ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... an occupation inconsistent with my profession, as because I perceived that the fools are more numerous than the wise; and, though it is better to be praised by the wise few than applauded by the foolish many, I have no mind to submit myself to the stupid judgment of the silly public, to whom the reading of such books falls for the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... white with thin virginal arms and bust, who seemed to be coming out of the picture, almost to be already out of it and in the room. "Come and talk to me. Don't think any more of your father and mother there. You have been curtsying to them for a hundred years; and they are rather dull, stupid people, after all. Come and tell us secrets. Tell us what you have seen in this room—all the foolish people making love, and the sad people ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... west toward the holy of holies. All the superstitions and idolatrous notions of man lead him to turn to the east, to worship the rising sun. 'The heathen made the chief gates of their temples towards the west, that these stupid worshippers, drawing nigh to their blind, deaf, and dumb deities, might have their idols rising upon them out of the east.'[4] The temple as a type, and Christianity as the antitype run counter to such idolatrous ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Mr. Gould, marvelling inwardly at the mobility of her physiognomy. "All over the country. He's famous for that sort of munificence." "Oh, he didn't boast," Mrs. Gould declared, scrupulously. "I believe he's really a good man, but so stupid! A poor Chulo who offers a little silver arm or leg to thank his god for a cure is as rational ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... intelligent insects, and would soon cease to visit flowers which did not supply them with food. Flies, however, are more stupid, and are often deceived. Thus in our lovely little Parnassia, five of the ten stamens have ceased to produce pollen, but are prolonged into fingers, each terminating in a shining yellow knob, which looks exactly like a drop of honey, and by which Flies are continually deceived. Paris quadrifolia ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... intelligence in so much as one individual; such mean, coarse, vulgar features and figures betraying unmistakably a low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents. They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, animal, and soulless. It must require many generations of better life to wake the soul in them. All America ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that for truth upon the authority of others, which would require a diligent and patient investigation. From hence may be traced the hatred man betrays for every thing that deviates from those rules to which he has been accustomed; hence his stupid, his scrupulous respect for antiquity, for the most silly, the most absurd and ridiculous institutions of his fathers: hence those fears that seize him, when the most beneficial changes are proposed to him, or the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... I know perfectly good and well that it's only half trying. The stupid gadget could beat me easily if you just turned that knob ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... in some ways, a memorable dinner. I don't know what I expected in Mrs. Scherer—from Maude's description a benevolent and somewhat stupid, blue-eyed German woman, of peasant extraction. There could be no doubt about the peasant extraction, but when she hobbled into our little parlour with the aid of a stout, gold-headed cane she dominated it. Her very lameness ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... friend got a pair of "slaughter pen" boots and "jeans," and flung himself at his task. It was a weird sight, there on the killing beds—a throng of stupid black Negroes, and foreigners who could not understand a word that was said to them, mixed with pale-faced, hollow-chested bookkeepers and clerks, half-fainting for the tropical heat and the sickening stench of fresh blood—and all struggling to dress a dozen or two cattle in the same place where, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
