|
|
|
More "Superficiality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to answer yoh question, suh,' he says. 'Ah believe the blind pursuit and worship of riches is almost entirely responsible. It has bred a shallowness and superficiality in and towahds the finah things of life. But the historian will answer yoh question at a later day. He can bring a calmness to the task which is impossible to one surrounded and bewildered ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... drew his friend more and more into his practice. Frederick found a certain grim attraction in it. It was a strange treadmill, set in a world of everlasting suffering and dying, in a subterranean stratum of life, having nothing in common with that deceptive existence of a comparatively happy superficiality which he had been able to lead in New York. The Schmidts were doing hard service requiring the utmost self-renunciation. They received no greater compensation than enabled them to obtain sufficient food, clothing and shelter to be able to continue in that service. Though Peter Schmidt ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... the law of precedent, the mild gambols, the naive superficiality, the child-like irresponsibility for thinking, which were the characteristics of the first European novels, have generally distinguished the unnumbered and unclassified broods of them which have abounded in subsequent literature. Designed chiefly to amuse, to divert for ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... any further illustration be needed of the superficiality and harmfulness of the education forced upon the masses, we have it glaringly enough in the cheap literature of to-day. This stupendous mass of bosh could not have been produced unless there were a demand for it. Some people are never tired ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... education on the new-fashioned lines is really not necessary at all. I do not know whether the feminists are entirely right, but I feel sure that their own principles ought rather to lead them to an opposition to this breaking down of the barriers. It is nothing but a superficiality if they instinctively take their stand on the side of those who spread broadcast the knowledge ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... compensate for his often ill-balanced ferocity; the extraordinary vividness of his pictures of the life of Rome makes up for lack of perspective and proportion, the richness and variety of his imagination for its too frequent superficiality, the vigour and trenchancy of his blows for the absence of the rapier thrust, the fervour of his teaching for its lack of breadth and depth. These qualities make him the greatest of the satirists of Rome, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... dancer, but although she was physically too young and healthy not to find a certain enjoyment in the sheer delight of rhythmic motion, she was conscious as the evening progressed of a certain quality of superficiality in the pleasure she experienced. There was a sameness about it all that palled. What was there in it, after all? One of your partners knew a priceless new glide or shuffle which he forthwith imparted to you, or else you initiated him into some step hitherto unfamiliar ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... and bring to bear all his energies on whatever tussock or mole-hill it may be out of which he has to dig his fortune. When the youth steps out into life, it may be that his actual store of knowledge is superficial—a smattering of too many things—but superficiality is precisely the one quality which, in theory at least, his training has been calculated not to produce. Englishmen know that the American throws tremendous energy and earnestness into his business. They know that he throws the same earnestness into his sports. Is it not reasonable to suppose that ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... some Hegelisms' doubtless needs an apology for the superficiality with which it treats a serious subject. It was written as a squib, to be read in a college-seminary in Hegel's logic, several of whose members, mature men, were devout champions of the dialectical method. My blows therefore were aimed almost entirely at that. I reprint the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... judgment on some parts of the piece, but other parts, notably the meeting of Rinaldo with Armida, and the violent birth of their love, are depicted by the author with real poetic fire. As is the case with all such works, which are in reality always hampered by the superficiality of the dilettante, much should have been altered and rewritten for stage effect. Karl would not hear of this; on the contrary, he thought he had discovered, in an intelligent theatrical manager in Stettin, the very man who ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... approach such a task: The first is to take the book as a whole and write a review of it, which is a method liable to a superficiality; the second is to take such a work chapter by chapter, and to piece the various criticisms into an ordered whole. This I have attempted to do. I make no attempt to criticize the method of Chesterton's approach to Browning, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... though in his case no one has been so foolish as to claim that the love described in his poems (or those of his imitators) is ever supersensual. Professor Anthon has aptly characterized him as "an amusing voluptuary and an elegant profligate," and Hegel pointed out the superficiality of Anacreontic love, in which there is no conception of the tremendous importance to a lover of having this or that particular girl and no other, or what I have called individual preference. Benecke ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... 'following Christ' is a mere sentimental expression for so much morality as we can conveniently get into our daily life. But remember that here, with all his rashness, with all his ignorance, with all his superficiality, the Apostle has laid hold upon the great permanent, but alas! much-forgotten principle, that to die is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... premised this much, it is possible to take up the problem of the peace of 1917 or 1918, or whenever it is to be, with some sense of its limitations and superficiality. ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... answer. To ask for general information on a particular subject, may be a less successful experiment. Who undertakes extensive research except for an especial purpose? Who can so far confide in his memory as to append his name to a list of authorities without seeming to prove his own superficiality? I throw out these ideas for consideration, just as they arise; but neither wish to repress the curiosity of querists, nor to prescribe bounds to the communicative ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... admit your own superficiality?" asked the School-master, somewhat surprised by the Idiot's ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... veritable godsend—which I receive annually under the will of my aunt, will keep the wolf at a respectful distance and enable me to play the investigator to my heart's content. I'm determined to be thorough, George. There is no excuse for superficiality in science. But in the end I intend to find out something new. See if ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... kaleidoscopic play of colours makes upon one, does not the whole seem to blaze with the shimmer and sparkle of innumerable little stones borrowed from former civilisations? Is not everything one sees merely a complex of inharmonious bombast, aped gesticulations, arrogant superficiality?—a ragged suit of motley for the naked and the shivering? A seeming dance of joy enjoined upon a sufferer? Airs of overbearing pride assumed by one who is sick to the backbone? And the whole moving with ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... elsewhere. I took great interest in studying the life of our people there closely at that time. I found that while among them there was a large element of substantial, worthy citizens, there was also a superficiality about the life of a large class that greatly alarmed me. I saw young coloured men who were not earning more than four dollars a week spend two dollars or more for a buggy on Sunday to ride up and down Pennsylvania ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... restrained wrath of Felicia Ruys whenever she spoke of the doctor, asked himself in vain how he could enlighten his dear patron about such hypocrisy. He should have been aware, however, that in southerners, with all their superficiality and effusion, there is no blindness, no enthusiasm, so complete as to remain insensible before the wisdom of reflection. In the evening the Nabob had opened a shabby little letter-case, worn at the corners, in which for ten years he had been accustomed to work out the calculations of his millions, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... characterizes my narrative; but, while I have nothing to regret in this particular, I can assure them that I have been actuated by none other spirit than that of candor. Where I have used documents it was with a desire to escape the charge of superficiality. If, however, I may be charged with seeking to escape the labor incident to thorough digestion, I answer, that, while men with the reputation of Bancroft and Hildreth could pass unchallenged when disregarding largely the use of documents and the citation of authorities, I would find ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... whose early life was passed on the farm, and who holds his own boyhood there in greater contempt than perhaps any other reputable writer of such reminiscences. All the incidents are treated not only with seriousness, but with a forced drollery and catchy superficiality which reflect unfavorably at almost every point upon the members of his household, who are caricatured; all the precious associations of early life on a New England farm are not only made absurd, but from beginning to end his book has not ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... or to any embarrassment occasioned him on that account. On the contrary, while complaining of the unworthy character of the disputation, he excepted that particular thesis. He alluded rather to the superficiality and want of interest with which such important questions as justification by faith, and the sinfulness attaching even to the best works of man, were passed over or evaded. On all the points which he had wished to contend for and expound at Leipzig, he now published ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... comes the period of "piano fury," and the compositions appropriate for it. Now the three trifles required are distorted taste, hypocritical feeling, and a depraved ear, combined with the necessary superficiality and some power ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... gladsomeness and the bloom of boyhood. Wherever he went he carried with him an atmosphere of joy. Fresh ingenuousness and glowing enthusiasm were part of his charm. There was a rich vein of the romantic in his character, but the cast of his mind was philosophical. He had no patience with superficiality masquerading as wisdom, and was quick to detect a fallacy in reasoning. A shining trait in him was truthfulness. He would never compromise or palter with the truth, either by way of suppression, or exaggeration, or casuistical refinement. What Carlyle said ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... thoroughly tired of late breakfasts, boating on the muddy Iscam, noisy wines, and interminable whist parties. Moreover, he had made far less sensation at Camford than he had expected. Somehow or other he had a dim consciousness that men saw through him; that his cleverness did not conceal his superficiality, nor his easy manners blind men's eyes to his ungenerous and selfish heart. Even his late phase of popular scepticism was less successful at Camford than it would have been at places of less steady diligence and less sound acquirements. ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... I answered him. In spite of the superficiality of his own arguments, which I was not learned enough to detect, I was ingloriously routed. Darwin had kicked over the bucket, and that was all there was to it.... After we had left the club both Conybear and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is independent in action who has been earnest and thorough in preparation and self-culture. "Not for school, but for life, we learn;" and our habits—of promptness, earnestness, and thoroughness, or of tardiness, fickleness, and superficiality—are the things acquired most readily and ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... poetically unfolding this mechanical view of the world was of such a nature that never probably did poet expend life and art on a more ungrateful theme. The philosophic reader censures in the Lucretian didactic poem the omission of the finer points of the system, the superficiality especially with which controversies are presented, the defective division, the frequent repetitions, with quite as good reason as the poetical reader frets at the mathematics put into rhythm which makes a great part of the poem absolutely unreadable. In ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... though not so resolutely as now, tried to bring her to consider their position, and every time he had been confronted by the same superficiality and triviality with which she met his appeal now. It was as though there were something in this which she could not or would not face, as though directly she began to speak of this, she, the real Anna, retreated somehow into herself, and another ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... which Mr. Brumley had begun his career. With every justification in the world Mr. Brumley had set out to be an optimist, even in the Granta his work had been distinguished by its gay yet steadfast superficiality, and his early success, his rapid popularity, had done much to turn this early disposition into a professional attitude. He had determined that for all his life he would write for comfortable untroubled people in the character ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... when she spent a month in France with the Baroness de Hautenoblesse," continued Salemina. "When she returned to America it is no flattery to say that in dress, attitude, inflection, manner, she was a thorough Parisienne. There was an elegant superficiality and a superficial elegance about her that I can never forget, nor yet her extraordinary volubility in a foreign language,—the fluency with which she expressed her inmost soul on all topics without the aid of a single irregular verb, for these she was never able ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... equipment, nor his conviction that it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its possessor and train him for its effective use. But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... a favourable judgment on some parts of the piece, but other parts, notably the meeting of Rinaldo with Armida, and the violent birth of their love, are depicted by the author with real poetic fire. As is the case with all such works, which are in reality always hampered by the superficiality of the dilettante, much should have been altered and rewritten for stage effect. Karl would not hear of this; on the contrary, he thought he had discovered, in an intelligent theatrical manager in Stettin, the very man who would lay aside any such considerations as were peculiar to me. He had, however, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... an indication of superficiality. How, asks Mr. Worldly Wiseman, can that fellow Admirable Crichton do so many things so well when it takes all my time to do one thing badly? Therefore he must be regarded suspiciously. Now, there are no short cuts in the domain of the arts; Gradus ad Parnassum ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
