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More "Witless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contrary, the termination less added to substantives, makes adjectives signifying want; as, worthless, witless, heartless, joyless, careless, helpless. ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... the fashion among fools of both sexes to sneer at Susan B. Anthony and use her name to point witless jokes. But it seems to us—and we differ from her most emphatically on the question of woman suffrage—that her brave, unselfish life reflects a credit on womanhood which the follies of a thousand ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... music of thy breast has throbbed the faster, If I have touched it with my charming-wands. And yet,—the wonder any woman knows Thou dost deny the proud Soul that has fed Among the lilies of the White Eros.— Ere I go down among the witless Dead Give, give the secret, for my bliss or rue, Lest lack of that ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... We be soldiers three (Deuteromelia) We be three poor mariners (Deuteromelia) We must not part as others do (Egerton MS. 2013) We shepherds sing, we pipe, we play (Weelkes) Wedded to will is witless (Byrd) Weep no more, thou sorry boy (Tomkins) Weep you no more, sad fountains (John Dowland) Welcome, sweet pleasure (Weelkes) Were I a king I might command content (Mundy) Were my heart as some men's are, thy errors would not move me (Campion) What hap had I to marry a shrow (Pammelia) ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... witless vanity about my friend that sat on him almost like a virtue. He made parade of his crafts less, I could see, because he thought much of them, than because he wanted to keep himself on an equality with me. In the same ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... She is but a poor harmless body," said Kenric. "Only the witless carls and cottar folk are so simple as to believe that she has aught of evil ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... with his wife, witnessed the play, from the large stage boxes of the second tier, two thrown into one, and profusely draped with the National flag. The acts and scenes of the piece—one of those singularly witless compositions which have at least the merit of giving entire relief to an audience engaged in mental action or business excitements and cares during the day, as it makes not the slightest call on either the moral, emotional, esthetic or spiritual nature—a piece ("Our ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... at the window looking out, And the rain came down like silken strings That Swithin's day. Each gutter and spout Babbled unchecked in the busy way Of witless things: Nothing to read, nothing to see Seemed in that room for her and me ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... At this witless, sweet impudence the Canadian looked very sheepish—for a beaver; and all the other people laughed; but the noble historical shades of Basil's thought vanished in wounded dignity beyond recall, and left him feeling rather ashamed,—for he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... it is not to be forgotten, that the aristocracy was just then intoxicated by its recent victory and the democracy deeply humbled, and that the aristocracy was led by the pedantically stiff and half-witless Cato, and the democracy by the supple ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the Regent's power seemed on the point of slipping from him; Marshal Villeroy, aged, witless, and tactless, irritated at the elevation of Dubois, always suspicious of the Regent's intentions towards the young king, burst out violently against the minister, and displayed towards the Regent an offensive distrust. "One ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... The witless are under the protection of God, stammered a flat-cheeked Usbeg in broken Hindi. They ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... that you will?" returned his wife. "Once a witless fool, always a witless fool!" and giving free rein to her vexation and ill-temper she continued to upbraid her husband until his anger also was stirred, and he had wellnigh made a second bid and wished himself ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... my offerings few, While witless wisdom fool'd my mind; But now I trim my sails anew, And trace the course I left behind. For lo! the Sire of heaven on high, By whose fierce bolts the clouds are riven, To-day through an unclouded sky His thundering ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... the Dean's "Frequent reproaching the [132] Animadverter with the Character of a Wit, tho join'd with such ill-favour'd Epithets, as his witless Malice has thought fit to degrade it with, as that he is a spiteful Wit, a wrangling Wit, a satirical Wit, and the WITTY, subtle, good-natur'd Animadverter, &c. the Dr. says, that tho there be but little Wit shewn ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... 's a witless azzy!" blurted Hodge. "If a 's so great a man amongst the lords and earlses, a 'd na come back to Stratford. An' I say a 's ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... other Gods, and anon the Immortals bethink them of harp and minstrelsy. And all the Muses together with sweet voice in antiphonal chant replying, sing of the imperishable gifts of the Gods, and the sufferings of men, all that they endure from the hands of the undying Gods, lives witless and helpless, men unavailing to find remede for death or buckler against old age. Then the fair-tressed Graces and boon Hours, and Harmonia, and Hebe, and Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, dance, holding each by the wrist the other's hand, ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... without any fineness either of feeling or mind, unable to understand her misery, grossly curious, mistaking her manner for disdain, her silent shrinking for pride. The wife of the "odious person" was witless and fatuously conceited. Of the two girls of the house one was pious and the other a romp; both were coarse-minded—if they may be credited with any mind at all. The rather numerous men of the family were dense ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... her last hope, but in one instant's scrutiny she saw that this had vanished, too. Some terrible thought had sobered and engrossed him. Now he was eyeing her like a witless thing, his features drawn, his eyes burning. The moment was charged with ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... soft violence, she grasped his hands. Perhaps the moment had come. She was not afraid, but the suddenness of her extremity left her witless. ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... all these were when no man did them know, Yet have from wisest ages hidden been: And later times things more unknown shall show. Why then should witless man so much misween That nothing is but that which he hath seen? What if within the moon's fair shining sphere, What if in every other star unseen, Of other worlds he happily should hear, He wonder would much more; yet such ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... cried, now rising too. "What are you saying? Are you turned witless? Come, sirs, since you are both my friends, be friends each with ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... gods, stupid conventions, traditions, examples, your lapses from that consistency? His Seigneurie, at all events, delightfully, hadn't the least real idea of what any John Berridge was talking about, and the latter felt that if he had been less beautifully witless, and thereby less true to his right figure, it might scarce have ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... Witless, jester to a noble and free-born man, Cedric of Rotherwood, called the Saxon: and I, Gurth, the ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... eternal garb of woe; And yet I owe you thanks for one sweet hour Of healthy human intercourse and peace. 'T is not for me to tarry by the way. Farewell!" The impetuous, remorseful boy, Seeing sharp pain on that kind countenance, Fell at his feet and cried, "Forgive my words, Witless but innocent, and leave me not Without a blessing." Moved unutterably, The pilgrim kissed with trembling lips his head, And muttered, "At this moment would to God That I were worthy!" Then waved wasted hands Over the youth ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... "Ignorant and witless, you know not what you say. The plant thus tossing to and fro may well look down upon the rank and vulgar herbs. If it tosses, it is, at least, all self-contained—itself both flower and seed. Do thou be ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... of connected calcite bowls whose beautifully fluted rims are of regular and uniform height, and all are equally filled with clear, still water. A great number of these basins are said to have been destroyed by an ax in the hands of a poor witless creature for the gratification of a burst of temper, and a magnificent stalagmitic column, too heavy for one man to lift, lay detached and broken, in proof that his body did not share the ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... laddies, the dog, and the witless sheep, Are bound to come home, for the snow will be deep. The mother is pickling a scornful word To throw at the head of the elder lad, Hugh; But talkative Jamie, as gay as a bird, Will have nothing beaten save snow from his shoe. He has fire in his eyes, he has curls on his head, And a silver ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... quoth the Duke, "ye are witless, in faith, for there is no man here but is without wine, as in ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... the whole thing just witless, accidentally cruel perhaps, but not malignant? Or is it wise, and merely refusing to pamper us? Is there somewhere in the immensities some responsive kindliness, some faint hope of toleration and assistance, something sensibly on our side against ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... to use two English words to translate that single Greek one. The 'cunning' workman, thoughtful in experience, touch, and vision of the thing to be done; no machine, witless, and of necessary motion; yet not cunning only, but having perfect habitual skill of hand also; the confirmed reward of truthful doing. Recollect, in connection with this passage of Pindar, Homer's three verses about getting the lines of ship-timber ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... he reached the gates, passing through without discovering her, and was struck dumb and witless with relief when she stepped quietly from the shadows of a low branching tree, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... he say it. I, who had been so witless as to let this come upon us! Moa's weapon prodded me. Her voice hissed at me with all the venom of a reptile enraged. "So that was your game, Gregg Haljan! And I was so graceless as to ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... a wailing cry from the north, a howl of witless fear. The singers stopped in mid-note, the drummer paused, his hand uplifted. Dane darted forward in a plunge which carried him to that man. The Khatkan did not have time to rise from his knees as ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... knows when or how Diane de Poitiers first came to fascinate Francois, or how or why her power waned. At any rate at the time Francois pardoned her father, the witless Comte de St. Vallier, for the treacherous part he played in the Bourbon conspiracy, he really believed her to to be the "brightest ornament of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... etiquette, Waiving his function at the scowl of power, And seeks the rustic cot to stretch his limbs In homely freedom. I fulfil a doom. We who are topmost on this heap of life Are nearer to heaven's hand than you below; And so are used, as ready instruments, To work its purposes. Let envy hide Her witless forehead at a prince's name, And fix her hopes upon a clown's content. You, happy lowly, know not what it is To groan beneath the crowned yoke of state, And bear the goadings of the sceptre. Ah! Fate drives us onward in a narrow ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... cannot explain now. But you seem to understand. Or am I drunk? Ein galgen gelachter, nicht wahr? I will take quarters at the hotel. I know the management well. I saved the place from being looted in the November excitement. Have you seen the Kaiser Salle? His Majesty dined there once. A witless popinjay. Liebknecht is a man. Flames in his heart. But a poor orator. He will be killed. They must kill him. A little Jew, Haase, has brains. You will meet him. And the Dadaists—they know how to laugh. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... to the cold-blooded statement. The shock of it produced a beating in the head, and a sickness. And I felt foolish, as though I might do something lunatic, like giving a witless shout, or running amok with a table-knife. I touched Doe, and whispered: "I'm going to get out of this. The old fool doesn't know what ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... of these words, more unexpected than any other words could have been, was first and chiefly to convince him that he was dealing with a witless person. Leaving him again, the speaker had hurried on in front, making his way still toward the wood. When Trenholme came up with him the wanderer had evidently found the place where he had been before, for there was the irregular circular track of his former ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... hours ago wert my willing vassal, now wish to break away from my gentle rule, because, forsooth, of the words of an old woman, who is no longer vassal of mine, as if, like her, thou art now unwitting of what delights I am the source? O most witless of women! forbear, and reflect whether thou shouldst not find befitting happiness in that which makes the happiness of Heaven and earth. All things that Phoebus beholds during the bright day, from what time he emerges from Ganges, until he plunges with his tired ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... glimpse dazzles their dimmed eyes and weakling forces, and this glimpse mocks at their lean might Through these rent places, when the opening is made large enough, a few men here and there, not quite so witless as their fellows, know how to summon us of Audela when for an hour the moon is void and powerless: we come for an old reason: and we ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... or ball. Or take the converse case, of gawky country lads, hooked in by knowing widows or other female adventurers, and the chain riveted in an unguarded moment, before their unhappy parents, or even the witless victims themselves, had dreamed that it was forging. But even this kind of publicity is not necessary. As far as we see, the registrar may, at any hour, be summoned to attend at the most private spot of his district, and there be compelled to witness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Doctor Holmes's trenchant sayings have become a heritage in our households, detached often from their original kinship, and seeming like the rightful property of every one who utters them. It is an amusing, barefaced, witless sort of robbery, yet surely not without its compensations; for it must be a pleasant thing to reflect in old age that the general murkiness of life has been lit up here and there by sparks struck from one's youthful fire, and that these sparks, though they wander ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... speech men think that Halfdan spoke: he warned us it would soon come to pass that an understanding father should beget a witless son. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... pleasure draw it all around him, its width, contrasted with its want of longitude, formed a fantastic piece of drapery. He had thin silver bracelets upon his arms, and on his neck a collar of the same metal bearing the inscription, "Wamba, the son of Witless, is the thrall of Cedric of Rotherwood." This personage had the same sort of sandals with his companion, but instead of the roll of leather thong, his legs were cased in a sort of gaiters, of which one was red and the other yellow. ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... arouse the village to their help. One of the women therefore essayed the journey; but was so clumsy as to attract the enemy's attention. She was seized and made to confess how the house was protected and where it was most likely to fall before a sharp assault. Being a witless wench, she told them truly, and Master Ford then bade her help them collect sticks and leaves in order that they might be able to fire the ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... privilege of connecting various threads of action in one plot, disregarding chronology, and hazarding an ethical solution of motives which mere fidelity to fact hardly warrants. He shows us Vittoria married to Camillo, a low-born and witless fool, whose only merit consists in being nephew to the Cardinal Monticelso, afterwards Pope Paul IV.[9] Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, loves Vittoria, and she suggests to him that, for the furtherance of their amours, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... wrath, and when he is stirred up a little too much his patience gives way, and he has a manner of shaking his mane and sweeping round with his tail which is dangerous to his enemies and a delight and fascination to his friends. He took up the witless and unhappy Cochrane, shook him, and dropped him sprawling and mutilated, in about as limp a condition as the late Lord Wolmer—I call him late in the sense of a person politically dead—when that distinguished nobleman was called to account for his odious calumny ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... always forgot what he was going to do. He was much more sensitive than Maria, more shy and reluctant. But his shyness, his sensitiveness only made him more aimless and awkward, a tiresome clown, slack and uncontrolled, witless. All day long his mother shouted and shrilled and scolded at him, or hit him angrily. He did not mind, he came up like a cork, warm and roguish and curiously appealing. She loved him with a fierce protective love, grounded ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... though cords were strong; But happier Orpheus stood unbound, And shamed it with a sweeter song. His mode be mine. Of Heav'n I ask, May I, with heart-persuading might, Pursue the Poet's sacred task Of superseding faith by sight, Till ev'n the witless Gadarene, Preferring Christ to swine, shall know That life is sweetest when it's clean. To prouder folly let me show Earth by divine light made divine; And let the saints, who hear my word, Say, 'Lo, the clouds begin to shine About the ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... saith Hooker,(791) they are as sacraments. But in Augustine's dialect, they are not only as sacraments, but they themselves are sacraments. Signa (saith the father) cum ad res divinas pertinent, sacramenta appellantur; which testimony doth so master Dr Burges, that he breaketh out into this witless answer,(792) That the meaning of Augustine was to show that the name of sacraments belongeth properly to divine things, and not to all signs of holy things. I take he would have said, "belongeth properly to ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... say it! I, who had been so witless to let this come upon us! Moa's weapon prodded me. Her voice hissed at me with all the venom of a reptile enraged. "So that was your game, Gregg Haljan! And I was so graceless ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... From a witless puppy I brought thee up: gave thee fire and food, and taught thee the self-respect of an honest dog. ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... what going ashore on Malaita meant—one hand for the ship and the other hand to fight off the natives. What they held on with I don't know, and they needed to hold on as the Minota lifted, rolled, and pounded on the coral. The bushmen clung in the rigging, too witless to watch out for the topmast. The whale-boat was run out with a tow-line endeavouring in a puny way to prevent the Minota from being flung farther in toward the reef, while Captain Jansen and the mate, the latter pallid and weak with fever, ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... treasure knowledge, say, Increased beyond the fleshly faculty— Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven: The man is witless of the size, the sum, The value ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... knew Ere mated with his being. Conscious then Of his high theme alone, he smiled again Straight back upon himself in many a hue And tint, and light and shade, which slowly grew Enfeatured of a fair girl's face, as when First time she smiles for love's sake with no fear. So wrought he, witless that behind him leant A woman, with old features, dim and sear, And glamoured eyes that felt the brimming tear, And with a voice, like some sad instrument, That sighing said, "I'm dead there; ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... delightful to sit there in the crisp October air, with the brook seemingly humming tender legends of the woods, which witless men could not translate, with an uncertain breeze playing through the newly fallen maple-leaves, now turning them one by one in lazy curiosity, then of a sudden making them caper and swirl in a scarlet merry-go-round. Still, the young Farrars were ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... ape our race? Such truckling is called virtue by the base Hucksters of sophistry, the priest and friar,— Gilt claws of tyrant brutes,—who lie for hire, Preaching that God delights in this disgrace. Look well, ye brainless folk! Do fathers hold Their children slaves to serfs? Do sheep obey The witless ram? Why make a beast your king? If there are no archangels, let your fold Be governed by the sense of all: why stray From men to worship every ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... her face towards her niece. It was a kindly face, but infinitely sad and lined with more cares than fall to the lot of most women of her age. The ingratitude of sons, the death of daughters, the poor troubled husband, old and witless in the King Charles ground-floor suite, weeping for his lost eyesight or sitting smiling mirthlessly over his violin, had marked her. But in spite of all she had kept ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... stretching away leafless, treeless, without bud or flower, herd or herdsman, church or cottage, to the shadowed horizon, looming dark as the twilight deepened, was in sympathy with the gloom which had come upon me as Martin Hall ceased to speak. I had thought the man a fool and witless, flighty in purpose and shallow in thought, and yet he seemed to speak of great mysteries—and of death. In one moment the jester's cloak fell from him, and I saw the mail beneath. He had made a great impression upon me, ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... not because he was not trying hard, and studying for all he was worth, that "Witless Abner," as Wittemore had come to be called, had won his nickname. He worked night and day, plunged in a maze of things he did not quite understand until long after the rest of the class had passed them. He was majoring in sociology through the advice ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... vindictive urgings of the Hollander newspaper, the Volksstem, few could believe that the death sentence would be carried out and most people recognized that the ebullitions of that organ expressed the feelings of only a few rabid and witless individuals among the Hollanders themselves and were viewed with disgust by the great majority of them. At the same time the scene in court had been such as to show that the Government party—the officials and Boers then present—had not regarded the death sentence ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... the marriage of St. Catherine," observed his visiter, stepping through the casement, "I wish I could break all marriages as easily; and as to the motive, your honour, I did not like to wait quietly, and see a pistol-ball walk towards my witless pate, to convince, by its effects thereupon, the unbelieving world that Robin Hays had brains. As to the domestics, the doors were locked, and they, I do believe, (craving your pardon, sir,) too drunk to open them. As to the wall, it's somewhat straight ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... wound a blast so strong That it shook both bush and tree, And to his side came witless Will, And Jem of Netherbee; With all the worst of Robin's band, And ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... known sunburn and frost but never a shoe, and a damsel or two in cotton homespun dress made of one piece from collar to hem, and pantalettes of the same reaching to the ankles—all standing and looking the picture of witless incapacity, and making no plea against tyranny! Is that a thing worth while to turn and look back upon? If the blow fell upon ourselves or our set, that would be different; but these illiterate and lowly ones—they are—you don't know—so dull and insensible. Yes, it may be true that it ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... preposterous affectation of taking me off in speech and manner, was persuaded by the stricken mother to sing. "Sing that dear old plantation melody from London," she cried, "so that my poor boy may know there are worse things than death." And all this witless piffle because of a quite ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... confidently as we adjured him to use caution, and then slipped back along the track so that he could climb to the level of the one-eyed person's perch before attempting to creep upon him. We sat down to await developments. The witless one was evidently a lookout, and it was advisable to wait and see the success of Maru's expedition before we attempted ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... contrast between "witless Gabriel and ruffling Richard." The astronomer Richard was continually baiting the great bear in the firmament, and in his lectures set up atheistical questions, which Nash maliciously adds, "as I am afraid the earth would swallow me if I should but rehearse." ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... some peculiar things With brighter hues resplendent, and portray'd With features nobler far than e'er adorn'd Their genuine objects. Hence the fever'd heart Pants with delirious hope for tinsel charms; Hence oft obtrusive on the eye of scorn, Untimely zeal her witless pride betrays! 160 And serious manhood from the towering aim Of wisdom, stoops to emulate the boast Of childish toil. Behold yon mystic form Bedeck'd with feathers, insects, weeds, and shells! Not with intenser view the Samian sage Bent his fix'd eye on heaven's intenser fires, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... The wind blew over pleasantly and it was a curiously protected and hidden place, sheltered and quiet, with its one small crop of cider apples dropping ungathered to the ground, and unharvested there, except by hurrying black ants and sticky, witless little snails. ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... article "GREEN," you will see that the Verdant Greens are a family of some respectability and of considerable antiquity. We meet with them as early as 1096, flocking to the Crusades among the followers of Peter the Hermit, when one of their number, Greene surnamed the Witless, mortgaged his lands in order to supply his poorer companions with the sinews of war. The family estate, however, appears to have been redeemed and greatly increased by his great-grandson, Hugo de Greene, but was again jeoparded in the year 1456, when Basil ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... at home we fed, Like witless fools, with fostering bread, Have impiously come to this— They've stolen the Acropolis, With bolts and bars our orders flout And shut ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... me, so haply she may make shift for my release.' 'Verily,' answered the fox, 'the excess of thy gluttony and thy much greed have brought thee to destruction, since thou art fallen into a pit whence thou wilt never escape. O witless wolf, knowest thou not the proverb, "He who taketh no thought to results, Fate is no friend to him, nor shall he be safe from perils?"' 'O Aboulhussein,' said the wolf, 'thou wast wont to show me affection and covet my friendship and fear ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... the notes of a street bagpiper? When his harrassed brain should be solaced by music, will he listen patiently to stupid remarks? I fear not. The man of letters suffers keenlier than people suspect from sharp, cruel noises, from witless observations, from social misconceptions of him of every kind, from hard utilitarian wisdom, and from his own good things going to the grave unrecognised and unhonoured. And, forced to live by his pen, to extract ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... there's a cold breeze blowing, I'm afraid that I'll change, that I'll grow wrinkled and old in eight footsteps, or shrink down to the witless blob of a baby, or forget altogether who ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... the pool outside—cannot you hear them, Jac Hallen?" Impatience came to his voice; in truth, I must have been staring at him witless. "Maidens out there, Jac Hallen, who are seeking handsome youths like yourself for escort. Must I speak plainly? You are ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... charities. When a poor ruined fellow at his elbow saw him win at a throw L200, and murmured 'How happy that would make me!' Nash tossed the money to him, and said, 'Go and be happy then.' Probably the witless beau did not see the delicate satire implied in his speech. It was only the triumph of a gamester. On other occasions he collected subscriptions for poor curates, and so forth, in the same spirit, and did his best towards founding an hospital, which has since proved of great value to those afflicted ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... emotion, "it cuts me to the heart to hear his very name. Would that it might be as thou sayest!—but 'tis an idle dream. Peace be unto his ashes! And may the gods at least preserve unto us his son, Telemachus, who lately departed on a witless errand, led thereto, as I think, by some malign deity who hates the house of Odysseus. But no more of this! Tell me rather of thyself, who and whence thou art, and how ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... beer from hops that are freshly picked, Nor even Benedictine to tempt a benedict. For wine has a spell like the lure of hell, and the devil has mixed the brew; And the friends of ale are a sort of pale and weary, witless crew— And the taste of beer is a sort of a queer and undecided brown— But, comrades, I give you coffee—drink it up, drink it down. With a ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Stunner contemptuously. "Of course I seemed, and the difficulty it required to seem! Do you think I was so witless as to let my manoeuvres be seen? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... world—for the world's delight, for mankind's wonder. And here unfortunate circumstances—my poverty and not my will—constrain me to stint the world of its due: to languish in this lost corner of Nowhere, like Wamba the son of Witless, the mere professed buffoon of a merer franklin. Well, my unassuageable craving to write a song is, in its essence, just a great, splendid, generous desire to indemnify the world. The world needs me—the world has me not—but the world shall have me. For the world's behoof, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... a rustle overhead. She fancied that a squirrel could not have climbed more swiftly; for, glancing up, she discovered the witless youth already upon the projecting branch, moving toward its slender tips, which swayed beneath his weight, threatening instant breakage. Below him roared the rapids, hurrying to dash over the great ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... dying Achaians. But when the host were conven'd, thus spake swift-footed Peleides:— "Wand'ring again is our doom, as it seems to my mind, Agamemnon! Home to escape as we may, unless death be the issue to welcome, Since not the battle alone, but the pestilence wastes the Achaians. Come, without witless delay, let some prophet or priest be consulted, Yea, or expounder of dreams, (for the dream, too, comes from Kronion,) Who may interpret the wrath unrelenting of Phoebus Apollo; Whether for forfeited ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... boy and the gifts, she gazes and takes fire. He, when hanging clasped on Aeneas' neck he had satisfied all the deluded parent's love, makes his way to the queen; the queen clings to him with her eyes and all her soul, and ever and anon fondles him in her lap, ah, poor Dido! witless how mighty a deity sinks into her breast; but he, mindful of his mother the Acidalian, begins touch by touch to efface Sychaeus, and sows the surprise of a living love in the long-since-unstirred spirit ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... that terrifying, motionless presence beneath him, than able to distinguish it by power of vision, he endured interminable minutes of trembling horror, in a witless daze, before he thought of his match-box. Immediately he found it and struck a light. As the wood caught and the bright small flame leaped in the pent air, he leaned forward, over the body, breathlessly dreading ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... expectation, and resents a scarcity of the supernatural. Mr. Sludge is not so much to blame: the people at length push the thing so far that he is obliged to cheat in self-defence. And when a man tasks his wits successfully, if it be only to mislead the witless, he has a sense of satisfaction in the effort akin to that of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... intrenchment, and a thousand years ere that perhaps it was still grander; for learned men say that it was a British work, wrought out before the Danes had ever learned to build a ship. Whatever, however, may be argued about that, the wise and the witless do agree about one thing—the stronghold inside it had been held by Danes, while severed by the Dike from inland parts, and these Danes made a good colony of their own, and left to their descendants distinct speech and manners, some traces ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... few minutes wiped off the coating with which he had bedaubed the picture, and instead of a copy, restored the original in all its beauty to his holiness. Although this story is related by many writers, it is doubtless a gross libel on the fair fame of this great artist, originating with some witless wag, who thought nothing too horrible to impose upon the credulity of mankind. It is discredited by the best authors. A similar fable is related of Parrhasius. See the Olynthian Captive, vol. I. ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... This poor witless youth, plied with champagne; the older men who flattered him with lies; the suggestion of champagne made as though it were a sudden inspiration, and the six bottles standing ready in the cupboard; ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... distant future they were vague, though rosy. He would make the ten miles to Brig Tickle in less than three hours, and from there turn a point or two westward from the coast and strike across country to the head of Witless Bay. He had a cousin in Witless Bay and could afford to rest in that cousin's house for a few hours. There he would hire a team of dogs and make the next stage in quick time. Dennis Nolan, who would not discover the theft of the diamonds until after sun-up, would be left ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... no idea to advance, but with the lessening of her fear and the gradual clearing of her mind she felt that she would not much longer be witless. ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... approaches them. In Humphrey Prideaux's letters there is not a trace of any such feeling. He does his business, but it is hack-work. In this he differs from the modern student, but in his caustic description of the rude and witless society of the place he is modern enough. In his letters to his friend, John Ellis, of the State Paper Office, it is plain that Prideaux wants to get preferment. His taste and his ambition alike made him detest the heavy, beer-drinking doctors, the fast "All ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... on through the twilit gloom. The horror of the life gathered about him is no more grim than is the condition of his witless brain. Over hills and through brakes; in valleys and along winding tracks made by the forest lords; now pushing his way through close-growing scrub, now passing like a fierce shadow among the bare, primeval tree-trunks, he moves forward. His goal is ahead, and one ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... O'Shaughnessy and I found ourselves with the children upon our largest wagon; that was absolutely all the protection to be had. It would have gone down like a house of cards if that heaving sea of destruction had turned our way. I was scared witless. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy knelt among the children praying with white lips. I stood up watching the terrible scene. The men hastily set the horses free. There was no time to mount them and ride to safety with so many little children, and as there was nothing to tie them to but the wagons; ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... masked ball! Indifference and pique swung Ryder towards a geisha girl, but a trace of irritation lingered and he found her, "You likee plink gleisha?" singularly witless. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... he cursed out, too witless to see that this same hero of his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whose life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary for making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in some dark league against him—"hell ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... of good threescore; Cure them of tours, hussar and highland dresses; Tell them that youth once gone returns no more, That hired huzzas redeem no land's distresses; Tell them Sir William Curtis is a bore, Too dull even for the dullest of excesses, The witless Falstaff of a hoary Hal, A fool whose bells have ceased to ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... dusk heavens silvery, when they Thus sprang direct towards the Galaxy. Nor did speed hinder converse soft and strange— 490 Eternal oaths and vows they interchange, In such wise, in such temper, so aloof Up in the winds, beneath a starry roof, So witless of their doom, that verily 'Tis well nigh past man's search their hearts to see; Whether they wept, or laugh'd, or griev'd, or toy'd— Most like with joy gone ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... not imagine this dustless, spotless, sweet apartment as anything but beautiful. Its appearance is a little unfamiliar, of course, but all the muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witless ornament that cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, the curtains to check the draft from the ill-fitting windows, the worthless irrelevant pictures, usually a little askew, the dusty carpets, and all the paraphernalia about the ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... awhile with that indefinable interjection of displeasure which defies all spelling. "You talk like the witless creature that you are. Didn't I tell the lad, two years ago, Michaelmas was, that the day he could pay off the mortgage on the farm, he should have you and the farm too? And eight hundred and fifty florins oughtn't to frighten a man as has got the right spirit in ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... "Ay, and thou, witless boy, the first of all. Oh, that my beloved spouse, Philippus Primus, could rise from his grave—what would he say to his lost son, who, like the prodigal in Scripture, loves strange women and ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... will tell thee how I love thee best, And all my thoughts of thee shall be confess'd And none withheld, not e'en the witless one Which late I harbor'd when the mounting sun Burst from a cloud,—the moon a mile away, As if in hiding from the lord of day,— As if, at times, the moon were like thyself, And fear'd the semblance of a ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... way, put grace in their soul for this end, begin resolutions in them, and sow the seed of faith; and so stay their course which they were violently pursuing, and make them look about and consider what they are doing. As the former was good news to poor, blind, and witless creatures that were wandering and knew not whither they were going; so this is good news to poor souls that find their heart inclining to wander, ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... filcher of my crown? Come, answer this, didst thou detect in me Some touch of cowardice or witlessness, That made thee undertake this enterprise? I seemed forsooth too simple to perceive The serpent stealing on me in the dark, Or else too weak to scotch it when I saw. This thou art witless seeking to possess Without a following or friends the crown, A prize that ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... grounds. I left the happy pair tete-a-tete, in their princely parlor together, little fancying that there was another argument which had been prepared to overthrow my feeble virtue. But all this had been arranged by the small cunning of this really witless couple. I was left to find my way down stairs as I might; and just when I was about to leave the dwelling—vexed to the heart at the desperate stolidity of the miserable man, whom avarice and weakness were about to expose to a loss which might be averted ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... particularly, the call to monotheism and the denunciation of idolatry, with the pictures of the Divine reward for the righteous, and of the Divine judgment for the ungodly, remind us of the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah; as when the poet says,[25] "Witless mortals, who cling to an image that ye have fashioned to be your god, why do ye vainly go astray, and march along a path which is not straight? Why remember ye not the eternal founder of All? One only God there is who ruleth alone." And again: "The children of Israel shall mark out the path ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... Jimmy Kelly said, "and were about to dive when one of the enemy skyrocketed up. He was blue in the face and scared witless. We hauled him out and then started to dive again. And along came Scotty, half dead and babbling about you. I started straight down to get you, but you met me halfway." He grinned. "You weren't in very good shape, either, for ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... on my wasted path Wave after wave in wrath Frets 'gainst his fellow, warring where to send me. Flung forward, heaved aside, Witless and dazed I bide The mercy of the comber that ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... take away the strength and might of Englishmen with this clerkly lore, so that her folk may have the better of them in France; and the poor, witless King gives in to her. And so while the Beauforts rule ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... how the hoary old giant was far more wise than anyone who had not quaffed of the magic water. It is true that in the assemblies of the Vanir Hoenir gave excellent counsel. But this was because Mimer whispered in Hoenir's ear all the wisdom that he uttered. Witless Hoenir was quite helpless without his aid, and did not know what to do or say. Whenever Mimer was absent he would look nervous and frightened, and if folk ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... know for truth at least, One thing more than groan of witless beast, One thing more than jest at mumming feast, Pain is still increased, increased, increased Marking life ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... "The Netherlands formed, nevertheless, but a weak bulwark to Germany. Internal disunion, superfluous fortresses, a weak army. On the one side, a witless, wealthy, haughty aristocracy, an influential and ignorant clergy; on the other, civic pride, capelocratic pettiness, Calvinistic brusquerie. The policy pursued by the king ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... to be ferried over last; so, if I had not come to terms, I would have been, as I always was in crossing rivers which we could not swim, completely in the power of the enemy. It was but rarely we could get a head man so witless as to cross a river with us, and remain on the opposite bank in a convenient position to be seized as a hostage in case of my ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... cords were strong; But happier Orpheus stood unbound, And shamed it with a sweeter song. His mode be mine. Of Heav'n I ask, May I, with heart-persuading might, Pursue the Poet's sacred task Of superseding faith by sight, Till ev'n the witless Gadarene, Preferring Christ to swine, shall know That life is sweetest when it's clean. To prouder folly let me show Earth by divine light made divine; And let the saints, who hear my word, Say, 'Lo, the clouds begin to shine About the coming ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... fate of the lost sheep was so plain, as to admit of no misinterpretation of the meaning of the witless speaker. Animals of that class were of the last importance to the comfort of the settlers, and there was not probably one within hearing of Whittal Ring, that was at all ignorant of the import of his words. Indeed, the loud chuckle and the open ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... have "skilfully conveyed a false impression" by giving certain German figures in hundredweights and English figures in tons. Surely he had the wit to see that I was merely transcribing figures without stopping to translate them; and it is difficult to imagine he could think I was so witless as to adopt a silly sleight-of-hand trick such as that of which he accuses me, a trick which would not deceive a child in the lowest standard of a ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... hostil'ties, as you-all might call it, an' makes Moon an' his Winchester workin' nephy a speech. He addresses 'em a whole lot on the enormity of downin' Apaches who goes prowlin' about an' scarin' up your mules at midnight, in what this yere witless agent calls a 'motif of childish cur'osity,' an' he winds up the powwow with demandin' the surrender of ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... how I love thee best, And all my thoughts of thee shall be confess'd And none withheld, not e'en the witless one Which late I harbor'd when the mounting sun Burst from a cloud,—the moon a mile away, As if in hiding from the lord of day,— As if, at times, the moon were like thyself, And fear'd the semblance of ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... whence is caution needful, save from sin?) And those two Truths, each gazing upon each, Embraced like sisters, thenceforth one. For her No arduous thing was Faith, ere yet she heard In heart believing: and, as when a babe Marks some bright shape, if near or far, it knows not, And stretches forth a witless hand to clasp Phantom or form, even so with wild surmise And guesses erring first, and questions apt, She chased the flying light, and round it closed At last, and found it substance. "This is He." Then cried ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... "The witless are under the protection of God," stammered a flat-cheeked Usbeg in broken Hindi. "They foretell ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... Glare, which did go To mass in jest, catch'd, was fain to disburse The hundred marks, which is the statute's curse, Before he 'scap'd; so't pleas'd my Destiny (Guilty of my sin of going) to think me As prone to all ill, and of good as forget- Ful, as proud, lustful, and as much in debt, As vain, as witless, and as false as they Which dwell in court, for once going that way, Therefore I suffer'd this: Towards me did run A thing more strange than on Nile's slime the sun E'er bred, or all which into Noah's ark came; A thing which would ...
— English Satires • Various
... springs, cracking jokes like a little internal combustion engine. And David, now very tanned and wide awake, finishes our four. Without looking, we know the voice of each of our neighbors behind or in front, even so far as the witless stutterer some squads ahead, or the flat-voiced constant querist somewhere behind. But now when he raises his song his neighbors ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... unctuous balms, Falls with sweet savor. Impious counterfeits! Prating of heaven, for earth their bosom beats! Grasping at weeds, they lose immortal palms! God needs not iteration nor vain cries: That man communion with his God might share Below, Christ gave the ordinance of prayer: Vague ambages and witless ecstasies Avail not: ere a voice to prayer be given, The heart should rise on ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... years it was easy, as in some places it still is, for stunt night to be no more than clowning, witless and cheap; but there is a distinct tendency to exercise the imagination in ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... when his chamber is lanced through and through by the notes of a street bagpiper? When his harrassed brain should be solaced by music, will he listen patiently to stupid remarks? I fear not. The man of letters suffers keenlier than people suspect from sharp, cruel noises, from witless observations, from social misconceptions of him of every kind, from hard utilitarian wisdom, and from his own good things going to the grave unrecognised and unhonoured. And, forced to live by his pen, to extract from his ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... properly, the mold was either held over the fire, or thrust in hot water half a minute, then the candles withdrawn by help of the reeds. They were cooled a bit, to save the softened outside, then nubbed of surplus wick, and laid in a dish outside. Careless or witless molders, by laying candles still soft upon the pile, often made themselves ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... portray'd With features nobler far than e'er adorn'd Their genuine objects. Hence the fever'd heart Pants with delirious hope for tinsel charms; Hence oft obtrusive on the eye of scorn, Untimely zeal her witless pride betrays! 160 And serious manhood from the towering aim Of wisdom, stoops to emulate the boast Of childish toil. Behold yon mystic form Bedeck'd with feathers, insects, weeds, and shells! Not with intenser view the Samian sage Bent his fix'd ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... Baldassarre da Leccio, all very much his friends, whom he represented clad in white armour, burnished and resplendent, as real armour is, and truly with a beautiful manner. He also portrayed there the Chevalier Messer Bonramino, and a certain Bishop of Hungary, a man wholly witless, who would wander about Rome all day, and then at night would lie down to sleep like a beast in a stable; and he made a portrait of Marsilio Pazzo in the person of the executioner who is cutting off the head of S. James, together with one of himself. This work, in short, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... his mind but for the more distant future they were vague, though rosy. He would make the ten miles to Brig Tickle in less than three hours, and from there turn a point or two westward from the coast and strike across country to the head of Witless Bay. He had a cousin in Witless Bay and could afford to rest in that cousin's house for a few hours. There he would hire a team of dogs and make the next stage in quick time. Dennis Nolan, who would not discover the theft of the diamonds until after sun-up, ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... indifference to calumny or depreciation. Having proved in his boyhood, at Fontarabia, and in his maturity: at Muhlberg, that he could exhibit heroism and headlong courage; when necessary, he could afford to look with contempt upon the witless gibes which his enemies had occasionally perpetrated at his expense. Conscious of holding his armies in his hand, by the power of an unrivalled discipline, and the magic of a name illustrated by a hundred triumphs, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Jayadev! Deep as pearl in ocean-wave Lurketh in its lines a wonder Which the wise alone will ponder: Though it seemeth of the earth. Heavenly is the music's birth; Telling darkly of delights In the wood, of wasted nights, Of witless days, and fruitless love, And false pleasures of the grove, And rash passions of the prime, And those dances of Spring-time; Time, which seems so subtle-sweet, Time, which pipes to dancing-feet, Ah! so softly—ah! so sweetly— That among those wood-maids featly Krishna cannot choose ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... Upon the futile, faithless thing. Now, wheeling round with bootless skill, Thy bo-peep tail provokes thee still, As oft beyond thy curving side Its jetty tip is seen to glide. Whence hast thou, then, thou witless puss, The magic power to charm us thus? Is it that in thy glaring eye, And rapid movements we descry— While we at ease, secure from ill, The ...
— Baby Chatterbox • Anonymous
... of the book, but are replete with padding, pointless babble and occasional puerile inaccuracies. They are largely attempts to explain and to moralize upon Yorick's emotions,—averbose, childish, witless commentary. The Wortregister contains fourteen pages in double columns of explanations, in general differing very little from the kind of information given in the notes. The Allgemeine Litteratur Zeitung[30] devotes a ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... occultism, magic, alchemy, or necro- mancy. These "ways that are vain" are the inventions of animal magnetism, which would deceive, if possible, [15] the very elect. We will charitably hope, however, that some people employ the et cetera of ignorance and self- conceit unconsciously, in their witless ventilation of false statements and claims. Misguiding the public mind and taking its money in exchange for this abuse, has become [20] too common: we will hope it is the froth of error passing off; and that Christian Science will some time appear ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... poor thing! what put such a strange fancy into your head? An enemy in my ship! Why, there is not a man on board who would not cut off his right hand rather than harm one hair of your poor, witless, defenseless head! There was not a dry eye on the deck when you and the rest wuz lifted from ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... a Persian wife, no, three or four wives—although I have heard the custom of these witless Greeks is to be content with only one. There is no surer way to turn his heart ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Mahomet and Brigham Young receiving supplementary revelations, grim men babbling secrets to schoolgirls, enamoured errand boys, amorous old women, debauchees dreaming themselves thoroughly sensible men and going about their queer proceedings with insane self-satisfaction, beautiful witless young persons dressed in the most amazing things, all down the vista of history—a Vision of Fair Women—looking their conscious queenliest, sentimentalists crawling over every aspect and leaving tracks like snails, flushed young blockheads telling the world "all about women," intrigue, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... face towards her niece. It was a kindly face, but infinitely sad and lined with more cares than fall to the lot of most women of her age. The ingratitude of sons, the death of daughters, the poor troubled husband, old and witless in the King Charles ground-floor suite, weeping for his lost eyesight or sitting smiling mirthlessly over his violin, had marked her. But in spite of all she had kept the cult ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... old conventions, bloody, vast, distressful encounters that may still leave the art of war essentially unmodified, but sooner or later—it may be in the improvised struggle that follows the collapse of some one of these huge, witless, fighting forces—the new sort of soldier will emerge, a sober, considerate, engineering man—no more of a gentleman than the man subordinated to him or ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... of St. Catherine," observed his visiter, stepping through the casement, "I wish I could break all marriages as easily; and as to the motive, your honour, I did not like to wait quietly, and see a pistol-ball walk towards my witless pate, to convince, by its effects thereupon, the unbelieving world that Robin Hays had brains. As to the domestics, the doors were locked, and they, I do believe, (craving your pardon, sir,) too drunk to open them. As to the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... was as like unto humour as water is like unto wine. Still, when a monarch jests, if you are wise, if you have a favour to sue, or a position at Court to seek or to maintain, you smile, for all that the ineptitude of his witless wit be ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... ludicrous contrast between "witless Gabriel and ruffling Richard." The astronomer Richard was continually baiting the great bear in the firmament, and in his lectures set up atheistical questions, which Nash maliciously adds, "as I am afraid the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... what he was going to do. He was much more sensitive than Maria, more shy and reluctant. But his shyness, his sensitiveness only made him more aimless and awkward, a tiresome clown, slack and uncontrolled, witless. All day long his mother shouted and shrilled and scolded at him, or hit him angrily. He did not mind, he came up like a cork, warm and roguish and curiously appealing. She loved him with a fierce protective love, grounded on pain. There was such a split, a contrariety in his soul, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... meddler, know That I am proud possessing such appendice. 'Tis well known, a big nose is indicative Of a soul affable, and kind, and courteous, Liberal, brave, just like myself, and such As you can never dare to dream yourself, Rascal contemptible! For that witless face That my hand soon will come to cuff—is ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... whose beautifully fluted rims are of regular and uniform height, and all are equally filled with clear, still water. A great number of these basins are said to have been destroyed by an ax in the hands of a poor witless creature for the gratification of a burst of temper, and a magnificent stalagmitic column, too heavy for one man to lift, lay detached and broken, in proof that his body did not share the feebleness ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... and suddenness, since on the previous evening there had been no talk of his departing. Her father was abed with a wound that made him feverish. Their grooms were all sick, and wandered in a dazed and witless fashion about the castle, their faces deadly pale and their eyes lustreless. In the hall she had found a chaotic disorder upon descending, and one of the panels of the wainscot ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... stretches his long neck again, lays his little witless head on the side again, bobs and bobs, looks and looks and looks, says quint, quint, quint, quint—"I think I'll go to roost," but is just ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... expressions of the day. She goes away; but, after an absence of five years in a country where she hears little except in a foreign tongue, she returns, and with her comes her slang. How common, how witless, her talk appears! Her slang has long since gone out of fashion. The best of ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... a witless thing, Of all under heaven must needs be king, King of kings, and lord of lords, Swayer of souls as well as of swords, Ruler of speech, and through speech, of thought; And hence to his brain was a madness brought. He madden'd in East, he madden'd in West, ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... tries to recall a date, or name, or place, or idea, or book, it frequently happens that the endeavor fails utterly. The more he tries, the more obstinately the desired object fails to respond. As the poet Pope wrote about the witless author: ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... was not dead. She died a year after; but all that while she went witless, always smiling and seeming ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... after awhile with that indefinable interjection of displeasure which defies all spelling. "You talk like the witless creature that you are. Didn't I tell the lad, two years ago, Michaelmas was, that the day he could pay off the mortgage on the farm, he should have you and the farm too? And eight hundred and fifty florins oughtn't ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... how bitter are his words! They cut Like sharpen'd swords and burn like hissing flames! What is his will? His speech, though witless, ay, And senseless too, insults and threatens me.— It warns me too—of what?—Oh God, I quake! If but Brangaene came, or Dinas came! They come not and this creeping fear—how hard It grips my soul!—More Gaelic barons come—! How often have I stood concealed here And seen him ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... think of our petty, grievous human life, as of a drunkard's tune on a sorry musical instrument, or as of a beautiful song spoilt by a witless, voiceless singer, there begins to wail in my soul an insatiable longing to breathe forth words of sympathy with all mankind, words of burning love for all the world, words of appreciation of, for example, the sun's beauty as, enfolding the earth in ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... open, but she still beheld, Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep: There was a painful change, that nigh expelled The blisses of her dream so pure and deep. At which fair Madeline began to weep, And moan forth witless words with many a sigh While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep; Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye, Fearing to move or speak, she ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... dreamt a dream! What can it mean? And that I was a maiden Queen Guarded by an Angel mild: Witless woe ...
— Poems of William Blake • William Blake
... wailing cry from the north, a howl of witless fear. The singers stopped in mid-note, the drummer paused, his hand uplifted. Dane darted forward in a plunge which carried him to that man. The Khatkan did not have time to rise from his knees as ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... start a series of articles to-morrow. What shall it be?" An unfortunate still stood at the corner of the street. "'Letters to a Light o' Love!' Frank must advance me something upon them.... Those stupid women! if they were not so witless they could rise to any height. If I had only been a woman! ... If I had been a woman I should have liked to have ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... shown him naught but dislike in all these months? He could never be so witless as to believe in such ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... concert or ball. Or take the converse case, of gawky country lads, hooked in by knowing widows or other female adventurers, and the chain riveted in an unguarded moment, before their unhappy parents, or even the witless victims themselves, had dreamed that it was forging. But even this kind of publicity is not necessary. As far as we see, the registrar may, at any hour, be summoned to attend at the most private spot of his district, and there be compelled to witness and legalise the most ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... a youth, a witless youth, That fills the place where she should be; We'll send him o'er to his native shore, And bring our ain ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... church or cottage, to the shadowed horizon, looming dark as the twilight deepened, was in sympathy with the gloom which had come upon me as Martin Hall ceased to speak. I had thought the man a fool and witless, flighty in purpose and shallow in thought, and yet he seemed to speak of great mysteries—and of death. In one moment the jester's cloak fell from him, and I saw the mail beneath. He had made a great impression upon me, but I concealed it from him, and replied jauntily and with ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... "Witless hizzie, e'en 's you like, The ne'er a doit I 'm carin'; But men maun be the first to speak, An' wanters maun be speerin'. Yet, lassie, I ha'e lo'ed you lang, An' now I'm come to woo you; I 'm no sae auld as clashes gang, I think you 'd better ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... made the swathe better there than any where else," they reply. "Witless now is Njal," says Hallgerda, "though he knows how to give counsel ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... knife, nodded confidently as we adjured him to use caution, and then slipped back along the track so that he could climb to the level of the one-eyed person's perch before attempting to creep upon him. We sat down to await developments. The witless one was evidently a lookout, and it was advisable to wait and see the success of Maru's expedition before ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... robbers escaped from the galleys were introduced—Robert Macaire, the clever rogue above mentioned, and Bertrand, the stupid rogue, his friend, accomplice, butt, and scapegoat, on all occasions of danger. It is needless to describe the play—a witless performance enough, of which the joke was Macaire's exaggerated style of conversation, a farrago of all sorts of high-flown sentiments such as the French love to indulge in—contrasted with his actions, which were philosophically unscrupulous, and his appearance, which was most picturesquely ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hope is to acquire Worship goods and worldly weal; When they have their mind's desire, Then such witless Joy they feel, That in folly they believe Those ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... delight, for mankind's wonder. And here unfortunate circumstances—my poverty and not my will—constrain me to stint the world of its due: to languish in this lost corner of Nowhere, like Wamba the son of Witless, the mere professed buffoon of a merer franklin. Well, my unassuageable craving to write a song is, in its essence, just a great, splendid, generous desire to indemnify the world. The world needs me—the world ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... her go, Jacky," coaxed his poor witless wife. "He's struck wi' her—you can see that. He called her Coz! He'll marry her, most likely, and make a lady of her; and then she'll be what her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... irrational, silly, imbecile, witless, insensate, weak-minded, half-witted, brainless, fatuous, fatuitous, insagacious, unintelligent; indiscreet, imprudent, ridiculous, absurd, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... sweet hour Of healthy human intercourse and peace. 'T is not for me to tarry by the way. Farewell!" The impetuous, remorseful boy, Seeing sharp pain on that kind countenance, Fell at his feet and cried, "Forgive my words, Witless but innocent, and leave me not Without a blessing." Moved unutterably, The pilgrim kissed with trembling lips his head, And muttered, "At this moment would to God That I were worthy!" Then waved wasted hands ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... you will?" returned his wife. "Once a witless fool, always a witless fool!" and giving free rein to her vexation and ill-temper she continued to upbraid her husband until his anger also was stirred, and he had wellnigh made a second bid ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... of Netherfield said he was well known by repute for twenty years as a witless man that journeyed without rest to all the shrines of England. The old man sits, Saxon fashion, head between fists. We Normans rest the chin on the left palm. '"Who answers for him?" said I. "If he fails in his duty, who ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... restricted to a sphere where they do not interfere with the happiness and freedom of others; the common weal becomes an essential part of individual welfare. In short, even if under the most perfect conditions "Witless will always serve his master," man aims to escape from his place in the animal kingdom, founded on the free development of the principle of non-moral evolution, and to establish a kingdom of Man governed upon the principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a moral ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... and fled in terror through the night, All witless whither her weak steps might stray, As some freed bird first wings its rapid flight From its close prison to the realms of day; But on a sudden beam'd an inward light Upon her troubled soul and bid her stay, With the warm blood sent swiftly to her cheeks, ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... cursed out, too witless to see that this same hero of his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whose life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary for making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... bankrupt—non and a corslet for non dur habit (otherwise non durabit, it shall not last), un lit sans ciel, that is, a bed without a tester, for un licencie, a graduated person, as bachelor in divinity or utter barrister-at-law; which are equivocals so absurd and witless, so barbarous and clownish, that a fox's tail should be fastened to the neck-piece of, and a vizard made of a cowsherd given to everyone that henceforth should offer, after the restitution of learning, to make use of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... extravagancies that he might think proper to commit. This maxim was completely illustrated in the sequel. Wealth and despotism easily know how to engage those laws as the coadjutors of their oppression, which were perhaps at first intended [witless and miserable precaution!] for the ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... multitude to slaughter at Bothwell, by prophesying a certainty of victory, and dissuading them from accepting the amnesty offered by Monmouth. "All could not avail," says Mr. Law, himself a presbyterian minister, "with McCargill, Kidd, Douglas, and other witless men amongst them, to hearken to any proposals of peace. Among others that Douglas, sitting on his horse, and preaching to the confused multitude, told them that they would come to terms with them, and like a drone was always ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Star!" he mused, as he noticed this brilliant and singular decoration, "an emblem of the fraternity, I suppose, meaning ... what? Salvation and Immortality? Alas, they are poor, witless builders on shifting sand if they place any hope or reliance on those two empty words, signifying nothing! Do they, can they honestly believe in God, I wonder? or are they only acting the usual worn-out comedy ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Collar of SS. was a livery ensign bestowed by our kings upon certain of their retainers, in much the same sense and fashion as Cedric the Saxon is said to have given a collar to Wamba, the son of Witless. For myself, and all those entitled to carry armorial bearings in the kingdom, I repudiate the notion that the knightly golden Collar of SS. was ever so conferred or received. Further, I maintain that there was a distinction ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various
... promises to find out the thief. On Sunday the priest tells the congregation to sit down, which they do accordingly. Then says he, "Why are ye not all seated?" Say they, "We are all seated." "Nay," quoth Mass John, "but he that stole the goose sitteth not down." "But I am seated," says the witless goose-thief. ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... depends on HOW the attention has been cheated, has been squandered. There are high-handed insolent frauds, and there are insidious sneaking ones. And there is, I fear, even on the most designing artist's part, always witless enough good faith, always anxious enough desire, to fail to guard him ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... better knows than you How I have ever loved the life removed, And held in idle price to haunt assemblies Where youth, and cost, and witless bravery keeps. 10 I have deliver'd to Lord Angelo, A man of stricture and firm abstinence, My absolute power and place here in Vienna, And he supposes me travell'd to Poland; For so I have strew'd it in the common ear, 15 And so it is received. Now, pious sir, You will ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... and, with his wife, witnessed the play from the large stage boxes of the second tier, two thrown into one, and profusely draped with the national flag. The acts and scenes of the piece—one of those singularly witless compositions which have at the least the merit of giving entire relief to an audience engaged in mental action or business excitements and cares during the day, as it makes not the slightest call on either the moral, emotional, esthetic or spiritual nature—a ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... is no friend of the revolution of France. Of this we have sufficient proofs in the thanks given by that weak and witless person, the Elector of Hanover, sometimes called the King of England, to Mr. Burke for the insults heaped on it in his book, and in the malevolent comments of the English Minister, Pitt, in his speeches ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... tottering fortress of the ultra-masculine, abetted by a petty handful of witless traitors—those petticoated creatures who also see in women nothing but their sex. They may be, in some cases, honest in their belief; but their honesty does no credit to their intelligence. They are obsessed by this dominant idea of sex; due clearly enough to the long period of ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... with its expectation, and resents a scarcity of the supernatural. Mr. Sludge is not so much to blame: the people at length push the thing so far that he is obliged to cheat in self-defence. And when a man tasks his wits successfully, if it be only to mislead the witless, he has a sense of satisfaction in the effort akin to that of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Goddess shalt thou know When to thine heart the brazen spear shall pierce Sped by my might. Patroclus' death I avenged On Hector, and Antilochus on thee Will I avenge. No weakling's friend thou hast slain! But why like witless children stand we here Babbling our parents' fame and our own deeds? Now is the hour when prowess ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... entrance-room of the Louvre, filled with the luxurious orfevrerie of the sixteenth century, types perfect and innumerable: Satyrs carved in serpentine, Gorgons platted in gold, Furies with eyes of ruby, Scyllas with scales of pearl; infinitely worthless toil, infinitely witless wickedness; pleasure satiated into idiocy, passion provoked into madness, no object of thought, or sight, or fancy, but horror, mutilation, distortion, corruption, agony of war, insolence of disgrace, and misery ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the city-walls AEneas doth she lead, And shows him the Sidonian wealth, the city's guarded ways; And now she falls to speech, and now amidst a word she stays. Then at the dying of the day the feast she dights again, And, witless, once again will hear the tale of Ilium's pain; And once more hangeth on the lips that tell the tale aloud. But after they were gone their ways, and the dusk moon did shroud 80 Her light in turn, and setting stars bade all to sleep away, Lone in the empty house she ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... away from school, and is defiantly ready to take all the consequences of his disobedience to the rules of discipline and order. For years he had wanted a "new" experience of life. No one would give him what he sought. To him the "social" round was ever the same dreary, heartless and witless thing, as empty under the sway of one king or queen as another, and as utterly profitless to peace or happiness as it has always been. The world of finance was equally uninteresting so far as he was concerned; he had exhausted it, and found it no more than ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... crew, Guilty of treason to the revenue: Their lurid language and their unctuous warnings, Their moral-pointings and their tale-adornings, And, worst of all, their shameful waste of ink In signing pledges to abstain from drink, Proved them a witless and a churlish band, Unfit to dwell in any ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... like a witless man, I saw our couch, I saw our quiet room, Its shadows heaving by the fire-light gloom; And o'er my lips a subtle feeling ran, 10 All o'er my lips a soft and breeze-like feeling— I know not what—but had ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... lion has potentialities of Olympian wrath, and when he is stirred up a little too much his patience gives way, and he has a manner of shaking his mane and sweeping round with his tail which is dangerous to his enemies and a delight and fascination to his friends. He took up the witless and unhappy Cochrane, shook him, and dropped him sprawling and mutilated, in about as limp a condition as the late Lord Wolmer—I call him late in the sense of a person politically dead—when that distinguished nobleman was called to account for his odious calumny ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... yon fause stream that, near the sea, Hides mony an elf and plum, And rives wi' fearful din the stanes, A witless knicht ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... shades of grey and pale green, and with the glister of wine-tinted, ribbon-like leaves, and the air is alert with rich and spicy odour, there is ample apology ever ready for the season and the direct results thereof. The trees are manifestly over-exerting themselves, in a witless competition with others which may never boast of painted, scented fruit. There is not a sufficient audience of aesthetics to tolerate the change of which ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Foam," which Drusus had given her. The sensuous smiles on the face of the goddess sickened Cornelia, as she looked upon it. To her, at the moment, laughter was more hideous than any sobbing. Outside the door she heard the gay, witless chatter of the maids and the valets. They were happy—they—slaves, "speaking tools,"—and she with the blood of the Claudii and Cornelii in her veins, a patrician among patricians, the niece of a ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... of taking me off in speech and manner, was persuaded by the stricken mother to sing. "Sing that dear old plantation melody from London," she cried, "so that my poor boy may know there are worse things than death." And all this witless piffle because of a ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Ho thou! Wilt thou plead some errand hither from my sister? Dost thou deem me so witless as not to know that if she had sent thee hither thou wouldst not have come in this plight? Nay, I know; thou hast stolen thyself from her: thou art a thief, and as a thief ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... their lemman may their great folly heare: 'But yet moreover these fooles are so unwise, That in cold winter they use the same madness. When all the houses are lade with snowe and yse, O madmen amased, unstable, and witless! What pleasure take you in this your foolishness? What joy have ye to wander thus by night, Save that ill ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... hear my hope from men of liberal mind, Faults, that indulgence crave, shall seek and find; For whose blames and of despite decries, Is wight right witless, clean reverse ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... thou, witless boy, the first of all. Oh, that my beloved spouse, Philippus Primus, could rise from his grave—what would he say to his lost son, who, like the prodigal in Scripture, loves strange women and keeps company with ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... patiently sat. Of the term now used, the best explanation I can give is this, that in the selection of books—other questions, such as rarity or condition, being set aside or equally balanced—a general preference is to be given to those which are the most witless, preposterous, and in every literary sense valueless—which are, in short, rubbish. What is here meant will be easily felt by any one who chooses to consult the book which Dibdin issued under the title ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... so; and the Captain Eric entered heartily into his plans as Bernulf laid them before him. "The loons!" he exclaimed with a hearty laugh, as he heard of the journey through the fens. "The witless geese! And thou hast not once told them that the young lord and his serving-man came ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... are above all men the most unable to stand up, to abide the shock and trial, that for their profession is coming upon them. Wherefore, by and by they are offended; to wit, with their own profession, and call themselves an hundred fools, for being so heedless, so witless, and unwary, to mind God's holy things in such a time and day. (Matt. 4:16, 17; Luke 8:13) Then they bethink with themselves, how to make an honourable retreat, which they suppose they usually do, by finding fault, first with their own unadvisedness, and of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... have known sunburn and frost but never a shoe, and a damsel or two in cotton homespun dress made of one piece from collar to hem, and pantalettes of the same reaching to the ankles—all standing and looking the picture of witless incapacity, and making no plea against tyranny! Is that a thing worth while to turn and look back upon? If the blow fell upon ourselves or our set, that would be different; but these illiterate and lowly ones—they are—you don't know—so dull and insensible. Yes, it may be true that it is only some ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... whole thing just witless, accidentally cruel perhaps, but not malignant? Or is it wise, and merely refusing to pamper us? Is there somewhere in the immensities some responsive kindliness, some faint hope of toleration and assistance, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... neglected the precept about the right hand and the left, and showed some ostentation in his charities. When a poor ruined fellow at his elbow saw him win at a throw L200, and murmured 'How happy that would make me!' Nash tossed the money to him, and said, 'Go and be happy then.' Probably the witless beau did not see the delicate satire implied in his speech. It was only the triumph of a gamester. On other occasions he collected subscriptions for poor curates, and so forth, in the same spirit, and did his best towards founding an hospital, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Smith on great occasions." A possible Caesar Borgia on more extensive ground, Gilet lived very comfortably, although without a personal income. And that is why Max with certain inherited qualities and defects rashly went to live with his supposed natural father, Jean-Jacques Rouget, a rich and witless old bachelor who was under the thumb of a superb servant-mistress, Flore Brazier, known as La Rabouilleuse. After 1816 Gilet lorded it over the household; the handsome chap had won the heart of Mlle. Brazier. Surrounded by a sort of staff, Maxence contested the important inheritance ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... buffoons who with their coarse pantomime, their heavy horse-play, did so much to debase a great art. There, even at his side, was the arch offender, none other than Jeff Baird himself, the man whose regrettable sense of so-called humour led him to make these low appeals to the witless. And even as he looked the cross-eyed man entered the scene. Garbed in the weirdly misfitting clothes of a waiter, holding aloft a loaded tray of dishes, he entered on roller skates, to halt before Baird with his uplifted tray at ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... the head of an influential press, if its influence is not exerted to promote the cause of truth." He was true to his promise. The free soul of a free, strong man spoke out in his paper. How refreshing was it, after listening to the inanities, the dull, witless vulgarity, the wearisome commonplace of journalists, who had no higher aim than to echo, with parrot-like exactness, current prejudices and falsehoods, to turn to the great and generous thoughts, the chaste ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... to provide women at the police-stations for the examination of women who are arrested failed to become law. It is hard, upon the merits of the proposal, to understand why. Women who are arrested may be criminals, or drunkards, or vagabonds, or insane, or witless, or sick. But whatever the reason of the arrest, there can be no good reason whatever, in a truly civilized community, that a woman taken under such circumstances should be abandoned to personal search and examination by the kind of men to whom that business is usually allotted. The surest sign ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... from the hearth at last and faced the betrothed. She was terrible to view in her witless old age; her face drawn into furrows and dull as lead, her bleared eyes empty of sight or conscience, and her thin hair scattered before them. It was despair, not sorrow, that Prosper read on such a face. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... George Wiltis Vinrest Wimondesola Guilliam Wind Edward Windgate Joseph Windsor Stephen Wing Jacob Wingman Samuel Winn Jacob Winnemore Seth Winslow Charles Winter George Winter Joseph Winters David Wire John Wise Thomas Witham John Witherley Solomon Witherton William Withpane William Witless Robert Wittington W. Wittle John Woesin Henry Woist Henry Wolf John Wolf Simon de Wolf Stephen de Wolf Champion Wood Charles Wood (3) Daniel Wood (4) Edward Wood (2) George Wood Jabez Wood John Wood Jonathan Wood Joseph Wood (2) Justus Wood Matthew Wood Samuel Wood (2) William Wood Herbert ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... understand. Or am I drunk? Ein galgen gelachter, nicht wahr? I will take quarters at the hotel. I know the management well. I saved the place from being looted in the November excitement. Have you seen the Kaiser Salle? His Majesty dined there once. A witless popinjay. Liebknecht is a man. Flames in his heart. But a poor orator. He will be killed. They must kill him. A little Jew, Haase, has brains. You will meet him. And the Dadaists—they know how to laugh. The cult of the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... does it matter as he will never know it unless I tell him myself? What shall I do if I do not pray him for his love? For he who desires a thing ought indeed to request and pray for it. How? Shall I then pray him? Nay, indeed. Why not? It never happened that a woman did aught so witless as to beg a man for love unless she were more than common mad. I should be convicted of folly if I said with my mouth aught that might turn to my reproach. If he should know it from my mouth, I deem that he would hold me the cheaper for it, and would ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... a fool foretells the truth. Or if some erring crossbow-bolt should break Thine unarmed head, shot from behind a house, So, evil falls, and a fool foretells the truth." "Well," quoth Lord Raoul, with languid utterance, "'Tis very well — and thou'rt a foolish fool, Nay, thou art Folly's perfect witless man, Stupidity doth madly dote on thee, And Idiocy doth fight her for thy love, Yet Silliness doth love thee best of all, And while they quarrel, snatcheth thee to her And saith 'Ah! 'tis my sweetest No-brains: mine!' — ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... than he is willing to admit,—is that of Lazarus, whose firm conviction rests that he was dead (in fact they buried him) and then restored to life by a Nazarene physician of his tribe, who afterwards perished in a tumult. The man Lazarus is witless, he writes, of the relative value of all things. Vast armaments assembled to besiege his city, and the passing of a mule with gourds, are all one to him; while at some trifling fact, he'll gaze, rapt with stupor, as if it had for him prodigious ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... cloak, and my motley was revealed in the cold, morning light, she cried out in amazement first, and then in rage—deeming me one of those parasites who tramp the world in the garb of folly, seeking here a dinner, there a bed, in exchange for some scurvy tumbling or some witless jests. ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... Spond was the greatest and heaviest of the wolfhounds; Anap, rightly Anapaest, was a slender and swift greyhound; and whereas he found this pastime of names good sport he carried it further. Thus it came to pass that the witless creatures who shared his loneliness were reminders of many pleasant things. One of a pair of fleet bloodhounds which were ever leashed together was named Nich, and the other Syn, in memory that he had been betrothed on the festival ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fool! For it is in the presence of a fool, gentlemen, that we now find ourselves, and the case is all the more curious, all the more interesting, seeing that, in many points, it recalls the insanity of the unfortunate prince who recently died, of the witless king who reigned platonically over Bavaria. I shall hence designate ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... body to which, for the time, we belong (Ere yet the swift course of the Atom hath hurried us breathless along)— The BRITISH ASSOCIATION—like Leviathan worshipped by Hobbes, The incarnation of wisdom built up of our witless nobs; Which will carry on endless discussion till I, and probably you, Have melted in infinite azure—and, in short, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... men think that Halfdan spoke: he warned us it would soon come to pass that an understanding father should beget a witless son. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... and as he grew up into boyhood, and showed that his wits had been addled by his fall, his family knew not what else to do with him, and so sent him off to the Monastery of St. Michaelsburg, where he lived his simple, witless life upon a sort of sufferance, as though he were ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... before). Ha! (making an entry in his note-book). And they laugh at a witless joke! Good! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... limit of his capacity was being reached. Mr. Slosson had become a sort of Greek chorus. He anticipated all the possible phases of drunkenness that awaited his companions. He went from silence to noisy mirth, when his unmeaning laughter rang through the house; he told long witless stories as he leaned against the bar; he became melancholy and described the loss of his wife five years before. From melancholy he passed to sullenness and seemed ready to fasten a quarrel on Yancy, but the latter deftly ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... "If like desire, and if an equal flame Move one and the other sex, who warmly press To that soft end of love (their goal the same) Which to the witless crowd seems rank excess; Say why shall woman — merit scathe or blame, Though lovers, one or more, she may caress; While man to sin with whom he will is free, And meets with ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... styles it, has had a far larger number of supporters than any other. Unfortunately, the opinions of others have not the slightest weight with Mr. Massey, and words are too weak to express his scorn of this theory and its supporters. Mr. Brown wraps things in a winding sheet of witless words (delicious alliteration!); he leaves the subject dark and dubious as ever; his theory has only served to trouble deep waters, and make them so muddy that it is impossible to see to the bottom; in short, Mr. Brown and his fellow thinkers, in the opinion of Mr. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... of record, that some English ships of war have fallen a prey to the enemy through the insubordination of the crew, induced by the witless cruelty of their officers; officers so armed by the law that they could inflict that cruelty without restraint. Nor have there been wanting instances where the seamen have ran away with their ships, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... anon the Immortals bethink them of harp and minstrelsy. And all the Muses together with sweet voice in antiphonal chant replying, sing of the imperishable gifts of the Gods, and the sufferings of men, all that they endure from the hands of the undying Gods, lives witless and helpless, men unavailing to find remede for death or buckler against old age. Then the fair-tressed Graces and boon Hours, and Harmonia, and Hebe, and Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, dance, holding each by the wrist the other's hand, while among them ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... thee from me, for I had it in mind to do thee a mischief, but now I will not hurt thee nor trouble thee." I wondered at this and said to her, "What then didst thou purpose to do with me, and we lovers?" Quoth she, "Thou art infatuated with me; for thou art young and witless; thy heart is free from guile and thou knowest not our perfidy and malice. Were she yet alive, she would protect thee, for she is the cause of thy preservation and hath delivered thee from destruction. And now I charge thee that thou speak not ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... affair, just enough for comfort; it was far too small for the new style of wholesale entertainment which the plutocracy has introduced from England, where the lunacy for aimless and extravagant display rages and ravages in its full horror of witless vulgarity. Thus, the Severences from being leaders twenty years before, had shrunk into "quiet people," were saved from downright obscurity and social neglect only by the indomitable will and tireless energy ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... spite of the protests of the other officer, the husband assented. Probably he had been having too many brandies and sodas. I don't know. But in any event, they put the witless idea into execution. Toward nightfall the young wife returned. She had on a frock of some thin, slinky stuff and a droopy garden hat with flowers on it and carried a sunshade. She was awfully pretty. She hadn't been out there long enough to lose her ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... that old Kate was not the irresponsible, witless creature that people thought her to be. I had begun to think of her with a kind of awe as one gifted above all others. One by one the things she had said of the future seemed ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... dull souls of its inhabitants, and here, within half an hour's train travel of the Lord Mayor's Mansion and the golden vaults of the Bank of England, transpired on the sweltering night of which I write, one of the most witless and appalling tragedies of the present war. Forever memorable in the hitherto colorless calendar of Walthamstow will be this tragedy in ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... trusted her inspiration farther than it appeared likely to carry her. Again she could think of nothing happier than to repeat, on the same witless note of interrogation: ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... earth have you been doing ever since you came up to the post?" asked his witless or too witty tormentor. "He's simply eager to get off by himself somewhere and devour his ration of spoon meat. I know how it is, Mrs. Cranston. I was there ten years ago." And Davies's low-toned protestations were drowned in the jovial tones ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... ejaculated Barty, "I sincerely wish thee joy and life-long happiness, good Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe. Thou art a right fit mate for her, peerless as she may be among women! A benison on you both from your poor Wamba, the son of Witless." ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... innocence; For lifted clear and still and strange From the dark woven flow of change Under a vast and starless sky I saw the immortal moment lie. One instant I, an instant, knew As God knows all. And it and you I, above Time, oh, blind! could see In witless immortality. I saw the marble cup; the tea, Hung on the air, an amber stream; I saw the fire's unglittering gleam, The painted flame, the frozen smoke. No more the flooding lamplight broke On flying eyes and lips and hair; But lay, but slept unbroken there, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... were not criminals, but political prisoners who had fought in Monmouth's Rebellion. Pitied by the planters, despised even by the negro slaves, this small colony held itself aloof, starved, and married none but members of their own colony. They are now mere shadows of men, with puny bodies and witless minds, living in brush or wooden hovels and eating nothing but a little wild fruit ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Word of his defiance of Whitburn had gotten around among the faculty—Whitburn might have his secretary scared witless in his office, but not gossipless outside it—though it hadn't seemed to have leaked down to the students yet. Handley, the Latin professor, managed to waylay him in a hallway, a hallway ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... now. He must have met Duchaine that morning as the old man was flying or wandering aimlessly along the tunnel. They had reached le Vieil Ange together, and Leroux had probably had little difficulty in inducing the witless old man to take him back into the ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... ways are witless ways, As any sage will tell,— And what am I, that I should love ...
— A Few Figs from Thistles • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... by those who know it intimately as the most stupid and witless of birds, and yet before leaving its eggs exposed to the hot African sun, the parent bird knows enough to put a large pinch of sand on the top of each of them, in order, it is said, to shade and protect the germ, which always rises to the highest point of the ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... of privileged noble with conquering Frank was of older date; and in this century it has been made the master-key to modern history. When Thierry discovered the secret of our national development in the remarks of Wamba the Witless to Gurth, under the Sherwood oaks, he applied to us a formula familiar to his countrymen; and Guizot always defined French history as a perpetual struggle between hostile nations until the eighteenth century made good the wrong that was done ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... beest a lover but three days, thou wilt be heartless, sleepless, witless, mad, wretched, miserable, and indeed a stark fool; and by that thou hast been married but three weeks, though thou shouldst wed a Cynthia rara avis, thou wouldst be a man monstrous—a cuckold, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... listened to the cold-blooded statement. The shock of it produced a beating in the head, and a sickness. And I felt foolish, as though I might do something lunatic, like giving a witless shout, or running amok with a table-knife. I touched Doe, and whispered: "I'm going to get out of this. The old fool doesn't know what he's ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... once in November When first she breathed, witless of all; Or in heavy years she would remember When circumstance held her in thrall; Or at last, when she ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... themselves with their clothes, their wraps, their filthy rugs, and tattered rags, and were as warm as possible. The tents had many advantages over a brick house. Besides having no draughts, there was no accumulation of snow upon the tops of the tents; and so these witless people were content to endure poverty, hunger, cold, and dirt for the sake of minimising their contribution to the general good of the whole commonwealth. The poorest working man in London who does an honest week's work is a hero compared with such men as these. It would be impossible to ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... townsman mine I'd lief see thrown from thy gangway Hurled head over heels precipitous whelmed in the quagmire, Where the lake and the boglands are most rotten and stinking, 10 Deepest and lividest lie, the swallow of hollow voracious. Witless surely the wight whose sense is less than of boy-babe Two-year-old and a-sleep on trembling forearm of father. He though wedded to girl in greenest bloom of her youth-tide, (Bride-wife daintier bred than ever was delicate kidlet, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength—signifying nothing. ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... fear her not. She is but a poor harmless body," said Kenric. "Only the witless carls and cottar folk are so simple as to believe that she has aught of evil ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... and as round As a new engagement ring— (So we murmured, gently bound To some flapper's leading string.) Sweet and witless repartee: Perilous canoes careen— Telescopes would split, to see MOONS ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... am forced to use two English words to translate that single Greek one. The 'cunning' workman, thoughtful in experience, touch, and vision of the thing to be done; no machine, witless, and of necessary motion; yet not cunning only, but having perfect habitual skill of hand also; the confirmed reward of truthful doing. Recollect, in connection with this passage of Pindar, Homer's three verses about getting the lines of ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... through The regions of the dead?" My sapient guide Made sign that he for secret parley wish'd; Whereat their angry scorn abating, thus They spake: "Come thou alone; and let him go Who hath so hardily enter'd this realm. Alone return he by his witless way; If well he know it, let him prove. For thee, Here shalt thou tarry, who through clime so dark Hast been his escort." Now bethink thee, reader! What cheer was mine at sound of those curs'd words. I did believe I never ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... men in after-ages invented the book of Joshua, affirming it was written at the time of that imaginary event by Joshua himself, adducing this pile of stones in evidence of its truth, what is the answer which every one who heard it must have made to this witless falsehood? 'We know this pile of stones,' they would say; 'but of such an origin as thou hast related we have, not heard, nor even of this book of Joshua. Where has it been concealed, and from whence was it brought forth? Besides, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
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