"Dunce" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... abuse; And since you ne'er provoked their spite, Depend upon 't, their judgment's right. But if you blab, you are undone: Consider what a risk you run: You lose your credit all at once; The town will mark you for a dunce; The vilest doggrel Grub Street sends Will pass for yours with foes and friends; And you must bear the whole disgrace, Till some fresh blockhead ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... by the side of Moliere, who died long before him. He was born July 8th, 1621, at Chateau Thierry. His father was keeper of the royal domains. While young, La Fontaine gave no promise of his after distinction. His teachers declared him to be a dunce. His father, who seems to have been an admirer of poetry, persuaded him to attempt to write verses, but he could not make a rhyme. Seeing at nineteen that he could not make a poet of his son, the old man resolved to make a priest of him. After eighteen months of trial the young man ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... old a boy was dull or quite adverse to knowledge, he Was set an imposition or corrected with a switch: Far different our practice is, who reign by Methodology And guide the dunce by precepts learnt from Landon or from Fitch: 'Twas difficult by rule of thumb to check unseemly merriment, To make your class their pastor treat with proper due regard— 'Tis easy quite for specialists ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... History, and this is your French Grammar; and here is a Geography Book, and here is a History of Rome. Now read attentively, and do not let your thoughts wander; and be very careful not to dogs-ear the leaves: that always looks like a dunce. And mind you sit upright,' added she, looking back, as she left the room in obedience to a ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... text. Last year it was Parry and Switzerland; 'ardly know where to go next. I should much like to try Monty Carlo, and 'ave a fair flutter for once, But I fear it won't run to it, pardner; my boss is the dashdest old dunce. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... "bridge" over which the "evolutionist" may pass, if he will, without wearing either the dunce's cap or the ass's ears. It spans the chasm between the anthropoid ape and man as no other bridge can span it. Across this bridge is flung the living garment of God, and how grandly, yet reverently and humbly, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... successive villages of the same district. Daniel, from the first, was a thing of inconsistencies; his life proceeded as if by fits and starts. At school, for a while, he lay dormant: at the age of seven he could not read, and had acquired the reputation of a perfect dunce. But 'all at once,' says his biographer, 'the rind which enclosed his spirit started asunder;' and Daniel became the prodigy of the school! His good father determined to make a learned man of him: ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... brood in us 45 To split and divide into heads multitudinous, While charms that surprise (it can ne'er be denied us) Sprout forth from each head, like the ears from King Midas. Were a genius of rank, like a commonplace dunce, Compell'd to drive on to the main point at once, 50 What a plentiful vintage of initiations[342:3] Would Noble Lords lose in your Lordship's orations. My fancy transports me! As mute as a mouse, And as fleet as a pigeon, I'm borne to the house Where all those who are Lords, from father to son, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... formula worked successfully the child was declared educated in the same way that pork which has been successfully treated by the proper processes is declared to be pickled. If the formula did not work the child was not educated. He sat in school with a dunce-cap upon his head, or else played hookey and spent his hours in fishing, swimming ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... When British bards begin t' immortalize? 'Who lasts a century can have no flaw, I hold that wit a classic, good in law.' Suppose he wants a year, will you compound? And shall we deem him ancient, right and sound, Or damn to all eternity at once, At ninety-nine, a modern and a dunce? 'We shall not quarrel for a year or two; By courtesy of England, he may do.' Then, by the rule that made the horse-tail bare, I pluck out year by year, as hair by hair, And melt down ancients like a heap of snow: While you, to measure merits, look in Stowe, And estimating ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... characteristic phrase was his remark to Miss Monckton. She had declared, in opposition to one of Johnson's prejudices, that Sterne's writings were pathetic: "I am sure," she said, "they have affected me." "Why," said Johnson, smiling and rolling himself about, "that is because, dearest, you are a dunce!" When she mentioned this to him some time afterwards he replied: "Madam, if I had thought so, I certainly should not have said it." The truth could not be ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... shock! —What do you think the parson found, When he got up and stared around? The poor old chaise in a heap or mound, As if it had been to the mill and ground! You see, of course, if you're not a dunce, How it went to pieces all at once,— All at once, and nothing first,— Just as bubbles do when ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... enough, but was still in the way, As dunces still are, let them be where they may; Indeed, they appear to come into existence 240 To impede other folks with their awkward assistance; If you set up a dunce on the very North pole All alone with himself, I believe, on my soul, He'd manage to get betwixt somebody's shins, And pitch him down bodily, all in his sins, To the grave polar bears sitting round on the ice, All shortening their ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... like me in this, any more than in bodily favour; he was keen of wit and quick of memory; he was quick in learning, yet as modest as he was clever, for he never sought in any way to lord it over me because I, poor dunce, was not of such nimble parts ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... I'll warrant she'll not be a dunce with Purcell. And you must admit, doctor, that your George Frederick Handel is much ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... schoolhouse. Master Crawford kept a "blab" school. The "scholars," as he called his pupils, studied their lessons out loud. The louder they shouted, the better he liked it. If a scholar didn't know his lesson, he had to stand in the corner with a long pointed cap on his head. This was called a dunce cap. ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... shriek, in rushed the household, headed by the physician, and closely followed by the companion, with the hired nurses. Methought that the doctor looked on this wreck of mortality with grim satisfaction. "I knew it," said he, slowly; "and Doctor Phillimore is nothing more than a solemn dunce. I told him that she would not survive to be subjected to the consultation of the morrow. And how happens it," said he, turning fiercely to the companion and the nurses, "that my patient was thus left alone ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... have his own way, Yet I'm happy to say They quarrel, if ever, but seldom. Though competent quite To maintain their own right, And even to fight, Yet peace to their bosom is welcome. Both go to school, And learn by rule That in neither a dunce we may find; Both read and spell And like it well; Thus with pleasure is profit combined. One's eyes are black, The other's blue; They both have honest hearts and true, And love each other dearly: ...
— The Kings and Queens of England with Other Poems • Mary Ann H. T. Bigelow
... my little man, Is very hard to get? Will it make it any easier For you to sit and fret? Then wouldn't it he wiser Than waiting like a dunce, To go to work in earnest, And learn ...
— New National First Reader • Charles J. Barnes, et al.
... for fame! "March to the field—knock out a Mounseer's brains "And pick the scoundrel's pocket for your pains. "Come Humphrey come! thou art a lad of spirit! "Rise to a halbert—as I did—by merit! "Would'st thou believe it? even I was once "As thou art now, a plough-boy and a dunce; "But Courage rais'd me to my rank. How now boy! "Shall Hero Humphrey still be Numps the plough-boy? "A proper shaped young fellow! tall and straight! "Why thou wert made for glory! five feet eight! "The road to riches ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... playing "odd or even" under the master's eye; eating apples openly and without rebuke; pinching each other in sport or malice, without the least reserve; and cutting their initials in the very legs of his desk. The puzzled dunce, who stood beside it to say his lesson "off the book," looked no longer at the ceiling for forgotten words, but drew closer to the master's elbow, and boldly cast his eye upon the page; the wag of the little troop squinted and made grimaces (at the smallest ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... mother to New York shortly; but as "that dear old dunce" was the worst of all possible sailors, it would be necessary to wait for the largest of all possible steamers, and as the largest steamers sailed from Liverpool, and Ellan was so near to that port, perhaps ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... TOMMY (indignantly)—"Any dunce would know that. If it's milk that's spilled all you have to do is to call the cat an' she'll lick it up cleaner'n anything. But this ain't milk, an' mother'll do the lickin', ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... pardon—I ought to have known; I mean, it's very natural," I faltered and stuttered, thinking what a dunce I had been not to understand that both hers and Lord Ralles's letters had been only a pretext to get away from the ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... fly, didn't jump With flapping arms from stake or stump, Or spreading the tail 5 Of his coat for a sail, Take a soaring leap from post or rail, And wonder why He couldn't fly, And flap and flutter and wish and try— 10 If ever you knew a country dunce Who didn't try that as often as once— All I can say is, that's a sign He never would do ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... which were given us by M. Rossi, the minister of Pius IX. But Greek and Latin, and hours spent over an exercise or a translation with a fat dictionary to keep me company! Oh, mercy on me! From the scholastic point of view I was simply a DUNCE, nothing but a dunce. Yet I managed to scramble one prize—the shabbiest of them all—the second for Latin versions in the seventh class! I was presented with my reward at the prize distribution, to the tune of "Vive Henri IV." Vive ce roi vaillant, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... "Shoot, you dunce, shoot before he gets up to you!" shouted Will. "If he gets one swipe at you with that paw, you'll land out in the Gulf of Alaska! Fill him ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... virtually has to wait until the others have caught him up. Similarly, if equality of opportunity, other than an equality that is relative, were to be maintained in the sphere of education, a clever boy who had learned to speak German in a year would have to be coerced into idleness until every dunce among his classmates could speak it as well as he; and a similar process would be repeated in after-life. This policy, as has been pointed out already, is, even if wasteful, not ruinous in the sphere of ordinary labour—a ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... nowadays this term is equivalent to "dunce," but it was originally employed as a law term. It is a Latin word, and literally translated means, "we do not know." In former days when a grand jury considered that a bill or indictment was not supported by sufficient ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... writer:[19] and—as not a defect but a consequence of the quality just attributed to them—they do not quite carry the reader along with them in that singular fashion which distinguishes the others. But no one save a dunce can find them dull: and their variety is astonishing when one remembers that the writer was, for great part of his life, a kind of recluse. He touches almost everything except love (one wonders whether there were any unpublished, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... occupied with Dora, who, sitting on Harold's knee, seemed to expect her full rescue from all grievances, and was terribly disappointed to find that he had no power to remove her from her durance in the London school-room, where she was plainly the dunce and the black sheep, a misery to herself and all concerned, hating everyone and disliked by all. To the little maiden of the Bush, only half tamed as yet, the London school-room and walks in the park were penance in themselves, and the company of ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cutting down a hill, where scores of people are working together, the absurd and adventitious distinctions of society do not intrude. The capitalist and his agents are looking for the greatest amount of labor or the largest income in money from their investments, and they do not promote a dunce to a station where he will destroy raw material or slacken industry because of his name, or birth, or family connections. The obscurest and humblest person has a fair field for competition. That he ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... of haze in Copley Fielding's fine drawing of "Folkstone Cliff." There is an affected absence of effect in his "Arundel Castle"—the blues and yellows are not in harmony—and all has an uncomfortable, unsubstantial look. Eliza Sharpe's "Little Dunce" is a delightful drawing. It is only the old dame that can ever be angry with a little dunce—and she puts on more than half her anger; and this is a glorious little dunce, that we would not see good for the world—the triumph of nature over tuition. This charming little creature ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... does not remember the first letter received in one's childish days, written in a fair round text for childish eyes, or perhaps even printed by the kind and painstaking correspondent for the little dunce of a recipient. Who has not slept with such a letter carefully hoarded away under the pillow, that morning's first light might give positive assurance of the actual existence of our treasure. Nor is the little urchin the only glad supporter of our admirable ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... degrees, pride sways the soul? (For though in all, not equally, she reigns,) Awake to knowledge, and attend my strains. Ye doctors! hear the doctrine I disclose, As true, as if't were writ in dullest prose; As if a letter'd dunce had said, "'Tis right," And imprimatur usher'd it to light. Ambition, in the truly noble mind, With sister virtue is for ever join'd; As in fam'd Lucrece, who, with equal dread, From guilt, and shame, by her last conduct, fled: Her virtue long ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... wretches! Earth-born, groveling dolts! Begone! nor dare reply to my just wrath! Never behold me more! or if you stay Let not a sigh, a shrug, a stoop betray What poor, weak, miserable men you are. Not as I—I am a God! Look, dunce! I tread or leap beneath ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... dunce I am!" cried Heinz in amazement, pressing his hand upon his brow. "That's why your face was so familiar! By my saint! I am no knight if I did not see you then, before the battle waxed hot. It was close beside your Burgrave Frederick, who ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 'You little dunce. Why, what we call a stafell without the household furniture. So you will find a wedding dress and all kinds of dresses and garments without number awaiting you, for I ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... the descendant of heroes and kings, was a lone, friendless mariner on the main, only true to his origin in the sea-life that he led. But so it has been, and forever will be. What yeoman shall swear that he is not descended from Alfred? what dunce, that he is not sprung of old Homer? King Noah, God bless him! fathered us all. Then hold up your heads, oh ye Helots, blood potential flows through your veins. All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... his Jacket of Flame, The Fryer he pull'd off his Cowle; The Devil took him for a Dunce of the Game, And the Fryer took him for a Fool: He piqu'd, and repiqu'd so oft, that at last, He swore by the Jolly fat Nuns; If Cards came no better than those that are past, Oh! oh! I shall ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... and there's charity,' says Iky, 'but my mother sewed happiness on my waist this morning.' Did you ever hear of such a dunce as that kid?" ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... of Sterne's writings were very pathetick. Johnson bluntly denied it. 'I am sure (said she) they have affected me.' 'Why (said Johnson, smiling, and rolling himself about,) that is, because, dearest, you're a dunce[350].' When she some time afterwards mentioned this to him, he said with equal truth and politeness; 'Madam, if I had thought so, I certainly should not ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... still greater obstacles to social contacts. The idiot and the imbecile are obviously debarred from normal communication with their intelligent associates. The "dunce" was isolated by village ridicule and contempt long before the term "moron" was coined, or the feeble-minded segregated in institutions and colonies. The individual with the highest native endowments, the genius, and the talented ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... transcendental curve, perfectly drawn, may work upon his gentler mood. I happen to have in my portfolio the very thing to please him. Fortune serves me well in this special circumstance. Among my boys, there is one who, though a regular dunce at everything else, is a first rate hand with the square, the compass and the drawing pen: a deft-fingered numskull, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... those who have feeling minds, pain and pleasure altogether computed, have the advantage; or at least they think so; for they would not change with those who have them not, were they to gain by the bargain the most robust body that the most selfish coxcomb, or the heaviest dunce extant, ever boasted. For instance, would you now, my lord, at this moment change altogether with Major Benson, or Captain Williamson, or even our friend, 'Eh, really now, "pon honour"—would you!—I'm glad ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... Clement. All his rarities, secret manuscripts, of what quality soever, Dr. Napper of Lindford in Buckinghamshire had, who had been a long time his scholar; and of whom Forman was used to say he would be a dunce: yet in continuance of time he proved a singular astrologer and physician. Sir Richard now living, I believe, has all those rarities in possession, which were Forman's, being kinsman and heir unto Dr. Napper. (His son Thomas Napper, Esq.; ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... pleasure to learn. Sometimes a boy would ask a foolish question, which would make the rest laugh; but then Mr. Harrison would say it was better to be laughed at for trying to learn, than to grow up a dunce. ...
— The Apple Dumpling and Other Stories for Young Boys and Girls • Unknown
... masters in fencing and dancing, and my Lord Castlewood's chaplain, the Reverend Mr. Sampson, having come hither to drink the waters, has been so good as to take a vacant room at my lodging. Mr. S. breakfasts with me, and we read together of a morning—he saying that I am not quite such a dunce as I used to appear at home. We have read in Mr. Rapin's History, Dr. Barrow's Sermons, and, for amusement, Shakspeare, Mr. Pope's Homer, and (in French) the translation of an Arabian Work of Tales, very diverting. Several men of learning ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sons,—the elder a dunce, the younger, Lycophron (or wolf-heart), a youth of noble nature and fine intellect. He sent them on a visit to Proclus, their mother's father, and from him the boys learned, what they had not known before, that their father was ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... place too long monopolized by the "three R's." There was need of it. It had seemed sometimes as if, in our anxiety lest he should not get enough, we were in danger of stuffing the boy to the point of making a hopeless dunce of him. It is a higher function of the school to teach principles than to impart facts merely. Teaching the boy municipal politics and a thousand other things to make a good citizen of him, instead of so filling him with love of his country and pride in its traditions that he is bound to take the ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... rock, At half past nine by the meet'n'-house clock,— Just the hour of the Earthquake shock! What do you think the parson found, When he got up and stared around? The poor old chaise in a heap or mound, As if it had been to the mill and ground! You see, of course, if you 're not a dunce, How it went to pieces all at once,— All at once, and nothing first,— Just as bubbles ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... grew up he clearly showed in what direction his interest lay. At school he was something of a dunce at his lessons, but let him but have a pencil and paper and his mind was wide awake at once. Every spare moment he spent making sketches on the walls ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... tales and making bad things worse. He appeared to accept the idea that he had taken her over and made her, as he said, his particular lark; he quite agreed also that he was an awful fraud and an idle beast and a sorry dunce. And he never said a word to her against her mother—he only remained dumb and discouraged in the face of her ladyship's own overtopping earnestness. There were occasions when he even spoke as if he had wrenched his little charge from the arms of ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... of the crew needs especial remark, Though he looked an incredible dunce: He had just one idea—but, that one being "Snark," The good Bellman engaged him ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... entirely, so she is, it 'ud cost his heirs and succissors betther nor ten pounds to have him out as soon as the other. Get along, man, and take half a year at dogmatical theology: go and read your Dens, you poor dunce, you!" ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... Marilla," she groaned. "I'm sure I'll never be able to make head or tail of it. There is no scope for imagination in it at all. Mr. Phillips says I'm the worst dunce he ever saw at it. And Gil—I mean some of the others are so smart at it. It is extremely ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... existence; its novelty shall not avail (with me at least) to save its ugliness from annihilation. If I thought otherwise, I admit that a round dozen of vultures would be none too many for the liver of a dunce who could not see that ugliness was ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... that I am dunce enough to mistake your feelings towards Mademoiselle—they may be read in your face at this moment. Of course I do not presume to hazard a conjecture as to those of Mademoiselle towards yourself. But when I met her not long since at the house of Duplessis, with whose ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... large-hearted, and chivalrous,—kind, and patient, and hard-working,—but stupid where women are concerned. Indispensable and delightful as they are in real life, pleasant and comfortable as women actually find them, not one in ten thousand but makes a dunce of himself the moment he opens his mouth to theorize about women. Besides, they have an axe to grind. The pretty things they inculcate—slippers, and coffee, and care, and courtesy—ought indeed to be done, but the others ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... That in his heart he loved a jest: A wag he was, he needs must own, And could not let a dunce alone: Sometimes his friend he would not spare, And might perhaps be too severe: But yet the worst that could be said, He was a wit both born and bred; And, if it be a sin and shame, Nature alone must bear the blame: One fault he has, is sorry for't, His ears are half a foot too short; Which ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... venerable university (where my instructors were wise and worthy); and I am now so old, that I may say, without any great exhibition of vanity, that I have always kept well up among my school- and college-companions: but that blockhead kept me steadily at the bottom of my class, and kept a frightful dunce at the top of it, by his peculiar system. I have observed (let me say) that masters and professors who are stupid themselves have a great preference for stupid fellows, and like to keep down clever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... next few years, except to say that I went to college, where I was shunned by all, though never alone: was a dunce, and plucked twice. Perhaps it was I who shunned others, for had I not society in the constant presence of my Familiar? I was of course a dunce, for my brain was never steady enough to carry me over the Pons Asinorum, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... into seven or eight volumes to make it palatable. For we are told that a young Cantab, who, when asked if he had read Clarissa, replied, "D—-n it, I would not read it through to save my life," was set down as an incurable dunce. And that a lady reading to her maid, whilst she curled her hair, the seventh volume of Clarissa, the poor girl let fall such a shower of tears that they wetted her mistress's head so much, she had to send her out of the room ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... "You've been a dunce, Boy. Why didn't you get busy at the island last summer, after all your talk about adoration? You could have got her. I don't believe ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... not stay, Various as the chameleon that she bore; Now a grand monarch with a crown of hay, Now mendicant in silks and golden ore: A statesman, now equipp'd to chase the boar, Or cowled monk, lean, feeble, and unfed; A clown-like lord, or swain of courtly lore; Now scribbling dunce, in sacred laurel clad, Or papal father now, in ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... beginning only with some trifle, they would soon go on to God knows what. Frequently, even I myself did not know to what they related. Anything and everything would enter into them, for my father would say that I was an utter dunce at the French language; that the head mistress of my school was a stupid, common sort of women who cared nothing for morals; that he (my father) had not yet succeeded in obtaining another post; that Lamonde's "Grammar" was a wretched book—even a worse one than ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Sir Walter Scott at the University of Edinburgh, was 'The Greek Dunce.' Both of these great men, to their sorrow and loss, absolutely and totally declined to learn Greek. 'But what the reason was why I hated the Greek language, while I was taught it, being a child, I do not yet understand.' ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... irrepressible passion. Alfieri was fifty; he was tormented by gout; his health was rapidly sinking; but the sense of weakness only made him more resolute to finish the work which (however mistakenly) he thought it his duty to leave completed; more determined that, having lived for so many years a dunce, he would go down to the grave cleansed of the stain of ignorance, having read and appreciated as much of the great writers of antiquity as any man who had had a well-trained youth, a studious manhood. Soon after his great illness (which, I believe, changed ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... choice patron bless each gray goose quill! May ev'ry Bavius have his Bufo still! So, when a Statesman wants a day's defence, Or Envy holds a whole week's war with Sense, 250 Or simple pride for flatt'ry makes demands, May dunce by dunce be whistled off my hands! Blest be the Great! for those they take away. And those they left me; for they left me Gay; Left me to see neglected Genius bloom, 255 Neglected die, and tell it on his tomb: Of all thy blameless life the sole return My Verse, and Queenb'ry ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... realized what he was undertaking. What if the bottle was false! What if he should fail! Would not his head be dangling from the ropes of the scaffold, to be hailed by the multitude as the remains of a blockhead, a dunce, and a fool? The coffin was opened. With these meditations in his mind, Juan tremblingly uncorked his bottle of violet liquid, and held it under the nose of the princess. He held the bottle there for some time, but she gave no signs of life. An hour longer, still ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... and passion prone, without a rhyme, Inane and madlike was he many a time, His outer self, forsooth, fine may have been, But one wild, howling waste his mind within: Addled his brain that nothing he could see; A dunce! to read essays so loth to be! Perverse in bearing, in temper wayward; For human censure he had no regard. When rich, wealth to enjoy he knew not how; When poor, to poverty he could not bow. Alas! what utter waste of lustrous grace! To state, to family what a disgrace! Of ne'er-do-wells below he ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... interruption;—all of which tendencies are augmented by the power of the imagination, the vivid character of the whole range of thought, including what is disagreeable. This applies, in various degrees, to every step in the long scale of mental power, from the veriest dunce to the greatest genius that ever lived. Therefore the nearer anyone is, either from a subjective or from an objective point of view, to one of those sources of suffering in human life, the farther he is from the other. And so a man's natural bent ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Nash, from the top of his wit looking down upon simple creatures, calleth Gabriel Harvey a dunce, a foole, an ideot, a dolt, a goose cap, an asse, and so forth; for some of the residue is not to be spoken but with his owne mannerly mouth; but he should have shewed particularlie which wordes in my letters were the wordes of a dunce; which sentences the sentences of a foole; which arguments ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... modified my conceit. I was always the dunce of the party—the smallest child knew more of woodcraft than I did, and had something to tell of everything. Seeing Oogahnahbayah, a small eagle-hawk, flying over, they would say, 'He eats the emu eggs.' He flies over where the ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... a plucky thing to do, I daresay, but it didn't help him much with Skeats that day, for he never spared him a bit, as he did not take the excuse that had been offered him, and he blundered and floundered worse than ever, so that Curtis, the biggest dunce in the class, answered for him, and took ...
— That Scholarship Boy • Emma Leslie
... of the Wise and Good Are seen, far off, and rarely understood. The world's a father to a Dunce unknown, And much he thrives, for Dulness! he's thy own. No hackney brethren e'er condemn him twice; He fears no enemies, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... string with your teeth, and fire our new gun? If I could, you might be the Artillery all to yourself, and it would be capital fun. You wag your tail at that, do you? You would like it a great deal better? But I can't bear you to be such a dunce, when you look so wise; and yet I don't believe you'll ever learn a letter. Aunt Jemima is going to make me a new cocked hat out of the next old newspaper, for I want to have a review; But the newspaper after that, Papa Poodle, must be kept to make ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... have intelligence. But I'm a 'dunce with wits.' I know what I ought to do but I don't do it. I think that I have brains enough to write, I am sure I have imagination enough to paint, I have strength enough when I am well to"—she laughed,—"scrub floors. But I don't ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... her arms with a saintly embrace, thanks you for your advice, and loves you the more for it; she wishes to be beholden to you for everything, even for her intellect; she may be a dunce, but, what is better than saying fine things, she knows how to do them! But she desires also to be your pride! It is not a question of taste in dress, of elegance and beauty; she wishes to make you proud of her ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... his school days, "How to be a Dunce," and although in mature life he was "on the side of his masters" and grateful to them "that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes," he ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... bounteously and boundlesly infused; thou sometimes secretary to Pierce Pennylesse and master of his requests, ingenious, ingenuous, fluent, facetious T. Nash, from whose aboundant pen hony flow'd to thy friends, and mortall aconite to thy enemies; thou that madest the doctor a flat dunce[298] ... sharpest satyre, luculent poet, elegant orator, get leave for thy ghost to come from her abiding and to dwell with ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... by a paradox. Goldsmith was great in spite of his weaknesses, Boswell by reason of his; if he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. He was a dunce, a parasite, a coxcomb, a Paul Pry, had a quick observation, a retentive memory, and accordingly—he has become immortal! Alas for the paucity of such immortals under so common circumstances; their number should be legion! That ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... on me all at once, 175 This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left, a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... other boys. At last Patience saw her brother. Oh, dear, how disgraced she felt! Peregrine had not learned his lesson well, because he had looked out of the window. He had not recited well, so Mistress Endicott had put the dunce's cap on his head and he stood in a corner where all could ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... Fanny Hutton Her last dress has put on; Her fine lessons forgotten, She died, as the dunce died: And prim Betsy Chambers, Decay'd in her members, No longer remembers Things, as ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... had coincided with the announcement of midnight, made, with maddening deliberation, by Mrs. Mangan's cuckoo-clock. The usual delirium of cracker-head-dresses had befallen the company. Larry, decorated with a dunce's cap, placed upon his yellow head by a jovial matron, found himself fated, by a final effort of penalising fancy on the part of another matron, to select "a young lady," to conduct her to the topmost step of the staircase, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... who clever was found. D was a dunce, and Harlequin bound, E was soon formed with the aid of a child, F in a frolic ...
— Funny Alphabet - Uncle Franks' Series • Edward P. Cogger
... by poor Oliver's appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who had once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him, and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though he should be persuaded that the fool, or the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they with theirs.... It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... a notable dunce at the parson's school, while Lenny Fairfield was the pride and boast of it; therefore Mr. Stirn was naturally, and almost justifiably, ill-disposed towards Lenny Fairfield, who had appropriated to himself the praises which Mr. Stirn had designed ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... might be raised by "education" to the normal stature of the human mind. It fired Godwin himself with a zeal for education. "Folly," said Helvetius, "is factitious." "Nature," said Godwin, "never made a dunce." The failures of education are due primarily to the teacher's error in substituting compulsion for persuasion and despotism for encouragement. The excellences and defects of the human character are not due to occult causes beyond the reach of ingenuity to modify or correct, nor are ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... high shelf; and beside them a motley collection of peg-tops, balls, kites, fishing-lines, marbles, half-eaten apples, and other confiscated property of idle urchins. Displayed on hooks upon the wall in all their terrors, were the cane and ruler; and near them, on a small shelf of its own, the dunce's cap, made of old newspapers and decorated with glaring wafers of the largest size. But, the great ornaments of the walls were certain moral sentences fairly copied in good round text, and well-worked sums in simple addition ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... upon the parade ground, by day and by night, he was made to feel that he belonged to an inferior and despised race, and that no excellence of deportment, diligence in study, or rank in his class could entitle him to the recognition accorded to every white dunce and rowdy. Yet with rare strength of character he persevered, and when, having maintained the standing of No. fifty in a class of seventy-six, he received his well-earned diploma, there was a round of ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... are to be fools, I would rather they were fools in little matters than in great; dulness turned up with temerity is a livery all the worse for the facings; and the most tremendous of all things is the magnanimity of the dunce. ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... salvation. The reviewer must review. But what, it may be asked, moves any follower of the Muses to satirise a scribbler? He seems to go out of his way to do so; for verse has naturally better associations. But the personal aggression on the wit by the dunce, may fairly instigate the wit to flay the dunce. Now he finds the object of his satire in the way. The fact is, that Dryden's poem and Pope's were both moved in this way. The grew out of personal quarrels. Are they on that account to be blamed? Not if the dunces, by them ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... with eager eyes. 'I see!' cried Tom, 'I see! You go and seek another mouse, And leave this mouse to me.' 'Indeed, I won't!' cried Jack at once; 'You surely take me for a dunce! ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... between the horns of a dilemma. Either our young chieftain must be a dunce, or we are rearing the Clever ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Church to-day: I am acquainted with about thirty in the drawing-room, and I am so proud I make all the Lords come up to me; one passes half an hour pleasant enough. We had a dunce to preach before the queen to-day, which often happens. Windsor is a delicious situation, but the town is scoundrel. The Duke of Hamilton would needs be witty, and hold up my train as I walked upstairs. It is an ill circumstance ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... Dr. Johnson, who was then in his sixty-ninth year, was willing to write the Lives to order. He added, indeed, three or four names to the list which had been given him; but he made no protest, and contented himself, as he told Boswell, in saying that a man was a dunce when he thought ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... oath? Can he leave all his wrongs to the future, and carry his heart in his cheek? Can he do an hour's work in a minute, and live on a sixpence a week? Can he courteously talk to an equal, and brow-beat an impudent dunce? Can he keep things in apple-pie order, and do half-a-dozen at once? Can he press all the springs of knowledge, with quick and reliable touch? And be sure that he knows how much to know, and knows how not to know too much? Does he know how ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... dunce onyway," said the boy. "He canna spell an easy word like 'examination,' an' he had twenty-two mistakes in his dictation test," he went on, and she was quick to note the air of priggish importance in ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... isles, by preparing a "Guide to Conversation," that for utility and correctness of idiom surpasses all previous attempts of the same kind. With it in one hand, and a bagful of Napoleons or Zecchini in the other, the biggest dunce in London—nay, even a schoolmaster—may travel from Boulogne to Naples and back, with the utmost satisfaction to himself, and with substantial profit to the people of these barbarous climes. The following is a specimen of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... inability and ill looks of my advocate, than to my cause. Again, thou art deprived of the force men of our cast give to arguments; for she won't let thee swear!-Art, moreover, a very heavy, thoughtless fellow; tolerable only at a second rebound; a horrid dunce at the impromptu. These, encountering with such a lady, are great disadvantages.—And still a greater is thy balancing, (as thou dost at present,) between old rakery and new reformation; since this ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... the Stoics' account was in the forenoon (for example) the worst man in the world is in the afternoon the best of men; and he that falls asleep a very sot, dunce, miscreant, and brute, nay, by Jove, a slave and a beggar to boot, rises up the same day a prince, a rich and a happy man, and (which is yet more) a continent, just, determined, and unprepossessed person;—not by shooting forth out of a young and tender body a downy beard or the sprouting ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... always had to smile when he saw the villagers tumbling through their doorways. They couldn't have done anything that would have suited him better. Had there been a single one among the prairie dogs that wasn't a dunce he would have run away from his hole, outside the village, to hide somewhere until Benny Badger left ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... poultry — that she may always keep a good table. I give her my new carriage and horses — that she may visit her friends in comfort. I give her my family bible — that she may live above the ill tempers and sorrows of life. I give my son Peter a hornbook — for I am afraid he will always be a dunce. ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... "hark to that lovely rascal in the cart, yonder—hark to him; Galen was an ass and Hippocrates a dunce beside this ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... of ideas would permit; but, unlike my brother, who was at this time at school, and whose rapid progress in every branch of instruction astonished and delighted his preceptors, I took no pleasure in books, whose use, indeed, I could scarcely comprehend, and bade fair to be as arrant a dunce as ever brought the blush of shame into the cheeks of anxious ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... and rendered the public less willing and less apt to be bullied or blackguarded out of its senses. Were Hazlitt alive now, and called, by any miserable scribbler in the "Athenaeum" or "Spectator," a dunce, he could laugh in his face; instead of retiring as he did, perhaps hunger-bitten, to bleed out his heart's blood in secret. Were Shelley now called in "Blackwood" a madman, and Keats a mannikin, they would be as much disturbed ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Ignoramus.— N. ignoramus, dunce; wooden spoon; no scholar. [insulting terms for ignorant person: see also imbecility 499, folly 501] moron, imbecile, idiot; fool, jerk, nincompoop, asshole [vulgar]. [person with superficial knowledge] dilettante, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... and the fire shot roaring out of the window after him, too late to eat him, and the crowd cheered the fireman and me, I did feel warm about the waistcoat, and, for the first time this ever so long, life seemed not quite ended. I felt there was a little bit of good left, that even a poor dunce like me could do, and she could approve—if she can look down and see me, as I hope ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... up to, inasmuch as they form part of previous roles, but the teeth and hair, the upright position, the power of speech, though all tolerably familiar, give him more trouble—for he is very stupid—a regular dunce in fact. Then comes his newer and more complex environment, and this puzzles him—arrests his attention—whereon consciousness springs into existence, as a spark from a ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the truth that the God of truth and integrity never left Himself without a witness. Our own literature also is scattered full of the Flatterer and his too willing dupes. "Of praise a mere glutton," says Goldsmith of David Garrick, "he swallowed what came. The puff of a dunce he mistook it for fame." "Delicious essence," exclaims Sterne, "how refreshing thou art to poor human nature! How sweetly dost thou mix with the blood, and help it through the most difficult and tortuous passages to the heart." "He that slanders me," says Cowper, ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... prosody; for although I'm not so sharp at my Latin as I was, still I couldn't use ignarus, as you see, without fairly committing myself as a scholar; and indeed, if I went to that, it would surely be the first time I have been mistaken for a dunce." ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... you received the Holy Spirit by the Law. As long as you were servants of the Law, you never received the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever heard of the Holy Ghost being given to anybody, be he doctor or dunce, as a result of the preaching of the Law. In your own case, you have not only learned the Law by heart, you have labored with all your might to perform it. You most of all should have received the Holy Ghost by the ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he, for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill |
