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More "Stupid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... traditional honesty of New England came into Miss Brown's face in an instant; and, although she, Yankee-like, estimated the value of the dust, and sighingly thought how much easier it was to win gold in that way than by forcing ideas into stupid little heads, she firmly declined the gold, and bade ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... says the registrar at the gate, roughly. "The other cannot go through," he says, pointing to de Vaudrey, who tries to look as stupid ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... in the plains," he said. "It is a barbaric and stupid instinct that makes them destroy their own property for the sake of hampering us. As we approach Moscow we shall find that the more civilized inhabitants of the villages, enervated by an easy life, rendered selfish by possession of ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... men and women who were merely square pegs in round holes, and vice versa. Most marriages were unhappy because the contracting parties were not properly mated. Religion was mostly superstition, science for the most part sciolism, popular education merely a means of forcing the stupid and repressing the bright, so that all the youth of the rising generation might conform to the same dull, dead level of democratic mediocrity. Life would soon become so monotonously uniform and so uniformly monotonous as to be scarce ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... made some noise, quiet as they tried to be. For before they reached the car the heavy man scrambled out, stared for a moment in stupid bewilderment, then threw both hands ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... who occupied nearly an hour. As the tumult from without increased, and the brick-bats fell thick and fast (no one, however, being injured) her eloquence kindled, her eye flashed, and her cheeks glowed, as she devoutly thanked the Lord that the stupid repose of that city had at length been disturbed by the force of truth. When she sat down, Esther Moore (a Friend) made a few remarks, then Lucretia Mott, and finally Abby Kelley, a noble young woman ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... for Brighton. Now as this honorable member was prosy and commonplace, not to say stupid, I should not detain my readers with any allusion to his speech, but as illustrating a prominent and very creditable feature of the debates in the House. That time is of some value, and that no remarks can be tolerated, unless they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... "A stupid trick, indeed," agreed Lieutenant Commander Mayhew, but the naval officer did not quite share the shipbuilder's confidence in the submarine boy's innocence. Mr. Mayhew had known of too many cases of naval apprentices ruined through ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... think of me, Peter," she went on. "I suppose you think I never can be serious—no, I won't say serious—conventional. But you're very stupid; we all of us can be, and must be sometimes. You asked me just now what I thought of your friend—well, I'll tell you. He is as different from you as possible. He has his thoughts, no doubt, but he prefers to be very tidy. He takes refuge in the things ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... for place bouquets for—for the girls," I said stupidly as I moved over a little nearer to him. Why it is that the minute that man comes near me I get warm and comfortable and stupid, and as young as Billy, and bubbly and sad and happy and cross is more than I can say, but I do. I never possibly know how to answer any remark that he may happen to make unless it is something that makes me lose my temper. His next remark ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... wearily. 'It would be stupid of me to refuse, Ask your questions, Mr Trent.' 'It's only this,' said Trent hurriedly. 'We know that your husband lately drew an unusually large sum of ready money from his London bankers, and was keeping it here. It is here now, in fact. Have you ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... Elias, as if of fixed intent to thwart him, stood always in the way, annihilating the unhappy youth with condescension, bidding him cheer up and amuse his Honour. Iskender heard his rattle with a stupid admiration which the Emir's applauding laughter made quite envious. He himself had fallen to the level of a mere serving-lad, to run his Honour's ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... administered by an indiscreet and lazy nurse, unknown by the parent), a low, irritative, febrile state is produced, gradually followed by loss of flesh, the countenance becoming pallid, sallow, and sunken, the eyes red and swollen, and the expression stupid and heavy, and the powers of the constitution at last becoming completely undermined. Such an object is to be seen daily among the poorer classes,—the miniature of a sickly aged ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... mother had died some years ago, an uncle remained—in the law line—nothing more distinctly honourable was hazarded of him, than that he was in the law line; and with him the daughter had lived. Emma guessed him to be the drudge of some attorney, and too stupid to rise. And all the grandeur of the connexion seemed dependent on the elder sister, who was very well married, to a gentleman in a great way, near Bristol, who kept two carriages! That was the wind-up of the history; that was ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... you stupid Caesar, you 'spose I got eyes all round," replied Jupiter, leaping on his legs with the empty sack hanging round his nook, and stooping down his head ready to receive the ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... Soul can fling the Dust aside And, smiling, on a Tiger blithely ride, Were't not a Shame—were't not a Shame for him In stupid Niger ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... steps onward brought me to a promontory on the shore, and revealed the brown archways of the decoy on the opposite bank. There was the paling behind which we had knelt to watch the snaring of the ducks; there was the hole through which "Trim," the terrier, had shown himself to rouse the stupid curiosity of the water-fowl; there, seen at intervals through the trees, was the winding woodland path along which Mary and I had traced our way to Dermody's cottage on the day when my father's cruel hand had torn us from each other. How wisely my good mother had shrunk ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... Grandma Padgett with her well-known decision. "I suppose he calls every vagabond that comes along a mover, and his own house is too clean for such gentry. I've heard about the Swopes and the Dutch being stupid, but a body has to travel before ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... preceding we spent at the Scala. The opera was stupid, and Madame Bellochi, who is the present primadonna, appeared to me harsh and ungraceful, when compared to Fodor. The new ballet however, amply indemnified us for the disappointment. Our Italian friends ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... prisoners," boomed the announcer, "and know there is nothing more to the rumored anti-social plot than this stupid chatter. Remain vigilant and you have nothing ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... Duchess of Newcastle, Fanshaw, and Shirley himself; that the common notion of a 'new manner' having been introduced from France after the Restoration, or indeed having come in at all, is not founded on fact, the only change being that the plays of Charles the Second's time were somewhat more stupid, and that while five of the seven deadly sins had always had free licence on the stage, blasphemy and profane swearing were now enfranchised to fill up the seven. As for the assertion that the new manner (supposing it to have ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... "Stupid fool! It was I who rang!" cried the count. "Did I not yesterday notify you through the majordomo that I should no longer call you with a whistle, but with ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... no better than I expected. In fact, it was worse. Girlie's second great-aunt stayed too, upon urging, and they all talked on and on. They were trying to teach her a little prayer, and she was so stupid! Over and over and over, and still she could not ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London. My road homeward lay through Oxford Street, and near the "Pantheon" I saw a druggist's shop. The druggist (unconscious minister of celestial pleasures!), as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be expected to look on a Sunday, and when I asked for the tincture of opium he gave it to me as any other man might do; and furthermore, out of my shilling returned to me what seemed to be a real copper half-penny, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... The place was very nearly dark, but he made out some six souls to be there. He found out that he was come to Lucefrith in West Greenland; the winter sickness was heavy on the place. The woman did not refuse to take one of his men, and did not agree. She seemed stupid with misery. He told her that he should send her a man, and went out. In every house in the Settlement was much the same story. Sickness and death on all hands, but no refusals. At the end of his rounds he had managed to place out all ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... cannot exactly understand what believing in him means. I am very stupid." Eleanor raised her head and looked ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... station-master's office," the latter continued, "and tried to persuade them to let me ride in the guard's van of your special, but he made a stupid fuss about it, so I thought I'd better come to you. Can I beg a seat in your compartment, or anywhere in the train, as far ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... seems to me, first, that a fair degree of intellect and imagination is necessary before this kind of disease is possible. It does not seize on merely stupid peasantries, but on those which belong to intellectual races, and in whom the faculties of imagination and the sensibilities of heart were originally strong and tender. In flat land, with fresh air, the peasantry may be almost mindless, but ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... anything? Recollecting Mrs Winn's story, she rather hoped she would. But Anna, her gay spirits quite checked, walked soberly on in perfect silence. It made her uncomfortable to remember that she had never undeceived Aunt Sarah about that fly. What a stupid little mistake it had been! Nothing wrong in what she had done at all, if she had only been quite open about it. What would Delia think of it, she wondered. She glanced sideways at her. What a very firm, decided mouth and chin she had: she looked as though she were never afraid of anything, and ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... the same time, there is nothing I would not do to relieve an afflicted person: and I believe as a matter of fact that one ought to go so far as to express compassion for the misfortunes of such a man, since the unhappy are so stupid that compassion does them more good than anything else in the world. But I also hold that one should confine one's self to professions of pity and be very careful not to feel any. Pity is a passion ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... Miss —— a nice person, "Don't say nice, child, 'tis a bad word." Once I said to Dr. Johnson, "Sir, that is a very nice person." "A nice person," he replied; "what does that mean? Elegant is now the fashionable term, but it will go out, and I see this stupid nice is to succeed to it. What does nice mean? Look in my Dictionary; you will see it ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... disagreeable truths, but you will not correct them. It is impossible to paint in stronger colors the horrors of human society, from which our ignorance and weakness promise themselves so many consolations. No one ever spent so much wit in trying to make us stupid; when we read your book we feel like going on all fours. Nevertheless, as it is more than sixty years since I lost the habit, I am conscious that it is impossible for me to take it up again, and I leave ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... him. "Neglecting me? Dear stupid! D'you suppose I'd sit down under it if you did? Now I'm going to change for dinner; and do please make yourself agreeable to Mrs ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... are usually beyond speech. They fall asleep at the table, on the stairs; they are carried to bed and there laid down as they are, unwashed, undressed; and the inanimate bundles of rags so lie until the mill summons them with its imperious cry before sunrise, while they are still in stupid sleep: ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... you mean," she said gaily. "Now don't be stupid yourself, so please change the subject. Do you know," she continued without giving me time to speak, "that the only way I can be reconciled to this place and the sights we have seen is to imagine I am in Canton or Peking, ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... itself plainly, the Mazzinists noisily. Europe must be very stupid, not to understand the one; very deaf, ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... fellow," exclaimed Fritz, in honest admiration of the proposal. "I declare I never thought of such a simple thing as that. Of course it can be done. What a stupid I was, not to think of it! That old goat must have knocked all my seven senses out of my head; for, I declare I never recollected that there was any other way of getting down from here save ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... visitor and present. Know, O dull and stupid! that it is a most beautiful young tiger, for our approaching games in the amphitheatre. Hear you that, Medon? Oh, what pleasure! I declare I shall not sleep a wink till I see it; they say it has ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... pleasantly, having no need, as a mere passer-by, to do otherwise, but if I had been obliged to have dealings with them, I should have begun by distrusting them outright. The man was of the common sort of ale-house keeper, ugly, beery, and stupid, and old enough to be the father of his wife, as I call her on account of the wedding ring on her finger. She was, for the place and post, a complete surprise, being a jaunty, townish, garish woman, dressed in decayed finery. He would have slit my throat ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... of matter,—not content, with Condillac, to get rid of spirit or mind,—proceeds to a miracle greater than any his Maker has yet vouchsafed to reveal. He, being then alive and in the act of writing, gets rid of himself altogether. Nay, he confesses he cannot reason with any one who is stupid enough to think he has a self. His words are: 'What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions or objects united together by certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with perfect simplicity and identity. If any one, upon serious and ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and the poetess also, what wonderful thing to say about anything so lovely, all in measured lines rhyming to perfection. She sighed once or twice when her head was on the pillow. It seemed amazing to her to be gifted as Jerry and his poetess were, and very stupid to be ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... Mason is obliged, by his tenure, to obey the moral Law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious Libertine. But though in ancient Times Masons were charged in every Country to be of the Religion of that Country or Nation, whatever it was, yet, 'tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Liberty to think and do and move as one wished. The real realm of freedom was found in experience to be much narrower than this in one direction and much broader in another. In matters of Truth and Faith and Beauty, the Ancient Law was inexcusably strait and modern law unforgivably stupid. It is here that the future and mighty fight for Freedom must and will be made. Here in the heavens and on the mountaintops, the air of Freedom is wide, almost limitless, for here, in the highest stretches, individual freedom harms no man, and, therefore, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... into old age, without our knowing where we are going, she drugs us with strong opiates, and so we stagger along with wide open eyes that see nothing until snow enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our comatose brains out of their stupid trances. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... speared too, and jumped and bucked about and got into the swamps. I now told Mr. Kennedy to sit down while I looked after the saddle bags, which I did, and when I came back again I saw blacks along with Mr. Kennedy. I then asked him if he saw the blacks with him. He was stupid with the spear wounds, and said, 'No.' I then asked him where was his watch? I saw the blacks taking away watch and hat as I was returning to Mr. Kennedy. Then I carried Mr. Kennedy into the scrub. He said 'Don't carry me a good way.' Then Mr. Kennedy looked this way, very ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... not stupid, Madame. I will proceed. Both of you, I assume, know something of the radio? Very good! You know that an etheric wave transmits the message, and that it is received and amplified so that it is within the range of the human ear. These waves were there when paleolithic man hunted ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... renowned, of the ancient Greeks and Romans, desiring especially to know whether they possessed any secrets which had been lost. His conclusion was, that the dishes served upon the tables of Lucullus, Augustus Caesar, and others, were "utterly bad and atrociously stupid." But he commended the decoration of their tables, the cups and vases of gold, the beautiful pitchers, the chased silver, the candles of white Spanish wax, the fabrics of silk whiter than the snow, and the beautiful flowers ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... a human being than a dwarf, Rug," he said. "But at least it is to the honour of our race that the most wicked dwarf is also the most stupid." ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... what secures the civil life, But pawns of children, and a wife? 810 That lie like hostages at stake, To pay for all men undertake; To whom it is as necessary As to be born and breathe, to marry; So universal all mankind, 815 In nothing else, is of one mind. For in what stupid age, or nation, Was marriage ever out of fashion? Unless among the Amazons, Or cloister'd friars, and vestal nuns; 820 Or Stoicks, who to bar the freaks And loose excesses of the sex, Prepost'rously wou'd ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... n't been "stupid," as Fan said, she would have had her wits about her, and let it pass; but, you see, Polly was an honest little soul and it never occurred to her that there was any need of concealment, so she answered in her straightforward way, "Oh, ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain considerations overlooked by youth. They have matter to communicate, be they never so stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature; classic in virtue of the speaker's detachment, studded, like a book of travel, with things we should not otherwise have learnt. In virtue, I have said, of the speaker's detachment,—and this is why, of two ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... what you told me yesterday, I feel I never wish to see you again. This is not anger; but it's incurable. I can't account for it, but it is there. How you could have been so stupid as to think I could remain with both you and Romer in the house with this knowledge between us, I simply can't understand. How could I help contrasting his generosity with your self-interested selfishness? I am not angry any more about Miss ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... a trackless forest inhabited by fierce, wild beasts; nor an enchanted wood with lords and ladies imprisoned in the trees; it was only an orchard—a commonplace old orchard—nothing more. Indians and robbers were stupid creatures of no importance whatever. There were no fairies, no giants, no soldiers left in the boyhood world. The rail fence war horse refused to charge. The apple tree ship was a wreck on the rocks of discontent. The ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... what she had to do was so simple that she would indeed have been stupid if she had been unable to do it. She gave all her attention to the task, but every now and again old Ninepins called ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... that scarcely ever leave us. I don't know whether they expect me to produce my spoils from my pocket and lay them upon the table, or whether one of them is a student of the lip language and hopes to learn the secrets of our conversation. Bah! They are very stupid, this professional potpourri of secret-service agents and detectives. Can't you hear them, how they will whisper in the lobby after we have left? 'Jocelyn Thew is entertaining a young Flying Corps man on leave from the front, the brother of Miss Beverley, who has already helped ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the opposite side on his intended landing-place just as his black form reared from the deep water and gained the shallows, into which I had waded knee-deep to meet him. I now experienced that pleasure as he stood sullenly eyeing me within fifteen paces. Poor stupid fellow! I would willingly, in my ignorance, have betted ten to one upon the shot, so certain was I of ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... "It is Mademoiselle de Retz, then." No, nor she either; you are extremely provincial. "Lord bless me," say you, "what stupid wretches we are! it is Mademoiselle de Colbert all the while." Nay, now you are still further from the mark. "Why, then, it must certainly be Mademoiselle de Crequy." You have it not yet. Well, I find I must tell ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... upon an uprising. The speech of Doolittle was variously received; many of the members were much interested; others who were in the higher degrees of the order were vexed beyond measure that Doolittle should be so stupid as to proclaim, in this public manner, a matter which really belonged to higher degrees of the organization to decide. One of the number, James Geary, a second-hand clothes dealer and broker on Wells street, who will receive further mention by ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... had promised survival and security on their own land: for they said to the Exiles, Get ye far from the Lord, for unto us is this land given in possession.(475) Through the early uneventful years of Sedekiah, this stupid and self-righteous party found time to gather strength, and in his fourth year must have been stirred towards action by the arrival in Jerusalem of messengers from the kings of Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre and Sidon, all of them states within the scope of Egyptian intrigues against Babylon.(476) For ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... 107 deg. F. The pulse beats from 80 to 100 a minute. Feeding and rumination are suspended. Chills and muscular tremors may appear and the skin show uneven temperature. The ears and base of the horns are cold, the coat staring. The animals are dull and stupid and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... still increased. People's faces grew red with congestion in the growing heat. Each had the stupidly gaping mouth of the ignoramus who judges painting, and between them they indulged in all the asinine ideas, all the preposterous reflections, all the stupid spiteful jeers that the sight of an original work can possibly elicit from ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... no lack of wit; but to-day I was unfortunately its butt. And what was my fault?—only my stupid modesty. The conversation was carried on in the Danish language; some members of our party spoke French and others German, but I purposely abstained from availing myself of their acquirements, in order not to ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... this was not very important. He must be careful, but do nothing to suggest that he understood the risk he ran. If his antagonists thought him stupid, so much the better. He saw the difficulty of playing what Jake called a lone hand against men skilled in the intricate game; but he could not ask for help until he was sure of his ground. Besides, he must find a ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... of the Middle Ages was practicable, just because the rational treatment of all subjects by the humanists had trained the historical spirit. In the fifteenth century this spirit had so far penetrated the history even of the individual cities of Italy that the stupid fairy tales about the origin of Florence, Venice, and Milan vanished, while at the same time, and long after, the chronicles of the North were stuffed with this fantastic rubbish, destitute for the most part of all poetical value, and invented as ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... it. There is nothing to interest or amuse them; no sport; no castles or factories to visit; no adventurous expeditions; no gay music in the morn, and no light dance in the evening. There is always danger of the day becoming a course of heavy meals and stupid walks, for the external scene and all teeming circumstances, natural and human, though full of concern to you, are to ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... have pop-corn to-night all so fast!" he says, doggedly, in the midst of a momentary lull that has fallen on a game of whist. And then the oldest Mills girl, who thinks cards stupid anyhow, says: "That's so, Billy; and we're going to have it, too; and right away, for this game's just ending, and I shan't submit to being bored with another. I say 'pop-corn' with Billy! And after that," she continues, rising and addressing the party ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... turned with relief to the thought of Pinkerton waiting for me, as I knew, with unwearied affection, and regarding me with a respect that I had never deserved, and might therefore fairly hope that I should never forfeit. The inequality of our relation struck me rudely. I must have been stupid, indeed, if I could have considered the history of that friendship without shame—I who had given so little, who had accepted and profited by so much. I had the whole day before me in London, and I determined, at least in words, to set the balance somewhat straighter. Seated in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... speak to her, for all the rest had moved away a little, and left them standing together; and when he did so, his voice faltered, and his manner was so much agitated, that she must have been blind, indeed, and stupid, not ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... witnesses of this scene listened with stupid surprise to this address. The women busied themselves in binding up the deep gash in Constantia's forehead; the men, in raising Monthault, and lifting up the carriage. By this time the out-riders were come up, who, faithful ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the abnormally foolish is not the abnormally clever, which is obviously a matter in dispute. That which can condemn the abnormally foolish is the normally foolish. It is when he begins to say and do things that even stupid people do not say or do, that we have a right to treat him as the exception and not the rule. It is only because we none of us profess to be anything more than man that we have authority to treat him as ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... thing!" exclaimed Geraldine, kissing her, "no wonder you attract the really interesting men and leave me the dreadful fledglings! It's bad of you; and I don't see why I'm stupid enough to have such an attractive woman for my closest"—a kiss—"dearest friend! Even Duane is villain enough to tell me that he finds you overwhelmingly attractive. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... university graduates, and the like, would be unceremoniously set down by divine wisdom as fools; and surely if account is taken of the whole compass and duration of our being, and of all our relations to things and persons seen and unseen, nothing can be more stupid than godlessness, however cultured. The word literally means coarse or thick, and may suggest the idea of stolid insensibility as the last stage in the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... you were stupid enough to say to your wife, "To-morrow, my dear" (sometimes she knows it two days beforehand), "I have got to get up early." Unfortunate Adolphe, you have especially proved the importance of this appointment: "It's to—and to—and ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... but he confessed that it grew easier as he saw more of Miss Casey. He attributed his reform to her entirely. She had made the semi-political, semi-social organizations to which he belonged appear stupid, and especially so when he lost his money playing poker in the club-room (for the club had only one room), when he might have put it away for her. He liked to talk with her about the neighbors in the tenement, and his chance of political advancement to the position of a ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... our dome at Washington; but externally I think ours is the more graceful, though the effect inside is tame and flat in comparison. This is owing partly to its lesser size and height, and partly to our hard, transparent atmosphere, which lends no charm or illusion, but mainly to the stupid, unimaginative plan of it. Our dome shuts down like an inverted iron pot; there is no vista, no outlook, no relation, and hence no proportion. You open a door and are in a circular pen, and can look ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... in the gospel chain, I pity the inhabitants of the earth when he gets loose again. After reading the description of the millennial reign, as it shall be, as described by the Prophet Isaiah, can anyone be so stupid as to believe that we are now living in that holy day? Shame on him who would deceive and tamper with the souls of men! The gentleman who told ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... insults, and affronts on you, or something to that effect? He has done the same by me. He is made of venomous insults and affronts, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. Are you so hopeful or so stupid, as not to know that he and the other will treat your application with contempt, and light their cigars ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... days when religion is nothing more than a useful means to some, and a poesy to others. Devotion causes a moral ophthalmia. By some providential grace, it takes from souls on the road to eternity the sight of many little earthly things. In a word, pious persons, devotes, are stupid on various points. This stupidity proves with what force they turn their minds to celestial matters; although the Voltairean Chevalier de Valois declared that it was difficult to decide whether stupid people became naturally pious, or whether piety had the effect of making intelligent ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... you that neither they nor I were visibly disturbed. The fact is, when a fellow is sure to be put to death, he is either dramatic—as this madman was—or quietly undemonstrative. Martyr! Nonsense! It was simply stupid. I don't want to talk about it. Those mischief-makers in Congress will howl over it." They did, and secession ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... provoked mercy will no longer strive, but never too late for men to repent in this world." I told Atkins every word the priest had said, who then parted from us to walk with his wife, while we discoursed with the rest. But these were very stupid in religious matters; yet all of them promised to do their endeavours to make their wives turn Christians; and upon which promises the priest married the three couple. But as Atkins was the only sincere convert ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... prompts to these delightful acts, and that the great God of nature gifted us with the powers necessary for their performance. But, as the world has chosen to brand them with its censure, men of prudence, like myself, whilst apparently conforming outwardly to such stupid prejudices, know how in secret to fully enjoy them. I am blessed in your darling aunt with a wife who fully understands and humours my desires. She is rarely splendid in the glorious beauties of her body, and in temperament ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... boat was pulled up, and presently they saw two men coming from the sands and into the light of their fire,—ragged, dirty; one shabby old garment—a pair of tow pantaloons—on each; bareheaded, barefooted,—great, clumsy feet, stupid and heavy-looking heads; slouching walk, stooping shoulders; something eager yet deprecating ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... denied this, but was taken to the princes, who flogged him and flung him into a vault in the house of Jonathan, the Secretary. After many days he was sent for by the king who asked, Is there Word from the Lord? There is, he replied, and, as if drumming a lesson into a stupid child's head, repeated his message, Thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the King of Babylon. He asked what he had done to be treated as he had been, and, by contrast, where were the prophets who had said that the Babylonians would not come to Judah—his ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... cross of English and Yankee, and therefore first cousins to us both. "Perhaps," said he, "that 'ere Eagle might with more propriety have been taken off as perched on an anchor, instead of holding it in his claws, and I think it would have been more nateral; but I suppose it was some stupid foreign artist that made that 'ere blunder, I never seed one yet that was equal to our'n. If that Eagle is represented as trying what he can't do, it's an honourable ambition arter all, but these Bluenoses won't try what they can do. They put me in mind of a ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... on,' answers the ghost. 'I was alive when it struck eight bells in the middle watch, and its now only just gone two. I take it it is the morning watch, for I heard it strike just before that stupid sentry put out his light, and for some reason or other I couldn't make out, took to ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... Cetinje. We visited the director that Easter Monday morning, and were received unofficially in his quarters. We always had great fun with that man—a pompous individual filled to overflowing with the importance of his position, and, not unlike men similarly afflicted, most aggressively stupid. ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... surpass the stars; Your mouth is like the bow of Cupid; Your rose-ting'd cheeks no wrinkle mars— Yet why are you so sweetly stupid? ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... visible consort, though far to the north and the south its brethren and sisters dominated their realms. Of all the peaks from California to {p.103} Frazer's River, this one before me was royalest. Mount Regnier[5] Christians have dubbed it, in stupid nomenclature perpetuating the name of somebody or nobody. More melodiously the Siwashes call it Tacoma,—a generic term also applied to all snow peaks. Tacoma, under its ermine, is a crushed volcanic dome, or an ancient volcano fallen in, and ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... to speak: but he stamped with his foot, and said, Begone! I tell you: I cannot bear this stupid romantic folly. ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... seemed very stupid to—the gentleman who took me in," remarked Fan. "Can you tell me something about him, Mrs. Travers? Is he a friend of yours ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... me is, how are we to get it sent to such an out-o'-the-way place—Traitor's Trap! It's a bad name, and the stupid fellow makes no mention of any known town near to it, though he gives the post-office. If I only knew its exact whereabouts I might get some one to take the money to him, for I have agents in many parts ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... there is no evidence against her. You just find two or three of my stupid things in her room, but that is nothing. French maids always take things like that—one expects it. But I am not angry. You think what is quite—quite silly, but you do something which is quite right." And then, turning to the professor, she ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... to say this—that I am very sorry indeed now that I was so tiresome and stupid. I think I did really believe your arguments all along. But I did not want to believe them. Do you see now why ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... raved enormous folly, Of Baptisms, Sunday-schools, and Graves, 615 'Twould make George Colman melancholy To have heard him, like a male Molly, Chanting those stupid staves. ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... utmost, by being shouldered about, and elbowed right and left, on all sides. Some of these had muddy sandals and umbrellas, and stained garments: having trudged in from the country. The faces of the greater part were as coarse and heavy as their dress; their dogged, stupid, monotonous stare at all the glory and splendour, having something in it, half miserable, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... hopes and my ambitions; but you mighty soon got sick of that—you yawned, you were sleepy, and you wanted to go about; you thought it was silly staying cooped up like that, and seeing no one, going nowhere! It was stupid for you, you were bored to death, you wanted noise and excitement, to spend money, to see and be seen,—as if that game was worth the candle in a God-forsaken hole of a place like Mount Hope! You killed my ambition then and there; I saw it was no use. You wanted the results, but you wouldn't pay ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... morning), "and his bald head and de boys who call um names, and de bars eat em up, and serve um right," says Gumbo. But as for my lady, when discoursing with her cousin about the old porter, "Pooh, pooh! Stupid old man!" says she; "past his work, he and his dirty old dogs! They are as old and ugly as those old fish in the pond!" (Here she pointed to two old monsters of carp that had been in a pond in Castlewood gardens for centuries, according ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unceasingly. 'I have been recommended for the St. Anna Cross for the expedition. Now I shall stay here a bit until we start on the campaign. It's capital here. What women! Well, and how are you getting on? I was told by our captain, Startsev you know, a kind-hearted stupid creature.... Well, he said you were living like an awful savage, seeing no one! I quite understand you don't want to be mixed up with the set of officers we have here. I am so glad now you and I will be able to see something of one another. I have put up at the Cossack corporal's ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... remember the rest, but it is quite long. But he wants to make a song about Salo now, because he is so awfully nice. He said it as soon as Salo went away today. We all like him, and Bruno said that if he made a stupid song he would tear ...
— Maezli - A Story of the Swiss Valleys • Johanna Spyri
... hotly. "He's like a pillar of sanity and law in this house of shams and swollen vanities, where people stalk about with a sort of madhouse dignity, each one fancying himself a king or a pope. If you could have heard that woman talk of him! Why, she thinks him stupid, bigoted, blinded by middleclass prejudices. She talked about his having no aesthetic sense and insisted that her artists had always shown him tolerance. I don't know why it should get on my nerves so, I'm sure, but her stupidity and assurance are enough ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... every "superstition," every anodyne and nepenthe offered to the inmates of this House of the Incurable. Such "sprinkling with holy water," such "rendering ourselves stupid," is the only alternative. Anything else is the insight of the hero, or the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... kindness to take advantage of the etiquette which dispenses with introductions at morning calls. Many a witty, talented person has had a stupid bore pursue him upon such an introduction, and even the one necessary conversation following an introduction is a painful effort, owing to the entire uncongeniality ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... tackle and marbles and kites Were waiting them there in this Land of Delights. They dwelt on the Island of Endless Play For five long years; then one sad day A strange, dark ship sailed up to the strand, And 'Ho! for the voyage to Stupid Land,' The captain cried, with a terrible noise, As he seized the frightened and struggling boys And threw them into the dark ship's hold; And off and away sailed the captain bold. They vainly begged him to let them out, He answered ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... surely far more than a match, in this respect, for the simple- looking lad who stood there staring at him so solemnly. Yes, diplomacy was undoubtedly the way out of this unfortunate scrape; the Englishman must be made to realise that the capture of Nombre was a stupid mistake, out of which neither honour nor profit was to be gained; and once convinced of this, he would perhaps withdraw himself and his forces peaceably. These thoughts flashed through Don Sebastian's brain while George was still speaking; and by the time that the latter had finished, ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... two hundred Arabs were overthrown. The shock was stunning to both sides, and for perhaps ten wonderful seconds no man heeded his enemy. Terrified horses wedged in the crowd, bruised and shaken men, sprawling in heaps, struggled, dazed and stupid, to their feet, panted, and looked about them. Several fallen Lancers had even time to re-mount. Meanwhile the impetus of the cavalry carried them on. As a rider tears through a bullfinch, the officers forced their way through ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... prisoner, fearing that his presence might incommode his host, asked to be removed to another tent, a captain and fifty men were ordered to guard him. In the morning an Indian, alone and apparently unarmed, loitered about the entrance, and the stupid sentinel let him pass in. He immediately drew a sword from under a sort of cloak which he wore, and tried to stab Dieskau; but was prevented by the Colonel to whom the tent belonged, who seized upon him, took away his sword, and pushed him out. As soon as his wounds would permit, Dieskau was carried ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Betty was still very backward sometimes in the matter of r's—"Cywil's got to be my chum—don't be such a stupid Nancy—er—Polly. He's got to try to murder me in the middle of the night to get the pearl. Look here, we've only just put you in to amuse you a bit, we can just as well do ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... home and friends, your Honorable Strawness, but they were so quiet and happy and comfortable that I found them dismally stupid. Nothing in that corner of Oz interested me, but I believed that in other parts of the country I would find strange people and see new sights, and so I set out upon my wandering journey. I have been a wanderer for nearly a full year, ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... over plains green as an emerald with the young verdure of April, till at length they saw, far as the eye could reach, the boundless prairie alive with herds of buffalo. The animals were in one of their tame, or stupid moods; and they killed nine or ten of them without the least difficulty, drying the best parts of the meat. They crossed the Colorado on a raft, and reached the banks of another river, where one of the party named Hiens, a German of Wuertemberg, and ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... both proud and stupid, therefore more than ordinarily slow to understand what he was unprepared ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... met people of both sexes who were neither Hindoos nor Mohammedans, but bore a strong resemblance to the Chinese. The men were short, stout and muscular, and their faces wore a stolid and almost stupid look, which was not at all improved by their long black hair or by their filthy garments and persons. The women, however, were rather good-looking, not concealing the face as in the plains. These people ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... I had found apparently asleep, and, unless he acted a part with supreme skill, he was a stupid and ignorant boor, and as innocent of the murder as myself. There was still the Russian princess whom he had expected to find, or had pretended to expect to find, in the same room with the murdered man. I judged that she must now be either upstairs ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis
... clearing the snow from the horses' hoofs. The driver, stupid or dazed, sat on the box, helpless as a ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... a conjugal blister well conceived, for this husband neither neglected to rear his family nor to invite to his house neighbors who were tiresome, stupid or old; and if he spent the winter in Paris, he flung his wife into the vortex of balls and races, so that she had not a minute to give to lovers, who are usually the fruit ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... have barred his way, not to the tree of life, but to death. The awful mystery that a human will can, and the yet sadder mystery that it does, set itself against the divine, is never more unintelligible, never so stupid, and never so tragic as when God says, 'Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?' and we say, 'Why need I die? I will ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... fellow-citizens? Are their rights alone not to be guaranteed by the application of those great principles upon which all our constitutions are founded? We are told by the greatest of British orators and statesmen that at the commencement of the War of the Revolution the most stupid men in England spoke of "their American subjects." Are there, indeed, citizens of any of our States who have dreamed of their subjects in the District of Columbia? Such dreams can never be realized by any agency of mine. The people of the District of Columbia are not the subjects ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... women; it was the place where the errant males rejoined their wives and children, and hence the women became the owners of the homes and the heads of households. For as yet the men were occupied in fighting. The clumsy and the stupid among them were killed soonest; the fine hand, the quick eye—these prevailed age by age. Tools and weapons were doubtless fashioned by these fighters, but for destruction; the male's attention was directed mainly by his own desires. And may we not ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... its appearance,—rude as they were in a moral sense,—were not so intellectually stupid as to mistake for a star that speck of yellowish hue, struggling to reveal itself against the almost kindred ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... old friend who was with him. 'He is a cynical old fool; and yet, I assure you, my dear M. Lesec, that I had Leonidas got up expressly for him, thinking to tickle his old republican fancies, for to my mind it is as stupid a play as Germanicus, though I contrive to produce an effect with some of its high-sounding patriotic passages; and I thought the worthy David would have recognised his own picture vivified. But he will not come: ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... among them all alone, His silly, stupid wife; The world seems tasteless, dead and done— An ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... reprovingly. "Father will come to look for us if you do not hasten. Why did not Luretta give you back your shoes and stockings?" she asked as Anna came slowly down the path. "It's a stupid game for her to keep them, I will say;" and she put a protecting arm across her sister's shoulder. "But do not feel bad, Dan, dear; she will bring them over before bedtime, if the storm holds ...
— A Little Maid of Old Maine • Alice Turner Curtis
... bear watching," thought the principal grimly. "He's my best pupil, and one of the most mischievous. I'd rather have any youngster mischievous than stupid." ...
— The Grammar School Boys of Gridley - or, Dick & Co. Start Things Moving • H. Irving Hancock
... man with a very heavy purse and a very empty head, whose contributions to the county papers were never read but to be laughed at. Not having the slightest personal knowledge of the author, I answered innocently enough, 'Oh, he's a stupid, conceited fellow. It is a pity he has not some friend to tell him what a fool he makes of himself, whenever he appears in print. His poetry is such dull trash, that I am certain he must pay the Editor of the paper for allowing him ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... doubtless howled around the pyramids and a black bear from our own forests are fellow-prisoners and most excellent friends. Are there any two living creatures who have so few sympathies that they cannot possibly be friends? Here sits a great white bear whom common observers would call a very stupid beast, though I perceive him to be only absorbed in contemplation; he is thinking of his voyages on an iceberg, and of his comfortable home in the vicinity of the north pole, and of the little cubs whom he left rolling in the eternal snows. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Orient. He laid stress upon the fact that we need China more than she needs the United States. As other nations are studying her people and her resources we are letting things drift. He said, "United States is pursuing the same stupid psychology that originally caused England to lose her trade in China to the painstaking, persistent Germans. There are few Americans that can name readily six Chinese cities. China favors America because she stands for Liberty, Fraternity, Equality ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer
... that in any critical or reproachful sense, Gladys. Don't you dare think I do—not for one moment! Do you hear me? Well then! If you are stupid enough to misunderstand me I'll put a perfectly horrid pair of ears on you!... I've made a very dainty pair of ears for you, dear; I only said that to frighten you. You and I like that man up there—tremendously, don't we? And we're very grateful to him for—for a great many happy ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... me that was pretty stupid. There would have been another man sent in Major Connel's place, and we were warned that something big was in ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... said. "I don't trust this crazy little pier of yours one atom. Any one of these boards looks capable of crumbling and letting one through.—And, Damaris, please don't be cross with me or I shall be quite miserable. Forgive my having asked you stupid questions. I was a blundering idiot. Of course, what I heard last night was just some echo, some trick of wind or of the river and tide. I was half asleep and imagined the whole thing most likely, magnified sounds as one ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... quite wrong. Elsie had not tired of her idea, but she was dreadfully afraid stupid little Duncan might unwittingly betray them, and so, with the craftiness which soon comes to those who plot, she was bent upon turning his mind quite away from her schemes until the time came for action. She even went so far as to talk about all sorts of things in ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... proposed new Constitution. You are sensible, Sir, that the Seeds of Aristocracy began to spring even before the Conclusion of our Struggle for the natural Rights of Men, Seeds which like a Canker Worm lie at the Root of free Governments. So great is the Wickedness of some Men, & the stupid Servility of others, that one would be almost inclined to conclude that Communities cannot be free. The few haughty Families, think They must govern. The Body of the People tamely consent & submit to be their Slaves. This unravels the Mystery of Millions being enslaved by the few! But I must ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... find interesting and valuable facts where other investigators have succeeded, their blundering ignorance is now assisted by newspaper mendacity. The New York Times, of Aug. 22, concludes an extremely stupid article on this subject, by the following paragraph, which, if the writer gave any indications of intelligence, would be set down as a pure specimen of mendacity, but is more probably a specimen of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... desperate struggle. He sounded his rattle for assistance; two of them, who evidently had been garroting and robbing the third, ran, leaving him lying motionless on the tow-path. He had either been choked until he was insensible, or else he had been made so stupid by drink as to be incapable of thought or action. Policeman Johnson coming up, they gave chase to the other two who, however, made good their escape. They carried the one who had been assaulted to No.—— Station, where he was recognized by Sergeant Jameson as a man ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... I demanded. "Drink?" "Hush-sh-sh! Mon cher, you are stupid. It is jealousy, jealousy, my friend, with perhaps an occasional over-dose of chloral. Chloral is the favorite prescription now-a-days, you must remember that. But jealousy will do, jealousy will do. It will accomplish a great deal, will jealousy; will destroy ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... maybe some of this egghead stuff doesn't get through to me but I'm not stupid, see? You got the stuff, haven't you? You gave ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... brig, it being Sunday, as a matter of curiosity; and there was enough there to gratify it. Though no larger than the Pilgrim, she had five or six officers, and a crew of between twenty and thirty; and such a stupid and greasy-looking set, I certainly never saw before. Although it was quite comfortable weather, and we had nothing on but straw hats, shirts, and duck trowsers, and were barefooted, they had, every man of them, double-soled boots, coming up to the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... his fast by throwing up his food and continued it to the end; yet because he had talked about a fast it was supposed to be a case of suicide of the stupid kind; and though the post-mortem revealed a diseased gall-bladder, the doctors who made it did nothing to lessen the suicidal impression, and the death from "starvation" appeared under large headlines ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... fanfares of poetic chivalry. Yes, faith, enthusiasm, love, were so many cheats, so many lies. All beings who, like himself, were worshippers of the ideal, all dreamers of better things, all lovers of love, were inevitably doomed to deception, treason, and the stupid ironies of fate. And, full of anger against himself, his pessimism of to-day sneering at his confidence of yesterday, he abandoned himself with delight to his bitterness, and he took keen joy in repeating to himself that the secret of happiness ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... penetrating author of the "Spirit of the Laws," "would be equal if their education were, too. Test women in the talents that have not been enfeebled by the way they have been educated, and we will then see if we are so strong." "It is in spite of our stupid system of education," declared Aime Martin, more than fifty years ago, "that women have an idea, a mind and a soul." And even the more radical utterances of the late Eugene Pelletan find an echo. "By ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... and settled upon a little estate in Westchester County, near New York. Until the age of thirty, he was not in the least a bookman, but a healthy, man of action. Then, as the well-known anecdote goes, he exclaims to his wife, after reading a stupid English novel, "I believe I could write a better story myself." "Precaution" (1820) was the result, but whether it was better than the unknown English book, no one can now say. It was bad enough. Yet the next year Cooper published "The Spy," one of the finest of his ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... on angrily. "O.K. Then let's suppose that Bossard really was stupid. He could have been framed easily, couldn't he? He could have been set up as a ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... working of his blind machine. It is an evidence of some latent nobility in the Greek character, in the midst of that levity with which all Europe taxes it, that never, except once, were the secrets of the society betrayed; nor was there the least ground for jealousy offered either to the stupid Moslems, in the very centre of whom, and round about them, the conspiracy was daily advancing, or even to the rigorous police of Moscow, where the Heteria had its head-quarters. In the single instance of treachery which occurred, it happened that the Zantiote, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... A stupid plan that fools project, Not only will not take effect, But proves destructive in the end To those that bungle and pretend. Some hungry Dogs beheld an hide Deep sunk beneath the crystal tide, Which, that they might extract for food, They strove to drink up all the flood; But ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... be kept from the immense solace of making a clean breast to her former ally of her stupid dawdling and trifling, and the retribution which had at once befallen her. "Did father tell you, Mr. Robinson, that I have failed in my examination?" she began plaintively. "Yes, I have, and it was all my own fault. I was too silly; I would not pull myself together ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... the sympathy of the peasants that explains the union of the Bolsheviki with those who are called the "Socialist-Revolutionists of the Left" (for the name Socialist-Revolutionist spoke to the heart of the peasant), who played the stupid and shameful role of followers of the Bolsheviki, with a blind ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... said the stupid wretch, 'then I'll say you're coming, and he may stretch the large canvas; for the skipper says he likes a wet jacket when he has ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... these houses were not peculiar people at all, but precisely such persons as those among whom I lived. As there are among us, just so among them; there were here those who were more or less good, more or less stupid, happy and unhappy. The unhappy were exactly such unhappy beings as exist among us, that is, unhappy people whose unhappiness lies not in their external conditions, but in themselves, a sort of unhappiness which it is impossible to right by any sort ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... England. Her father, who died before her marriage, had been a sea-captain, and a man of great wealth, and was looked upon as a kind of autocrat, whose opinion was a law and whose friendship was an honor. When a young lady, Miss Geraldine had chafed at the stupid town and the stupider people, as she designated the citizens of Allington, and had only been happy when the house at Grey's Park was full of guests after the manner of English houses, where hospitality is dispensed on a larger scale than is common in America. She had been abroad, and had spent some ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... weakened, does, with the assistance of food, drive away hunger, and so recruiting itself recovers its former vigour? And being thus refreshed, it finds a pleasure in that conflict; and if the conflict is pleasure, the victory must yet breed a greater pleasure, except we fancy that it becomes stupid as soon as it has obtained that which it pursued, and so neither knows nor rejoices in its own welfare. If it is said that health cannot be felt, they absolutely deny it; for what man is in health that does not perceive it when ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... now be prepared to learn that it was not Mr. Timothy Cockayne, late of Lambeth, who had planned the family's journey to Paris. Mrs. Cockayne had projected the expedition. Everybody went to Paris now-a-days, and you looked so very stupid if you had to confess in a drawing-room that you had never been. She was sure there was not another family on Clapham Common, of their station, who had not been. Besides, it would exercise the girls' French. If Mr. Cockayne could only consent to tear himself away from ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... for. The hint of least moment, as you may imagine it, is often pregnant with events of the greatest. Be implicit. Am I not your general? Did I ever lead you on that I brought you not off with safety and success?—Sometimes to your own stupid astonishment. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... could compare, And won her, too, with all her lands, By force of looks and might of hands From Ireland's green and lovely isle He carried off the Queen in style. He made proud Alfin's weapon dull, And flattened down his stupid skull— This did the bold King Gundalf do When he went o'er the sea ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... that he was too stupid to feel a passion as intellectual as love, and that he was afraid he was destined by nature to remain ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the stupid understanding of some one or two of them, decreed that their good intentions also should be taken from them. The log-book disappeared, and the strictest search failing to bring it to light, the conclusion was reached that it had been fed to the fires among the wreckage of the ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... to see her, and for a time cried softly on her bosom, while Mrs. Noah's tears kept company with hers. Not a word was said of Guy, except when Jessie told her he was gone to Boston, and it was so stupid at ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... calculated), beheld a pretty, charming face, large Irish blue eyes (a bit startled at this moment), and a head of hair as shiny-black as polished Chinese blackwood. The match, still burning, curved like a falling star through the window. "A thousand pardons, madam! Very stupid of me. Quite evident that I am lost. I beg your pardon again, and hope I have not ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... before him a stick to which had been tied a number of white feathers. As they approached us they began to leap and dance to the accompaniment of a weird rising and falling chant. They certainly did not look very formidable, with their heterogeneous mixture of clothing, their round, black, stupid faces and their straight hair. Most of them were armed simply with bows and arrows, but three carried specimens ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... [54-*] Of all stupid appliances of man to his horse, the most dense is the Austrian and south German mode of driving the einspanner or single horse or a leader. The rein goes single from the driver's hand, and divides into two at the horse's ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... in the same house with her husband, whose third wife she was, they had long been separated, only meeting at their joyless meals. Mrs. Ready considered her husband a very stupid animal, and did not fail to make both him and her friends acquainted with ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... donations of so many countries in it. Who could bear to be the first that should set that temple on fire? who could be willing that these things should be no more? and what is there that can better deserve to be preserved? O insensible creatures, and more stupid than are the stones themselves! And if you cannot look at these things with discerning eyes, yet, however, have pity upon your families, and set before every one of your eyes your children, and wives, and parents, who will be gradually ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... is good writing, as the papers show. But the case of my companion in the train is the case of thousands and tens of thousands of young fellows who for the first time in their lives want to write and discover that they have no gift of self-expression. It is not that they are stupid. It is that somehow the act of writing paralyses them. They cannot condense the atmosphere in which they live to the concrete word. You have to draw them out. They need a friendly lead. When they have got that they can talk well enough, but without ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... if she does not, what steps can I take to find her?—Maurice is at Deauville with the rest, and I do not know Miss Sharp's home address—nor if she has a telephone—probably not. My heart beats—I have every feeling of excitement as stupid as a woman! I analyse it all now, how mental emotion reacts on the physical—even the empty socket of my eye aches—I could hardly control my voice when Burton began a conversation about my orders for ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... superb with indignation. With her ardent, half-wild nature she seemed to accept the charge of murder composedly enough, but that of theft exasperated her. They knew it, and that was why folks, from stupid malice, often cast the accusation in ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... a group of tatterdemalions, seated in the shade of some baskets of charcoal, a broad-shouldered and stupid looking boy rose to meet him. His face was streaked with red and his neck was scratched; he bore the traces of a recent fight. He walked along beside Tchelkache, and said ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... exclaimed the little tailor, "you mean because I have once or twice mentioned that Monsieur Alphonse owed me a few thousand francs. It was very stupid of me to speak so. Monsieur Alphonse has not only paid me the trifle he was owing, but I know that he has also satisfied a number of other creditors. I have done ce cher beau monsieur great injustice, and I beg you never to give him a hint ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... Father, Is at the Nuptiall of his sonne, a guest That best becomes the Table: Pray you once more Is not your Father growne incapeable Of reasonable affayres? Is he not stupid With Age, and altring Rheumes? Can he speake? heare? Know man, from man? Dispute his owne estate? Lies he not bed-rid? And againe, do's nothing But what he did, being childish? Flo. No good Sir: He has his health, and ampler strength indeede ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... blood is impeded in the viscera; he acts more from instinct than reflection; the nervous fibres are too relaxed or too tense, and he finds a difficulty in moving them; if you heighten his sensations, you awaken new ideas in this stupid being; and as we cure the stupid by increasing his sensibility, we may believe that a more vivacious fancy may be promised to those who possess one, when the mind and the body play together in one harmonious accord. Prescribe ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Muse and I. Since thus I wander from my first intent, Nor am that grave adviser which I meant, Take this short lesson from the god of bays, And let my friend apply it as he please: Beat not the dirty paths where vulgar feet have trod, But give the vigorous fancy room. For when, like stupid alchymists, you try To fix this nimble god, This volatile mercury, The subtile spirit all flies up in fume; Nor shall the bubbled virtuoso find More than fade insipid mixture left behind.[6] While thus I write, vast shoals of critics come, And ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... at a sudden crackling report that resounded through the lonely building, followed by a strange continued sputtering. He went slowly into the corridor and to Jonathan's office. At the door he stopped, staring in stupid surprise at the intent kneeling figure dimly outlined in the glow of hot metal and the bluish crackling flame. Then, with a vague notion that it was the wrong thing to do but his overwrought brain not quite grasping the situation, he took ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... but pleasures are very nice things," he said. "And doesn't it seem obvious now that you are coming to Munich with me? It's a purely selfish suggestion on my part. After being with you it will be very stupid to be alone there. But it would be so ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... as others do; I've tried, and failed. Last winter, when Prue made me go about, though people probably thought me a stupid little thing, moping in corners, I was enjoying myself in my own way, and making discoveries that have been very useful ever since. I know I'm whimsical, and hard to please, and have no doubt the fault was in myself, but I was disappointed ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... know," said he to Mrs. Endicott, "her son was one of the party of tourists that Folsom sent to jail, and I never once connected the names. Absurd and stupid ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... fine specimen of the real French savant. He was small, and his face was decidedly German, with the tete carree which one sees so often in Germany, only lighted up by a constant sparkle, which is distinctively French. I must have seemed very stupid to him when I tried to explain to him what I really wanted to do in Paris. He told me himself afterwards that he could not make me out at first. I wanted to study the Veda, but I had told him at the same time that I thought the Vedic ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... right merrily. Juchhe! Juchhe! Juchheisa! Heisa! He! So fiddle-bow was braying. Our swain amidst the circle press'd, He push'd a maiden trimly dress'd, And jogg'd her with his elbow; The buxom damsel turn'd her head, "Now that's a stupid trick!" she said, Juchhe! Juchhe! Juchheisa! Heisa! He! Don't be so ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... having these stupid headaches," she said. "They come and go, and whenever I want to think they get worse. I suppose I have been very bad, and that all you say is right, but somehow I can't think it out. Only there is one thing, Pen—if I were you I wouldn't ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... accosted the policeman and said he was wanted inside meaning that he would be glad to have him turn from the error of his ways, and seek the truth and enjoy a peace that passeth all understanding. The stupid policeman thought there was some trouble in the church, ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... was absurd to care twopence what they thought of her. What on earth did it matter if two inhabitants of the desert were offended or not offended once she was on the other side of the sea? And what did it matter at all how she treated them? She heaped such epithets as absurd, stupid, and idiotic on Anna's head, but Anna was not to be moved. She threatened to take Miss Leech and Letty away with her, and leave Anna a prey to the criticisms of Mrs. Grundy, and Anna said she could ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... I did not marry that L10,000 a year. I used to say I wouldn't, you know; but, nous verrons; what I wish to tell you now is, that I am coming to Stoneleigh for the holidays. Mother wishes me to go with her and Blanche to some stupid place near Edinburgh, and we have had a jolly row about it, but I prefer Stoneleigh and you; so you may expect me the 23rd, on the evening train from Bangor; and please tell old Dorothy to have a roasting fire in my room, which you know is something after the stable order, and oh, if ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... sort to get the rest of the distance. He was turned out at a lonely rural station with no vehicle for hire within miles. Very good, he would make the best of a small misfortune, and would walk. He got directed by a stupid peasant, and set off in the wrong direction. When he had walked some two miles out of his way, he made further inquiries and retraced his steps. The roads were a little heavy, the sun was hot, and Paul of late ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... to which France was thus inevitably exposed. This, as we spoke in English, she immediately translated for the benefit of the company, adding "Ce Monsieur Anglois dit cela, et c'est bien vrai il a raison," and then she laughed and seemed to enjoy the catalogue of stupid ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... is," she said decidedly, though joining in the laugh. "Oh," she continued, "what a pity a pet lamb grows up into a sheep. Only think of my poor Daisy's white face getting dirty and torn like that great stupid-looking ...
— Carry's Rose - or, the Magic of Kindness. A Tale for the Young • Mrs. George Cupples
... friends, your Honorable Strawness, but they were so quiet and happy and comfortable that I found them dismally stupid. Nothing in that corner of Oz interested me, but I believed that in other parts of the country I would find strange people and see new sights, and so I set out upon my wandering journey. I have been a wanderer for nearly a full year, and now my wanderings have brought ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... to Hanover, could Soubise make anything of it; though he did (owing to a couple of stupid fellows, General Prince von Ysenburg and General Oberg, detached by Ferdinand on that service) escape the lively treatment Ferdinand had prepared for him; and even gave a kind of Beating to each of those stupid fellows, [1. "Fight of Sandershausen" ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... must be more than human not to be biassed and if, to contradict the bias, you praise the book against your judgment, you act wrongly as a critic. What is honesty? There is the crux. Courts of law are but man-made machinery and very imperfect, juries are often very stupid, even judges—but perhaps we ought to pause here. Consequently, if the author has any grounds for suggesting that you are ill-disposed towards him, and yet you must act as critic (amateur or professional), be scrupulously relevant and decidedly colourless. At present the honesty has not been ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... minute and forty-five seconds!" How Yan did cheer. Sam was silent, but his eyes looked a little less dull and stupid than usual, and ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... varieties: the stupid and the merely dull. It is the stupid reviewer who exasperates beyond patience the lover of good books. He is the man who gets a book wrong from the start, and then plods on after his own conception, which has no reference whatsoever to the author's. He is the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" said Bois-Guilbert, striding up and down ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... and in a few months no doubt we shall hear of little Miss H—— singing away as a prodigy, and in a few years the voice, health, and strength will all be gone, and probably the poor little life itself have been worn out of its fragile case. Stupid barbarian! After rehearsal drove to Bannisters.... In the evening, at the theater, the play was "The Provoked Husband." The house was very full; I played fairly well. I was rather tired, and Lady Townley's bones ached, for I had been taking a rowing lesson from Emily, and supplied my ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... of his desk and lifted out the big bow of purple ribbon which Lettie lost on the day Marjie and I went out to the haunted cabin. "In your stupid self-conceit you refused to grant a measure of good common sense and powers of observation to those about you. I have seen your kind before; ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Sibyl, "I could get a lovely doll's house for that. But I think sometimes I am getting tired of my dolls. It's so stupid of 'em not to talk, and never to cry, and not to feel pain or love. But, on the whole, I suppose I should like a new doll's house, and there was a beauty at the toy-shop for twenty shillings. It was there at Christmas-time. I expect it's a little ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... mutiny.... The fool who handled every case alike, as if he were an animal trainer instead of a builder of human character ... and so on, ad infinitum. It is a long and sorry list, but the overwhelming majority of dutiful executives in the armed services avoid these stupid blunders by following a Golden ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... a bang! My escort, a stupid fellow, has said "Good-night!" He drives down the street in his old rattletrap of a coupe. I am so glad he is gone! And yet I am always afraid of burglars—or—something dreadful, whenever I go into the house alone so late at ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... felo-de-se—goes off with his companion to leave the water clear for Barbara Allen, who enters, takes an affecting leave of her laird lover, and straightway drowns herself. Jack Ketch is now, by a rapid change of scene, discovered in limbo, and condemned to death; why, we were too stupid to make out. The fatal cart—very likely modelled after "the best authorities"—next occupies the stage, drawn by a real horse, and filled with Sir Gregory Gash (who it seems is going to be hanged) and Jack Ketch not as a prisoner, but as an officer of the crown; for we are to suppose ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... street out of bed to see the balloon—was easily produced. The star-gazers would thus spend an hour or so minutely examining all the stars in the firmament in their endeavours to select the one that most resembled a balloon. This was not easily done—the stars being much alike to the stupid naked eye—but they would near the point of agreement on the question; and then the confounded night-patrol would come along with his gun, and the observers would have to rush for the cover of their blankets. When it was thought that the patrol had passed two thousand ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... help it, Phoebe," she answered with the rose wave mounting under her eyes. "I'm stupid—I don't know how to manage them. I'm just—fond ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... you feel better content just to look without trying to use words. They're such poor things when it comes to telling about Him. He is so much more than anything that can be said about Him. His will is so wise and thoughtful and far-reaching and loving. Strange how stupid you have been in insisting so strenuously and blindly on having your own way. His plan, His thought about everything concerning you, is so superb. And He asks me to be His follower. What joy! What if the way be a bit rough; it's following Him; that's enough. He calls me to be His personal ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... Peters has been frightfully burned with some of the molten glass, this morning, and has no one to take care of him? His hands and arms are so bad he is perfectly helpless, and there's no one in the house but a stupid child that is too frightened to do anything but stare. Isn't there a doctor here, or somebody? Ellen, you and I must attend to him, if there isn't. He ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... learn right away. I can't bother to teach you myself, but I know where you can get private lessons and become really good in a month. It is stupid not to be ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... the sons of France proud, effeminate and carefully adorned like women. They said that the Germans were furious and obscene at their feasts; the Normans vain and boastful; the Poitevins traitors and always adventurers. The Burgundians they considered vulgar and stupid. The Bretons were reputed to be fickle and changeable, and were often reproached for the death of Arthur. The Lombards were called avaricious, vicious and cowardly; the Romans, seditious, turbulent and slanderous; the Sicilians, tyrannical and cruel; the inhabitants ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... seething with impressions, luminous with pictures, aflash with odds and ends of minor but significant things heard and seen and felt. It was his first inner view of tragedy and of the reactions of the human creature, brave or stupid or merely absurd, to a crisis. For all of this he had an outlet ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... people are apt to be selfish. Clearly to realise the condition of the unfortunate is the beginning of philanthropy. Clearly to realise the rights of others is the beginning of justice. "Put yourself in his place" strikes the keynote of ethics. Stupid people can only see their own side of a question: they cannot even imagine any other side possible. So, as a rule, stupid people are Conservative. They cling to what they have; they dread revision, redistribution, justice. Also, if a man has imagination he is likely to be Radical, even though ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... thee to have done so, good fellow, if thou canst say nothing better than that," replied Hamet angrily, for he was a stupid as well as an ambitious man. "Let's have something better from thee, else the bastinado shall drive sense from thy heels into ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... very stupid of us not to think of it, papa," said Sylvia, tactfully ignoring the fact that there was scarcely an undamaged article in the room; "still, you know, if we had thrown the water it mightn't have had ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... occupied with his helm, and the thoughts he didn't seem to feel the necessity of sharing; a quiet, poised, probably stupid man, for whom I could not deny the respect we must always give to content, however simple. His hand was on the wheel, his eyes on the sails and the horizon, and, though I was but a yard away from him, you would have said I was not there at all, judging by his face. In fact, you would have ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... poor, scholar or unlearned, there is no respect of persons with Him. 'In Christ Jesus,' says St. Paul, 'there is neither male nor female, slave nor freeman, Jew who fancies that God's promises belong to him alone, or Gentile who knows nothing about them, clever learned Greek, or stupid ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... your sensations; you will not pin your faith so unimaginatively on momentary appearance as to deny that the world exists when you stop thinking about it. You feel that your intellect has wider scope and has discovered many a thing that goes on behind the scenes, many a secret that would escape a stupid and gaping observation. It is the fool that looks to look and stops at the barely visible: you not only look but see; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... come home to our nature, in a way that it feels but cannot talk of. And he seemed to be of the past somehow, although so young and bright and brave; of the time when greater things were done, and men would die for women. That he should woo three maids in vain, to me was a stupid old woman's tale. ...
— Slain By The Doones • R. D. Blackmore
... to explain to you my disquietude on this head, and the favor I seek at your hands, from you who command France, whilst I, I ought to die in peace, not to displease any person, and live wisely with all. I conclude, madame la comtesse, this long and stupid epistle, which is, in fact, less a letter than a real case for consideration, by begging you to believe me, etc., "VOLTAIRE ", April 28, 1769. Gentleman in ordinary to the king. "P. S. My enemies say everywhere that I am not a Christian. I have just given ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... bridge, in under the upper deck and the after, there is a swarm of people, a curiously stupid swarm, like sheep that get up on to one another's backs and look foolish. "What a cargo of cattle!" cries the fat pilot up to the captain, tramping delightedly on the breakwater with his wooden-soled boots. There are sheepskin caps, old military caps, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... themselves unable to stir hand or foot until they could account for duality. To the common, ignorant peasant, no such trouble occurred, for he knew the Trinity in its simpler form as the first condition of life, like time and space and force. No human being was so stupid as not to understand that the father, mother, and child made a trinity, returning into each other, and although every father, every mother, and every child, from the dawn of man's intelligence, had asked why, and had never received an answer more intelligible to them ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... dark, dingy ante-room, luxuriously furnished with faded tapestry, and divans which lined the walls; and fretted and fidgeted, while the two girls watched him over their embroidery out of the corners of their eyes, and agreed that he was a very stupid person for showing no inclination to return their ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... asking stupid questions, as some brothers would, and hurried the others off to the room of the mirrors. No longer was it a room of mystery; yet romance, once awakened, cannot be put to sleep in a minute, and Peter Rolls's heart beat with excitement ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... enormous sum of L20,000 sterling; while the colonists were struggling under unusual losses, as well as enormous expenses, growing out of the war and Indian ravages. At such a time their parsimony, their "incredible meanness," as Franklin called it, was cruel as well as stupid. At last the Assembly flatly refused to raise any money unless the proprietaries should be burdened like the rest. All should pay together, or all should go to destruction together. The Penns too stood obstinate, facing the not less resolute Assembly. ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... Smokes, haven't you ever seen ground meat? That's what you should've got when I sent you to the house instead of coming back with that stupid grass." ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... so badly. But the biological objection to any such proposition is not far to seek. No one who thinks straight can countenance a plan which thus leaves maternity to the less intellectual woman—to a docile, domestic type, the parallel of the stupid parasitic queen-bee. Mind counts in the valuation of offspring as well as physical qualities. The splitting of one sex into two contrasted varieties, which we see in its completed development in the bee-hive, cannot be an ideal that can ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... see, boys, that Seizem is 'quick' and alive to praise; but to beauty of colour, and form he is insensible, and as it were, dead. The beauty makes no impression upon him at all, he is stupid and lifeless, so far ...
— Caleb in the Country • Jacob Abbott
... of modern ideas. But modern ideas streamed in through the chinks. Young Schleiermacher was now like a golden eagle in a cage. At Niesky he had learned to think for himself; at Barby he was told that thinking for himself was wrong. He called the doctrines taught by the professors "stupid orthodoxy." He rejected, on intellectual grounds, their doctrine of the eternal Godhead of Christ; and he rejected on moral and spiritual grounds their doctrines of the total depravity of man, of eternal punishment, and of the substitutionary sufferings of Christ. He wrote a ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... all, and I find every chance in my favour. The bride will arrive here on the day of our wedding: my servant will be one witness; some stupid old Welshman, as antediluvian as possible—I leave it to you to select him—shall be the other. My servant I shall dispose of, and the rest I can ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said his mother, reprovingly, "and raise her head. Don't you see that Miss Ainslie cannot drink lying there. I never saw you so stupid, my son. I shall have to grow worse again soon to keep you from ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... there; I heard from McGregor this morning, and he says Carr left him on Tuesday. Why, how stupid I am! The colonel says Carr told him he was going off for a couple of days' sail in his yacht. I expect he's got contrary winds, and can't get ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... Tone had gone away the old life had lost its charm and become dull and stupid. Lory was not sure she could be happier elsewhere, but her crushed and dispirited nature responded to the suggestion of change. It was interesting to have something different to look ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... making that stupid blunder, and tried to rectify it by saying he remember now that it WAS at noon Monday that the man gave him ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... cows. The Moss Maidens, that could do anything with leaves, even turning them into money, helped Styf, for they too liked mischief. They teased men-folks, and enjoyed nothing better than misleading the stupid fellows that fuddled their brains with too ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled, and the moisture broke out on his forehead. The affronts which his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded men to offer to him would have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him rude even to ferocity. Unhappily the insolence which, while it was defensive, was pardonable, and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... heard tell of any clever man that came out of entirely stupid people. If you look around the families of your acquaintance, you will see such cases in all directions. I know that it has been the case in mine. I can trace the father, and the son, and the grandson, and the family stamp is quite distinctly legible upon each of them, so that it goes for a ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... special place in my heart for those poor little creatures who figure in circuses and shows, or elsewhere, as "infant prodigies." Heaven help such little folk! It was an unkind fate that did not make them commonplace, stupid, happy girls and boys like our own Fannys and Charleys and Harrys. Poor little waifs, that never know any babyhood or childhood—sad human midges, that flutter for a moment in the glare of the gaslights, and are gone. Pitiful little children, ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Observation Pavilion and her coming to the hospital, also the incidents during the manic state, when she heard cannon and thought a war was on, and voices she could not recognize nor understand. Then she became stupid, although neither ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... their stupid welcome to these foreign princes," muttered he, "and presently she will be attracted by the sound, and seek to know what it means. My God!" ejaculated he, striking his forehead, "this love is the curse of my life. It will drive me to madness, ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... closest friends, and might have made a pastoral visitation every day in the week and been welcome. He had almost got ahead of the doctor in the eldest orphan's regard; for while the doctor had plenty of books, whole shelves of them, they were queer, stupid things, full of long, hard words, and never a battle or a shipwreck from ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... period of years I have heard it applied only to the discharged invalided pensioners of the army. On a late Queen's birthday review on the Green, the boys and girls were in ecstasies at seeing the "old fogies" dressed out in new suits. It is very often spoken derisively to a thick-headed stupid person, but which cannot determine accurately ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... Haley; "but your good fellers are just the critturs to want ter run off. Them stupid ones, as doesn't care whar they go, and shifless, drunken ones, as don't care for nothin', they'll stick by, and like as not be rather pleased to be toted round; but these yer prime fellers, they hates it like sin. No way but to fetter 'em; ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Herod's steward, Salome, the mother of James and John, and Mary, the mother of Jesus (Luke viii, 3; Mark xvi, 40; John xix, 25), strongly discountenance such a supposition. The error, which had no other source than ecclesiastical tradition, has been fostered and perpetuated by the stupid blunder of the translators of the authorized version in identifying her with the "sinner" who is described in Luke vii, 37-50 as washing the feet of Jesus with her tears (see head-note ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... inequality of ground and in half an hour find a hundred or two private lawns graded—from the house to each boundary line—on a single falling curve, or, in plain English, a hump. The best reason why this curve is not artistic, not pleasing, but stupid, is that it is not natural and gains nothing by being unnatural. All gardening is a certain conquest of Nature, and even when "formal" should interfere with her own manner and custom as slightly as is required by the necessities of the case—the needs of that particular ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... more who she was and from whom she had inherited her wonderful memory and power to grasp points which are usually far beyond the comprehension of a child of ten, or even twelve, and which Maude Tracy could no more have mastered than her brother, the stupid Jack. His intellect had not grown with his body, and when at thirteen he was asked the question, 'If there are five peaches on the table, and Tom eats three of them, how many will there be left?' ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... praised irrelevantly—the one thing this nation has not been able to do with these men is to use their genius. It is this life-sapping quality of our politics that should be fought—its wanton waste of the initiatives we have—its stupid indifference. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Dean, tall, bony, and green As green corn in the milk, stood fast at the foot— Stood day after day, as if he'd been put A soldier on guard there did poor Bally Dean. And stupid! God made him so stupid I doubt— But I guess God who made us ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... and conversation: Coxcombs, an ever-noisy race, Are trumpets of their own disgrace. 'Why so severe?' the cub replies; 'Our senate always held me wise!' 'How weak is pride,' returns the sire: 'All fools are vain when fools admire! But know, what stupid asses prize, Lions and ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... mellowed no opinion, toned down no crudity. He was coming, he said, to make a last hopeless call on his famous pupil, the others were working. The others—he explained—were his little Klaartje and his newest pupil, Kerkkrinck, a rich and stupid youth, but honest and good-hearted withal. He had practically turned him over to Klaartje, who was as good a guide to the Humanities as himself—more especially for the stupid. "She was too young in thy time, Benedict," ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... before it had learned to subdue the forces of Nature. It is because, taking advantage of alleged rights acquired in the past, these few appropriate to-day two-thirds of the products of human labour, and then squander them in the most stupid and shameful way. It is because, having reduced the masses to a point at which they have not the means of subsistence for a month, or even for a week in advance, the few can allow the many to work, only on the condition of themselves ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... her mother. "I am sure all these places are nothing to us, and I think the country is very stupid. And I like travelling where I know what the people say. I feel as if I had got five thousand miles from anywhere. What do you suppose keeps your ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... correspond with the outside truth; that a man shall he fundamentally true, so that his thought corresponds to fact; unless there is truth in a man, Yoga is for him impossible. Missing the point, illogical, stupid, making the important, unimportant and vice versa. Lastly, instability: which makes Yoga impossible, and even a small amount of which makes Yoga futile; the unstable man ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... to prove that Vautrin is as innocent a work as a drama of Berquin's? To inquire into the morality or immorality of the stage would imply servile submission to the stupid Prudhommes who bring the ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... great fancy to the Amerindians who came to trade at Fort Nelson. As he played with them, and they returned his affection, he learnt their language, and—for some inconceivable reason—this gave great offence to the stupid governor of the fort (indeed, when Kellsey as a grown man, some years afterwards, compiled a vocabulary of the Kri language for the use of traders, the Hudson's Bay Company ordered it to be suppressed). Stupid Governor Geyer not only ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... disorders of 1835, he got into the secret of a plot for assassinating his friend, hatched by some villains whose only cause of enmity was their owing him money and envying his prosperity. It was such as these who aroused the stupid and brutal animosity of the Muras against the whites. The negro, on obtaining this news, set off alone in a montaria on a six hour journey in the dead of night to warn his "compadre" of the fate in store for him, and thus gave him time to fly. It was a pleasing sight to notice the cordiality of ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... its regularity of day and night, and summer and winter, with all its beautiful flowers and lofty trees, with all its variety of birds, and beasts, and fishes? To bring the matter down to the level of the intellect of the most stupid pantheist, tell us in plain English, Did the paving stones make themselves? For the paving stones are made out of a dozen different chemical constituents, and each one is built up more ingeniously than the house you live in. Now, did the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... condescendingly civil, vouchsafed much tender commiseration for my "exile," as she termed my quarters in Kilrush; wondered how I could possibly exist in a marching regiment, (who had never been in the cavalry in my life!) Spoke quite feelingly on my kindness in joining their stupid family party, for they were living, to use her own phrase, "like hermits;" and wound up all by a playful assurance that as she perceived, from all my answers, that I was bent on preserving a strict incognito, she would tell no tales about me on her return to "Town." ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... a pair of "slaughter pen" boots and "jeans," and flung himself at his task. It was a weird sight, there on the killing beds—a throng of stupid black Negroes, and foreigners who could not understand a word that was said to them, mixed with pale-faced, hollow-chested bookkeepers and clerks, half-fainting for the tropical heat and the sickening stench of fresh blood—and all struggling to dress a dozen or two cattle in the same place ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... reasonable anatomical provision exactly shared by men. Why, he particularized, did he prefer them in silk stockings rather than bare, and in black more than bright colors? Anette's had never failed to excite his imagination, but Alice Lucian's, graceful enough, were without interest for him. How stupid was the spectacle of women in tights! Short bathing skirts left him cold, but the unexpected, the casual, the vagaries of fashion and the wind, were unfailingly potential. Humiliating, he thought, a curiosity that should be left with the fresh experience of youth; but it wasn't—comic opera ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... presently want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt men to forgery. We do already threaten the privacy of the post because of betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind of thing is narrow, unimaginative, mischievous, stupid...." ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... usual spirits. By this time the constantly accumulating urine has distended the bladder beyond its power of resistance and a rupture occurs, allowing the urine to escape into the cavity of the abdomen. Then dullness increases; the animal lies down most of his time; he becomes stupid and sometimes drowsy, with reddish-brown congestion of the lining membrane of the eyelids; pressure on the abdomen causes pain, flinching, and perhaps groaning, and the lowest part of the belly fluctuates ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... at her; and she looked up just once. I saw her face plain. It wasn't surprised or glad or anything—just stupid like a breed. She never stopped walking. She stepped right off the flat rock into the deep water with the man on her back; and they went out of sight; and some bubbles ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... time, when my heart is more hard and stupid, and when his terror doth not make me afraid, then I can come before him and ask mercy at his hand, and scarce be sensible of sin or grace, or that indeed I am before God. But above all, they are the rare times, when I can go to God as the publican, sensible of his glorious majesty, ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... that the decrease of the belief in magic was not necessarily accompanied by an increase of the belief in a moral order, but that in many cases, like the decaying faith in astrology, the delusion left behind it nothing but a stupid fatalism. ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... up at Coreyville spending the night. I used to hate it down at the Cove, it was so little and stupid; but ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... on their reciprocal surprise, and the Commandant withdrew. He had sighed, before now, as he had shut Mr. and Mrs. Pope's front gate after an evening's whist. Doubtless they were a stupid couple. ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... 'It was stupid of you,' said the aunt, 'but I am sure you meant to please me. Come down to supper.' And Amabel has a confused recollection of her aunt's saying that she was sorry, ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... the dark bird is scarcely attractive with his clumsy beak overbalancing a head that protrudes with stupid-looking awkwardness; but as he rises into the trees his lovely rose-colored breast and under-wing feathers are seen, and before he has had time to repeat his delicious, rich-voiced warble you are already in ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... see," said Quincy. "How stupid I have been! I knew all about it and that it was to be next Monday, but Mrs. Mason asked us so honestly to come to tea, and Huldy joined in so heartily, that for the time being I got things mixed, and besides, to speak frankly, Miss Pettengill, I ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... have lived side by side for centuries. And the human is not always the superior being. I might pass, among the Dry-towners and the relatively stupid humanoid chaks, for another Dry-towner. But Rakhal had cautioned me I could not pass among nonhumans for native Wolfan, and warned me ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... word. These nondescripts gathered there, they knew not why. Every day found them in the same place, always with the same fetid, unlighted cigars, always with the same frayed newspapers two days old. There they sat, inert, stupid, their decaying senses hypnotised and soothed by the sound of the distant rumble of the Pit, that came through the ceiling from the floor of the ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... be Sol in Leo! I have got rid from my sight of that fellow Moscione, that face of old-fashioned crockery, that nail in my heart. By travelling through the world he will at least become a man, and no longer be such a stupid ass, such a simpleton, such a lose-the-day ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... render the place impossible to him. It is a tragedy such as naturalism alone can stage and give the effect of life. I have read few things so touching as this tale of commonest experience which seems as true to the suffering and defeat of the newcomers, as to the stupid inhumanity of the neighbors who join, under the lead of the evillest among them, in driving the strangers away; in fact I know nothing parallel to it, certainly nothing in English; perhaps The House with the Green Shutters breathes as great ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 'Stupid!' she cried,'use my eyes, to be sure! Why there's the big apron! Of course that's a present, only she don't like to say so. The child's turned economical. Nobody ever saw Miss Kennedy protect her dress, I'll warrant. ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... perfection; suppose him likewise, if you please, nimble and active, nay, give him riches, honours, authority, power, glory; now, I say, should this person, who is in possession of all these, be unjust, intemperate, timid, stupid, or an idiot, could you hesitate to call such an one miserable? What, then, are those goods, in the possession of which you may be very miserable? Let us see if a happy life is not made up of parts of the same nature, as a heap implies a quantity of grain of the same kind. And ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... he.—"Yes," said they; but wished first to hear the diagnosis.— "You," he said to kung-hu, "have strong mental powers, but are weak in character; so, though fruitful in plans, you are weak in decision." "You," he said to Chi-ying, "are stong of will, though stupid; so there is a narrowness in your aims and a want of foresight. Now if I can effect an exchange of hearts between you, the good will ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... pamphlet also displays his characteristic ignorance, or stupid disregard to truth, when he says that the Journal ever charged Young with receiving pay in three capacities, during the extra session of 1815. It never made the charge as it respected that, or any other year;—but it so happens that during the ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector
... but of giving him tit for tat and of paying him out in his own coin; does not care a straw about destroying his happiness, sends everything to the devil, and talks a lot of bosh which she certainly does not believe. And then, because there is nothing so stupid and so obstinate in the whole world as lovers, neither he nor she will take the first steps, and own to having been in the wrong, and regret having gone too far; but both wait and watch and do not even write ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... bewildered fashion. Allowing for the baby's portmanteau to have gone astray, what, she asked, had become of the clothes he must have been wearing? Aristide entered upon a picturesque and realistic explanation. The landlady was stout, she was stupid, she could not grasp ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... I gave you the opportunity. You failed to profit by it. You got drunk the first night you arrived. Kenneth Traynor was a temperate man. Is it no wonder you excited wonder and talk? Then you were stupid under questioning and gave equivocal answers. Your explanation to Parker about the diamonds was more than unfortunate; it was idiotic. His suspicions were at once aroused. He may yet give us trouble before we have time to get rid of the stones. Finding the wife eluded you, ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... myself to compete with him, and by hewing nearly two feet of pavement for his one. And on this occasion my aunt, his wife, who had been no stranger to his previous complaints, was informed that her "stupid nephew" was to turn out ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... "No," she said with her old calm decision, and moved away. Four years ago she would have supplemented her refusal by the words, "You are stupid. You tease me," Now she contented herself ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... amazed and utterly at a loss, and said, "Two angels? What? Mam not know; what?" He looked at me with a laugh of wonder; pointed to my head and the wooden table, and replied—his usual way of calling me stupid— "Doll mam! Two small boys, dead, Portugal." My brother had lost two babes in Portugal; and thus exquisitely, thus in all the beauty of true sublimity, had the untaught deaf and dumb boy ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... artistic advice, and called her his "gallery." But there are wives and wives, and however deeply our humanity may sympathise with poor Minna Planer, our love for evolution can only rejoice that she was not permitted to tie her husband down to the narrow-souled ideals of the good-hearted, stupid little housewife she was. Wagner understood her far better than she understood him. He sympathised with her even in her resistance to his career. To the last it made him indignant to hear her ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... they got on pretty well, till they came to a river, when the ox would not cross through the water. Then Atoukama called to Quanqua to drive the ox across, but all she could get out of him was, 'QUAN? QUA? Quan? qua?' At last she said, 'Oh! you stupid fellow, you're no good; stop here and mind the ox while I go and get help to drive him across.' So off she went to fetch Ananzi. As soon as Atoukama was gone away, Quanqua killed the ox, and hid it all away, where ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... but I remain as stupid as ever; for still I fail to comprehend how this knowing what you know and do not know is the same as the ...
— Charmides • Plato
... get over his amazement at the incredible ignorance, the instinctive aversion for art, the type of ideas, the terror of words, peculiar to Catholics. Why was this? For after all there was no reason why believers should be more ignorant and stupid than any other folks. Indeed, the contrary ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... were every whit as foolish themselves. One word further would I say of them here: namely, this single remark, that, from 1300 to 1600, and yet later, but one kind of justice may be seen. Barring a small interlude in the Parliament of Paris, the same stupid savagery prevails everywhere, at all hours. Even great parts are of no use here. As soon as witchcraft comes into question, the fine-natured De Lancre, a Bordeaux magistrate and forward politician under Henry IV., sinks back to ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... than even he had been accustomed to, he gently raised his hand to his face and touched it. The touch was painful, so he desisted. Then he arose, remounted his steed, which stood close to him, looking stupid after the concussion, and followed the hunt, which by that time was ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... they must do, were France Quixotic enough to undertake to support them. We, I hope, shall be left free to avail ourselves of the advantages of neutrality; and yet, much I fear, the English, or rather their stupid King, will force us out of it. For thus I reason. By forcing us into the war against them, they will be engaged in an expensive land war, as well as a sea war. Common sense dictates, therefore, that they should let us remain neuter: ergo they will not let us remain neuter. I ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... the yacht and all the stupid folks on it; so she wanders out to windward of the worst smells, plants herself on the flattest rock she can find, and prepares to read. That's her pose when she looks up and discovers this male party with the sun kissed locks and the dreamy eyes standin' ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... not out of place, for the proposal market would be less active, were it not for "hints." But these are seldom given in words—unless a man happens to be particularly stupid. ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... or two Miss Anthony's heart smote her and she wrote again: "I have blown my bugle blast and I know I have wounded your dear souls, but I can not see the plan a bit prettier than I did at first. I may be very stupid or supersensitive. If it were to honor Mrs. Stanton, I would be willing to charge for tickets." And then a few days later: "Have I killed you outright? I can not tell you how much I have suffered because I can not see this as you do, but I would rather never have a mention of my birthday ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... avenue there was an old arch and a clock tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand—and which jumped straight from one hour to the next—and was therefore always in extremes. Through this arch you walked straight into the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... to see the great wrong she had ignorantly done to him. The youth she had blindly taken to gratify her green passion and to become the father of her only child! She had ruined him, as far as any one human being can ruin another, and now she knew it. She had been the stupid means of providing him with a feast of folly, and then had abandoned him when he behaved badly. So she wrote him gently, as one who at last comprehended that mercy and forgiveness are due all those whom we harm upon our road ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... "Well, isn't it stupid of a man to try to quarrel with his best friend when he won't be seeing her again for three ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... "Flirt," the younger of two sisters, breaks one girl's engagement, drives one man to suicide, causes the murder of another, leads another to lose his fortune, and in the end marries a stupid and unpromising suitor, leaving the really worthy ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... conclusion at which you are aiming, advance the desired conclusion,—although it does not in the least follow,—as though it had been proved, and proclaim it in a tone of triumph. If your opponent is shy or stupid, and you yourself possess a great deal of impudence and a good voice, the trick may easily succeed. It is akin to the fallacy ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... believe that a man could be so stupid? He never knew of my existence, this big, red booby. He never knew that I existed until—until his 'dream' had fled—with me! In a week we were in Paris, that dream-girl and I—in a month we had quarrelled. I always end these matters with a quarrel; it makes the complete ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... he not strike at the very root of the matter by exposing those stupid plagiarists who were attempting to play off upon the intelligence of the Roman world a clumsy imitation of the far-famed Buddha? It was the very kind of thing that the enemies of Christianity wanted. Why should the ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... what the theme of conversation would be, she felt a thrill of terror as the good woman came in, knitting in hand, and announced her intention of sitting through the chapel exercises. She was not going to prayer meeting that night, she said, for Dr. Foster was absent, and they were always stupid when he was away. She could not understand all Mr.—— said, his words were so learned, while the man who talked so long, and never came to the point, was insufferable in hot weather, so she remained away, and came to see her friend, who, she supposed, knew that she had a governor ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... called to preside had consisted thus far of very heterogeneous and discordant materials. Vast numbers of the people were of the humblest and most degraded condition, consisting of ignorant peasants, some stupid, others turbulent and ungovernable; and of refugees from justice, such as thieves, robbers, and outlaws of every degree. But then, on the other hand, there were many persons of standing and respectability. The sons of families of wealth and influence in Alba had, in many cases, ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... for receiving a knowledge of the animal have not been wanting; traders having for one hundred years frequented this river, and specimens, such as have been brought here within a year, could not have been exhibited without having attracted the attention of the most stupid." ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... that a minister is of opinion that you know more of music than of state. My friend! the quarrels of ingenious men are generally far less reasonable and just, less placable and moderate, than those of the stupid and ignorant. We ought to blush at this: and we should blush yet more deeply if we bring them in as parties to our differences. Let us conquer by kindness; which we cannot do ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... well, there was not so much of this stupid humbugging-us-about system as there is now, but we were not kept so clean. The Scots-greys were frequently on the march on the clothes ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... Oakley's devotion; it had got somehow to make amends to him, even if he never was to know of it, for this last unfair stroke of destiny. Luttrell walked across London, dwelling upon the qualities of individual men in the company which was his command—how this man was quick, and that man stupid, and that other inclined to swank, and a fourth had a gift for reading maps, and a fifth would make a real marksman; and so he woke up to find himself before the bookstall in the station at Waterloo. Then he remembered the visit he had promised, but there was no longer any time. ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... come to a bad end. Howsoever, he was a wonderful chap to track and ride; none could beat him at that; he was nearly as good as Warrigal in the bush. He was as cunning as a pet dingo, and would look as stupid before any one he didn't know, or thought was too respectable, as if he was half an idiot. But no one ever stirred within twenty or thirty miles of where he lived without our hearing about it. Father fished him out, having paid him pretty well ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... need of further delay," she said. "No one cared to see 'Lena married. Weddings were stupid things, anyway, and her mother could just as well go ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... it]. Not at all. Your Majesty is very good. I have been very awkward; but I did not intend it. I am rather stupid, I ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... are compelled to think. When they find themselves face to face with a greater and more enduring strength than their own, they will renounce their idol. But they are a brave people, a faithful people, and a stupid people, so that they will need rough proofs. They cannot be driven from their position by a little paper shot. In their present mood, if they hear an appeal to pity, sensibility, and sympathy, they take it for a cry of weakness. I am reminded of what I once heard said by a genial and ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... looking for something. He ultimately came across an old rusty battle-axe, of great size, and, setting off after the others, he arrived at the scene of strife just as the combatants were closing with each other. Duncan Macrae (for such was his name), from his stupid and ungainly appearance, was taken little notice of, and was wandering about in an aimless, vacant, half-idiotic manner. Hector Roy, Alexander's third son, and progenitor of the Gairloch Mackenzies, observing him, asked why he was not taking part in the fight, and supporting his chief ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... is too much to do. If I go out that stupid girl will burn the cake," and she pointed to a Kafir intombi (young girl), who, arrayed in a blue smock, a sweet smile, and a feather stuck in her wool, was vigorously employed in staring at the flies ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... ships, they raised such a commotion in the sea that we discharged all our artillery to drive them away. We soon afterwards came to an island named Ascension, where we saw many birds about the size of ducks, which were so stupid that we took them with our hands, yet immediately afterwards they shewed wonderful fierceness. In that island we saw no outer living creatures besides these birds, which seemed as if they had never seen mankind before, and there were prodigious quantities ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... Sirdars? I can't smoke anything else and no one sells them out here. Our landlady has one eye that looks up the chimney and another that goes cellar wards and Carlton says that she always regards him obliquely—never mind, she is a good stupid soul and I can forgive a landlady anything but perspicacity. I don't see how our intimacy has escaped her,—to me it looks like the first foreign sticker on an American five dollar ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... touched—drunk! I could have struck the man for uttering the word, with her lying—poor suffering angel—so white, and still, and helpless before him. As it was, I gave him a look, but he was too stupid to understand it, and went droning on, saying the same thing over and over again in the same words. And yet the story of how they found her was, like all the sad stories I have ever heard told in real life, so very, very short. They had just seen her lying along ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... way with the technical objection that the Conference was called to discuss Conscription alone and that no other topic must be permitted to go further. Could stupid malignancy or blind ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... of the Gods.—The average intelligent citizen probably has views midway between the stupid rabble and the daring philosophers. To him the gods of Greece stand out in full divinity, honored and worshipped because they are protectors of the good, avengers of the evil, and guardians of the moral law. They ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... he had a wond'rous wise look when he was born, and so he named him Solomon, thinking that if indeed he turned out to be wise the name would fit him nicely, whereas, should he be mistaken, and the boy grow up stupid, his name could ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum
... children, we lost. The cry that it would "interfere with private practice" defeated us. The fact was easily demonstrated that not only was ophthalmia rampant in the schools with its contagion, but that the pupils were made both near-sighted and stupid by the want of proper arrangement of their seats and of themselves in their classrooms. But self-interest prevailed. However, nothing is ever settled till it is settled right. I have before me the results of an examination of thirty-six ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... cloak which they wore on the side on which the wind comes when walking or sitting. They lived chiefly on shell-fish, and in search of them wandered from place to place. They were considered as among the most dull and stupid of the human race. No wonder, indeed, considering the few objects on which their minds could be expanded. A farther acquaintance with these tribes has shown that they have minds as capable of receiving good impressions as other human beings, and that they are not destitute ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Soldier Boy, whose adventures in the army were so much enjoyed. We have only to repeat that there are few better stories for boys than these of Mr. Adams'. Always bright and even sparkling with animation, the story never drags; there are no stupid tasks or tiresome descriptions; the boys whose characters are drawn are real boys, impulsive, with superabundant animal life, and the heroes are manly, generous, ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... remarked Cola, "that this stupid place can strike even a stranger as being delightful, since there is no one to see but fisherfolk, who can talk of nothing but fish, and there isn't a thing to do but watch the boats go and come. For my part, I am so tired of it all that I wish something ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... to preach. I remember well, ten years ago, when I was a curate (which in Scotland we call an assistant) myself, what advices I used to receive (quite unsought by me) from well-meaning, but densely stupid old ladies. I did not think the advices worth much, even then; and now, by longer experience, I can discern that they were utterly idiotic. Yet they were given with entire confidence. No thought ever entered the heads of these well-meaning, but stupid ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... intelligent insects, and would soon cease to visit flowers which did not supply them with food. Flies, however, are more stupid, and are often deceived. Thus in our lovely little Parnassia, five of the ten stamens have ceased to produce pollen, but are prolonged into fingers, each terminating in a shining yellow knob, which ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... of imposing proportions. But for his eyes no turfman would have looked at him twice. They were large, clear, and unusually intelligent; they redeemed his homely face. Without them he would have been called a stupid horse. ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... momentary appearance as to deny that the world exists when you stop thinking about it. You feel that your intellect has wider scope and has discovered many a thing that goes on behind the scenes, many a secret that would escape a stupid and gaping observation. It is the fool that looks to look and stops at the barely visible: you not only look ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... very magnanimous and somewhat stupid for Abe Storms to volunteer to go down in his coat of armor and scoop the oysters into a huge basket, for the very parties who had tried so hard to drown him when similarly engaged the day before. Nothing, it would seem, could be more absurd, ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... thanks!" she exclaimed. "How stupid of me to have left it there. Thank you again. My precious bag! I am so glad you have found it." She took the bag eagerly from him. "I am afraid I have been a nuisance, and disturbed you to no purpose. You must forgive my mistake. But now I will not ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... so stupid! I think I could learn it—it seems only to hold this thing so,"—here he bent forward, and placed his hand upon the shuttle, so as to touch the fingers of the girl,—"and then put it between the threads in this manner; ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... which I liked, there was a set-off for this: it was the absence of those stupid trade-regulations which in England, and on the continent of Europe, hamper so annoyingly the movement of commerce, and complicate so vexatiously the relations between employers and employed. Few of these relics of feudal-age policy exist in the United States: a master takes as many apprentices ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... although differences caused by the moulding influence of intelligence will probably be here discovered. But among individual dogs and horses we find all degrees of intelligence from absolute stupidity to high intelligence. And many mammals are slandered grievously by man. The pig is not stupid, far from it. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... but I have no recollection now of doing so, while I distinctly remember rehearsing the allegories and fables of the 'Gesta Romanorum', a book which seems to have been in my hands about the same time or a little later. I had a delight in that stupid collection of monkish legends which I cannot account for now, and which persisted in spite of the nightmare confusion it made of my ancient Greeks and Romans. They were not at all the ancient Greeks and Romans of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... disposed to do all the talking, though he occasionally appealed to his companions to approve of what he said. It was evident that he was the leading spirit of the party, and that he controlled them. He was rather a bright fellow, while the others were somewhat heavy and stupid in their understanding. The bottles were again handed to the guests, both of whom went through the form of drinking without taking a ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... ways, and loved God's creatures as did St. Francis d'Assisi, to whom every creature of God was dear, from Sister Swallow to Brother Wolf. So he learned, as he grew older, to love men and women and little children, even although they might be ugly, or stupid, or bad-tempered, or even wicked, and this sympathy cleansed away many a little fault of pride and self-conceit and impatience and hot temper, and in the end of the days made a man of John Carmichael. The dumb animals had an instinct about this young fellow, and would make ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... know. I feel stupid about tackling the bush again; and what can I do with Jeanie? I wish I was dead. I've half a mind to go and shoot that brute of a woman and then myself. But then, poor Jeanie! poor little Jeanie! I can't stand it, ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... exclaimed impatiently. "Why do you keep staring so? Are you as stupid as you choose to ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... illustrations of this fact. One day, in the midst of a Council of State, Napoleon grossly insults Beugnot, treating him as one might an unmannerly valet. The effect produced, he goes up to him and says, "Well, stupid, have you found your head again?" Whereupon Beugnot, tall as a drum-major, bows very low, and the little man raising his hand, takes the tall one by the ear, "an intoxicating sign of favour," writes Beugnot, "the familiar gesture of ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... had received an invitation letter to dine with a great lord; while others as proud as peacocks of the honour, yet not very sure as to their being up to the trade of behaving themselves at the tables of the great, were mostly dung stupid with not knowing what to think. A council meeting or two was held in the gloamings, to take such a serious business into consideration; some expressing their fears and inward down-sinking, while others cheered ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... d'Aldrigger's principal, but he did not venture to remonstrate with his pearl of a Wilhelmine. His was the most ingenious unintelligent tenderness in the world. A good man, but a stupid one! 'What will become of them when I am gone?' he said, as he lay dying; and when he was left alone for a moment with Wirth, his old man-servant, he struggled for breath to bid him take care of his mistress and her two daughters, as if the one reasonable being ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... for hours at a stretch in a clump of dead grass or berry bushes, till the flock comes near enough for a rush. Then she hurls herself among them, and in the confusion seizes one by the neck, throws it by a quick twist across her shoulders, and is gone before the stupid hens find out what it ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... have some breakfast," I said, and he chattered again. "Come and have some breakfast," I shouted; and then to myself: "How stupid I am! He ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... family. Now you see why I can understand the psychology of saying 'no' to a proposal. This stripling, who was at least five years my junior, proposed to me out of sheer gratitude. I actually succeeded in drumming quadratic equations into his stupid head, and he offered me his hand by ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man. I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being, who at the last day shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow, and the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... in the money while he looked on in stupid terror. When he left the table, all made way for him to pass; the cards were shuffled, ...
— The Queen Of Spades - 1901 • Alexander Sergeievitch Poushkin
... the full penalty of her stupid acquiescence in the rule of Disraeli and Salisbury; and it will cost her yet far more than she paid for the results of Tory infamy and Whig senility in the "Alabama" business, for she has enemies to deal with who are far less generous and far ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... BERGAMIN. How stupid! But I know now what has turned your silly head: you come here to read! [SYLVETTE starts as she hears this. PERCINET also shows signs of fear as his father pulls the book from the youth's pocket.] Plays! ...
— The Romancers - A Comedy in Three Acts • Edmond Rostand
... chickeree," sang one bird to another. "What a stupid girl that is! I could tell her which way to go. Why, there's the mark of his big foot on the moss close by. Why doesn't she see it ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... told you no, man, and I must put a stop to this stupid idolatry, which will ruin my child, and do you no good. Give her back to ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... cheeks and her lips, as Roland did. He never said to her, "You are fit to be a duchess or a queen; you sing like a nightingale and charm my soul out of me, and you have hands and feet like a fairy." Poor Tris! He was stupid and silent. He could only look and sigh, or, if he did manage to speak, he was sure to plunge into such final questions as, "Denas, will you marry me? When will you marry me?" Or to tell her of his stone cottage, and his fine ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... perfection," may be found the key for all the extraordinary and apparently stupid prohibitions and restrictions placed by the mother-country on colonial wool manufacture. The growth of the woollen industry in any colony was regarded at once by England with jealous eyes. Wool was the pet industry and principal staple of Great Britain; and well ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... that alter cases. With us he would be free to act on his own devising, for we should make him commander of the forces. Against us he is only a subordinate, controlled by some stupid major-general." ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... up on the bridge together, where they could talk freely. The man at the wheel was a thick-set, rather stupid-looking native from Niue (Savage Island), who took no notice of their remarks, or at least appeared not to do so. But Huka was not such a fool ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... caught some of Hampstead's levelling ideas and encourages the young man. It was all Kingsbury's fault from the first. He began the world wrong, and now he cannot get himself right again. A radical aristocrat is a contradiction in terms. It is very well that there should be Radicals. It would be a stupid do-nothing world without them. But a man can't be oil and vinegar at the same time." This was the expression made by Lord Persiflage of his general ideas on politics in reference to George Roden and his connection with the ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... elaborately educated. After having been for some time after the death of Louis XIII. the favorite, the confidant, the first man, in short, at the court, he had been obliged to yield his place to Mazarin and so became the second in influence and favor; and eventually, as he was stupid enough to be vexed at this change of position, the queen had had him arrested and sent to Vincennes in charge of Guitant, who made his appearance in these pages in the beginning of this history and whom we shall see again. ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... he said, apologetically. "How stupid of me! I hope that you'll accept my warmest congratulations and be very, very happy. I can't tell you how pleased I am. But for the life of me I can't see why it ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... have sought about for shells and a few have been brought me from the Cataract, but of snails I can learn no tidings nor have I ever seen one, neither can I discover that there are any shells in the Nile mud. At the first Cataract they are found sticking to the rocks. The people here are very stupid about natural objects that are of no use to them. Like with the French small birds are all sparrows, and wild flowers there are none, and only about five varieties of ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... at that moment because he made her suffer. Love her! She knew he loved her. He really belonged to her. This about not loving her, physically, bodily, was a mere perversity on his part, because he knew she loved him. He was stupid like a child. He belonged to her. His soul wanted her. She guessed somebody had been influencing him. She felt upon him the hardness, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... distinctions. I've been talking about the boy's people and his bringing up and the way he acts, whereupon you fly off on a tangent and coolly conclude things about the boy himself. It is not only unkind, but stupid." ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... was a great success. In dumb show, the speaker he referred to begged for mercy. This only delighted the audience still more, and when the dull speaker finished it was admitted that, for once, he had escaped being stupid or commonplace. He had also forced upon the next speaker the necessity of removing the unpleasant effects of the jokes made at his expense, a task that ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... Charles's long letter is so stupid, so gloomy, so loving, and so little to the purpose, that I take an editor's privilege, and omit it altogether. Of course he was coming home again, as soon as the Samarang ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... tried to explain his subsequent actions; perhaps he had had a stupid evening. He merely yawned and addressed the burglar with all possible respect. "Do you imagine I'll permit any guest of mine to go away hungry? If you'll wait till I dress, we'll stroll over to a restaurant in the next ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... fellow townsman, whom we presume must know you well, that you are destitute of feeling; your unexampled effrontery in the publick transaction which has unhappily brought you into notice, added to the consummate assurance evidenced in the stupid composition to which you have tacked your name, are strong circumstances in favour of this position But is your modesty truly impregnable? cannot the weapon of stern rebuke arouse your sensibility? must ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... blockhead,—you have no management," replied the first voice. "I will arrange the matter without your stupid interference." ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... listened and sympathised with all her heart and soul, and understood why such a shot was a good one, and why such another failed, and was absorbed in the interest of the attempt to recover a wounded bird when the retriever was stupid, long after the intruder had made her exit, and they might have returned to matters touching her more closely, though regarded by Gerald as hardly equal in importance to roe deer, ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... for its treatment of him, although some of the happiest years of his life had been spent there. "The Spaniards are a stupid, ungrateful set of ruffians," he afterwards wrote, "and are utterly incapable of appreciating generosity or forbearance." He piled up invective upon the unfortunate country. It was "the chosen land of the two fiends—assassination ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... things, but there are rare occasions, moments of supernatural understanding or suffering (which are two words for one and the same thing), when we see life in all its worm-like meanness, and death in its plain, stupid loathsomeness. Two days out of this year live like fire in my mind. I went to my uncle Richard's funeral. There was cold meat and sherry on the table; a dreadful servant asked me if I would go up to the corpse-room. (Mark the expression.) I went. It lay swollen and featureless, and ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... every moment knocked against the framework of a wagon-cover. Even a jolly young Irishman of Plaster Cove, whose nature it is to sleep under whatever discouragement, is beaten by these circumstances. He wishes he had his fiddle along. We never know what men are on casual acquaintance. This rather stupid-looking fellow is a devotee of music, and knows how to coax the sweetness out of the unwilling violin. Sometimes he goes miles and miles on winter nights to draw the seductive bow for the Cape Breton dancers, and there is enthusiasm in his voice, as he relates exploits of fiddling ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the immediate reason that there was no one except a stupid young soldier servant to speak to. But he was not anxious for the opportunities of which his severe arrest deprived him. He would have been uncommunicative from dread of ridicule. He was aware that the episode, so grave ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... often, at length has failed. But will this final failure bring to reason the hotheads of Sofia? After the cruel disappointment they received at the hands of Rumania, the Bulgarian politicians must understand that whatever is won by war by war only is given back. No one is so stupid as to give them willingly ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... that matters. It's all in the clothes and the sillier things they talk about. Why, I'd rather hear old Adam Doolittle talk than that stupid Judge Grayson, who dined with us the other night, and never mentioned anything but stocks. If I've got to hear about a single subject I'd rather it would be crops than stocks—they seem more ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... practice of allowing the manufacture of armaments to remain in the hands of private companies; that it is very tempting to see in the great Armament Firms the principal if not the only cause of modern war. Examiners of German militarism, most of them stupid enough to quote Nietzsche, may be pardoned for emphasising the political influence of Krupp; and since every great Power has a more or less efficiently organised Krupp of its own, it would be permissible to suggest that war would be already obsolete but for the intensive cultivation it receives ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... progressive. Books will never make a soldier, but Wolfe, as a military student, had the advantage of actual experience of war. Whenever he could find a teacher, he studied mathematics, zealously though apparently not with delight. "I have read the mathematics till I am grown perfectly stupid, and have algebraically worked away the little portion of understanding that was allowed to me. They have not even left me the qualities of a coxcomb for I can neither laugh nor sing nor talk an hour upon nothing. The latter of these is a ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... hand she worshipped would tremble suddenly, as though waking to life within her own. But that pride was gone, and from its disappearance there had been but one step to the most utter degradation of soul to which a woman can descend, and from that again but one step more to a resolution almost stupid in its hardened obstinacy. But as though to show how completely she was dominated by the man whom she could not win even her last determination had yielded under the slightest pressure from his will. She had left her house beside him with the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... you afterwards. She has been dead two or three hundred years; it was her gold, or her people's, and those are her footprints in the dust. How stupid you are not to understand! Never mind the hateful stuff; come ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... that well-known stupid physical force which used to be the basis of strength of the Russian Empire. Its ruthlessness, its carelessness of life, however innocent, terrorized, and, we used to think, won respect. We know better now, especially those of us who were eye-witnesses of the ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... common sense; he has a desire for accomplishment and achievement. To such a man, the mere pulling of cords, or the swinging about of his arms and legs, the bending of his back, just for the sake of exercise, seems a trifle stupid. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... But there are further curious particulars in connection with this claim. You must know, they are a family of singular characteristics, humorists, sometimes developing their queer traits into something like insanity; though oftener, I must say, spending stupid hereditary lives here on their estates, rusting out and dying without leaving any biography whatever about them. And yet there has always been one very queer thing about this generally very commonplace family. It is that each father, on his death-bed, has had an interview with ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the intrigue against Sparta. He can dupe stupid people like the Thebans, or the Peloponnesians; warning therefore is necessary. To the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... Hoddan indignantly. "I'll raise it somehow. If they're too stupid to save money— ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... is," said Staniford, dropping his teasing tone. "It's stupid. And I suppose it's pretty lonesome at South Bradfield ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... discriminating community, who are never enslaved, or misled, by whim, caprice, or fashion. It has been said, but it seems too monstrous for belief, that, formerly, persons were actually to be found so extremely indolent, or stupid, or timid, as never to think for themselves; but who followed with the crowd, like a swarm of bees, to the brazen tinkle of a mere name! Happily, the minds of the present age are far too active, enlightened, independent, and fearless, for degradation so unworthy. In ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... too delicate, too modest; she had too few arts, too little coquetry, too much charity. Lighting a cigar some day while he summed up his situation, her husband had probably decided she was incurably stupid. It was the same taste, in essence, our young man moralised, as the taste for M. Gerome and M. Baudry in painting and for M. Gustave Flaubert and M. Charles Baudelaire in literature. The Count was a pagan and his wife a Christian, ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... other. But he was a little vexed, for he was a young man with great capacity for pleasure, and it pleased him that morning to be with his friend. The thought of two ladies waiting lunch did not deter him; stupid women, why shouldn't they wait? Why should they interfere with their betters? With his ear on the ground he listened to Rickie's departing steps, and thought, "He wastes a lot of time keeping engagements. Why will he be pleasant to fools?" And then he thought, "Why has ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... "How stupid of me not to have thought of that!" exclaimed Mrs. Holden. "You know it will be just two weeks now till we go up to the lake for all the summer. Why didn't I think to have you plant stuff in our back garden? ...
— Mary Jane's City Home • Clara Ingram Judson
... sometimes seen in Petersburg society a woman who has even yet not been forgotten. Princess R——. She had a well-educated, well-bred, but rather stupid husband, and no children. She used suddenly to go abroad, and suddenly return to Russia, and led an eccentric life in general. She had the reputation of being a frivolous coquette, abandoned herself eagerly to every sort of pleasure, danced to exhaustion, laughed and jested with young men, ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... clean and your necktie just so. Neatness is a "without-which- not;" but there must be more—a boy must work hard, be polite, honest, full of force, bright, quick, frank, good-natured. The "Old Man" may keep to sweep the floor a lazy, shiftless, stupid, silly, grouchy "stiff"; but when he wants some one to go on the road he looks for a live manly man. When you get in stock it is up to you; for eyes are on you, eyes just as anxious to see your good qualities as you are to ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... very much put out. I heard him say to himself over and over again, "Stupid boy! stupid boy! no cloth put on, and I dare say the water was cold, too; boys are no good;" but Joe was a good ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... did, Sally. Forgive me! I was stupid besides unkind for saying so. But how shall we manage it? Won't the ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... to Nicodemus. Very shortly after this conversation they made their appearance, not only to Jesus, but to Peter and James and John on the holy mount in glory. How had they gotten there? I will tell you just what I think our Lord meant. He meant to teach that stupid, materialistic Nicodemus that people do not go to heaven by merely ascending, like as one would ascend or go up from a lower room in a building to a higher one. He meant to teach him that heaven must be in the man, inwrought into his character ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... am sorry that, amongst all the verses you have sent me, you should have forgotten what you commend the most, Les trois exclamations. I hope you will bring them with you. Voltaire's are intolerably stupid, and not above the level of officers in garrison. Some of M. de Pezay's are very pretty, though there is too much of them; and in truth I had seen them before. Those on Madame de la Vali'ere pretty too, but one is ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... she gave him an excellent dinner; after which, she made him so comfortable, what with an easy-chair and complimentary converse, that, when Jasper rose late to return to his lodging, he said, "After all, if I had been ugly and stupid, and of a weakly constitution, I should have been of a very domestic ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... swarthy, clad in robes diagonally striped, which left visible arms muscled and gnarled as trunks of oaks. Their thick pouting lips, the gold rings which they wore through the partition of their nostrils, their great teeth sharp as the fangs of wolves, the expression of stupid servility on their faces, ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... I had an inspiration. I turned down the inside pocket of my coat; and there, stitched into it, was the label of my tailor's with my name written on it. I had often wondered why tailors did this; obviously they know how stupid guards can be. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... For he now raved enormous folly, Of Baptisms, Sunday-schools, and Graves, 615 'Twould make George Colman melancholy To have heard him, like a male Molly, Chanting those stupid staves. ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
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