"Crass" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so can five seconds, when wonders are working, but the crass ignorance of humanity oft prevents the operation being seen. Be that as it may, Royson discovered that it was nearly eleven o'clock before he had cleaned his soiled clothes sufficiently to render himself presentable. As he set out once more ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... to cheat the ignorant you say The thing that's not, elated still to sway The crass credulity of gaping fools And women by ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... stealthy movements or rank scent of a beast of prey. Now this hourly life-and-death excitement is a keen delight to most wild creatures, but must be peculiarly distracting to the comfort-loving temperament of others. The latter are alone suited to endure the crass habits and dull routine of domesticated life. Suppose that an animal which has been captured and half-tamed, received ill-usage from his captors, either as punishment or through mere brutality, and that he rushed indignantly into the forest with his ribs aching from blows ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... crossed himself, and again bowed. I was amazed to witness the crass ignorance and astounding superstition displayed by the Emperor of Russia, whom all Europe believed to be a progressive, wideawake monarch. That he possessed a spiritualistic kink, as did also his German wife, was quite apparent. Any bogus medium or charlatan could easily impose ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... pleasures, was to make him at home in Athens as he had never been at home in Rome. He rested in the charm of the smaller, simpler city, where among all classes and all ways of life mental refinement took precedence of crass display. Here, he felt, he could live and work, unknown to fame indeed, but with all that was best in him dedicated in freedom and integrity to the life of the spirit. The memory of Egypt, where all effort lost ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... place opposite; and the aspect of this lady made an additional element in his uneasiness. She, too, was gotten up bravely according to her lights. She seemed something under forty, tall and angular; her hair, a crass yellow, was tied with a large girlish bow of black ribbon behind; and in her cheeks she had crudely striven to recall the hues of youth. Around her long neck another black ribbon accentuated the scrawny lines it was designed to hide; and on top of all she wore a wide black hat, which had ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... opinion," was the answer, "it's a piece of crass stupidity on the part of the commander of the New York. It is all nonsense to play such tricks with a country where we are not particularly welcome guests at any time, in spite of all the diplomatic courtesies of Porfirio Diaz. The gentlemen over in Tokio have every movement of ours in ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... bright particular being into a peculiar and reserved parterre of paradise, where bloom at once the graces of Panthism, the simplicity of Deism, and the pathos of Catholicism; where he can sip elegances and spiritualities from flowerets of every faith!' Fancy my crass ignorance, when I assure you that I actually laughed over that verbal syllabub, thinking it intended as a famous ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... luck to yer ugly carcase! You're a nate-looking baste to interfere with a pair of illigant craythers! Be the crass! he's all shill, boys. Och, mother o' Moses! I can't find a ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... Note 78). He was an adherent of Danish culture and of the esthetic view of art and life, who hated all national exclusiveness and showed a love of his country no less true and intense than Wergeland's by chastising the Norwegians of his time for their big, empty words and their crass materialism. For this he was rewarded with abuse, and called "traitor to his country" and "matricide." In reality Welhaven was a dreamer, a worshiper of nature, a man of tender feeling. His subjective lyric poetry is not surpassed in richness of content ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... two things in one glance. Raffles had stepped a few inches backward, and stood poised upon the ball of each foot, his arms half raised, a light in his eyes. And another kind of light was breaking over the crass features of ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... seriously. Still I cannot but wish that an angry English journalist with his clever and fiery pen, would fall upon Sombart's book and give its author a sample of English spirit. The work teems with unjust, incorrect opinions; is full of crass ignorance and grotesque exaggerations, which lead the unlearned astray, injure Germany's cause, and annoy those who know better—so far as they ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... generalization. Does the fact look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... granted that this illiterate black son of the south will know, as we do, all the troubles and standards of the labour market: will discern the reason, which to us is obvious, of his princely pay. But this is where our crass stupidity overtakes us. The native does not arrive at his conclusions through the same channel of thought as we do ourselves. How could he? And as we only use him to suit our own convenience, and remain reckless of the ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... secularising of that wealth, just as in the old Celtic church, by various devices, to get it into the hands of unqualified men and minors; luxury, avarice, oppression, simony, shameless pluralities, and crass ignorance; and above all that celibate system, which nothing would persuade them honestly to abandon, though it had proved to be a yoke they could not bear, and was producing only too generally results ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... I thought him a crass materialist. He had doctored the body until he was able to believe only in the body. He referred everything back to the body. Every emotion, according to him, was only caused by the terminal of a nerve vibrating in a ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... a really humorous witness tells a story which involves very considerable consequences, but which he does not really end with tragic conclusions. Suppose the subject to be a great brawl, some really crass deception, some story of an attack on honor, etc. The attitude toward the event is altered with one turn, even though it would seem to have been generated progressively by ten preceding witnesses and the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... At one we shudder and at one we mock. Man last appears. In him the Soul's pure flame Burns brightlier in a not inord'nate frame. Of old when Heroes fought and Giants swarmed, Men were huge mounds of matter scarce inform'd; Wearied by leavening so vast a mass, The spirit slept and all the mind was crass. The smaller carcase of these later days Is soon inform'd; the Soul unwearied plays And like a Pharos darts abroad her mental rays. But can we think that Providence will stay Man's footsteps here upon the upward way? Mankind in understanding ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... is quite familiar with the crass individual who assumes the cheap skeptical attitude toward occult matters, which attitude he expresses in his would-be "smart" remark that he "believes only in what his senses perceive." He seems to think that his cheap wit has ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... caused at night by the determination of the Imperial to make itself known. She had been brought up to believe that, gas being dear, no opportunity should be lost of turning a jet down, and that electricity was so dear as to be inconceivable in any house not inhabited by crass spendthrift folly. She now saw electricity scattered about as though it were as cheap as salt. She saw written in electric fire across the inner entrance the beautiful sentiment, "Our aim is to please YOU." The "you" had two lines of fire under it. She ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... and his face assumed a terribly blank expression, for the coroner went on to say that never in the whole course of his experience, which now extended over a quarter of a century, had he been cognisant of such utterly crass stupidity as that of this policeman—a man who, in his opinion, ought to be ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... later, called the piece a disgrace to the age and wondered how a man could write and print such nonsense. The plot consisted, he declared, of a simpleton's quarrel with Providence over a stupid and affected girl. It was full of crass, ribald wit and senseless rodomantade. There were a few scenes of which something might have been made, but 'this writer converted everything into inflated rubbish'. Some one taxed Moritz with undue severity, whereupon he returned to the attack, insisting that this extravagant, blasphemous and vulgar ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... priest, rigid in a pious convention, who could neither bend nor break. The sin of an infidel breaker of the law, that was one thing; the crime of a son of the Church, which a human soul came to relate in its agony, that was another. He had a crass sense of justice, but there was in him a deeper thing still: the revelation of the human soul, the responsibility of speaking to the heart which has dropped the folds of secrecy, exposing the skeleton of truth, grim and staring, to the eye of a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... meat-fed instincts, and what with the county Members, the Bishops, the Peers, all the hereditary force of the country, they still rule the roast. And there's a certain disease—to make a very poor joke, call it 'Pendycitis' with which most of these people are infected. They're 'crass.' They do things, but they do them the wrong way! They muddle through with the greatest possible amount of unnecessary labour and suffering! It's part of the hereditary principle. I haven't had to do with them thirty five ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... says my father, 'isn't this a hard case,' says he, 'that ould villain, lettin' on to be my friend, and to go asleep this way, an' us both in the very room with a sperit,' says he. 'The crass o' Christ about us,' says he; and with that he was goin' to shake Lawrence to waken him, but he just remimbered if he roused him, that he'd surely go off to his bed, an lave him completely alone, an' that id be ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... sweetness of the land. They avoided scandals only by the terror of your name, the threat of the stake, and the brand of heresy, . . . if, indeed, this can be called avoiding scandals and not rather exciting schisms and revolt by crass ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... king with his fellow, Hold converse of desolate speech: And her waters are haggard and yellow And crass with the scurf of the beach: And his garments are grey as the hoary Wan sky where the day lies dim; And his power is to her, and his glory, As hers ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the egregious Deeford, was quite charming to watch and hear. Mr. CYRIL RAYMOND should, I am sure, mitigate the asinine priggishness of the young viscount's bearing in the First Act. His conversion from this to the merely crass stupidity of the second was too much for us to bear. Mr. VINCENT STERNROYD as Mr. Hugh Meyers looked quite as if he might have been able to put his hand on two million; Mr. HARBEN as Sir Michael Probert just as if he would sign any document which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... heart and little speech, Slow, stubborn countrymen of heath and plain, Now have ye shown these insolent again That which to Caesar's legions ye could teach, That slow-provok'd is long-provok'd. May each Crass Caesar learn this of the Keltic grain, Until at last they reckon it in vain To browbeat us who ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... faults of taste which have just been noticed passed easily into occasional, though only occasional, faults of criticism. I do not recommend anybody who has not the faculty of critical adjustment, and who wants to like Leigh Hunt, to read his essay on Dante in the Italian Poets. For flashes of crass insensibility to great poetry it is difficult to match anywhere, and impossible to match in Leigh Hunt. His favourite theological doctrine, like that of Beranger's hero, was, Ne damnons personne. He did not like monarchy, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... active service. Unhappily the measure struck a mortal blow at the principle of universal liability by excusing any person who found a substitute for himself or paid into the war office a sum, not exceeding three hundred dollars, to be fixed by general order. This provision, so crass and so obviously favoring the well-to-do, sowed seeds of bitterness which sprang up ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... activity based in utilitarianism is not crass or all so obviously wrong, especially in today's context. Population growth poses a moral question but also a logistical one: uncontrolled growth may well be questionable, but it is a staggering reality. ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... all crass materialists. I tell you, books are the depositories of the human spirit, which is the only thing in this world that endures. What was it ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... want to be believed in by anybody so ignirant!" said Mr. Macey, in deep disgust at the farrier's crass incompetence to apprehend the conditions of ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... and pitiful in their hatred of the German and their cautious dealings with him as they were in their other activities. Their hatred was of the emptyheaded kind, but all the more dangerous for being based on frivolity of heart and crass ignorance. ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... King was very starn, bekase he knewn it was only an axcuse she was afther makin,' an' she was lookin' that he'd be sayin' somethin' about the young Kings an' was afther dodgin' as long as she cud. So whin he shpoke so crass, she riz up aff the sate, for it was a fib she was tellin', an' she didn't shwape the kitchen at all, an' that was done be wan av the maids, an' gev a sigh, an' wint in the ould ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... words. A veritable fire burned there, a fire, it might be, of mere physical irritation and savage exasperation at the too-rapid crumbling of the wilfully disobedient body, a glory, perhaps, of obstinate pride and conceit, a fire of superstition and crass ignorance, but a fire to be doubted of no man ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... adherence to human creeds! It was vastly more than observance of forms! "God is a spirit," he read; "and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." Then, voicing his own comments, "Why, then, this crass materializing of worship? Are images of Saviour, Virgin, and Saint necessary to excite the people to devotion? Nay, would not the healing of the sick, the restoration of sight to the blind, and the performance of the works of the Master by us priests do more than wooden or marble images to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fearing the spread of cholera, and the Allies are thinking that the Greeks want to be endangered by cholera any more than the Italians?... The history of the Balkan politics of the Allies is the record of one crass mistake after another, and now, through pique over the failure of their every Balkan calculation, they try to unload on Greece the results of their own stupidity. We warned them that the Gallipoli expedition would be fruitless and that the Austro-Germans would surely crush Serbia.... ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... Then, with the usual crass idiocy of our tribe, we proceeded to swallow oblivion by the tumbler until the afternoon was nearly gone. I felt damp and cold and sticky, so I said I should scull home and change my clothes. Then Darbishire yelled with spluttering cordiality, "Home! Not if I know it! My togs just ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... to myzell, 'poor Tom wun't coom here to-day: arl up with her, if 'a doeth: and who be there to suckzade 'un?' Mark me now, all these charps was good to shutt 'un, as her coom crass the watter; the watter be waide enow there and stony, but no deeper than ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... rehearsals had been held, Wagner supervising them all. In the end, even the anti-Wagnerites who went to curse, admitted that unheard-of results had been achieved: they would not give in about the music, which remained, in their crass ears, "without form or melody"; and we may therefore the more readily accept their testimony as to Wagner's supremacy as a musical director. The late Mr. Joseph Bennett's reports—and he was till his last breath a violent anti-Wagnerite—are typical: they may be read in the files ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... that there was never any agitation for Reform in Trinidad before that which he passes under review. It is, however, a melancholy fact, which we are ashamed to state, that Mr. Froude has written characteristically here also, either through crass ignorance or through deliberate malice. Any respectable, well-informed inhabitant of Trinidad, who happened not to be an official "bird of passage," might, on our author's honest inquiry, have informed him that Trinidad is the land of chronic agitation for Reform. ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... The crass ignorance of the average Englishman about geography is really appalling. He neither knows, nor wants to know, anything about it, and oddly enough seems to think that there is something rather clever about his dense ignorance. This ignorance ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... members of a philosophic system; we infuse new blood into thought. Truth becomes palpable, a theme is eviscerated, thought is lame, science is childish. History speaks clearly; there is an embryo of knowledge, a vacillating science; the infancy, youth, maturity, and death of a theory; morality is crass, the spirit meagre or acute; the mind adapts itself, logic is maimed; there is a conflict of ideas, the inspiration of science, truncated thoughts. Again we talk of the head of the mob, of the foot of the altar ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... set at ease by some self-constructed theory which would not bear its own examination for a minute—as if a quack were to treat himself with his own bread-pills and feel better—Mark, having convinced himself that the reviewer was a crass fool whose praise and blame were to be read conversely, found the wound to his self-love begin ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... come to Scotland to vindicate the honour of one of the neatest men she has ever produced. My business is to point out to you that the only way of escape out of the "crass materialism" in which we just now landed, is the adoption and strict working out of the very principles which the Archbishop ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of the deposit, and exploited its treasures by quarrying from the other side of the hill. But their crass ignorance of modern science led to their undoing. The accumulation of liberated carbonic acid gas in the workings killed them in scores. They probably fought this unseen demon with the tenacity of their race, until ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... crass material endeavour," small wonder that the American had remained in spiritual poverty of the most debasing sort until the New Dawn should come to enrich him, to topple in ruins an ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... yar sergeant ossifer— Dat sassy un what call me "Woolly-bear." An' kick my shin, he holler 'crass to me:— "You, Pete, jes' you go in, an' tell Ma'am Secord I'se comin' in ter supper wiv some frens." He ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... assumed the political aspect that caused the Civil War. Yet the student who would forget the spiritual element in our life, who would overlook the fact that man is a human being and not a mere animal, will wander far astray into unreal bypaths of crass materialism. ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... involves nothing less than to be precisely this CAUSA SUI, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness. If any one should find out in this manner the crass stupidity of the celebrated conception of "free will" and put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his "enlightenment" a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... with a good deal of fullness his theory that the motifs of the sonnets recur in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece—in Venus and Adonis, a certain crass naturalism; in Lucrece a high and spiritual morality. In the sonnets the same antithesis is found. Compare Sonnet 116—in praise of friendship—with 129, in which is pictured the tyranny and the treachery ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... certain than that we are about to free ourselves from the crass blindness of the nineteenth century in its great delusion that the wealth of a nation consists in the number of things it makes and possesses. Parenthood and childhood will shortly come to be recognized as the first concern of the State that is ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... because he has the constructive imagination which can place alongside of that chaos of cupidities and stupidities a vision of a rational world-order which seems easily attainable if only some malignant spell could be lifted from the spirit of man. But he finds himself impotent in face of the crass inertia of things-as-they-are. Except the gift of oratory, he has all possible advantages for the part of a social regenerator. He has the pen of a ready and sometimes very impressive writer; he has a fair training in science; he ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? - Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan . . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... without experiencing any serious check, and with the single important incident of taking Ghuzni by storm on the way. Our positions at and about Cabul were not seriously molested until late in 1841, when the paralysis of demoralisation struck our soldiers because of the crass follies of a wrong-headed civilian chief and the feebleness of a decrepit general. Nott throughout held Candahar firmly; the Khyber Pass remained open until faith was broken with the hillmen; Jellalabad held out until the "Retribution Column" camped under its walls. But for the awful catastrophe ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... that this is not the first time of simple and good-natured intrusion—looking in, as who would say, with beaming fellowship and crass camaraderie upon the highly finished table and well-seated guests—to be kindly and swiftly shuffled into some further respectable place—that all ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... allegorical group—by the Commissioners of the Minneapolis Exhibition. He took the rejection with Promethean irony, proclaimed it as the clinching proof of his ability, and abounded in reasons why, even in an age of such crass artistic ignorance, a refusal so egregious must react to the advantage of its object. But his sister's indignation, if as glowing, was a shade less hopeful. Of course Caspar was going to succeed—she knew it was only a question of time—but ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... pompous disorder and correct agitation hurt him in that hour like a want of frankness. No doubt it was not Beethoven or Schumann that he heard, but their absurd interpreters, their cud-chewing audience whose crass stupidity was spread about their works like a heavy mist.—No matter, there was in the works, even the most beautiful of them, a disturbing quality which Christophe had never before felt.—What was it? He dared not analyze it, deeming ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Crass rays streaming from the vestibules; Cafes glittering like jeweled teeth; High-flung signs Blinking yellow phosphorescent eyes; Girls in black Circling monotonously About ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... before others man comes, finally, to deceive himself, believing himself a being whose happiness consists in the renunciation of self and all that is earthly, and in the thought of his moral excellence.—The crass assumptions in Mandeville's reasoning are evident at a glance. After analyzing virtue into the suppression of desire, after labeling the impulse after moral approbation vanity, lawful self-love egoism, and rational acquisitiveness avarice, it was ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... at its height, in the zenith. world-wide, widespread, far-famed, extensive; wholesale; many &c. 102. goodly, noble, precious, mighty; sad, grave, heavy, serious; far gone, arrant, downright; utter, uttermost; crass, gross, arch, profound, intense, consummate; rank, uninitiated, red-hot, desperate; glaring, flagrant, stark staring; thorough-paced, thoroughgoing; roaring, thumping; extraordinary.; important &c. 642; unsurpassed &c. (supreme) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... merely that, owing to the rapid progress, they are aggravated, and that to point out Germany as a model of successful achievement, along these and other lines, in order to bolster up political cure-alls at home, is a betrayal of crass ignorance of the general internal situation of the country, and once such prejudiced pleaders are found out, the rebound will go too far the other way. That were a pity, too, for we have much to learn ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the fort that Braddock had intended to capture, fired their cannon in rejoicing at a victory that forever killed the prestige of British arms in the New World. For hitherto the British soldier had been thought invincible, and this exhibition of crass stupidity and bungling gave the colonials a different opinion of British arms. The British were brave it is true, but they could not adjust themselves to meet the enemy on their own ground,—and in all history the Briton ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... thrown off his balance by what he had just learned—"if I understand you aright, my good Xaxaguana, all this means that the lives of my friends and myself have been put into the utmost jeopardy by my crass folly of last night, I knew—yes, I knew, when it was too late, that I had been a fool," ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... may be "crash" for "crass" from crassus, clumsy; or it may be "curt," defective, imperfect: anything would be better than Warburton's "'scus'd," which honest Theobald, of course, adopts. By the by, it seems clear to me that this speech of Exeter's properly belongs ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... apperception discriminated from each other. There was associative apperception, subsumptive apperception, assimilative apperception, and others up to sixteen. It is needless to say that this is nothing but an exhibition of the crass artificiality which has always haunted psychology, and which perpetuates itself by lingering along, especially in these works which are advertised as 'written for the use of teachers.' The flowing ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... either courage of an extraordinary but unenviable character or else crass stupidity that led Bernhardi to submit to the civilization of the present day such a debasing gospel, for if his brain had not been hopelessly obfuscated by his Pan-Germanic imperialism, he would have seen that not only would this philosophy do his country infinitely more harm ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... shouldered his instrument and took his place on the platform. The storm was abating but there were still thunderings and occasional flashes of lightning concerning the crass ignorance and stupidity of the people of Orchard Glen and Methodists the ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... water out of the top of his head, and cannot swallow a herring. Indeed, so lately as last year a popular M.P., writing to one of the religious papers, allowed himself to say that "science will not hear of a whale with a gullet capable of admitting anything larger than a man's fist"—a piece of crass ignorance, which is also perpetrated in the appendix to a very widely-distributed edition of the Authorized Version of the Bible. This opinion, strangely enough, is almost universally held, although I trust that the admirable ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... approached with its favourite fruit. At length, feeling pretty sure that it would not fly away, she let it loose just before its usual feeding time, and then held out some fruit which she had got in readiness. The bird flew towards her; and from that day followed her about wherever she went. "Crass," (the name we gave to the curassow), soon became a great favourite, and made Quacko and Ara very jealous. The monkey would, now and then, steal down and slyly try to pluck the feathers out of Crass, which would immediately run for protection to Marian; while Ara would fly down and perch on ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... since it was good form for a maid to avoid the crass mention of sex. With prohibition has come such an outburst of Get Moral Quick legislation that the reaction is now being felt throughout the length and breadth of the flapper. The legislators would lengthen the skirts to protect the defenceless male from a chance thought of ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... nae doot, that James Moore—curse him!—will win ma Cup awa' from me, yer ain dad. I wonder ye're no 'shamed to crass ma door! Ye live on me; ye suck ma blood, ye foul-mouthed leech. Wullie and me brak' oorsel's to keep ye in hoose and hame—and what's yer gratitude? Ye plot to rob ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... can't think that we carried persistency so far as to apply to the Russian and the Japanese. Many of our scheme perished in their own vagueness. Others, vivid and adventurous, were checked by the first encounter with the crass reality. At one time, I remember, we were to have sent out a detachment of stalwart Amazons in khaki breeches who were to dash out on to the battle-field, reconnoitre, and pick up the wounded and carry them away slung over their saddles. The only difficulty was to get the horses. But the author of ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... all who approached them should do so without sin either of omission or commission, the idea was universal. Pride of service and pride of self entered into its composition in about equal proportions; hence the sailing-master who neglected to salute the flag, or who through ignorance, crass stupidity, or malice aforethought flew prohibited colours, was no more liable to be taught an exemplary lesson than the bum-boatman who sauced the officer of the watch when detected in the act of smuggling spirits or women into one ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... Dr. Hale's, however, a surprise greeted him, and as he responded to the old pastor's outstretched hand, he knew he met with one in whom firm gentleness and affable dignity were the chief charm of character. There was not, as he anticipated, coarse, crass assertiveness—a semi-cultured man whose narrow creed joined hands with barren intelligence. Far otherwise; he stood before one whose presence commanded reverence, one at whose feet he ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... be 'crash' for 'crass' from 'crassus', clumsy; or it may be 'curt,' defective, imperfect: anything would be better than Warburton's ''scus'd,' which honest Theobald, of course, adopts. By the by, it seems clear to me that this speech of Exeter's properly belongs to ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... bad," said Linda reflectively; "because Eileen is sensitive and constant contact with crass vulgarity certainly would ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... everything in his future, he was to discover a little later, except for the affable condescension of Mrs. Peachey toward the profession of letters. Cyrus's antagonism he had attributed to the crass stupidity of the commercial mind; but it was a blow to him to encounter the same misconception, more discreetly veiled, in a woman of the charm and the character of Mrs. Peachey. Bland, plump, and pretty, she received the modest avowal of his occupation with ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... of a proper ham reaches the level of high art. Proper boiling makes any sound ham tolerable eating; conversely a crass and hasty cook can spoil utterly this crowning mercy of the smokehouse. Yet proper cooking is not a recondite process, nor one beyond the simplest intelligence. It means first and most, pains and patience, with somewhat of foresight, ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... outskirts she presently threw off the obvious marks of her hysteria, but by little signs another woman might read, Ruth saw hours afterward that the spell possessed her still. Its gloom seemed to overcast the entire evening. Either through insufficient advertising, or the crass stupidity of the enfranchised of Eden Centre, who thought less of their political enlightenment than the noisy saving of their souls, Shelby's meeting proved a pitiful fiasco. Hardly a score had gathered in the low-ceiled schoolhouse, fetid with reeking kerosene lamps ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... de Sarrion was one of those good Spaniards and good Catholics who lay the entire blame for the downfall of their country from its great estate to a Church, which can only hope to live in its present form as long as superstition and crass ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... not happened to be an exceedingly obstinate man, he might have been defeated by the crass Toryism of Mr. Chawner. But Mr. Povey was obstinate, and he had resources of ingenuity which Mr. Chawner little suspected. The great, tramping march of progress was not to be impeded by Mr. Chawner. Mr. Povey began to make his own tickets. At first he suffered as all reformers and inventors ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... her soul and go through those mental and physical relaxing exercises which the wonderful lecturer of last winter had explained. She let her head and shoulders and neck droop like a wilted flower-stem, while she took into her mind the greater beauty of a wilted flower over the crass rigidity of a growing one; she breathed deeply and slowly and rhythmically, and summoned to her mind far-off and rarely, difficultly, beautiful things; the tranquil resignation of Chinese roofs, tempered with the merry human note of their tilted corners; ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... to gallop away. However, I walked to, and reassured him, and told him who I was and where I had come from. Of course he was an Irishman, and he said, "Is it South Austhralia yez come from? Shure I came from there meself. Did yez crass any say? I don't know, sure I came by Albany; I never came the way you've come at all. Shure, I wilcome yez, in the name of the whole colony. I saw something about yez in the paper not long ago. Can I do anything for yez? This is not my place, but the shepherd is not far; will I go and ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... foreign lottery-tickets, and procureur-syndics used to traffic in them. So much for the sense of our legislator and his driveling philanthropy. The encouragement given to savings banks is a piece of crass political folly. Suppose that things take a doubtful turn and people lose confidence, the Government will find that they have instituted a queue for money, like the queues outside the bakers' shops. So many savings banks, so many riots. Three street ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... ruler: his mental torpidity, founded upon physical indolence, renders immediate action and all manner of exertion distasteful: his conscious weakness shows itself in overweening arrogance and intolerance. His crass and self- satisfied ignorance makes him glorify the most ignoble superstitions, while acts of revolting savagery are the natural results of a malignant fanaticism and a furious hatred of every creed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... boys; two little boys who have been taught their Catechism, and will one day aspire to the priesthood." And that it should be two stupid little boys who had broken his statue seemed significant. "Oh, the ignorance, the crass, the patent ignorance! I am going. This is no place for a sculptor to live in. It is no country for an educated man. It won't be fit for a man to live in for another hundred years. It is an unwashed country, that ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... I have written fully in my book "The Tragedy of St. Helena," and have contented myself here with pointing out how the crass stupidity and blind prejudice of his opponents have helped largely to bring about the world-war of our own times. I have also endeavoured to contrast the statesmanlike attitude of Napoleon with the short-sighted policy of ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... of a languid and weary character; Don Calixto, the judge, and Caesar started in to exchange political reflexions of crass vulgarity. Caesar was gallantly attentive to the wants of Don Calixto's elder daughter, and less gallantly so to his other neighbour Amparito; the mayor's son, despite the fact that his official ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... virtues of a curate-and-tea-party novel that people are abashed into high resolutions. It may be because their hearts are crass, but to stir them properly they must have men entering into glory with sonic pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than any material ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... work. He tried to muster up a resentful feeling against Sophie Carr for the emotional havoc she had wrought, and the best he could do was a despairing pang of loneliness. He wanted her. Above all he wanted her. And she was a rank infidel—a crass materialist—an intellectual Circe. Why, in the name of God, he asked himself passionately, must he lose his heart so fully to a woman with whom he could have nothing more in common save the common factor that she was a woman and ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... come about as a result of the foregoing was a crass inequality in the bargaining relation between the employer and the individual employee standing alone. The great coal-mining and coal-carrying companies, which employed their tens of thousands, could easily dispense with the services of any particular miner. The miner, on the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... an impression of the myriad sides of life that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of this crass and earthly vanity. In towns or the busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of other men's existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear contempt. But Irvine had come scathless through life, conscious only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... last the point: This honest fellow had long been in the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father before him; but these were irresponsible inventions, told for the teller's pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure quitted for another, on fancy's least suggestion. So that the little people who manage man's internal theatre had not as yet received ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who made you—who was ta father to you, my poy. She would rather not pe knowing, for ta man might pe a Cam'ell poth. And if she couldn't pe lofing you no more, my son, she would pe tie pefore her time, and her tays would pe long in ta land under ta crass, my son." ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... than those of the intestines, it, nine times out of ten, neither knows nor suspects that any such organs or mechanism exist. If the functions above attributed to the human frame could be shown really to belong to it, pure, not to say crass, materialism, would require no further proof. Those particular functions undoubtedly take place without the cognisance of that particular sensitive soul which we call ourself, so that if no other sensitive soul take cognisance of them, they must needs ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... this question becomes little more than a conflict between aesthetic preferences. Matter is gross, coarse, crass, muddy; spirit is pure, elevated, noble; and since it is more consonant with the dignity of the universe to give the primacy in it to what appears superior, spirit must be affirmed as the ruling principle. To treat abstract principles as finalities, before which our intellects ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... at the expense of the many. This point of view is however a good deal less than just. It is quite true that as worked by William the Norman and several of his successors the system became only too often an instrument of gross injustice and crass despotism; but at its best, and in its origin, it was based on the twin foundations of protection on the one hand and duty on the other. I will venture to quote a high authority in this ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... her hand the crust of Chaos thirl'd, And forced from his black breast the bursting world, High swell'd the huge existence crude and crass, A formless dark impermeated mass; No light nor heat nor cold nor moist nor dry, But all concocting in their causes lie. Millions of periods, such as these her spheres Learn since to measure and to call their ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... was exactly what a dunderheaded policeman believed. P.C. Robinson had revealed himself by many a covert glance and prick-eared movement. Grant squirmed uneasily at the crass conceit, as there was no denying that circumstances tended towards a certain doubt, if no more, in regard to his own association ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... pass, glad growing grass!- I climb the air with lissome mien; Unsheathing keen The vivid sheen Of springing green, I thrill the crude, exalt the crass Fine-flex'd ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... later, with Balaclava and Inkerman behind us, and the world ringing with the story of our valour; and something here and there being said about the staring incapacity of our commanders and the crass dishonesty and stupidity of our contractors. The army which left home in such bright array is transformed to a crowd of ragged vagabonds, and all the services are mixed together in the trenches and the camps before Sevastopol. Here are men of the ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... denied—for instance, the vital power, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat's distinction between the working of the passions and the working of intelligence, or they return to crass atomism, etc., etc. Hence the course ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... at the open window. Finger on trigger, Banneker held up his flashlight in his left hand and irradiated the spot. He saw the hand, groping, and on one of its fingers something which returned a more brilliant gleam than the electric ray. In his crass amazement, the agent straightened up, a full mark for murder, staring at a diamond-and-ruby ring set upon ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... having been shrewd, he said, that for many days he felt no repentance of the act nor was in the least lonely. There was an infinite relief merely in getting clean away from the huge world of men, with all its exactions and temptations and the myriad rebukes and rebuffs of its crass propriety and thrift. He had endured solitude enough in it; the secret loneliness of a spiritual bankruptcy. Here was life begun over, with none to make new debts to except nature and himself, and no besetments but his own circumvented ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... most firmly that President Wilson gave the criminal such chances of reform as no court of law in the world would grant. But, at last, his patience was exhausted. Whether the enslavers of Germany thought, in that crass ignorance of other men's minds they have so often displayed, that America meant to keep out of the war at all costs, or were merely careless of consequences so long as the immediate end was attained, is now immaterial. From the welter of Teutonic ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... The crass coolness of her tactics, with its implied rating of my intelligence, was the very bracer I needed for a most unpleasant task. I accepted her hand, bowed over it formally, and released it. Then I spoke with the most ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... hours of moral anguish man seeks a refuge either in love or in faith. Unhappily the family and friends of Francis were incapable of understanding him. As to religion, it was for him, as for the greater number of his contemporaries, that crass fetichism with Christian terminology which is far from having entirely disappeared. With certain men, in fact, piety consists in making one's self right with a king more powerful than any other, but also more severe and capricious, who is called God. One proves one's loyalty to him as to other ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... the same work to-morrow; combating the irritating misrepresentations, exposing suppressors, discovering the truth under a mountain of crass stupidity and wilful deceit. Next day he will be again at work; and the same process will go on the following week. In the month there are perhaps about five days—exclusive of Sundays—upon which he does not sit. But those days are not holidays. They are spent in patiently reading a mass of deeds, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... commercial rapacity had seemed to the notary the result of superior powers; the shrewd old man had mistaken youth for strength, and luck for genius in business. Phileas certainly knew how to read and write and cipher well, but he had read nothing. Of crass ignorance, it was quite impossible to keep up even a slight conversation with him; he replied to all remarks with a deluge of commonplaces pleasantly uttered. As the son of a farmer, however, Phileas was not without a certain commercial good sense, and he was also kind and tender, and would often ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... whatever to prevent it—except insubordination on the part of the brain. And insubordination of the brain can be cured, as I have previously shown. When I see men unhappy and inefficient in the craft of living, from sheer, crass inattention to their own development; when I see misshapen men building up businesses and empires, and never stopping to build up themselves; when I see dreary men expending precisely the same energy on teaching a dog to walk on ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... fertile field for crass, popular propaganda. On the one hand the Allies urging China to join with them. On the other hand America, their friend. This great country sways back and forth between ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... clubhouse, Carrington Davies encountered unexpected opposition in gaining admittance. It seemed that no one had known who he was and, what was more, no one seemed to care after being informed. Such crass ignorance irritated Davies greatly, but he held his patience. The disregard shown him was only due to the prevailing excitement. If any one of them ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... once, so that he was not vexed by these anglings. He dragged it out of himself. "She was young, very young. My father was the squire of the Essex village that is our home...." It was useless. He could not tell her of that tragedy. How black a tragedy it was! How, it existing, he could be so crass as to eat and drink and be merry with love? He turned his face away from Ellen and wished her arm was not in his, yet felt himself bound to go on with his story lest she might make a vulgar reading of the facts and imagine ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... not responsible for the crass and purblind idiocy of railway officials, I ignored this expression of ingratitude and continued to ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... For the time it had failed. Saxe, as Stephen had said, had proved too much. He must make Saxe the scapegoat. The obvious lie damned him. It was crass stupidity to put into Hugues' mouth a lie which carried its own disproof with it. To force an accusation based upon the remainder of the story would be unpolitic. His best course would be to relieve the King of all his ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... these things were presented to us when we were, adults for the first time, we should smile at them. It isn't true that the Fountain of all common sense should punish a race for a venial offence committed by a person long since dead, and then should add to the crass injustice by heaping the whole retribution upon a single innocent scapegoat. Can you not see all the want of justice and logic, to say nothing of the want of mercy, involved in such a conception? Can you not see it, Bertie? How can you blind yourself to it! Take your eyes away from the details ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... speed of a Frenchman, from printed strips of cheap colored paper which she offered for sale at a cent each. They were political in nature, often in verse, insulting in treatment, and mixed with a crass obscenity at which the dismal multitude laughed bestially. Three musicians, one with a rude harp, a boy striking a triangle steel, sang mournful dirges similar to those of Andalusia. The peons listened to both music and reading motionless, with expressionless ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... given to suggest that this plan, whatever it was, had been put into operation. Torrington's syndicate was not composed of fools and yet the kidnapping of Barraclough had been mere child's play without a speck of opposition. His own side had been guilty of an act of crass stupidity in failing to carry off the servant Doran as well as his master. It was one of those tragic oversights which occur in the most carefully laid plans. Unquestionably Doran would have told his ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... be disappointed, of course, but she is so little that she will not feel it as much as if she were bigger. She will get over it, darling. Very little girls do not remember things long." Oh, how coarse and crass and stupid it sounded—how course and crass and stupid to say it to this small defiant scrap of what seemed the inevitable suffering ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... lofty disdain). Crass folly!—a woman utterly unknown, who came heralded by the roar of wind and the rush of rain—a creature born of the tempest, with flame in her eyes and hair, and fire in the scarlet of her mouth; a fierce, passionate ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... tower and estate in the southern part of the island, where the romantic scenery furnished fit environment for a poet's imagination. And Spenser, able all his life to take refuge in his art from the crass realities of life, now produced many poems, some of them short, but among the others the immortal 'Faerie Queene.' The first three books of this, his crowning achievement, Spenser, under enthusiastic encouragement from Ralegh, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... softly, "how bitter we were against the others—even at first against one another? You had been betrayed by that unimportant woman and the whole sex was hateful to you. I had just come from seeing the tragedy caused by a man's crass selfishness. I, too, was wearing the fetters. To me the whole of your sex seemed abominable.... You see," she went on, "my marriage was a terrible disappointment. I fancied that I was marrying a great man, a genius, an inspired statesman, and I found myself allied to a ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "Bought and Paid For" was one of the best popular commercial Anglo-Saxon plays I had ever seen anywhere. There were touches of authentic realism at the very crisis at which experience had taught one to expect a crass sentimentality. The fairy-tale was well told, with some excellent characterization, and very well played. Indeed, Mr. Frank Craven's rendering of the incompetent clerk was a masterly and unforgettable piece of comedy. I enjoyed "Bought and Paid For," and ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... and, though they did not look directly at one another, they seemed to be holding a silent conference. Another of the trio, in whose veins ran God alone knows what Semitic, Babylonish and Latin strains, gave a warning signal. Oh, nothing so crass as a wink or a nod. I almost doubted that I had intercepted it, and yet I knew he had communicated a warning to his fellows. More a shade of expression that had crossed his eyes, or a glint in them of sudden light—or whatever it ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... York. Few are the art centers there, and few the ruins; and perhaps there is not so much culture lying round loose as there might be—just bustle and hustle, and the rush and crush and roar of business and a large percentage of men who believe in supporting their own wives and one wife at a time. Crass perhaps, crude perchance, in many ways, but no matter. All her faults are virtues now. Beloved metropolis, we salute thee! And also do we turn ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... and blacks who formed the background for the tragedy of Reconstruction in Louisiana. There were also the Manichean gods of sharply defined good and evil, sanity and insanity, righteousness and corruption, civic pride and utmost indifference; murder, theft, malfeasance, ignorance and crass stupidity. All these thrown in the pot of political regeneration made a situation that was tragically immoral ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... the kitchen, "Troth she'll tell you that story; give me another drink o' fwhiskey and water. Oh, I'm hardly able to sit up, I'm getthi' so drowsy. A wink o' sleep, I may say, didn't crass my eye these three nights; an' I'd wish to stretch myself beside the poor boy widin. I'm an my keepin', boys, and fwhin you know that the law was at my heels fwhor the last foive weeks, you'll allow I want rest: throth ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... line was made, substituting "swam" for "calm," and that the cockneyism, though shuffled, was not thus corrected. In "The Saturday Review," June 25, 1898, the publication of Messrs. Duckworth was criticized; and the writer very properly pointed out that I had made a crass mistake. "Mr. Rossetti," he said, "must be a very hasty reader of texts. What is printed [in 'The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine'] is 'swarm,' not 'swam,' and the rhyme with 'warm' is perfect, stultifying the editor's ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various |
