"Superficiality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her programme. She was an excellent dancer, but although she was physically too young and healthy not to find a certain enjoyment in the sheer delight of rhythmic motion, she was conscious as the evening progressed of a certain quality of superficiality in the pleasure she experienced. There was a sameness about it all that palled. What was there in it, after all? One of your partners knew a priceless new glide or shuffle which he forthwith imparted to you, or else you initiated him into some step hitherto ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... their intellect, the thoroughness of their knowledge in their several studies, and the distinctness of their acquaintance with the outlines and principles of Martial learning generally,—an acquaintance as free from smattering and superficiality as necessarily unembarrassed by detail,—testified emphatically to the excellence of the training they had received, as well as to the hereditary development of their brains. What was, however, not less striking ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... consider themselves absolved from anything more. The penalty of it is a gradual decline of the unused powers, growing difficulty of sustained attention, dislike for what requires effort of mind, loss of wider interests, restlessness and superficiality in reading, and other indications of diminution of power in the years when it ought to be on the increase. Is this the fault of those who so decline in power? It would be hard to say that it is so universally, for some no doubt are pressed through necessity to the very limits of their ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... the lurking duplicity in Don Ippolito, that continually enfeebled the painter in his attempts to portray his Venetian priest, and that gave its undecided, unsatisfactory character to the picture before him—its weak hardness, its provoking superficiality. He expressed the traits of melancholy and loss that he imagined in him, yet he always was tempted to leave the picture with a touch of something sinister in it, some airy and ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... presence of his wealth, which flattered his parvenu pride; and sometimes, when he teased her, she would break out with the droll phrases of a Paris gamine, slang redolent of the faubourgs, seasoned by her pretty, piquant face, inclined to pallor, which not even superficiality could deprive of its distinction. So ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... atmosphere of joy. Fresh ingenuousness and glowing enthusiasm were part of his charm. There was a rich vein of the romantic in his character, but the cast of his mind was philosophical. He had no patience with superficiality masquerading as wisdom, and was quick to detect a fallacy in reasoning. A shining trait in him was truthfulness. He would never compromise or palter with the truth, either by way of suppression, or exaggeration, or casuistical ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... School," and in her unselfish reason for this, and the fact that she was forced to support herself and others at such an early age, when she longed for a more thorough education, lies an appeal for kindly criticism of her work rather than a verdict of superficiality, which some gave who did not understand or appreciate the nature, the inspiration, or the real genius of the young and ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... not seem able to attack the real inner man. If there is a lamentable increase of vulgarity, superficiality, and restlessness in our epoch, there is also an inspiring development of certain qualities. Those who were watching human nature before the war were pretty well aware of how, under the surface, unselfishness, ironic stoicism, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... It is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.[25] It deals with solids and geometrical figures, and its instrument is logic. But according to Bergson it has an inherent incapacity to deal with life.[26] When we contrast the rigidity and superficiality of intellect with the fluidity, sympathy and intimacy of intuition, we see at once wherein {119} lies the true creative power of man. Development, when carried too exclusively along the lines of intellect, means loss of will-power; and we have seen how, not individuals alone, but entire ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... of Roman superficiality, incuriousness and ignorance. Every old Egyptian city had its idols (images of metal, stone or wood), in which the Deity became incarnate as in the Catholic host; besides its own symbolic animal ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... elegant conversation, perpetually approximate. It is indeed the light and airy speech, eminently natural and spontaneous, but at the same time profoundly sophisticated, of a sort of Utopian aristocracy, that will, in some such delicious hesitations, innuendoes and stammerings, express their "superficiality out of profundity," in the gay, subtle, epicurean ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... DEUS OPERATUS EST SALUTEM IN MEDIA TERRAE. Then, they, that part from those parts of the west for to go toward Jerusalem, as many journeys as they go upward for to go thither, in as many journeys may they go from Jerusalem unto other confines of the superficiality of the earth beyond. And when men go beyond those journeys toward Ind and to the foreign isles, all is environing the roundness of the earth and of the sea under our countries on ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... adoption of all necessary and useful conceptions in the sphere to which he limited his mature interests. That he never extended this liberty to believe into more speculative and comprehensive regions was due simply to a voluntary superficiality in his thought. Had he been interested in the rationality of things he would have laboured to discover it, as he laboured to discover that historical truth or that political utility to which his interests ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... bearing of the old gentleman which he sought artificially to assume, so too his lack of repose and inward stability constantly contradicted it. He seemed merely to have borrowed the old gentleman's diplomatic manner of speaking in order to show his own superficiality and emptiness. Then at times he would suddenly lapse from the stiff demeanor of the wearer of the blue coat into his own patronizing joviality and onto a plane where joking rubs out with dirty fingers the line between superior and subordinate as if it ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... frailty and superficiality of our own judgments cannot brook contradiction. We abhor another man's doubt when we cannot tell him why we ourselves believe. Our ideal of other men tends therefore to include the agreement of their judgments with our own; and although we might acknowledge ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... volume, while they are definitely opposed and combated in more than one passage of this.[275] I admit that Sandeau, save in the one situation where I think he comes near to the first class—that of subdued resignation to calamity—is not passionate; I admit that Bernard has a certain superficiality, and that, as has been confessed already, his "form" sometimes leaves to desire. But they both seem to me to have, in whatever measure and degree, what, with me, is the article of standing or falling in novels—humanity. And they seem—also to me, and speaking under correction—to write, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Anacreon, though in his case no one has been so foolish as to claim that the love described in his poems (or those of his imitators) is ever supersensual. Professor Anthon has aptly characterized him as "an amusing voluptuary and an elegant profligate," and Hegel pointed out the superficiality of Anacreontic love, in which there is no conception of the tremendous importance to a lover of having this or that particular girl and no other, or what I have called individual preference. Benecke puts this graphically when he remarks ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... look on while the people eat at the first table; and the second table and the third are finished, and the viands still hold out. But these are placed upon the table down below, where hoi polloi and the lame, blind, and halt sit down and eat. And back of all this superficiality lies the great superstitious dread by means of which the Church ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... of Macaulay's interests and intuitions wearing a certain air of superficiality; there is a feeling of the same kind about his attempts to be genial. It is not truly festive. There is no abandonment in it. It has no deep root in moral humour, and is merely a literary form, resembling nothing so much as the hard geniality of some clever college tutor of ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... his own expression, and he has never been content with knowing only one of them. Guided by a sympathetic intelligence, adopting, not symbols, but ideas, he has, by force of penetration and comprehension, extracted the essence of each doctrine in turn. His changes therefore indicate, not superficiality, but depth. He is no more chargeable with volatility than society itself. Like it he is a seeker, listening to every proposition, accepting what is vital, rejecting what is merely formal. There is not one of the systems ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... towards more vital issues and then the long and futile argument began. The weapons of sarcasm and denunciation were denied to me by the laws of politeness and etiquette. I beat in vain against the solid walls of obstinate prejudice and superficiality. His statements were uttered with dogmatic emphasis. They expressed beliefs held with all the self-assurance born of ignorance. They were based on no independent reasoning or observation, but had been assimilated either directly from the ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... tell the truth in the plain, homely manner that characterizes my narrative; but, while I have nothing to regret in this particular, I can assure them that I have been actuated by none other spirit than that of candor. Where I have used documents it was with a desire to escape the charge of superficiality. If, however, I may be charged with seeking to escape the labor incident to thorough digestion, I answer, that, while men with the reputation of Bancroft and Hildreth could pass unchallenged when disregarding largely the use of documents and the citation of authorities, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... language that whilst it challenges you, it commands your respect by its very gracefulness. But it is just this attitude based upon insufficient or false information which has ruined many a cause in the British Isles. The superficiality, the one-sidedness the inaccuracy and often even dishonesty that have crept into modern journalism, continuously mislead honest men who want to see nothing but justice done. Then there are always interested ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... relieved by those brief and pregnant generalizations of which he is one of the greatest masters in our language. They are so close to life as all men know it, that the careless reader, as we have already seen, is apt to take them for platitudes; but there is all the difference between the stale superficiality which coldly repeats what only its ears have heard, and these sayings of Johnson heated to new energy in the fires of conscience, thought and experience. "I have already enjoyed too much," says the Prince in Rasselas; "give ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... approach such a task: The first is to take the book as a whole and write a review of it, which is a method liable to a superficiality; the second is to take such a work chapter by chapter, and to piece the various criticisms into an ordered whole. This I have attempted to do. I make no attempt to criticize the method of Chesterton's approach ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... to speak briefly of such a personage as Leo the Thirteenth, and of such a question as the 'assent and obedience' of Catholics in matters not connected with morals or belief, lays himself open to the accusation of superficiality. We are all, however, obliged to deal quickly and decisively, in these days, with practical matters of which the discussion at length would fill many volumes. Most of us cannot do more than form an opinion ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... censured by Irishmen, even in so august and impartial a court as the Dictionary of National Biography, as if he had traduced his countrymen. Did Thackeray, then, malign the English? The only charge that may fairly be brought against him is the one that cannot be rebutted—the charge of superficiality and of scamped work, of a humour that only plays over the surface of things—a humour which sees only the comic side that anybody might see. And because I cannot defend him, I say no more. Lever is certainly not a great humorist, but he is ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... some little known Latin commentator, then a reference to a German authority; and the fact was disclosed that he was a scholar. With smiling ease, apologetically, Weeks tore to pieces all that Hayward had said; with elaborate civility he displayed the superficiality of his attainments. He mocked him with gentle irony. Philip could not help seeing that Hayward looked a perfect fool, and Hayward had not the sense to hold his tongue; in his irritation, his self-assurance undaunted, he attempted to argue: he made wild statements and ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... to inform himself of the condition of a class of the population which he was not among, except by catching up the dinner-table maledictions of his planting friends against the class which they hate most, as being least dependent on them, would be of course entirely contrary to his professed superficiality. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... other hand, we received from Christians equally indiscriminate abuse and hatred. It was, therefore, needful that we should be our own harshest judges, and that we should be sure that we knew thoroughly every subject that we taught. He saved me from the superficiality that my "fatal facility" of speech might so easily have induced; and when I began to taste the intoxication of easily won applause, his criticism of weak points, his challenge of weak arguments, his trained judgment, were of priceless service to me, and what of value ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... smooth, white marble forehead. And no very great trial of endurance, either, Arthur Berkeley, if it comes to that; for say what you will of her, she's a beautiful, stately, queenlike woman indeed; and it somehow strikes me she's a truer and better woman, too, than you have ever yet in your shallow superficiality imagined. Not like little Miss Butterfly! Oh, no, not like little Miss Butterfly! But still, there are keys and keys in music; and if every tune was pitched to the self-same key, even the tenderest, what a monotonous, dreary world it would be to live and sing in after all. Perhaps ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... remember, that, at the very time when I, slow and cold, had come fully to admire her genius, and was congratulating myself on the solid good understanding that subsisted between us, I was surprised with hearing it taxed by her with superficiality and halfness. She stigmatized our friendship as commercial. It seemed, her magnanimity was not met, but I prized her only for the thoughts and pictures she brought me;—so many thoughts, so many facts yesterday,—so many to-day;—when there was an end of things ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... than those of any other nation. The baptismal name of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci was given, on account of his book of travels, to a new quarter of the globe, and if Paolo Giovio, with all his superficiality and graceful caprice, promised himself immortality, his expectation ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... though he was passionately devoted to the cause, to neither of his good qualities did he owe the successes, whether solid or specious, with which he has been credited. In the first place, judged by the standards of modern missions, the superficiality of his work was {409} almost inconceivable. He never mastered one of the languages of the countries which he visited. He learned by rote a few sentences, generally the creed and some phrases on the horrors of hell, and repeated them to the crowds attracted to him by the sound ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... section-cutting and the study of the tissues of the higher organisms under the microscope. This attitude was, no doubt, in part due to the fact that in most colleges then there was a not always intelligent copying of what was done in the great German universities. The sound revolt against superficiality of study had been carried to an extreme; thoroughness in minutiae as the only end of study had been erected into a fetish. There was a total failure to understand the great variety of kinds of work that could be done by naturalists, including what could be done by outdoor naturalists—the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the father who now—in the light of her secret knowledge—she comprehended for the first time. All her life she had wondered about him. Wondered why she and Brace had not loved and honoured him as they had their mother. His weakness, his superficiality, had been dominated by the wife who, having accepted her lot, carried her burden proudly to ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... a set of efficient institutions. But although Hamilton is much the finer man and much the sounder thinker and statesman, there were certain limitations in his ideas and sympathies the effects of which have been almost as baleful as the effects of Jefferson's intellectual superficiality and insincerity. He perverted the American national idea almost as much as Jefferson perverted the American democratic idea, and the proper relation of these two fundamental conceptions one to another cannot be completely understood until this ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... period in photography that did so much to destroy the vital significance of photography as a type of expression which may be classed as among the real arts of today. And it was a movement that failed because it added nothing to the idea save a distressing superficiality. It introduced a fog on the brain, that was as senseless as it was embarrassing to the eye caring intensely for precision of form and accuracy of presentation. Photography was in this sense unfortunate ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Lavish, who had several times tried to interrupt his mordant wit. "The narrowness and superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon tourist is ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... must be many kinds of treatment for the different cases in order to secure the largest growth of the individuals included. This does not in any sense necessitate the displacement of thoroughness by superficiality or trifling, but on the contrary greater thoroughness may be expected to result, as helpful adaptations of method and of matter give a meaningful and purposeful motive for that earnest application ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... more advanced studies, the examinations revealed a prevailing want of method and order, and much of that superficiality which must necessarily result from taking up such studies without disciplinary preparation. Such preparation seemed not to have been wholly neglected; but in a majority of cases it had been quite ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his conviction that it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its possessor and train him for its effective use. But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the eighth story of a building, he should not be condemned because he does not mount to the ninth; if he wishes a light lunch, he should not be found fault with for not ordering a seven-course dinner. And yet we continually hear persons accused of "superficiality" who purposely and knowingly acquire some slight degree of knowledge of a subject instead of a higher degree. And others are condemned, we will say, for reading for amusement when they might have read for serious information, without inquiring whether ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... treats of the lighter and brighter side of life. It is seldom in deadly earnest; it tends somewhat to superficiality; and it prefers cleverness to profundity, in both conception and treatment. Naturally, then, comedy rather than tragedy is its usual sphere; and though the tale may end in gloom, it more frequently suggests a possible tragedy in order to heighten the effect of the happy denouement. For similar ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... noisy wines, and interminable whist parties. Moreover, he had made far less sensation at Camford than he had expected. Somehow or other he had a dim consciousness that men saw through him; that his cleverness did not conceal his superficiality, nor his easy manners blind men's eyes to his ungenerous and selfish heart. Even his late phase of popular scepticism was less successful at Camford than it would have been at places of less steady diligence ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... technique and of inspiration that it supersedes the bounds of the hitherto-thought-to-be-possible art in America. The Princess's conception of night, black as a pall and yet luminous as a polished stove pipe, is only equalled by her feeling towards the Hudson which lies extended in soporific superficiality beneath the sable covering of darkness in which Her Highness has been pleased to overwhelm it. Throughout the day an eager-to-see crowd of spectators were beaten back from the picture by ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... devote their lives, rather than with a desire to qualify themselves for their proper work. The tendency is admitted; and it has become, in overcrowded professions and commercial pursuits, the fruitful source of superficiality, of charlatanry, of poverty at once of pocket and of honor, of empty speculations, and of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... a confession he regained strength to battle against Parisian superficiality, which even in the sacred sphere of art seemed to seek only for outward success and to admire whatever fashion dictated. His criticisms on the condition of life and art in Paris are very severe. Even the noble ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... will only drop your morbidness!" But in all seriousness, can such bald animal talk as that be treated as a rational answer? To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one's brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for THAT cure. The fact that we CAN die, that we CAN be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... caricaturists have represented it—viz. that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ changed in any manner the divine heart and disposition. It is not as unfriendly critics (who, perhaps, are not to be so much blamed for their unfriendliness as for their superficiality) would have us to believe, that the doctrine of Atonement says that God loves because Christ died. But the Apostle who preached that doctrine and looked upon it as the very heart and centre of his message ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... army in good fighting trim. In the long-run it wears down all opposition, but it is not a characteristic you notice at first. Gradually it makes itself felt, and gradually it governs your estimate of the whole army. And then the peculiar wickedness of Tommy (a child's naughtiness for superficiality) ceases to offend you so much. Rather your own regulation code seems a trifle less important than it did. Let's all lie and steal; what does it signify? I would lie and steal till the crack of doom to gain the serene endurance of the ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Desprey, M. a plenipotentiary of France at Berlin Congress quoted on treatment of ambassadors in Russia named ambassador to Rome Diplomatists antagonistic attitude of, toward the Republic anomalous and mistaken behaviour of superficiality of majority of Dufaure, M. appointed President du Conseil now cabinet ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... visiting Chinatown's restaurants, and while we confess to having some excellent dishes served us in Chinatown, our preference lies in other paths of endeavor. We suppose it is all in the point of view, and our point of view is that there is nothing except superficiality in the ordinary Chinese restaurants frequented by Americans, and those not so frequented are impossible because of the average Chinaman's disregard for dirt and the ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... which would mutually fail to respond at the best of times. Being what he was, this made him all the more careful to do all he could for her, but he never rejoiced in her really quick intellect as he did in the slow sensitive one of Ishmael, or even in the kittenish superficiality of Phoebe's. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... times already, though not so resolutely as now, tried to bring her to consider their position, and every time he had been confronted by the same superficiality and triviality with which she met his appeal now. It was as though there were something in this which she could not or would not face, as though directly she began to speak of this, she, the real Anna, retreated somehow into herself, and another strange and unaccountable woman came out, whom ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... is a very unfortunate thing—indicating superficiality of thought—that the modern popular notion of 'holiness' identifies it with purity, righteousness, moral perfection. Now that idea is in it, but is not the whole of it. For, not to spend time upon mere remarks on words, the meaning of the word thus rendered is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... this deprive us also of the moral law itself, which admits no empirical principle of determination. Therefore it will be necessary to add something here as a protection against this delusion and to exhibit empiricism in its naked superficiality. ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... until one might think one talked of different species of animal, but the educated explorer flings clear of all these delusions. To him men present themselves individualised, and if they classify it is by some skin-deep accident of tint, some trick of the tongue, or habit of gesture, or such-like superficiality. And after all there exists to-day available one kind at least of unbiassed anthropological evidence. There are photographs. Let the reader turn over the pages of some such copiously illustrated work as The Living Races of Mankind, [Footnote: The Living Races of Mankind, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... phenomena of the globe, and the simultaneous action of the forces that pervade the regions of space, I experience a two-fold cause of anxiety. The subject before me is so inexhaustible and so varied, that I fear either to fall into the superficiality of the encyclopedist, or to weary the mind of my reader by aphorisms consisting of mere generalities clothed in dry and dogmatical forms. Undue conciseness often checks the flow of expression, while diffuseness is alike detrimental to a clear and precise ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... The superficiality and glitter that are the bane of modern methods of education in our country have not spared sanctuary ordinances and family religion. "The church which is in thy house" is an empty form of speech when applied to a majority of so-called Christian homes. ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... all his intellect upon it—to concentrate and bring to bear all his energies on whatever tussock or mole-hill it may be out of which he has to dig his fortune. When the youth steps out into life, it may be that his actual store of knowledge is superficial—a smattering of too many things—but superficiality is precisely the one quality which, in theory at least, his training has been calculated not to produce. Englishmen know that the American throws tremendous energy and earnestness into his business. They know that he throws the same earnestness into his sports. Is it not reasonable ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... not, however, study "sparkling words and sonorous phrases" with the object of introducing them consciously into our speech. To do so would inevitably lead to stiltedness and superficiality. Words and phrases should be studied as symbols of ideas, and as we become thoroughly familiar with them they will play an unconscious but effective part ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... action who has been earnest and thorough in preparation and self-culture. "Not for school, but for life, we learn;" and our habits—of promptness, earnestness, and thoroughness, or of tardiness, fickleness, and superficiality—are the things acquired most readily and ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... not absorbed much of her thought. The coming of John Dunham into her life had changed all that. In a moment of high and sensitive excitement he had dawned upon her vision as a novel type of manhood, and one representing all that was desirable. In vain she knew the superficiality of this judgment. In vain she reasoned her ignorance of him and his character. He had captivated her imagination, and this was the reason that Edna Derwent, as soon as she mentioned him, loomed to Sylvia's stirred ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... expedients for hiding the meditations of his heart from Elisabeth's curious eyes was the discussion with her of what people call "general subjects"; and this tried her temper to the utmost. She regarded it as a sign of superficiality to talk of superficial things; and she hardly ever went in to dinner with a man without arriving at the discussion of abstract love and the second entree simultaneously. It had never yet dawned upon her that as a rule it is because one has not experienced ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... fantasy), light essays and religious philosophy. All these were so full at once of the profound seriousness of youth, and of the bubbling wine of its high spirits, as to recall another thing Gilbert said: that Dickens was "accused of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep seas." That was the matter in dispute about himself, and very furiously disputed it was during these years. Was G.K. serious or merely posing, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... his influence should interest us of to-day, when the same problems of wealth and poverty and of superficiality in religion confront our arrogant modern "civilization." That St. Francis was not a madman is evident from the orderliness of his work, his clear legislative and administrative capacity, his calm, powerful, amiable sway ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... mental differences no less pronounced. No adjective has been more frequently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the word "dull." The American mind has been accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity, commonplaceness, and dozens of other defects, but "dulness" is not one of them. "Smartness," rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation; or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... Welsh, Dutch, and Norman, with "a little Latin and less Greek" from his earliest visitors and invaders. This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of his nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be able to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the contradiction, the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... his official costume, as if satirical fortune had chosen to give the representative on trial a foretaste of all the joys of parliamentary life. The friends of the deceased, who came next in line, formed a very limited contingent, exceedingly well chosen to lay bare the superficiality and emptiness of the existence of that great personage, reduced to the companionship of a theatrical manager thrice insolvent, a picture-dealer enriched by usury, a nobleman of unsavory reputation and a few high-livers ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... immense variety, the beauty of his draughtsmanship, and the felicity of his decorative design. But all this self-conscious skill, this ingenious affectation, this ostentatious muscularity, this immense superficiality—I feel always now a spiritual vacuity behind it which leaves me cold and critical. Every famous achievement of Raphael's, when I come upon it for the first time, repels me with a fresh shock of disillusionment. I am unpleasantly reminded of Andrea del Sarto and even of lesser men; I see ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... elevated. A profile was visible against the dull monochrome of cloud around her; and it was as though side shadows from the features of Sappho and Mrs. Siddons had converged upwards from the tomb to form an image like neither but suggesting both. This, however, was mere superficiality. In respect of character a face may make certain admissions by its outline; but it fully confesses only in its changes. So much is this the case that what is called the play of the features often helps more in understanding a man or woman than the earnest labours of ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... of the people were manifesting, and of the need that those who would be his disciples should count the cost of their allegiance (Luke xiii. 22-30; xiv. 25-35; xii. 1-59). He did not hesitate to administer the most scathing rebuke to the Pharisees for the superficiality and hypocrisy of their religious life and teaching (Luke xi. 37-54),—a rebuke which is emphasized by the parable in which, on another occasion, he taught God's preference for a contrite sinner over a complacent ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... received from Giulio de' Medici through the Officiali dello Studio in 1520, with an annual allowance of 100 florins. In 1527, the year of his death, he dedicated the finished History to Pope Clement VII. This masterpiece of literary art, though it may be open to the charges of inaccuracy and superficiality,[2] marks an epoch in the development of modern historiography. It must be remembered that it preceded the great work of Guicciardini by some years, and that before the date of its appearance the annalists of Italy had been content with records of events, personal impressions, and critiques ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... voluntary power of combination: all his associations (as we said before) are those of habit or of tradition. He is a mere narrative and descriptive poet, garrulous of the old time. The definition of his poetry is a pleasing superficiality. ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... first glance often takes the prize from scholarship. All hasty, decisive judgment betrays, when it becomes habitual, superficiality of observation and impiety against the essential character of particular facts. Children know as completely determined and certain a great deal which is doubtful to the mature ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... little. "The exhibition you're making," she seriously sighed at last, "of your inconstancy and superficiality! All the relics of you that I've treasured and that I supposed at the time to ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... and how the inner experiences appear from such a psychological standpoint. The first chapters of this volume may appear like a long, tiresome way around before we come to our goal, the study of the psychotherapeutic agencies. And yet it is the only possible way to overcome the superficiality with which the discussion is too often carried on; we must understand exactly how the psychological analysis and explanation of the scientist differ from the popular point of view. After studying in this spirit the foundation of psychotherapy, we shall carefully examine ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... takes to his craft nowadays, not because he has taste for literature, but because he has an incurable faculty for scribbling. He has no culture, and he soon loses the power of taking pains, if he ever possessed it. But he can talk with glib superficiality and imposing confidence about every conceivable subject, from a play or a picture to a sermon or a metaphysical essay. It is the utter indifference to subject-matter, joined with the vulgar unscrupulousness of pretentious ignorance, that ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... good man who carries his loaf of bread and his word of hope into his neighbour's hovel reaps a more tangible return than the lonely thinker who schemes to undermine the strongholds of injustice. Still there was a perplexing contrast between the superficiality of Crescenti's moral judgments and the breadth and penetration of his historic conceptions. Odo was too inexperienced to reflect that a man's sense of the urgency of improvement lies mainly in the line of his talent: as the merchant is ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... institution whose gift to the social order is not yet outgrown and whose possibilities of social value are not yet fully developed, must work to make the right marriages easier to secure, and the wrong ones less easy to be consummated, and to purge the ideals of home of selfishness and of superficiality by constant portrayal of the best in ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... new-fashioned lines is really not necessary at all. I do not know whether the feminists are entirely right, but I feel sure that their own principles ought rather to lead them to an opposition to this breaking down of the barriers. It is nothing but a superficiality if they instinctively take their stand on the side of those who spread broadcast the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Dutch historian, published, in 1787, Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs. Byron reflects upon his paradoxes and superficiality in Note II., infra. Thomas Thornton published, in 1807, a work entitled Present State of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... has written many kinds of stories about the West Coast, reaching almost to greatness in her "Grania" (1892). In the short story, Miss Jane Barlow, accused of superficiality by many Irish critics and as eagerly declared to get the very quality of Connemara peasant life by others, has sure power and a charm all her own. No one who reads "Irish Idylls" (1892) will stop at that collection. Mr. Seumas MacManus is as truly a shanachie as the old story-tellers ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Hegelisms' doubtless needs an apology for the superficiality with which it treats a serious subject. It was written as a squib, to be read in a college-seminary in Hegel's logic, several of whose members, mature men, were devout champions of the dialectical method. My blows therefore were aimed almost entirely at that. I reprint the paper ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... desiring a king. They were but rude and sense-bound men, like children in many respects; their religion was little more than outward worship and a vague awe; they needed 'signs' as children need picture-books. The very slightness and superficiality of their religion made their confession easy and swift, and neither the one nor the other went deep enough to be lasting. The faith that is built on 'signs and wonders' is easily battered down; the repentance that is due to a thunderstorm is over as soon as ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... character. Among the most eminent of these teachers were Protag'oras of Abde'ra, Gor'gias of Leontini, and Prod'icus of Ce'os. That great philosopher of a later age, Plato, while condemning the superficiality of their philosophy, characterized these men as important and respectable thinkers; but their successors, by their ignorance, brought reproach upon their calling, and, in the time of Socrates, the Sophists—so-called—had lost their influence and had fallen into contempt. "Before ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... imagined, to the treatment his thesis on the Papal primacy had met with, or to any embarrassment occasioned him on that account. On the contrary, while complaining of the unworthy character of the disputation, he excepted that particular thesis. He alluded rather to the superficiality and want of interest with which such important questions as justification by faith, and the sinfulness attaching even to the best works of man, were passed over or evaded. On all the points which he had wished to contend for and expound at Leipzig, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... unfolding this mechanical view of the world was of such a nature that never probably did poet expend life and art on a more ungrateful theme. The philosophic reader censures in the Lucretian didactic poem the omission of the finer points of the system, the superficiality especially with which controversies are presented, the defective division, the frequent repetitions, with quite as good reason as the poetical reader frets at the mathematics put into rhythm which makes a great part of the poem absolutely unreadable. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... how I answered him. In spite of the superficiality of his own arguments, which I was not learned enough to detect, I was ingloriously routed. Darwin had kicked over the bucket, and that was all there was to it.... After we had left the club both Conybear and Laurens admitted they were ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a certain grim attraction in it. It was a strange treadmill, set in a world of everlasting suffering and dying, in a subterranean stratum of life, having nothing in common with that deceptive existence of a comparatively happy superficiality which he had been able to lead in New York. The Schmidts were doing hard service requiring the utmost self-renunciation. They received no greater compensation than enabled them to obtain sufficient food, clothing and shelter to be able to continue in that service. Though Peter Schmidt was ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... wisdom of the sort on draught in women's clubs—in brief, the sort of wisdom which consists entirely of a body of beliefs and propositions that are ignorant, unimportant and untrue. Such banal striving is most prodigally on display in the United States, where superficiality amounts to a national disease. Its popularity is due to the relatively greater leisure of the American people, who work less than any other people in the world, and, above all, to the relatively greater leisure of American women. Thousands of them have been ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... that a very large amount of the superficiality and easy-goingness of the Christianity of to-day comes just from this, that so many who call themselves Christians have never once got a glimpse of themselves as they really are. I remember once peering over the edge of the crater ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is a tendency in modern civilisation towards a diminution in the manifestations of genius—which may admit of question—-it can scarcely be due to any threatened elimination of corrupt stocks. It may perhaps more reasonably be sought in the haste and superficiality which our present phase of urbanisation fosters, and only the most robust genius can ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... so far as to allow that jokes on that scale are indeed inexhaustible. Longmore was not by habit an aggressive apologist for the seat of his origin, but the Count's easy diagnosis confirmed his worst estimate of French superficiality. He had understood nothing, felt nothing, learned nothing, and his critic, glancing askance at his aristocratic profile, declared that if the chief merit of a long pedigree was to leave one so fatuously ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James |
