"Brainless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was his answer. "Go ahead an' smash the boats. You can hang some of them. But you can't touch me with the law. 'Tis me that's a crippled creature of circumstance, too weak to raise a hand against any man—a feather blown about by the windy contention of men strong in their back an' brainless in their heads." ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... lips like a thread, a large, prominent chin, a well-opened, but frozen eye, of light at once craving and ingrate. She mortally hated work, and loved what she called pleasure; being an insipid, heartless, brainless dissipation of time. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... wind-swept bleak Japan as our sore throats we muffle, We see thy senseless pudding face and irritating shuffle; As you go slopping thro' the streets of your foul-smelling city, You're far too common to be rare, too brainless ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... he the force and she the guidance. She would have supplied the things he lacked. It was to her he came for counsel, as it was. But for her he would never have taken the first step. What right had this poor brainless lump of painted flesh to share his wounds, his triumphs? What help could she give him when the time should come ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... sitting upon the back porch, hulling strawberries and watching with absent amusement the tireless efforts of Jane to induce a very fat and entirely brainless pup to shake hands. It had been a busy day, for owing to the absence of the free and independent "Saturday Help" Esther had insisted upon helping Aunt Amy in the kitchen. Now the Saturday pies and cakes were accomplished and only the strawberries ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... rebel," said Jonathan, with marked emphasis on the word, "blown by the wind from a spike on the bridge above us. I don't know whose brainless head it may be, but it'll do for my collection." And he tossed it carelessly into the bottom ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... utterly shocking because it was made in a wood, or a meadow, instead of in a lawful marriage-bed. They will not be slow to punish you for your offence, so, of what good are they to you? They are stupid, cruel, brainless people. Why should you die because of stupid, cruel, ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... you ecclesiastical idiot. The principal thing for you is to enjoy yourself; my sweet carcass, a thing accessory. Your pleasure will be my death, and then you'll canonise me perhaps? Ah, you have the plague, and you would give it to me. Go somewhere else, you brainless priest. Ah! touch me not," said she, seeing him about to advance, "or I will ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... that she loved Louis XIV: for himself and not for his regal grandeur, is there a woman in the world, however disinterested, who believes that Madame de la Valliere would have liked Louis XIV. as much if Louis XIV. had been Mr. John Jones; Honoria would not have bestowed her hand on a brainless, worthless nobleman, whatever his rank or wealth. She was above that sort of ambition; but neither would she have married the best-looking and worthiest John Jones who ever bore that British appellation, if he had not occupied the social ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not make good matches in any one sense of the word. The struggling barrister, the clerk, the curate, the brainless masher—such are their prey; and if they make richer prizes than these, still the match cannot be called good; presently there is dis-union as the clever husband finds the pretty but nonsensical wife utterly unable to follow him through the paths of life that Fate has opened ...
— How to Marry Well • Mrs. Hungerford
... bit I told him so. Archie—my cousin, you know; he was only a boy then—was mad on card-playing at that time. And I was real worried about him. I knew he would get into a hole sooner or later, and I begged my surly Englishman to keep an eye on him. Oh, I was a fool! I was a brainless, chattering fool! And I'm not much better now, I ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Nearly all the women had left for the Hills, and the increasing heat was beginning to make life a burden. The younger officers did their best to be cheerful, and one of them, Bertie Oakes, a merry, brainless youngster, even proposed an impromptu dance to enliven the proceedings. But he did not find many supporters. Men were tired after the polo. Colonel Mansfield and Major Burton were deeply engrossed with some news that had been ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... abnormally big without the slightest suggestion of being either too big or awkward. He's simply magnificent. Most men of that size are just leggy and gawky: he is neither. Again, other men built as he, are usually rather brainless and weak, or probably made so much of by women that they become wrapped up in themselves, and are always expecting admiration. Alymer Hermon has the freshness of a delightful boy, with the fine face and courtly manners of a charming man. If you can't ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... tricks, is an interesting and modest knave; Scapin directly the reverse. He had no cause to boast so much of his tricks: they are so stupidly planned that in justice they ought not to have succeeded. Even supposing the two old men to be obtuse and brainless in the extreme, we can hardly conceive how they could so easily fall into such a clumsy and obvious snare as he lays for them. It is also disgustingly improbable that Zerbinette, who as a gipsy ought to have known how to conceal knavish tricks, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... reasoning mind in the mound. Look at those two guards at the door, for instance. There's no earthly need for them to keep guard as eternally as they do. We can't even move, let alone try to escape. They're utterly brainless, commanded to guard the entrance with their mandibles, and continuing to guard it accordingly although the need ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... long time he lived in clover; but gradually rumours began to reach him to the effect that he bore the reputation everywhere of a brainless ninny. ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... one time, foolish at another—wise in one act, foolish in another. To take Moonlight to your tent is wise. I love her. She has brains. She is not like the young Blackfoot squaws, who wag their tongues without ceasing when they have nothing to say and never think—brainless ones!— fools! Their talk is only about each other ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... roll a prurient skin, They graze and wallow, breed and sleep; And oft some brainless devil enters in, And drives ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... the Court of old," saith Father, "but it doth seem me we were scantly so brainless of old time as this. I shall send a letter to my cousin of Oxenford touching Walter. He must not ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... your most indefensible and even futile-appearing action gave the cue for my greatest interest,' said Vida, with a mixture of anxiety and bluntness. 'For just the woman you were, to do so brainless a thing—what was behind? That was what ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... endless variety of names—as a matter of fact, a big book would not be sufficient to describe all so-called "nervous diseases"—it can be readily seen in what a brainless way some "nerve specialists" classify patients of this kind. Not knowing the constituents of the nerve-cells, they still attempt to prescribe for neurasthenic patients. The results are in accordance with such travesty of treatment. The increase ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... connection with our family have been long known to me, and I hope your person will be not less so: you will find me an excellent compound of a "Brainless" and a "Stanhope." [7] I am afraid you will hardly be able to read this, for my hand is almost as bad as my character; but you will find ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... cried out the more upon them— Insolent, brainless, heartless! heiress, wealth, Their wealth, their heiress! wealth enough was theirs For twenty matches. Were he lord of this, Why, twenty boys and girls should marry on it, And forty blest ones bless ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... so pitiful that a wretched, brainless dog, when placed in a position like this, should be able to scramble out, while I, with the power of thinking given to me, with reason and some invention, ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... sweetest little mid To be found in journeying from here to Hades, I am also, nat-u-rally, a prodid- Gious favorite with all the pretty ladies. I know nothing, but say a mighty deal; My elevated nose, likewise, comes handy; I stalk around, my great importance feel— In short, I'm a brainless little dandy. ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... a poor little houseless, roofless, windowless, chimney-less, Esther-less, brainless, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... himself with conviction, that it was not worth a second thought, but this did not prevent him from thinking of it again and again. What manner of undertaker could hope to obtain business by giving away foolish handbills in the street? Really, the whole thing had the air of a brainless practical joke, yet his intellectual fairness forced him to admit that as far as the man who had given him the bill was concerned, brainlessness was out of the question, and joking improbable. There had been depths in those little bright eyes which his glance had not been ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Wirz, the underling, the tool, the servile, brainless, little fetcher-and-carrier of these men, was punished—was hanged, and upon the narrow shoulders of this pitiful scapegoat was packed the entire sin of Jefferson Davis and his crew. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... courting sympathy by sustaining the President of the United States preparatory to his assault upon me. Now, sir, if he is a defender of the President of the United States, all I have to say is, God save the President from such an incoherent, brainless defender, equal in valor in civil and in military life. His military record—who has read it? In what volume of ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... conditions it broadens the life. Everything has its value. Everything has a good use and a bad use. The forces of mind like wealth can be directed either for good or evil. A little rest will re-create forces. Too much rest degenerates into laziness, and brainless, dreamy longings. ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... sneer at the shame of them, Poster-Pan, Poltroons of the pigeon-liver. Your placards gibbet them, Poster-Pan, Who crowd like curs in the cowardly crush, Who flock like sheep in the brainless rush ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... the inquisitor, foreseeing his wiles by intuition, evading his masked pitfalls by instinct. She was terribly afraid of him, yet more afraid of herself, afraid that she would break down and become a brainless, weeping thing. It was the sincerity of her fight against this weakness that made her so dangerous to the prosecuting attorney. He wanted to compel her to admit that her son had confessed his deed to her. She sought to avoid this admission. She had not guessed that he was more in dread of ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... miracles ever occur is a question of common sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any final physical experiment. One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions" in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are asking whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous to insist that it shall be under ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days Looking on him was listening Love the difficulty better than the woman Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise Music in Italy? Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous Not much esteem for non-professional actresses Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency Philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded Polished barbarism Scorned him for listening to ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... known but little experience tending to evoke gentle feeling or generous action. She had confounded the few genuine admirers, who, infatuated with her beauty, endowed her with all heavenly graces, awaiting only the awakening hand of their love, with the heartless or brainless fellows who were not particular about heavenly graces, provided a girl had a fine figure and ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... Deniliquin mail. That is his maddest dream. I have heard him boast of it to his friends—the brainless boys who alone look up to him—I have even heard him rave of it ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... Colan And the axe of Alfred plied— The Danes poured in like a brainless plague, And ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... that water full of fish, without hooking one. Salmon-fishing, then, is a matter of chance, or of plodding patience. They will rise on one day at almost any fly (but the sniggler), however ill-presented to them. On a dozen other days no fly and no skill will avail to tempt them. The salmon is a brainless brute and the grapes ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... he yelled severely, 'is talked about men lowering themselves by marrying actresses. I was a guest at a supper-party last night at which an actress was present. And a more charming, sensible girl I never wish to meet. Not one of your silly, brainless chits who don't know the difference between lobster Newburg and canvas-back duck, and who prefer sweet champagne to dry. No, sir! Not one of your mincing, affected kind who pretend they never touch anything except a spoonful of cold consomme. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the bad old days, didn't you?" he said lightly. "When we danced and made love at the Grafton Galleries." She flushed a little, but did not lower her eyes. "Such a serious girl you were too, Margaret; I wonder how you ever put up with a brainless sort ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... Gaspar de San Agustin, our contemporary writers, we say, find that the native is a creature something more than a monkey but much less than a man, an anthropoid, dull-witted, stupid, timid, dirty, cringing, grinning, ill-clothed, indolent, lazy, brainless, ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... law, "Thou shalt not kill; whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of judgment: but I say unto you" of the new law, saith Christ, "that whosoever is angry with his neighbour, shall be in danger of judgment; and whosoever shall say unto his neighbour, 'Raca,' that is to say, brainless," or any other like word of rebuking, "shall be in danger of council; and whosoever shall say unto his neighbour, 'Fool,' shall be in danger of hell-fire." This card was made and spoken by Christ, as appeareth in the fifth chapter of ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... permit household bills to mount in a manner which could only bring ruin and disaster upon a minister of the gospel who throughout a protracted career of usefulness had sapped his intellectual manhood in the useless effort to support in silly idleness a family of brainless and maddening fools. Miss Alicia had heard her character, her unsuccessful physical appearance, her mind, and her pitiful efforts at table-talk, described in detail with a choice of adjective and adverb which had broken ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... all unconscious of the mischief done; Still the red beacon pours its evening rays For the lost pilot with as full a blaze,— Nay, shines, all radiance, o'er the scattered fleet Of gulls and boobies brainless at its feet. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the lethargic, the brainless, everything that savours of enthusiasm is a craze. The politician who throws himself heart and soul into a political contest is "off his head," is seized with a craze. The philanthropist who builds and endows hospitals and ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... Three young females under the care of the Shereef, assumed the airs and attitude of exclusives, and would not associate with the rest. Every passion and habit of civilized, is represented in savage life. A perfect democracy, in any country and state of society, is a perfect lie, and a leveller is a brainless fool. There is also an aristocracy in crime and in virtue, in demons and in angels. The slaves are clad variously. Haj Ibrahim tried to give every one of his a blanket or barracan, more or less large. Besides this, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before seen a woman. Caliban becomes the most sordid of clowns, and is allotted a sister, Milcha, who apes his coarse buffoonery. Ariel, too, is given a female associate, Sycorax, together with many attendants. The sailors ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... opposed by the whole nation of the Natchez, and at the same time was sensible that the resentment of a slighted woman is very formidable, I returned her such an answer as might shew my great respect for her daughter, and prevent her from making the same application to some brainless Frenchman, who, by accepting the offer, might expose the French settlement to some disastrous event. I told her that her daughter was handsome, and pleased me much, as she had a good heart, and a well turned mind; but the laws we received ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... over the course of organic evolution, we see the unfolding of a great drama, or tragedy, in which, for millions upon millions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless forms of life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during other millions upon millions of years, a savage carnival of huge bestial forms upon the land, amphibian monsters and dragons of the land ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... it:—However much thou art read in theory, if thou hast no practice thou art ignorant. He is neither a sage philosopher nor an acute divine, but a beast of burden with a load of books. How can that brainless head know or comprehend whether he carries on his back a library or ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... across the Channel into Life, for which they had been prepared by a course of lectures on the Dangers of Paris. There also went the confidential secretaries, the clerks and shorthand typists, in their hundreds; degreeless, brainless beings, but wise ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... the girl angrily. "You men make me tired. Two kinds of ladies! And ten thousand kinds of men! You want me to dress like a doll, I suppose, and keep my hands soft and white and go around like a brainless, simpering fool! There are two kinds of ladies, my fine friend: the kind that can and the kind that can't! Thank God I'm none of your precious, ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... the day. "I don't know what has come to them," he would remark irritably; "young men nowadays call their father 'governor,' and speak to him as though he were their equal in age. There is no respect shown to elders. A brainless young puppy will contradict a man twice his age, and there is not even the same courtesy shown to the weaker sex either. I have heard young men and young women—young ladies, I suppose I ought to say—who address each other in ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... theory of mine," returned the Philosopher, "that by Nature she was intended to possess one. It is her admirers who have always represented her as brainless." ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... fool or devil. Every passion of the human soul, which in manhood becomes so grand and glorious in its results, is fatal to womankind. Ambition makes a Lady Macbeth; love, an Ophelia; none but those brainless things, without will or passion, are ever permitted to come to a good end. What measure of content could you draw from the literature ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... "Foolish mob! brainless mob! swinish mob!" cried the stranger, when he at length stood beside the cart upon which the monster was still rending its hapless victim; "whither are ye running, and pressing, and crowding, and what are ye come to see? Know ye not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... a philosopher, and doesn't care; and the Kewp is a careless child. But I feel it, Sara; I have to confess to you that I am a prey to the 'last infirmity of noble minds.'" After a moment he added, less sadly but more irritably, "That creature, now, brainless as it is, is just a doll. ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... I am married, married forever to that tousle-headed, bristle-jawed, brainless, heartless dub. I won't stand for ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... environment. What chance have you under present conditions? None! For very shame, as the years pass on, you operatives will be better paid. What will it amount to? A few shillings a week more, the same life, the same anxieties, the same daily grinding toil, brainless, machine-like, leading you nowhere because there isn't a way out. There will still remain your masters; there will still remain you, the men. Can't you see what it is that I am aiming at? I want to make a great machine of all the ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that if anyone listens to you readily and takes your pamphlets at once, he is sure to be of an undesirable, brainless sort. Or you may chance upon some frightfully talkative individual who can do nothing but keep on repeating some favourite expression. One such nearly drove me mad; everything with him was "production." No matter what you said to him he came ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... this country were permitted, in defiance of law, to have press-gangs formed for the purpose of kidnapping respectable seamen into a service that was made at that time a barbarous despotism by a set of brainless whipper-snappers who gained their rank by backstair intrigue with a shameless aristocracy! All that kind of villainy has been wiped out; and the men of the Royal Navy are now treated like human beings; and they do their work not a whit less courageously and well than they did when it was ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... underwent a sudden change when he saw an opportunity of strengthening his hold upon the English people, and of providing for the penniless followers who accompanied him to his new kingdom. Unfortunately a brainless plot, the "Bye Plot," as it is called, organised to capture the king and to force him to yield to the demands of the conspirators, afforded the more bigoted officials a splendid chance of inducing ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... divine wit, than can vouchsafe residence in the leaden gravity of any money-monger; in whose profession all serious subjects are concluded. But he that shuns trifles must shun the world; out of whose reverend heaps of substance and austerity I can and will ere long single or tumble out as brainless and passionate fooleries as ever panted in the bosom of the most ridiculous lover. Accept it, therefore, good Madam, though as a trifle, yet as a serious argument of my affection; for to be thought thankful for all free and honourable favours is a great sum of that riches ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... lofty title are designated the members of the Indian Civil Service by lesser mortals, such as army officers—who in return are contemptuously termed "brainless military popinjays" ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... shrieking aloud for intellectual brilliance, it's the British Army! Do you think it's a refuge for fools? Do you think any born imbecile is good enough to outwit the German Headquarters Staff? Do you think the lives of hundreds of his men—and perhaps the fate of thousands—can be entrusted to any brainless ass? An officer can't have too much brains. We're clamouring for brains. It's the healthy, brilliant-brained men like Randall that the Army's yelling for—simply yelling for," I repeated, bringing my hand down on the arm of ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... "But she's coarse and brainless, Alden. I can't imagine a boy like my Joey falling in love with a woman like that. He ought to know better. Just remember ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... haply here will move a further doubt, And as for York's part allege an elder right: O brainless heads that so run in and out! When length of time a state hath firmly pight, And good accord hath put all strife to flight, Were it not better such titles still to sleep Than all a realm about the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... by paying idle brainless compliments! I knew I was ugly, and did not want any one to perjure his soul pretending they thought differently. What right had I to be small? Why wasn't I possessed of a big aquiline nose and a tall commanding figure?" Thus I sat in burning ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... thought. Alas! and alas! Before two years were gone, poor Lord Sandston was lying one foggy November morning on Hampstead Heath, with a bullet through his heart. Shot down at the commencement of a noble and useful career by a brainless gambler—a man who did all things ill, save billiards and pistol-shooting; his beauty and his strength hurried to corruption, and his wealth to the senseless DEBAUCHEE who hounded on his murderer to insult him. But I have heard ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... permit the principles of common-sense decorum to give place to the lawless vagaries of fancy and the hollow-hearted forms of artificial life. Under the gaudy drapery of smiles and flounces, of rustling silks and blandishments, there are hearts as brutish and stultified, and heads as brainless and incapable of gentle and moral emotion, and characters as selfish and ungenerous, as were ever concealed beneath the rags of poverty, or the uncouth manners and rough garb of the ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... think of a magter deprived of his symbiote," she said. "If his system can stand the shock, I imagine there will be nothing left except a brainless hulk. This is one series of experiments I don't care to witness. I rest secure in the knowledge that the Nyjorders will find the most ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... appreciated is a good measure of character. The pre-eminence furnished by thew and muscle is most generally recognized; but, as men reach levels above the animal, other qualities take the lead. It is seen that the immaterial spirit wins the greater triumphs,—that the brainless giant, compared with the dwarf of trained intelligence, can accomplish little. The scale runs on into the moral qualities, until at last humanity has given its sanction to the Divine words, "Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant." ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... had an idea of how much she knows," he muttered. "Did I act like a brainless idiot when I was—was that ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... fault with the way in which Mr. Collingwood has discharged his task, except, of course, Mr. Ruskin himself, who would certainly have scored through all the eulogies in passionate red ink and declared that his dear friend had selected for admiration the very parts of his work which were vile, brainless, and revolting. That, however, was merely Ruskin's humour, and one of the deepest disappointments with Mr. Collingwood is that he, like everyone else, fails to appreciate Ruskin as a humourist. Yet he was a great humourist: half the explosions which are solemnly scolded ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... a child haps to be got Which after proves an idiot When folk perceive it thriveth not, The fault therein to smother, Some silly, doting, brainless calf That understands things by the half, Say that the Fairy left this oaf And ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... your brother has suspended his studies for his approaching examination, and your elder sister her labours at the East End—on purpose to devote our combined intelligence to the subject. And are we to be told that we are no better than the brainless multitude who speculate on horse-racing! I am not angry, my child, I am only—(Enter ROBERT, the Page, with a paper in a postal wrapper.) Tiddler's Miscellany—ha, at last! Why didn't you bring it up before, Sir? You must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... know about it?" she exclaimed, with most unnecessary vehemence, I thought. "He wants the child and—and—well, you can see why he wants her, can't you? He is making the most desperate efforts to recover her. Max says the newspapers are full of the—the scandal. They are depicting me as a brainless, law-defying American without sense of love, honour or respect. I don't mind that, however. It is to be expected. They all describe the Count as a long-suffering, honourable, dreadfully maltreated person, and are doing what ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... to be a new attempt. He takes no notice of the sentence I have put in italics: nor does he mention my notice of him, unless he means to include me among those by whom he has been "ridiculed and sneered at" or "branded as a brainless heretic." I did neither one nor the other: I thought Mr. Upton a paradoxer to whom it was likely to be worth while to propound the definite assertion now in italics; and Mr. Upton does not find it convenient to take issue on the point. He prefers general assertions about algebra. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... original purpose, namely, to look after the service of the will; therefore it applies itself unceasingly to this end without ever going beyond it. While the genius, as I have stated, is at bottom a monstrum per excessum; just as conversely the passionate, violent, and unintelligent man, the brainless savage, is ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... presidents and others are but the servants of the people. All authority comes from the people, and not from the aristocracy of the air. Upon these texts of scripture which I have just read rest the thrones of Europe, and these are the voices that are repeated from age to age by brainless kings and ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... living a simple and brainless life. No field-days, of course, and for this relief much thanks. We don't know in the least what is happening. Troops come and troops go, and guns go by during the night, and Red Cross waggons go hither and thither, and the ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... "One of the most refined, ingenious and humorous authors of our time." He asserts with capable judgment that Sterne's use of the borrowed passages, the additions and alterations, the individual tone which he manages to infuse into them, all preclude Sterne from being set down as a brainless copyist. Nicolai's attitude may be best illustrated ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... a whiskey-faced coachman half-asleep in a great hammercloth, be sure it belongs to some snob who has not a sentence of good English in his head. Yes! perhaps a soap-chandler, an oil-dealer, or a candy-maker. Brainless people always creep into plush-always! People of taste and learning, like me, only are entitled to liveries and crests." This Madame says, inviting her guests to take seats at her banquet-table, at the head of which she stands, the Judge on her right, Mr. Soloman ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... left it on the table, and withdrew. The couple were thus revealed to me clearly: both removed their cloaks, and there was 'the Varens,' shining in satin and jewels,—my gifts of course,—and there was her companion in an officer's uniform; and I knew him for a young roue of a vicomte—a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely. On recognising him, the fang of the snake Jealousy was instantly broken; because at the same moment my love for Celine sank under an extinguisher. A woman who could betray ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... that is the ghastly part of the matter. If it would hate me, I could bear it. If it would attack me, if it would try to do me some dreadful harm, I should become a man again. I should be braced to fight against it. But this gentleness, this abominable solicitude, this brainless worship of an idiot, persistent, sickly, horribly physical, I cannot endure. What does it want of me? What would it demand of me? It nestles to me. It leans against me. I feel its touch, like the touch of a feather, trembling about my heart, as if it ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... he continued, "abate thy terrors. My fame is worse than my real character. I have wooed thee for reasons known to myself, and to be known soon to thee. Thou didst love Geordie Dempster; and thy love was weak indeed, if it is to be scared by brainless tongues or tongueless skulls. Wilt thou consent to be the lady of the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... Russia by his very stringency caused a great fictional literature to blossom, despite his forbidding blue pencil. In America the sentiment of the etiolated, the brainless, the prudish, the hypocrite is the censor. (Though something might be said now about the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.) Not that Mr. Howells is strait-laced, prudish, narrow in his views—but he puts his foot down on the expression of the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... his "Progress of Dulness," in three cantos,—an imitation, in manner, of Goldsmith's "Double Transformation." The title is happy. The decline of Miss Harriet Simper from bellehood to an autumnal marriage, in Canto III., is more tiresome than the progress of Tom Brainless from the plough-tail to the pulpit, in Canto I. The Reverend Mr. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... sweet constancy and gentle fortitude of a Beatrice and a Mellida remain in the memory more clearly, leave a more life-like impression of truth on the reader's mind, than the light-headed profligacy and passionate instability of such brainless and blood-thirsty wantons as Franceschina and Isabella. In fact, the better characters in Marston's plays are better drawn, less conventional, more vivid and more human than those of the baser sort. Whatever of moral credit may be due to a dramatist who paints virtue ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried. Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... envious to admit the just claims of the "upper classes." They convinced themselves that without them crops would cease to grow, sellers and buyers would be unable to find their way to market, barbarism would spread its rank and choking weeds over the whole garden of civilization. And, so brainless is the parrot public, they have succeeded in creating a very widespread conviction that their own high opinion of their services is not too high, and that some dire calamity would come if they were swept from between producer and consumer! True, thieves are found only where ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... be paltering with the truth to say that he had not had far more champagne than was good for him. Also, the general of Monaco had brought a pack of cards with him, and was spoiling the harmony by trying to induce Prince Ping Pong Pang to find the lady. And the brainless laugh of the ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... then two more in quick succession. There was no answer. He knocked again in precisely the same manner, and then a footstep sounded from within, and the door was flung open. "Fools!" growled Shluker in greeting, as they stepped inside and the door was closed again. "A pair of brainless fools!" ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... and controvert, to publish invention, and proscribe error. Truly it were enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive,—to be fitted with a colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaides might not keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to ramble brainless in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal, perceptions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have often cost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out of a man, fret, wear, worry him,—to be irritable is the conditional tax laid of old upon an author's ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... like Caesar. Fair and just Is his award, against these brainless creatures. 'Tis not the wholesome sharp morality, Or modest anger of a satiric spirit, That hurts or wounds the body of the state; But the sinister application Of the malicious, ignorant, and base Interpreter; who will distort, and strain The general scope and purpose of an author To ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... critic of my satires, say, What do you down at Pedum far away? Are you composing what will dim the shine Of Cassius' works, so delicately fine, Or sauntering, calm and healthful, through the wood, Bent on such thoughts as suit the wise and good? No brainless trunk is yours: a form to please, Wealth, wit to use it, Heaven vouchsafes you these. What could fond nurse wish more for her sweet pet Than friends, good looks, and health without a let, A shrewd clear head, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... vital principles of our democracy;—can be so dazzled by the false glitter of a title, that they deliberately choose to mate themselves (and their riches,) with such sorry specimens of lordliness; such brainless, nerveless bundles of selfishness, is something too ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... over a mouthful. "Dad, he set it an' it's doin' all right. He's up in another cabin." Through Hank's brainless titter, Joe added carefully, "Bad ground in the first right-hand drift. We had to abandon it. Rocks big as your head comin' in on yuh onexpected. None uh them right-hand drifts is safe fer a man t' walk in, much ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... his diminutive stature, his ample pot-belly, and ampler nose, was a man of fine feelings. Nature was outraged when he became a barber. He most assuredly was never destined by her to shave beards, and manufacture perukes for heads more brainless, many of them, than his own blocks. He ought to have been a professor of metaphysics or logic in some famous university, such as Heidelburg, Gottingen, or Glasgow;—but why lament over cureless evils? it ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... the organ of mind and consciousness, and to a brainless race these terms, and all other terms, would be meaningless; but no one is at liberty to assert, on the strength of that fact, that the realities underlying our use of those terms have no existence apart from terrestrial brains. Nor can we say with any security that the stuff called "brain" ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... how men run in grooves. The same style of man nearly always marries the opposite type of girl. I mean that the intellectual, the clever, invariably choose the insipid brainless girl. Pretty, she may be, but it is in a doll-like way, with not a thought above her household. You would have imagined that such men would require some help-meet, in the fullest sense of the word; with ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... wolves, hyenas. And what are we going to have? Is money goin' to be the master in this country, or is man goin' to be? I hate it—I hate it as Lincoln hated it when he asked whether the dollar or the man should be put first. And I hate it because it is brainless, spiritless. It cares for nothing but itself. It is a snake that swallows and sleeps and wakes to eat again. It is a despot; it is without love, genius, morality. It is against people, against God, against the country. ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... light, he made a lunge at me. By a happy chance I succeeded in parrying the stroke with the blow-pipe which I held in my left hand, and then, springing in upon him, I dealt him so tremendous a blow with my heavy, knotted, hard-wood club that his skull crashed under it like an egg-shell, and he fell a brainless corpse at ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... and figure is overcome as far as is possible. Thus adorned, the dull and jaded girl of the morning becomes, under the magical influence of the footlights, a dazzling sprite, and the object of the admiration of the half-grown boys and brainless men who crowd the front rows ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... commented Don Jorge, coming up. "Those brainless buzzards, if they only knew it and had sense enough to unite, could strip every feather off that swaggering vulture and send him packing. Fools! And we poor Colombians, if we had the courage, could as easily throw the Church into the sea, holy candles, holy oils, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... typhoon Straight, perpendicular, vertical, plumb, erect, upright. Strange, singular, peculiar, odd, queer, quaint, outlandish. Strong, stout, robust, sturdy, stalwart, powerful. Stupid, dull, obtuse, stolid, doltish, sluggish, brainless, bovine. Succeed, prosper, thrive, flourish, triumph. Succession, sequence, series. Supernatural, preternatural, superhuman, miraculous. Suppose, surmise, conjecture, presume, imagine, fancy, guess, think, believe. Surprise, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... they were neither more interesting nor less bigoted. Gay young men dazzled by operettas and races, they played lansquenet and baccarat, staked large fortunes on horses and cards, and cultivated all the pleasures enchanting to brainless fools. After a year's experience, Des Esseintes felt an overpowering weariness of this company whose debaucheries seemed to him so unrefined, facile and indiscriminate without any ardent reactions or excitement ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... every step of their progress. They will also testify that the improvements made in farming and in the implements of agriculture have not been made by farmers themselves, but by outsiders—mechanics, and men of science—who have marvelled at the brainless stupidity which toiled on in its old track of unreasoning routine, and looked with suspicion and discouragement upon innovations. The reason why the farmer has not been foremost in improving the instruments and methods ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... lesson they have not since forgotten or ever ceased to practise, and combining their hosts of slaves, lashed them onward to scare this stranger, Freedom, from the earth, even as in our times of intelligence they have done, and will do; and the brainless slaves, so lashed, shouted and went forward to the murderous work which rivetted their own fetters, even as in our time they have done, and will again do in times ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... unfathomably French; and the French intelligence is intelligence specially and solely. He was not "a thinking machine"; for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the same time. All his wonderful successes, that looked ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... me in an embarrassing position," said Tobermory, whose tone and attitude certainly did not suggest a shred of embarrassment. "When your inclusion in this house-party was suggested Sir Wilfrid protested that you were the most brainless woman of his acquaintance, and that there was a wide distinction between hospitality and the care of the feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-power was the precise quality which had earned you ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... probability—by the ordinary sequence of cause and effect—this girl should have been what I fancied her to be. This, then, forsooth, is the day of my fate! It would be the day of doom did some malicious power chain me to this brainless, soulless, heartless creature. What possessed Nature to make such a blunder, to begin so fairly and yet reach such a lame and impotent conclusion? To the eye the girl is the fair and proper outcome of this home ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... Francos, list; a more disturbing mob, Whose crop is filled with discord and contempt, On which they daily feed, I ne'er have sized. 'Twere well to laws enact to hold in curb These brainless cubs who wield a pricking quill And words indite with vitriol for an ink, Which burns the meaning into quiv'ring brain And leaveth scars which time can ne'er efface. A son of Erin in official place Did eulogize my effort ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... from a daub of yellow mud, to the great works which now adorn the galleries of the world. I saw also their sculpture, from the rude god with four legs, a half dozen arms, several noses, and two or three rows of ears, and one little, contemptible, brainless head, up to the figures of to-day—to the marbles that genius has clad in such a personality that it seems almost impudent to touch them ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... purpose, viz., to promote the service of the will; it devotes itself steadfastly to this end, and abjures extravagant aims. The genius, on the other hand, is at bottom a monstrum per excessum; just as, conversely, the passionate, violent and unintelligent man, the brainless barbarian, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... was within twenty yards, but invisible beyond the crowded undergrowth. The new arrival was perfectly attired, and handsome, in a supercilious, brainless way. He wore a Norfolk Jacket and knickerbockers, and his tanned boots were polished till they shone like glass. For a while he poked about the tent and its neighbourhood, and, having satisfied his curiosity, drew out a cigar-case ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... all I read; A certain doom, which nature's self must feel When the dread sentence checks the mundane wheel. Go! court the smiles of Hope, ye thoughtless crew! Her fairy scenes disclose an ample view To brainless men. But Wisdom o'er the field Casts her keen glance, and lifts her beamy shield To meet the point of Fate, that flies afar, And with stern vigilance expects the war. Perhaps in vain my admonitions fall, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... the very air—ominous portents of a storm whose dull, grim growling down the horizon could be heard only too clearly by those who did not wilfully close their ears, grin fatuous complacence, and bleat like brainless sheep: "All's well!" ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... peasants laughed at this merry jest, and they quickly followed his lead, as brainless sheep will follow the one that scrambles through a gap. Soon they were all joyously stamping and dancing in what had so lately been a pellucid pool. The water-lilies and blue forget-me-nots were trodden down, the fish that had ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... a club? Why should I, at my age, idle with a lot of idlers and listen to stuffy stories from stuffier individuals? Do you think that stale tobacco smoke, and the idiotically reiterated click of billiard balls, and the vacant stare of the fashionably brainless, and the meaningless exchange of banalities with the intellectually aimless have any ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... pampas in the extreme north of the Argentine Republic, where Bolivia, the Argentine, Paraguay and Brazil unite, was the place of sacrifice. Thousands of acres, white with the bones of those whom the monsters had engulfed. Brainless, devoid of intelligence, sightless, because even the sense had not become differentiated in them, yet by some infernal instinct the Earth Giants had become aware that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... the raucous and meaningless yells of the festive artisan. Thus he tided over a rather prolonged wait, but, when the train moved on, the inquiring rough returned to the charge. He was suspicious, and also was drunk, and obstinate with all the brainless obstinacy of intoxication. ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... writing. The subject of it is the old question of mixed-marriage, but treated from a new aspect. Kudah Bux (the Gift in question) is the son of an adoring Mohamedan father; he goes to England for education in the law, and there falls in love with and marries the brainless daughter of a London landlady. He is a very human and appealing figure. The debacle that follows his return to India with so impossible a bride is told in a way that convinces. Here Mrs. PERRIN is at her best. Some of the shorter tales ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... fashionable, with now and then a stray politician or journalist thrown in to give the party a soupcon of intellect. The principle of invitation is very simple. No one is asked who will not be of use in town. Any brainless little fop, any effete dandy, is sure of a welcome, provided he is known to certain circles and can help her to scramble into ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... walls where Folly holds her throne, And laughs to think Monro would take her down, Where o'er the gates by his famed father's hand Great Cibber's brazen,[80] brainless brothers stand." ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... King with a hollow head could chatter words, which had no sense, and laugh in a brainless manner at senseless things. That part of the story is true ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... your own company, to the people who play at real life, and build toy houses, and give themselves away body and soul for the clapping of hands in a theatre! Go back to the lies and hypocrisies of society, and the brainless, mashers who adorn it! They dance superbly, and are at home in drawing-rooms, and know all about sporting matters and theatrical affairs! I know none of these things, and I am kicked and cuffed and ridiculed and hounded down as an indecent man or ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... saw no humor in it then, for I was even at this time an intellectual aristocrat. I despised brainless folk. I hated these loafers. I loathed the clerk at the desk who dismissed me with a contemptuous smirk, and I resented the formal smile and impersonal politeness of Mr. Baldwin, the President. Of course I understood that the attendants knew nothing of my dreams and my ambitions, and that they ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... bought. Moreover, there was nothing to pattern watch machinery after. It had never been made. So, you see, it was one thing to give a man tools and leave him to achieve with them a specified end, working toward the desired result as he went along; and quite another to invent a brainless device that would mechanically reach the same end. Numberless difficulties must be overcome. To manufacture watches in quantity it was imperative that the parts be interchangeable. They must not vary even an infinitesimal degree or the whole ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... of the feats desired, to pay the labour of instruction. But there has arisen in the land, men who set at nought the decrees of nature, who undertake to make artificial memories, not only equal but superior to the best natural memory, and who, at the shortest notice, engage to supply the brainless with brains. By certain technical helps, long passages, whole poems, may now be learnt by heart, as they call it, without any aid, effort, or cognizance of the understanding; and retained and recited, under the same circumstances, by any irrational, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... for some time. Still chewing on it, he strolled pensively down towards the swimming-pool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabby finery across the turf of the lower lawn. Odious birds! Their necks, thick and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up to the cruel inanity of their brainless heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. The fabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate their tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all the truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the red notebook!) He threw a piece of stick at the slowly pacing ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley |
