"Crudeness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his over-fastidiousness; in which, nevertheless, he secretly glorified. But now for so long had he mourned his loveless estate, that, since of all the subjects of his brush woman was most congenial to him, he had gradually come to lay every fault of his work, crudeness of coloring, hardness of line, harshness of texture, finally, his very conventionality of conception, to the door of his ignorance of the grand passion, in which he expected to attain to his final development. In the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... in brilliantly; the shadows on roads and pavements had real depth, and the outlines of the houses were hard against a cloudless sky. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground; for the crudeness of the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... they are expecting a wrong kind of pleasure. They have abandoned Worcester sauce, and they miss it. They miss the coarse tang. They must realise that indulgence in the tang means the sure and total loss of sensitiveness—sensitiveness even to the tang itself. They cannot have crudeness and fineness together. They must choose, remembering that while crudeness kills pleasure, fineness ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... author of "Sir Launfal," "Hunger and Cold," "The Landlord," and "The Search" should not have emulated Howard or Miss Fry, and have gone into the realms of destitution to relieve its wrongs. He was extremely fastidious, and anything that offended his taste by vulgarity or crudeness repelled him with such force that the work of practical philanthropy would have been impossible to his temperament. The indolence I have above spoken of—which must not be confounded with slothfulness, but is, as the true meaning of the word ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... instrument of culture, has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands, Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness, any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating influence on thought itself. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... venust'e, multa tenuiter multa cuni bile.' Mr. Pinkerton himself, in his 'Walpoliana,' admits that Heron's Letters was 'a book written in early youth, and contained many juvenile crude ideas long since abandoned by its author.' Would that the crudeness of many of the ideas were the worst that was to be said of it! but we shall find, in the course of this correspondence, far heavier and not less just complaints. The name of Heron, here assumed by Mr. Pinkerton, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... for some other panacea of immediate and guaranteed efficiency? And so with the body politic. I here to-day am merely attempting a diagnosis, pointing out the disorders, and exposing as best I can the utter crudeness and insufficiency of the market-place remedies proposed. Have you a right, then, to turn on me, and call for some other prescription, warranted to cure, in place of the nostrums so loudly advertised by the sciolists and the dabblers of the day, and by me so contemptuously set aside? ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... tone down the crudeness of Hungerford's language. It contents me to think that the solidity of his character and his worth will appear even through the crust of free-and-easy idioms, as they will certainly be seen in his acts;—he was sound at heart and true ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... reflection. A second reading confirmed his first impression. Thereupon, taking his pen, the frontier lawyer, in a careful revision of the whole despatch, so amended and changed the work of the trained and experienced statesman, as entirely to eliminate its offensive crudeness, and bring it within all the dignity and reserve of the most studied diplomatic courtesy. If, after Mr. Seward's remarkable memorandum of April 1, the Secretary of State had needed any further experience to convince him of the President's mastery in both administrative and diplomatic ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... startled at the crudeness of the allusion. "I didn't suppose David ever condescended to be spoony," he said, and at the same instant, to his absolute amazement, she caught his arm and pulled his hand ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... been called the Andalusia of Mexico, and the city is indeed a Seville of the West, though lacking in her spontaneity of life, for this cruder people is much more tempered with a constant fear of betraying their crudeness and in consequence much weighed down by "propriety." But its bright, central plaza has no equal to the north. Here as the band plays amid the orange trees heavy with ripening fruit, the more haughty of the population promenade the inner square, outside ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... curiosity by an act so bromidic as to be ridiculous. Were they rank amateurs, doing their simple best, or were they clever artists, simulating the awkward crudeness of country girls? That was the question. In a word, were ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... discriminating and unargumentative. Argumentativeness in women was a detestable vice, in his opinion, for it meant everything but what the word itself etymologically did. Craftily he drew her out, cunningly he touched up every fallacy or crudeness in her ideas, in such wise that she unconsciously adopted his amendments, under the impression that they were ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... were simple to crudeness. He had, though he did not say so, anticipated some assistance from Doom in identifying the object of his search; but now that this was out of the question, he meant, it appeared, to seek the earliest and most plausible excuse for removal into the immediate vicinity of Argyll's castle, and on ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... mentioned would have sneered or prayed. A young English nobleman who was there that day did not sneer. He was filled instead with something like awe at the vigor of this nation which was sprung from the loins of his own. Crudeness he saw, vulgarity he heard, but ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... people. The same holds good of their sympathies and antipathies. The sensitive feelings of children are constantly injured by lack of consideration on the part of grown people, their easily stimulated aversions are constantly being brought out. But the sufferings of children through the crudeness of their elders belong to an unwritten chapter of child psychology. Just as there are few better methods of training than to ask children, when they have behaved unjustly to others, to consider whether it would be pleasant for them to be treated in that way, so there is no better ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... Aleph]BL[Symbol: Xi] l g^{1} Cyr^{luc}[564], two MSS. of the Bohairic (d 3, d 2), the Lewis, and two cursives (71, 157) are literally the only authority, ancient or modern, for so exhibiting the text [in all its bare crudeness]. Against them are arrayed the whole body of MSS. uncial and cursive, including ACD; every known lectionary; all the Latin, the Syriac (Cur. om. Clause 1), and indeed every other known version: besides seven good Greek Fathers beginning ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... exchange criticisms and discuss standards with others, else he will be eternally making discoveries that are stale and unprofitable to the rest of the world; he will seek to reach men's souls through channels long dammed up, and his achievements will be marred by naive triteness and primitive crudeness. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... wonderful art which takes a rugged, knotted block of marble, standing upon a coarse wooden bench, and cuts out of its uncomely crudeness—as I saw it done—the face of my father, with its every feature illumined with prophetic light, so true to life that I felt that to my touch it ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... with which to defray a funeral. The residents of Hull-House were then comparatively new in the neighborhood and did not realize that they were really shocking a genuine moral sentiment of the community. In their crudeness they instanced the care and tenderness which had been expended upon the little creature while it was alive; that it had had every attention from a skilled physician and a trained nurse, and even intimated that the excited members of the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... that seemed to them one of the best they had ever tasted, in spite of the crudeness of its preparation, the little man treated himself to a bath in the lake, which he declared to be almost as good as a tub, after all. Before he emerged from it, he had succeeded, with the aid of his new-found ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... opening, and all the other signs of long-established civilization appeared suddenly to have no meaning save as they lulled Mr. and Mrs. Hilbery into the belief that nothing unusual had taken place. It chanced that Mrs. Hilbery was depressed without visible cause, unless a certain crudeness verging upon coarseness in the temper of her favorite Elizabethans could be held responsible for the mood. At any rate, she had shut up "The Duchess of Malfi" with a sigh, and wished to know, so she told Rodney at dinner, whether there wasn't ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... been put in such juxtaposition that the husband has a change of heart. The patients recover and the landlord endows a great sanitarium for the tuberculous. One may easily criticize the crudeness of the plot and the improbabilities with which it bristles. But it sets forth love and death and conversion and an appeal to rescue those who suffer from the great white plague: and this was sufficient for the crowd, for all are children when beholding the elemental things of ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... as you will! I do not follow you now as I did before. I come to see the crudeness, the barrenness, of that. But within—oh, are you not my enemy still? I ask Justice that, and what can she do but echo back my words? "Within" ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... throughout its great length with sketches of the most appalling clearness and power, though they tend to crudeness of colour and are few of them suitable ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... she now led was a curious one. She still visited her husband at Nohant, so that she might see her son, and sometimes, when M. Dudevant came to town, he called upon her in the apartments which she shared with Jules Sandeau. He had accepted the situation, and with his crudeness and lack of feeling he seemed to think it, if not natural, at least diverting. At any rate, so long as he could retain her half-million francs, he was not the man to make trouble about his former ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... unconscious or conscious I do not know) in the traditional style of local building, and with brick that from the first is mellow in tint and harmonizes with its setting, assimilate at once with their neighbours to right and left, and fail to offend the eye by any patchy appearance or crudeness. Hardly a single street in Bruges is thus without old-world charm; but the architectural heart of the city must be sought in its two market-places, called respectively the Grande Place and the Place ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... of the Muncy Historical Society contains examples of these early farm implements and offers vivid evidence of their crudeness. ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... give a better shade than if the original tint was satisfactory, but in the same way yarns which are too brilliant can often be made soft and effective by twisting them together with a paler tint. Minute particles of colour brought together in this way are brilliant without crudeness. It is, in fact, the very principle upon which impressionist painters work, giving pure colour instead of mixed, but in such minute and broken bits that the eye confounds them with surrounding colour, getting at the same time ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... but when they wished to rise above the commonplace they turned with a frequency which to-day appears astonishing to the devices of abstract personification and veiled meanings. No doubt this tendency was due in part to an idealizing dissatisfaction with the crudeness of their actual life (as well as to frequent inability to enter into the realm of deeper and finer thought without the aid of somewhat mechanical imagery); and no doubt it was greatly furthered also by the medieval passion for translating into elaborate and fantastic ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... must confess to a great disappointment. I looked upon you from the first as the most promising of my pupils. I overlooked the mechanical imperfections of your work, the utter lack of finish, the crudeness of your drawing. I said to myself, 'this will come.' It seems that I was mistaken. You cannot draw. Your fingers are even now as stiff as a schoolgirl's. You will never be able to draw. You have the ideas. You are an artist by the Divine right of birth, but whatever form of expression ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had no power to thrill her. She was comfortably content that things should be as they were, that was all. Yet her very lack of emotion added to her charm for him. He disliked emotional women. Excess of affection would have bored him. It smacked of crudeness, and he had ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... ears to the rest of the noise, if he strove to do so, and hear nothing but that harmonious moaning of the strings, steady and clear, like the aspirations of a man divorced from the facts of his weakness and his crudeness in ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... The city is a severe test of human ability to live peaceably and co-operatively at close quarters. In the country an unfriendly man can live by himself much of the time; in the city he is continually feeling somebody's elbows in his ribs. It is not strange that there is as yet much crudeness about the city. Its growth has been dominated by the economic motive, and everything has been sacrificed to the desire to make money. Dirty slums, crowded tenements, uncouth business blocks, garish bill-boards and electric signs, dumped ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... cults prevalent in India, though not recognized as sects, in which the worship of some aboriginal deity is accepted in all its crudeness without much admixture of philosophy, the only change being that the deity is described as a form, incarnation or servant of some well-known god and that Brahmans are connected with this worship. This ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... hand and have worked as manual laborers, generally in charge of the machinery or devices which they have improved. When new processes have been invented, these also have usually suggested themselves to the able workmen as they experienced the crudeness of existing methods. Indeed, few important inventions have come from those who have not been thus employed. It is with inventors as with poets; few have been born to the purple or with silver spoons in their mouths, and we shall plainly see later on that had it not been for Watt's ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... fields, sketch-book[20] in hand, and humming or roaring to himself as he went along. The rough jottings in the sketch-books were later on developed with the utmost care, being written out again and again, with fresh alterations and additions each time, until every trace of crudeness had disappeared, and the finished work stood out with such clearness and precision as to suggest that it had been but that moment created. Nothing, indeed, has struck those who have followed the gradual development of his work from ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... the picture that Mrs. Merston had painted for her into the background of her thoughts. All day long it had been pressing forward in spite of her. It seemed to be burning her brain, and now she could not ignore it any longer. Sitting there exhausted in mind and body, she had to face it in all its crudeness. She had to meet and somehow to conquer the sickening sensation of revolt that ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... Despite its relative crudeness, a fleet possesses, more fully than any other fruit of man's endeavor, the characteristics of an organism, defined by Webster as "an individual constituted to carry on the activities of life by means of parts or organs more or less separate in function, but mutually dependent." ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... ingratitude—of a girl he had helped, had indeed saved from starvation and who had betrayed him at every turn. Thornton Lyne was a poet. He was also a picturesque liar. The lie came as easily as the truth, and easier, since there was a certain crudeness about truth which revolted his artistic soul. And as the tale was unfolded of Odette Rider's perfidy, Sam's eyes narrowed. There was nothing too bad for such a creature as this. She was wholly undeserving ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... that expressed the prick of a lover's fancy. As he loaded his brush, he muttered between his teeth, "These paints are only fit to fling out of the window, together with the fellow who ground them, their crudeness and falseness are disgusting! How can one ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... been wrong about the Ramblin' Kid not caring what any one thought of him. He was supersensitive of his roughness, his lack of education and conscious crudeness, and the words of Carolyn June were still in his mind. When Skinny and the girl were going toward their horses the Ramblin' Kid turned and entered the gate. Sing Pete was still at ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... of London (1593), the Rose and the adjacent Bear Garden are correctly placed with respect to each other, but are crudely drawn (see page 147). The representation of both as circular—the Bear Garden, we know, was polygonal—was due merely to this crudeness; yet the Rose seems to have been indeed circular in shape, "the Bankside's round-house" referred to in Tom Tell Troth's Message. The building is so pictured in the Hondius map of 1610 (see page 149), and in the inset maps on the title-pages of Holland's Her[Greek: o]ologia, 1620, ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... Poe. He prided himself on conscientious loyalty to literary art. He disclaimed all sympathy with that sectional spirit which has sometimes lauded a work merely for geographical reasons; and in the critical reviews of his magazine he did not hesitate to point out and censure crudeness in Southern writers. But, at the same time, it was a more pleasing task to his generous nature to recognize and praise artistic excellence ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... more striking in its crudeness of ink and line and paper than the most finished of portraits could have been. It repelled, and yet it fascinated him. He had not for a moment doubted Herbert's calm conviction. And yet as he stooped in the grass, closely scrutinising the blurred obscure features, he felt the faintest ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... peculiar interest belong more to the earlier stages of the introduction of postage stamps. Local attempts at engraving in some of our own early colonial settlements were of the crudest possible description, and yet they are, because of their very crudeness, far more interesting than the finished product supplied by firms at home, for the local effort truly represented the country of its issue in the art of stamp production. The amusingly crude attempts ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... two tents, with opening in front and door between. The table was a plank resting upon two barrels, and another plank, resting upon kegs, served as a seat. There was a smoking lamp that flickered. The Mexican's tableware was of a crudeness befitting his house, but it was clean and he could cook—two facts that Joan appreciated after her long experience of Bate Wood. She and Jim were the only customers of the Mexican, who spoke English rather well and was friendly. Evidently it pleased him to see the meal enjoyed. Both the food ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... men of old, according to the counsel of the Wise Man (Eccles. xxxix.): The wise man, he says, will seek out the wisdom of all the ancients, we have not thought fit to be misled into the opinion that the first founders of the arts have purged away all crudeness, knowing that the discoveries of each of the faithful, when weighed in a faithful balance, makes a tiny portion of science, but that by the anxious investigations of a multitude of scholars, each as it were contributing his share, the mighty bodies of the sciences have ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... carelessness, lack of consideration, or crudeness; any word used to designate action or conduct which may be characterized as careless, ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... contrast between the beauty of his salon into which we went and the crudeness of the restaurant from which we had come. It was a long room, with black wall-paper, and at the far end of it was a shaded lamp on a grand piano. There was no other light, and the faces of the people in the room, the head of a Greek god on a pedestal, some ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... the introduction of a positive religion, or a definite creed, as a middle stage between the natural beginning of religious feeling and its end in philosophical culture. Only when a man has lived through the entire range of one-sided phases—through the crudeness of such a concrete individualizing of religion, and has come to recognize the universal nature of religion in a special form of it which excludes other forms—only when the spirit of a congregation has taken him into its ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... is a brief narrative poem in lyric form. The ballad was originally the production of wandering minstrels, and in its old English form it possessed a simplicity, directness, and charming crudeness that a more cultivated age cannot successfully imitate. The old English ballads, most of which were composed in the north of England, depict the lawlessness, daring, fortitude, and passion characteristic of life along the Scottish border. A group of ballads gathers about the name ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... otherwise engaged. Naturally enough, too, Chichester saw a great deal of Babe. He was interested in her because she was young and beautiful, and because of her quaint individuality. She was not only unconventional, but charmingly so. Her crudeness and her ignorance seemed to be ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... to the hurt of some of his earlier things. He was then probably in the revolt against too much literature in literature, which every one is destined sooner or later to share; there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness, which he indulged before his thought and phrase mellowed to one music in his later work. I tacitly agreed rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve from my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should have sided with him: I would ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... be patient now, if I give you a crude instance of what I mean? It is one among many others, but I choose it because its very crudeness makes my ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... society is excellent for the young artist. The lads are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; they are at that stage of education, for the most part, when a man is too much occupied with style to be aware of the necessity for any matter; and this, above all for the Englishman, is excellent. To work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, to ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so lofty a region may appear impracticable. Difficulties lie on the threshold which may seem, at first sight, insurmountable. But obstacles to a true method only test its validity. And he who honestly faces the task may find relief in feeling that whatever else of crudeness and imperfection mar it, the attempt is at least in harmony with the thought and movement ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... powerful magnifying-glass and through it the clumsy forgery stood out in all its crudeness, showing plainly where other names had ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... however, she made one slight investigation of those realms that govern professional theatrical engagements. It was a most disturbing experience. The mere color and odor of the stuffy offices, the gauche, material attendants, the impossible aspirants and participants in this make-believe world! The crudeness! The effrontery! The materiality! The sensuality! It came to her as a sickening breath and for the moment frightened her. What would become of refinement there? What of delicacy? How could one rise and sustain an individual ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... far above my years. That is a secret I learned from Colonel Morley, to whom I must present you,—the subtlest intellect under the quietest manner. Once he said to me, 'Would you throughout life be up to the height of your century,—always in the prime of man's reason, without crudeness and without decline,—live habitually while young with persons older, and when old with persons ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the child. It is indeed only a blind sentimentality that can raise the child to an angelic status, from which it is as far removed as from its opposite. We should be careful not to regard the crude form of the impulse as crude in the sense of an educated humanity, which must see in the crudeness something morally inferior. In robbery and annihilation there exists on the primitive or childish level hardly the slightest germ of badness. There is much to be said about the psychology and morality of the child. I cannot, however, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... of this generation certainly will only know it if it has had the good fortune to have been preserved by their mothers. It was only my second book, and in looking back at it so as to preserve consistency, I have been astonished at its crudeness. ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... portion of the whole explanation, but if they are added to the constant protests raised by the disciples of the Masters of the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions, against those who said that their instructors taught metempsychosis in all its crudeness, they assume considerable importance, and show that, although the restrictions of esoteric teaching travestied by the ignorance of the masses may have caused it to be believed that the contrary was the case, none ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... idealism, that, as I have already said, the men whose praise is most to be coveted, have learned to turn back to Giotto and his immediate successors, and, forgetting and forgiving all their ignorance, crudeness, quaintness, to dwell never wearied, and extol without measure these oldest masters' dignity of spirit, the earnestness of their originality, the solemnity and heedfulness of their labour. It would seem as if skill ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... from humble beginnings, he was animated by the most intense dislike of the "slavocracy," as he called the political aristocracy of the South. Like many other American leaders he was proud of his humble origin, but unlike many others he never sloughed off his backwoods crudeness. He continually boasted of himself and vilified the aristocrats, who in return treated him badly. His dislike of them was so marked that Isham G. Harris, a rival politician, remarked that "if Johnson were a snake, he ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... example approximating to the supposed type in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The strenuousness of the love emotion is in this book rendered with consummate power, and hence the hold it has over men of intelligence and over fools. But in almost every other respect the novel is sheer rhetoric, crudeness, and unshapeliness. ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... of olden time were artistic; of those of to-day this statement cannot be truthfully made. The wool is still fine and silky, but there is an element of crudeness of design and a defiance of the laws governing color. A pronounced medallion in the centre is usually seen. This is set in a solid field of a strong contrasting color. Sometimes the field is of a bright red or blue, with the medallion omitted. The borders ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... quite contentedly like a stout squaw in a blanket. The tall man walked about the cabin and sniffed. He was angered at the crudeness of the rescue, and his shrinking clothes made him feel too large. ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... hairbreadth escapes so dear to the small boy of all time. The thrilling incidents were further enlivened, moreover, by cuts called by the printer "curious" in the sense of very fine: and curious they are to-day because of the crudeness of their execution and the coarseness of their design. Nevertheless, the grotesque character of the illustrations was altogether effective in impressing upon the reader the doughty deeds of his old friend, Tom Thumb. The book itself shows marks of its popularity, ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... meet the needs of these widely different grades of individuals, widely different manners, customs, and institutions are indispensable. Culture, delicacy, and intelligence have their own attractions, which are wholly diverse from those of crudeness, coarseness, and simplicity. The surroundings which would bring happiness to the lover of art or the man of large mental endowment, would render miserable the peasant who still lacked the development to appreciate the elegancies of refinement; while ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... idea off with shame for its crudeness. What vulgar raw things would come into your head when you let your mind roam idly . . . like cheap ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... despite its crudeness, the administration of seigneurial justice in New France was satisfactory enough. The habitants, as far as the records show, made no complaint. Justice was prompt and inexpensive. It discouraged chicane and common barratry. Even the sarcastic La Hontan, ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... difference in the light and shade; and this is the case towards evening or when the day is cloudy, and works then painted are tender and every kind of face becomes graceful. Thus, in every thing extremes are to be avoided: Too much light gives crudeness; too little prevents our seeing. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... progress toward realism be shown? The humor of the play. Discuss in particular the humorous comments on contrasts between court and country life. Compare modern instances of the refinements and artifices of city life and the crudeness of work and pleasure in ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... that until he was universally accepted, the crudeness of his literary method was duly criticised with great severity by those professional literary critics who sometimes carp with such a big mouth at their betters, and occasionally kill the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... "twopence-coloured" sketch of an impossible villain, drawn with a crudeness unusual ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... area, very little was accomplished in the way of agricultural improvement before 1850. With some few exceptions the methods of cultivation were substantially the same as those of colonial days, and were marked by crudeness, waste and a general adherence to rule-of-thumb principles. The year 1850 roughly marks the beginning of a period of improvement and development. The Irish famine of 1846 and the German political troubles ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... when the cocksure critic in his crudeness Pops you the question while his back he pats, "What have you done?" you'll find at last, thank goodness, One ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... father's house, just where we had left it. The boy had become the man, the student had developed into the artist and thorough musician. He was the boonest of boon companions, and his jokes were so broad that they often reminded one, in their crudeness and their rudeness, of certain passages in Mozart's early letters. To say that he spoke French with a German accent a la Svengali would be putting it very mildly; Teutonic gutturals would most unceremoniously invade the sister language; ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... Rooms 113-116, shows an art so different in its characteristics from that of Sweden that she might be at the other end of the earth. Where the Swedish artists show boldness, sometimes almost to the point of crudeness, the Dutch are intent on some degree of finish. Modernity of color is apparent, and while there are few strokes that indicate timidity, there are fine touches of the poetic in which the Hollander's heart shows its love of home and gardens. Those great tulip beds are real and ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Hence, after the delivery of the Address, I went over it with the desire, not to revoke its principles, but to improve it verbally, and above all to remove any word which might give colour to the notion of 'crudeness, hurry, or haste.' ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... a superstitious man even for a sailor, and his weakness was so well known that he had become a sympathetic receptacle for every ghost story which, by reason of its crudeness or lack of corroboration, had been rejected by other experts. He was a perfect reference library for omens, and his interpretations of dreams had gained ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... autobiography—and an extraordinarily candid one—of a man whose peculiar temperament found expression in prose-verse. His gentleness, his brusqueness, his egotism, his humility, his grossness, his finer nature, his crudeness, his eloquence, are all here. To him they were the attributes ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... of a natural mode of feeling, thought, and life, upon which Art prospers in its purest form. In many respects the age itself was in this favourable to the Poet. It maintained a happy medium between crudeness and a vitiated taste: life was not insipid and colourless, as it is nowadays: men still ventured to appear what they were; there was still poetry in reality. Our German poets, in an age of rouge and powder, of hoops and wigs, of stiff manners, rigid proprieties, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... cover and the gilt stamp and edges. That a Blue and Gold edition, in the absence of its name qualities, becomes something far inferior may be seen from a copy that has lost them in rebinding. In spite of the hardness of their blue and the crudeness of their stamped designs, these little volumes attract every reader and never remain long on the shelves of the second-hand bookstores. We should not expect a publisher to succeed were he now to put them upon the market for the first time or in an exact reproduction. ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... latter class of novels, based on what may be called the centrifugal forces of wedlock, "Christian's Mistake" perhaps belongs. Its clear and practised style is refreshing, after the comparative crudeness of some other recent treatises on the same theme; the characters are human, not wooden, and the whole treatment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... power of Luther in stirring the popular mind. We do not regard the coarse invectives of Luther (which many cultured men of to-day seem to cite with outward horror—and inner enjoyment) as a remark of low peasant birth, or of crudeness of breeding, but as the language of a great leader who, in desperate struggle with the powers that be, knew how to attach himself to the mind of his age in such way as to influence it. How noble and great is his own remark at the close of his booklet ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work. At any rate I obey my happy hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May be, if I don't do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... impart something, but remembered her father's distastes and refrained. Rodney, civilised, sensitive and progressive, had no patience with his children's unsophisticated leaning to a primitive crudeness. He told them they were young savages. So Gerda kept her news till later, when she and Neville and Kay were lying on rugs on the lawn after Neville had beaten Kay in a ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... the camp. These stood near, huddled into a listless group, with their faces half hidden in check bonnets of various colors. A barbaric love of color was apparent in bonnet, shawl, and gown, and surprisingly in contrast with such crudeness of taste was a face when fully seen, so modest was it. The features were always delicately wrought, and softened sometimes by a look of patient suffering ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... enlightened him. Politeness and a dinner were at stake. Even Natsume and Imaizumi wondered and admired at what followed. The blunder of Iemon was a stroke of genius, the inspiration of an expert player. It was a slight blunder, not obvious to the crudeness of Kwaiba; but it opened up the whole of Iemon's position and put the game in his antagonist's hands. Kwaiba promptly seized the advantage. His triumphant glance shifted continually from Iemon to the onlookers, as the former struggled ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... chiselling and adjustment. They are told uncomfortable things how quickly! At the club, in the university, in the market, the ploughing-field, the counting-room, they rub up against each other, and no mercy is shown by man to man until primary signs of crudeness are worn off. Let a conceited professor get in a college chair! Watch a hundred students begin their delightful and salutary process of "taking him down" by the sort of mirth in which college boys excel! Their unkindness is not right, but the result is, they never molest a ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... with Howland. Winterman won't. Howland doesn't take to him. Says he's crude—frightfully crude. And you know how Howland hates crudeness." ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... the genius and the understanding of a god. I learned to talk from the side of my mouth and drink and curse with the rest of our 'noble crusaders.' Authority infuriated me and the first suspicion of an order made me sullen and dangerous.... Each man in his crudeness and lewdness nauseated me," writes a ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... even grotesquely stated and manifested, but the reality of the fact is no more invalidated by such crudeness than the existence of a father is invalidated by the crude attempts of a child to draw ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... such demonstration was shown through it all as when old Deacon Swift himself arose to address the assembly. He put Moses Jackson in the chair, and then as he walked forward to the front of the platform a great, white-haired, rugged, black figure, he was heroic in his very crudeness. He wore a long, old Prince Albert coat, which swept carelessly about his thin legs. His turndown collar was disputing territory with his tie and his waistcoat. His head was down, and he glanced out of the lower part ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the "American Plan." It seemed to her cheap and horrible; she did not want to stay in this room, and Martin, tipping the boy and asking for ice-water, seemed somehow a part of this new strangeness and crudeness. She began to be afraid that he would think she was silly, presently, if she said ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... him. Why all this was true, he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses one's imagination; that it is not to be had by order. She often wearied him, but she never bored him. Under her crudeness and brusque hardness, he felt there was a nature quite different, of which he never got so much as a hint except when she was at the piano, or when she sang. It was toward this hidden creature that he was trying, for his own pleasure, to find his way. In short, Harsanyi ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... in detail but synthetic in range, of a young man of high impulses but weak determination. In its over-emphasis upon errors of judgment, as well as upon real if exaggerated misdeeds, it has all the crudeness of youth. An almost fantastic self-consciousness is the central motive: it is a matter of question if this be absolutely vicarious. To me it seems that the author himself was at the time confused by the complicated flashing of the lights ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... derivative. Ornstein, they make plain, had benefited by the achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky and Scriabine. But they made plain as well that he had developed a style of his own, a style that was, for all its crudeness and harshness, personal. In becoming again a disciple he reverts to something that he seemed to have left behind him when he wrote his ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... pattern. If there is anything which impresses the careful student of psychology, it is the over-rich manifoldness, the complexity of mental life. Even the simplest content of consciousness is a tissue woven from millions of threads and any stereotyped influence means crudeness and destruction. The minister's attitude towards inner life is there directly opposite to that of the psychologist. He cannot enter into those endless interplays of associations and memories, or inhibitions and sensations and impulses, he cannot examine ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... pulling on her boots; and it appeared her former sufferings were as naught compared with the pangs of this morning. How she hated the cold, the bleak, denuded forest land, the emptiness, the roughness, the crudeness! If this sort of feeling grew any worse she thought she would hate Glenn. Yet she was nonetheless set upon going on, and seeing the sheep-dip, and riding that fiendish mustang until the trip ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... for glorying and drinking deep. It is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at all to the early manhood of genius,—a beauty like that of Amiens or Lincoln in Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the problems of full maturity, though foreshadowed and foreseen, have not yet begun ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... may be regarded as a cross, or a compromise, between "Anatol" and "A Piece of Fiction." The crudeness of speech marking the latter play has given room to a very incisive dialogue, that carries the action forward with unfailing precision. Some of the temporarily dropped charm has been recovered, and the gain in sincerity has been preserved. "Amours" seems to be the first one of a series of plays ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... Flying TJ boys standing disconsolately at the head of the street "set" upon which carpenters were hammering and sawing and painters were daubing. Luck's eyes chilled as he took in the stereotyped "Western" crudeness of ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... eyes, smiling a little now and then at the downright fashion in which the thirteen-year-old Catie made known her matrimonial plans. Mrs. Brenton liked Catie well enough, but not too well. She could have dreamed of another sort of wife for her boy, for Catie's crudeness occasionally irritated her, Catie's self-centred ambition, her intervals of density sometimes came upon Mrs. Brenton's nerves. However, girls were scarce upon the horizon of the Brentons. Catie was not perfect; but, at least, she might be infinitely worse. And Scott would be sure ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... was a huge earthen image or statue of a worm! It was shaped with a childish crudeness from the solid earth, a giant earthen worm shape whose body looped across the cave's end, and whose tentacled head or front end was reared upward to the cavity's roof. Before this awful earthen shape was a section of ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... did not think it worth his while to look for others. It should be mentioned, however, that this inequality of style is partly the effect of a desire to keep as close as possible in his narrative to the original Greek, so that it is the crudeness of translation we sometimes encounter. We raise no quarrel with him ourselves on this point; his language, in general, is all that is requisite; but a critic disposed to be severe on the minor delinquencies of style, might justify ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... that there were two of us, and that I was not alone in this situation was very comforting. However, in the course of the next few years I became accustomed to this treatment, though I never again met it in such crudeness. ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... her ambitions too, this bright little girl. They were tinctured with the crudeness of youth, and its boundless vision, it is true; and sometimes the passion of despair seized her soul in a cold grasp, when she felt hemmed in on every side, and longed for some opening, some step in the great ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... state of growing discontent and disintegration. The men and women possessed of leisure cultivated a humanist state of mind, with which arose a critical spirit, a nicer taste and a cultured discrimination. They were offended by literalism, bored by crudeness however much in earnest, and disgusted with the illogical assertions of pietists. The imperative mandate of the meeting awakened in them only opposition. They found many to sympathize with ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... stood there in fact, however, it seemed to him he had remembered her wrong; the brave, free, rather grand creature who instantly filled his studio with such an unexampled presence had so shaken off her clumsiness, the rudeness and crudeness that had made him pity her, a whole provincial and "second-rate" side. Miss Rooth was light and bright and direct to-day—direct without being stiff and bright without being garish. To Nick's perhaps inadequately sophisticated mind the model, the actress were figures of a vulgar setting; but ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... interfering, names for money, absurdity, neurotic effects of surprise or shock, honesty and lying, getting confused, fine appearance and dress, words for intoxication which Partridge has collected,[10]for anger collated by Chamberlain,[11] crudeness or innocent naivete, love and sentimentality, etc. Slang is also rich in describing conflicts of all kinds, praising courage, censuring inquisitiveness, and as a school of moral discipline, but he finds, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... least I have A certain faint perception of the gilded And quite preposterous crudeness of our days— The sordid sickness of his life, and ours; And that is something to ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day. Eucalypt, conifer, mimosa; tree, shrub, heath, in endless diversity and exuberance, yet sheltering little of animal life beyond half-specialised and belated types, anachronistic even to the Aboriginal savage. Faithfully and lovingly interpreted, what ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... remember that while affectation is odious, crudeness must be overcome. A low voice is always pleasing, not whispered or murmured, but low in pitch. Do not talk at the top of your head, nor at the top of your lungs. Do not slur whole sentences together; on the other ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... never seeks permanent abidence upon the heights of Olympus. She is human, and seeks all human needs. And so she descends, re-creating new civilizations; uplifting the crudeness of laws, giving scientific precision to morals and religion, stimulating enterprise, extending commerce, creating manufactures, expanding mechanism and mechanical inventions; producing revolutions and ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... chapel of the Podesta is proved by Dante's exile, in 1302, to have been painted before Giotto was six and twenty; yet we remember no head in any of his works which can be compared with it for carefulness of finish and truth of drawing; the crudeness of the material vanquished by dexterous hatching; the color not only pure, but deep—a rare virtue with Giotto; the eye soft and thoughtful, the brow nobly modeled. In the fresco of the Death of the Baptist, in Santa Croce, which we agree with Lord Lindsay in attributing to the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... were bounded largely by the weakness of her father and the crudeness of men like Henry Bittinger, Atwood Jones and others of their kind. She didn't consider Tommy at all. He was a nice boy and a faithful friend. His mother, too, was a faithful friend. She classed ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey |
