"Mindless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time, that Nature meant For peaceful sleep and meditative snores, To ceaseless din and mindless merriment And waste of shoes ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... us, this operation must needs appear to be what we call mechanical. The more unvarying the Will, the more unvarying must be this expression thereof; so that, if the former be absolutely self-consistent, the latter cannot fail to be as reasonably interpreted by the theory of mindless necessity, as by that of ubiquitous intention. Such being, as it appears to me, the pure logic of the matter, the proof of organic evolution amounts to nothing more than the proof of a natural process. What mode of being is ultimately concerned in this process—or in what it is that this process ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... Gusterson realized that he and his guides were becoming part of a general movement of people, a flow as mindless as that of blood corpuscles through the veins, yet at the same time dimly purposeful—at least there was the feeling that it was at the behest of a ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... she asked herself if Olive really suffered. No heart-pang was reflected in those blue mindless eyes; there was no heart to wound: only a little ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... place, but still the malady grew, till at last, unutterably mournful as it was, Mary felt it a relief when he ceased to be capable of watching the progress of it himself: his misery at least was over. Thereafter he slipped into perfect mindlessness, happy and harmless, but hopelessly mindless and vacant. Meantime, Lady Louisa Moor made a very brilliant marriage to a marquis, the eldest son of a duke, the account of which Mary Brunton read in the newspapers while watching her brother's face with its meaningless smile. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... own warm blush within the water glows, With thee the coloured shadow comes and goes, Its empty being on thyself relies; 40 Step thou aside, and the frail charmer dies. Still o'er the fountain's watery gleam he stood, Mindless of sleep, and negligent of food; Still viewed his face, and languished as he viewed. At length he raised his head, and thus began To vent his griefs, and tell the woods his pain. 'You trees,' says he, 'and thou surrounding grove, Who oft have been the kindly scenes of ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... all will be turned upon us if we fail in an effort to destroy the thing and those who have come from space upon it. If there was a way to smite them suddenly, to bring death to the Lodorians and to those swarming, mindless, murderous minions who act in obedience to them, I would favor ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... aeroplane, circling at a height of a mile or rising to two miles in case of danger, we looked down on fierce fighting in the trenches and saw the Germans drive steadily forward, sweeping ahead in close formation, mindless of heavy losses and victorious by reason ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... to be reduced to a handful? If men grew, in the first instance, out of bestial forms, mindless and speechless, they would have propagated and covered the world as did the bear and the wolf. But after they had passed this stage, and had so far developed as to be human in speech and brain, some cause reduced them again to a handful. What was it? Something, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... weaknesses and incapacities which now she feels. She wants to be helped, and will help you to help her. You have an active ally, not a passive fool who, too, desires to be made well, but can give you no potent aid. There are many kinds of fool, from the mindless fool to the fiend-fool, but for the most entire capacity to make a household wretched there is no more complete human receipt than a silly woman who is to a high degree nervous and feeble, and who craves pity and likes power. But to go back to the more helpful case. If you are wise, you ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... for the mother to place before all else the interests of the hairless, toothless and, apparently, mindless little creature that she clasps to her breast? The very existence of society depends upon her having the feeling that prompts her to do it. Is it rational to favor one's neighbor, to be proud of one's native town, which may be a poor sort of ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... question. For instance, to show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but appeal "to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree." He repeats, in effect, Plato's argument about the life of the oyster, having pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it your good? Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is expected to answer instinctively, No! It is an argumentum ad hominem (and there can be no other kind of argument ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... consequence of the scientific victory of Darwin) behold advancing as a deluge black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulphing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless destruction."—A Candid Examination ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... last a ruined planet, a cosmic plague, spinning through the shuddering heavens; its verdant plains, its murmuring forests, its meadows and its mountains manned only by a countless crew of soulless, mindless dead-alive, their shells illumined with the Dweller's infernal glory—and flaming over this vampirized earth like a flare from some hell far, infinitely far, beyond the reach of man's ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... privilege to dark and fair. To Yesterday a traitor, to To-day You're constant but the better to betray To-morrow. Your convictions all are naught But the wild asses of the world of thought, Which, flying mindless o'er the barren plain, Perceive at last they've nothing so to gain, And, turning penitent upon their track, Economize ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... Nevertheless we may venture to state with some confidence that both the sociologists and the reactionaries are wrong. It does not follow that human beings become less than human because their ideas appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we deduce that men are mindless solely from the fact that they are all of one mind. In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herd of bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings. Birds have never been known ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton |
