"Shallowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of your timidity. It betrays our shallowness. If two brothers want to live in peace, is it possible for a third party to separate them? If they were to listen to evil counsels, we would consider them to be foolish. Similarly, we Hindus and Mahomedans would have to blame our folly rather than the English, ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... shallowness &c. adj.; shoals; mere scratch. Adj. shallow, slight, superficial; skin deep, ankle deep, knee deep; just enough to wet one's feet; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... given of the existence of Renan or Strauss. But the effect on his own mind has been to drive him back on a closer survey of the history in its first fountains, and to bring him from it filled more than ever with wonder at its astonishing phenomena, to protest against the poverty and shallowness of the most ambitious and confident of these attempts. They leave the historical Character which they pourtray still unsounded, its motives, objects, and feelings absolutely incomprehensible. He accepts the method to reverse the product. "Look at Christ historically," ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... poetry of Schubert. A new era had set in. These three composers were neither the fools of princes nor the servants of the public: they were in the world, yet not of it. They looked upon their art as a sacred thing; and most probably the shallowness of much of the music produced in such abundance towards the close of the eighteenth century spurred them on to higher efforts. Dussek had lived an irregular, aimless sort of life; he had wandered from one country to another, ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... was like his country and its traditions, revealing himself only in glimpses. He attracted her immensely through his subtle impersonality underlying all that was seemingly personal. She could not fathom his depth, nor determine his shallowness—she did not even guess which it might be. She was irresistibly drawn to him; yet she was on her guard, as one who, looking down from a great height, in fear of vertigo clings to the parapet over which he leans. The parapet she clung to was her own good American common sense. Yet she feared ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... by the revolution of July,—he allows himself, in order to get out of his embarrassments, certain laxities of principle with persons who are friendly to him,—laxities which never come to the surface, but are buried in private life, where no one ever mentions or complains of them. The shallowness of his heart, the impurity of his hand, which clasps that of all vices, all evils, all treacheries, all opinions, have made him as inviolable as a constitutional king. Venial sins, which excite a hue and cry against a man of high character, are thought nothing of in him; the world hastens to excuse ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... gave foretaste of his later society dramas, and showed his planning, in the manner of the French, for excellent theatrical effect. He was to become more expert in the use of materials, but no whit less clever in his expansion of "small talk" and society shallowness. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... standards, government, and ideals of his town, his city, and his country. Civic conscientiousness burned strong within him; and he fought to develop and to maintain breadth of public view and sanity of popular ideals. Blind patriotism was impossible for this great American: he exposed the shallowness of popular enthusiasms and the narrowness of rampant spread-eagleism, without regard for consequence to himself or his popularity. What a tribute to his personality that, instead of suffering, he gained in popularity by his honest and downright outspokenness! He wielded the lash of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... tract of country between Lincoln and Boston, or rather between the points now occupied by those places, would be scoured by a greatly-augmented volume of water, and this may possibly account in some degree for the shallowness of “The Wash,” and the number of submarine sandbanks which lie off the mouth of the present Witham. Had the union of the two streams continued to the present time, bringing down their united body of silt, Boston would either never have come into existence at all, or would ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... the police novel or mystery story, which consists in beginning your yarn anywhere but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end; attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clews, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... ministers of each denomination in each town at least once—the preaching is, for the most part, very poor. There are certainly two or three exceptions; but 'what are they,' one is irreverently apt to exclaim, 'among so many?' The shallowness and often halting pace of these discourses is doubtless due, in large measure, to the colonial love of extempore preaching. For sermons read out of a book public opinion of all denominations in Australia ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... Owing to the shallowness of the river at this season, and to the rapids, the steam-boat is unable to go up the whole way to Peterborough, and a scow or rowboat, as it is sometimes termed—a huge, unwieldy, flat- bottomed machine—meets the passengers at a certain ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... is it, or can it be, navigable for anything but the smallest canoes. The only thing remarkable about it is that it abounds in crocodiles, but not one hippopotamus was seen; which may be taken as another evidence of its shallowness. The bays to the east of the Rusizi are of the same conformation as those on the west. Carefully judging from the width of the several bays from point to point, and of the several spits which separate them, the breadth of the lake may be said to be about twelve or fourteen ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... pleasure. He can not rid himself of its fascination until he tastes its emptiness. He can not know the worth of the country and how to appreciate the glory of its disadvantages and opportunities until he has seen the sham and shallowness of the city. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... gurgles along with the liquidest sweep;— 'Tis not deep as a river, but who'd have it deep? In a country where scarcely a village is found That has not its author sublime and profound, For some one to be slightly shallow's a duty, And Willis's shallowness makes half his beauty. His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error, And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror: 700 'Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice; 'Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuine hearty phiz; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... small as half a mile in diameter, and most probably, if we could more accurately estimate their size, still less. The crater-pit, however, has well-marked peculiarities which distinguish it from all other types, such as the absence of a distinguishable rim and extreme shallowness. They appear to be most numerous on the high-level plains and plateaus in the south-western quadrant, and may be counted by hundreds under good atmospheric conditions on the outer slopes of Walter, ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... year, to leeward of a clump of cone-bearing trees. In the Moor such self-sown woods come to no ripeness. The pines are unhealthy and stunted, hung with gray moss, and eaten out with canker. The excessive moisture and the impenetrable subsoil, and the shallowness of the congenial sand that encouraged them to root make the young trees decay ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... and Mommsen. Among literary historians, the special detestation of the pseudo-scientific school, Froude was pre-eminent. Few things excite more suspicion than a good style, and no theory is more plausible than that which associates clearness of expression with shallowness of thought. Froude, however, was no fine writer, no coiner of phrases for phrases' sake. A mere chronicler of events he would hardly have cared to be. He had a doctrine to propound, a gospel to preach. "The Reformation," he said, "was the hinge on which all modern history ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... that she did not like him, he might have had some hope of a more favorable hearing in the future. But he had no conception of any under-current of feeling in Margaret Adair. She had always seemed to him so frank, with a sweet, maidenly frankness, so transparent—without shallowness, that he was thrown into despair when she dismissed him. He was singularly ignorant of the nature of women, and more especially of young girls. His mother's proud, upright, rather inflexible character, conjoined with great warmth of affection and rare nobility of mind, ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... crossed—had never known a moment's anxiety—never even been obliged to do anything she did not like—to do anything except please herself. She was beautiful—most beautiful; and if she was shallow, well, then the very shallowness only made her more attractive. She fascinated us all." The man's voice took on a softer tone as he spoke. "Francis loved her—madly—passionately. His overwhelming joy in their betrothal was a thing never to be forgotten ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... won fame by the reading of an elegy at the burial of Larra. Zorrilla was a most prolific and spontaneous writer of verses, much of which is unfinished in form and deficient in philosophical insight. But in spite of his carelessness and shallowness he rivaled Espronceda in popularity. His verses are not seldom melodramatic or childish, but they are rich in coloring and poetic fancy and they form a page xxxviii vast enchanted world in which the Spaniards still delight to wander. His versions of old Spanish ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... that eagerness to finish things shows weakness. It certainly leads to shallowness, "Without haste, without rest" was Goethe's motto. I have heard of a woman who began to study botany at ninety. That shows a mind so trained and cultivated that the soil could not be exhausted with age. How good it was ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... This shallowness has no part in Byron himself. His weariness was a genuine outcome of the influence of the time upon a character consumed by passion. His lot was cast among spent forces, and, while it is no hyperbole to say that he was himself ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... Whatever may be the faults of Sansovino in both arts, it cannot be denied that he expressed, in a style peculiar to himself, the large voluptuous external life of Venice at a moment when this city was the Paris or the Corinth of Renaissance Europe. At the same time, the shallowness of Sansovino's inspiration as a sculptor is patent in his masterpieces of parade—the "Neptune" and the "Mars," guarding the Scala d'Oro. Separated from the architecture of the court and staircase, they are insignificant in spite of their colossal scale. In their place they add a haughty grandeur, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... "Memoirs of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society," Volume VIII., page 148, in 1848, Binney expressed the view that the sediments of the Coal Period were marine rather than estuarine, and were deposited on the floor of an ocean, which was characterised by a "uniformity and shallowness unknown" in any oceanic area of the present day. -on marshes of Coal period. -on coal ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... more reason why women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and melodramatic situations. She should learn—and that she can only learn by cultivation—to discern with joy, and drink in with reverence, the good, the beautiful, and the true; and to turn with the fine scorn of a pure and strong ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... salmon steaks, hot biscuits, porridge with milk and apricots. They certainly enjoyed the meal, went fishing as usual. Coming back about eleven o'clock, they went in for a swim and got a lot of enjoyment out of this. In spite of the northern clime in which they were, the shallowness of the lakes permitted the water to get pretty well heated by the hot July and August sun, and swimming was a real pleasure. It was only now and then when they struck a lake fed mainly by springs that they found the water too cold ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... was a different matter. The question was not of Greek statues and classical books, but of modern pruriencies and shallowness ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... culminated enlightenment, dignity, wisdom, and intelligence, and look upon the fathers of two and three hundred years ago as mere pigmies, just emerging from an era of barbarism and ignorance, not at all to be compared with the proud wiseacres of our day. Never was there a greater mistake. The shallowness and flippancy of the leaders and politicians of this last quarter of the nineteenth century show them but little more than school-boys compared with the sturdy, sober-minded, deep-principled, dignified, and grand-spirited men who discovered and opened this continent and laid the ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... on melons and water, besides being momentarily exposed to the musketry of the Arabs and the fellahs. We luckily escaped with but a few killed and wounded. The rising of the Nile was only beginning. The shallowness of the river near Cairo obliged us to leave the xebec and get on board a djerm. We reached Gizeh at three in the afternoon ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... crudity. And who is not sensible of the vulgarity and coarseness of the account of Boswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a great writer ... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,' and so forth, in which the shallowness of the analysis of Boswell's character matches the puerile rudeness of the terms. Here again, is a sentence about Montesquieu. 'The English at that time,' Macaulay says of the middle of the eighteenth century, 'considered a Frenchman who talked about constitutional checks and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... Sweet Home'), the clear, penetrating beauty of her reduced tones (different in quality from the whispering semi-ventriloquism which was one of Mlle. Lind's most favorite effects) was so unique as to reconcile the ear to a certain shallowness of expression in her rendering of the words ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... containing an amount of thought and philosophy to which only a very elaborate analysis would do justice. It is a book of very high merit. We hope its reception will be such as to induce the author to continue it. Its neglect would be a mark of the shallowness of the age and its indifference ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... spite of the shallowness and emptiness and glaring hypocrisy of this thing which calls itself the church; this thing which is so timid, so cowardly that it dares not touch any sin that is unpopular, I still believe that Christianity is in this land. To-day it is like a little grain of mustard seed, but ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... the criticisms which had sounded full of keenness and wit when she heard them, recurred to her at this time, and some way, with Flossy's low, earnest voice filling her heart, they dwindled into shallowness and coarseness. All the same, their baneful influence was on her, and helped to hold her back from opening her lips, for the critic had ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... one. In the third act, after an interval of many years, she reappears as Persida, mother of a daughter who is in the fresh bloom of youth. She is now a sort of combination of her two earlier selves: in religious loyalty and subjection she is Zoe: in triviality of character and shallowness of judgement—together with a touch of vanity in dress ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and I am—" She lost control of herself as though she had passed into a hypnosis, uniquely frozen with passion, incapable of movement, of the accommodation of her sight; her breathing was slow, almost imperceptible in its shallowness. "I am a part of you," Savina went on when she had recovered. "It would kill me if I weren't. But it does mean something." Her heel cut until he ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... In consequence of the shallowness of the river, it had been found necessary to moor the gun boats at a point considerably below, and out of sight of the fort. Gerald Grantham had obtained permission to leave his command, and take charge of one of the batteries, which, however, he relinquished on the day of ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... also famous are not the exclusive product of the locality but are extensively made throughout Somerset. The church is worth inspection. It is a fine Perp. building, with a lofty W. tower of four stages. It has triple belfry windows, and a spired stair turret, but the shallowness of the buttresses detracts from its impressiveness. Within there is a good coloured roof, some Perp. screens, a good 15th-cent. stone pulpit (also coloured), some carved benches, and a rich S. chantry chapel of the ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... dazed, numbed, with the shallowness of it all—the shale of sham which did not even conceal the base sub-stratum of ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... contemporaneous questions, intellectual movements, debates and ideals with which the young generation is occupied, Turgenev finds not the least common sense and gives us to understand that they lead only to demoralisation, emptiness, prosaic shallowness, and cynicism. Turgenev finds his ideal in quite a different place, namely in the 'fathers,' in the more or less old generation. Consequently, he draws a parallel and contrast between the 'fathers' and the 'children,' and we cannot formulate the sense of ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... politics, but stood apart from the great antislavery cause just as he did from the transcendental philosophy; neither of these two main movements in the life of his times touched him at all in a personal way. It belongs to the shallowness of his objection to undertake the biography, his dislike to take office as a kind of pay, that it was easily removed. Fields very sensibly persuaded him that he should not neglect so favorable an opportunity to provide for his wife and children, who had no support ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... of that," answered Bulmer; "this precious lake of ours is not two feet deep anywhere." And with one of his flourishing gestures he stuck his stick into the water to demonstrate its shallowness. They could see the short end bent in the water, so that he seemed for a moment to lean his large ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... great mistake that would suppose the man who has thus multiplied the objects of his exertion to be of necessity superficial; superficial, that is, in the sense of shallowness or ignorance. Ordinary minds are bound by fetters, no doubt. Custom has rendered the pursuit of more than one idea all but impossible to them, and the vulgar adage of "Jack of all trades, master of none," applies to them ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... knowledge must be held firmly together with a strong girdle of modesty, else they cannot possibly thrive; and to have the intellect "undevoutly free," loosened from the bands of reverence, is a sure pledge and forecast of intellectual shallowness ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Germany his own writings, which sin by being 'literary,' have suffered loss of credit. Philosophy, he says, has long assumed in Germany the character of being an esoteric and occult science. There is a genuine fear of popularity. Simplicity of statement is deemed synonymous with hollowness and shallowness. He recalls an old professor saying to him once: 'Yes, we philosophers, whenever we wish, can go so far that in a couple of sentences we can put ourselves where nobody can follow us.' The professor said this with conscious pride, but he ought to have been ashamed of it. Great as technique is, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... from preachers and college presidents, and men who under the old regime had been in high walks of life. Occasionally some conservative newspaper or magazine would praise him and his company highly; but he knew the shallowness of all the patter of praise. He knew that he paid for it in one way or another, and he grew cynical; and in his lonely afternoons on the river, often he laughed at the whole mockery of his career, smiled at the thought of organized religion, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... not enough even to fill the small sail of the seaward-bound boat; but the rowers pulled with all their might and the vessel glided northward. The captain stood at the prow with his pole; sounding the current: his brother, no less skilled, took the helm.—The shallowness of the water made navigation very difficult, and those who knew the river best might easily run aground on unexpected shoals or newly-formed mud-drifts. The moon had scarcely risen when the boat was stranded ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... producing any effect. When fired en ricochet, they diverged to the right and left in a manner which gave Vasiladhi the appearance of an enchanted spot. Captain Hastings conjectured that this singular circumstance was owing to the shallowness of the water; the mud approaching the surface close to the fort, afforded so much more resistance to the shells which fell in its immediate vicinity, as to cause a more marked deviation in the line of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... discovered his error, but it was too late to correct it, or evade the danger which threatened him. On ascending as far inland as sixty or seventy miles, the English approached an island, and their progress in the larger canoe was effectually obstructed by the shallowness of the stream. Amongst the trees and underwood that grew on this island, and on both banks of the river in its vicinity, large ambuscades of the natives had previously been formed, and shortly after ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Government disposable for service in that quarter is quite inadequate to effectually guard the line, even at those points where the incursions are usually made. An experiment of an armed vessel on the Rio Grande for that purpose is on trial, and it is hoped that, if not thwarted by the shallowness of the river and other natural obstacles, it may materially contribute to the protection of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... intensely characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to be found elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely external. This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend of his heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... pressing forward to a definite goal. He would patiently listen to every objection, and enter readily into the most complicated questions of minute critical scholarship; but he always wanted to see daylight; he could not bear mere groping for groping's sake. When he suspected any scholar of shallowness, pettiness, or professorial conceit, he would sometimes burst forth into rage, and use language the severity of which he was himself the first to regret. But he would never presume on his age, his position, or his authority. In that respect few men remained so young, remained ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... successfully in contrivances for the rescue of men from the perils of the deep. The cork jacket and the lifeboat have been the means of saving many lives, for cork will float on the surface of the water and bear up the person wearing the jacket and the shipwrecked people in the lifeboat. 'The shallowness of the boat and the bulk of cork within allow but little room for water; so that even when filled it is in no danger of overturning or sinking, like other crafts. Also, the lifeboat can move across the waves with perfect safety, and can make ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... considerations, that "when we try to visualize the motions of the air having one thousand separate tones, to present to the eye of the mind the battling of the pulses, direct and reverberated, the imagination retires baffled at the attempt;" and he might have added, the shallowness and fallacy of the wave theory of sound was made apparent. He, however, does express himself as follows: "Assuredly, no question of science ever stood so much in need of revision as this of the transmission of sound through the atmosphere. Slowly but surely ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... we now embarked were very small, owning to the shallowness of the river. The officers, assembled here from different parts of the country, detained us a whole day in order to have an opportunity of laying their several complaints before our physician, at the recommendation ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... strife. It resulted also that frequent changes of allegiance took place, for a family had often to choose between total ruin, on the one hand, and comparative prosperity at the sacrifice of constancy, on the other. Some historians have adduced the incidents of this era as illustrating the shallowness of Japanese loyalty. But it can scarcely be said that loyalty was ever seriously at stake. In point of legitimacy there was nothing to choose between the rival branches of the Imperial family. A samurai might-pass from ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... entry to the vast region watered by the Amazons. It is a small village, formerly a missionary settlement of the Jesuits, situated a few miles to the eastward of the Para River. Here the ship anchored in the open sea at a distance of six miles from the shore, the shallowness of the water far out around the mouth of the great river not permitting, in safety, a nearer approach; and, the signal was ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... toilsome. At length they came to an immense plain, where no vestige of timber was to be seen; nor a single quadruped to enliven the desolate landscape. Here, then, their hearts failed them, and they held another consultation. The width of the river, which was upwards of a mile, its extreme shallowness, the frequency of quicksands, and various other characteristics, had at length made them sensible of their errors with respect to it, and they now came to the correct conclusion, that they were on the banks of ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... which really corresponds to the moods which Mr Pickwick stimulated by indulgence in milk-punch. When it came face to face with death, and sin, and suffering, it made them mere occasions for displays of sentimentalism, disgusting because such trifling with the most awful subjects shows a hopeless shallowness of nature. Dickens's indulgence in deathbeds meant an effeminate delight in the 'luxury of grief,' revolting in proportion to the solemnity of the topic. This was only another side of the levity with which he treated serious political ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... large bay, perfectly secure from all winds, save from north to east, but unfortunately a great portion of it is rendered useless by the shallowness of the water. The best anchorage is with Point Sir Isaac, bearing north-north-west, about one mile and a half from the western shore in four or five fathoms. In working in with a southerly wind, you may stand to the eastward until you bring the above point to bear ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... interpretation of it? Why does the great wind stir the deep waters? It does but ripple the shallow pool as it passes, for shallowness can but ripple and throw up shadows. We cannot tell, but this we know—that deep things only can be deeply moved. It is the penalty of depth and greatness; it is the price they pay for the divine privilege of suffering and sympathy. The shallow pools, the looking-glasses of our little life, ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... I should like you to be?" she said, with a bright smile and one of those sudden descents into shallowness which he appeared ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... and makes progress possible. If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas; and I agree with the Archbishop at Naples who had a St. Januarius procession against the plague. It's no use having an Order in Council against popular shallowness. There is no action possible ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... of the book is admirable. Both the skeptic who sneers and the bigot who denounces might learn a beautiful lesson from its calm, yet earnest pages. It is free from the brilliant shallowness of Renan, and the bitterness which sometimes marred the teachings of Parker. It is a generous, tender, noble book,—enjoying, indeed, over most works of its class a peculiar advantage; for, while its logic has everywhere a masculine strength ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... whole of his alleged "naturalistic philosophy," stems directly, not from Zola, Flaubert, Augier and the younger Dumas, but from the Greeks. In the midst of democratic cocksureness and Christian sentimentalism, of doctrinaire shallowness and professorial smugness, he stands for a point of view which at least has something honest and courageous about it; here, at all events, he is a realist. Let him put a motto to his books, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... shall nurture in him from his infancy a firm faith in all that I have lost or feel uncertain about.' And his last written utterance, signed 'Your Old Niebuhr,' contains a lament that 'depth, sincerity, originality, heart and affection are disappearing,' and that 'shallowness and arrogance are becoming universal.' After all allowances for whatever of defect, one can well point to such a character as an illustrious example of true ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... stored with the promiscuous rubbish of libraries, and with facts which were transformed into rubbish by his treatment of them, was combined in him with a diseased imagination, and a personal vanity almost surpassing belief. His mental shallowness and consequent restlessness rendered anything like original thought impossible to him; and the faculty of intellectual digestion was not less beyond him. It is probable that curiosity was the motive which originally drew him to the study of witchcraft; a vague credence of such things was ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... some of the large stones likewise might be removed when the water is low, which is expeditiously done by digging a large hole by the side and undermining them; when they are rolled over and buried. But to improve the passage materially, appears to me to be impracticable, from the shallowness of the water, and the rapidity of the current in many of the rivers. We saw that beautiful phenomenon called the 'Aurora Borealis,' or the northern lights, on most clear evenings, consisting of long columns of clear white light, shooting across the heavens ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... leak, that we were rather upon the point to leave her than to keep her any longer; yet, hoping to bring all to good pass, sought the coast of Florida, where we found no place nor haven for our ships, because of the shallowness of the coast. Thus, being in greater despair, and taken with a new storm, which continued other three days, we were enforced to take for our succour the port which serveth the city of Mexico, called St. John de Ullua, ...
— Voyager's Tales • Richard Hakluyt
... disturbed by her attitude, for he discovered traits of character and a shallowness of sympathy that shocked him. His dream of married bliss was the absolute camaraderie he expected it to bring. He feared now that she would not enter into his life or ambitions, and, like too many ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... may be so termed) on Lake Ontario is so high during a sharp gale, that it was at first thought the smaller class steamboats could not live on it; and on Lake Superior, the waves almost rival those of the far-famed Cape of Storms, while the ground-swell, owing to the comparative shallowness, or little specific gravity of the fresh water, is such as to make the oldest sailor sick. Whether the water in the lowest depths of Lakes Superior and Ontario be salt or fresh, we can not ascertain; for the greater density of the former may keep it always below, or there may ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... said he, in a hurried tone, "for the shallowness of idlers and talkers attempting to mould men by theories; but the question whether France is to remain a monarchy or not, is one of the most pressing importance to your highness's operations. It is only in this practical sense that I should think of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... with great difficulty I could reach the shore. At another time, when swimming over to the small island, a shovel-nosed shark, which, as well as alligators, abound in those seas, struck me in the thigh, just as my foot could reach the bottom, and grounded itself, from the shallowness of the water, as I suppose, so that its mouth could not get round towards me. The blow I felt some hours after making the shore. By repeated practice, I at length became a pretty dexterous swimmer, and amused myself by passing from one island to ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... gas-works and groups of factories. Some special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each special appeal. One said things carefully adjusted to the distinctive limitations of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible silliness and shallowness drifted about us. Our advisers made us declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he will live here." The enemy obtained a number of these bills and stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... move in fashionable circles is to introduce some topic requiring depth of thought and sound judgment. Such a subject will usually produce either an instant lull in the conversation or a display of ignorance which cannot fail to reveal the shallowness of the speaker's intellect. It is this superficial class of minds that most easily fall victims to a sickly sentimentalism, which readily leads to digressions from the ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... dignity. She couldn't fool him any longer—not even with that wide-eyed appealingly infantile stare. He knew, without looking closer, that there was a flare of mirth hidden within its velvet duskiness. And there was only one way to deal with such shallowness—that was with firm and unmistakable severity. He leaned forward and pounded one meager knee for emphasis as Judge Maynard ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... the Norman Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the dull poetic pedantries of the age which succeeded Chaucer rose the glittering pinnacles of Shakespeare and his fellows. From the coldness and shallowness of the eighteenth century rose the rich and varied tableland of whose occupants Burns was one of the first and Tennyson and Browning perhaps the last. No other literature has shown such recuperative power, a thought full of hope and ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... direction to an abrupt termination. During what period of the world's history the exodus from Asia occurred is not known. There are those who believe it to have taken place when what is now known as Behring Strait was an isthmus, the shallowness of the water throughout that channel indicating the physical change to have been of comparitively recent date. This opinion was upheld by Lutke in his "Voyage Autour du Monde," vol. 2, page 209, and Whymper, in his work upon Alaska, page 94, alludes to the shallowness of Behring Strait ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... to our critical principle, if we did not recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless. There has been no attempt to palliate either the shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract. But there is another side to its influence. It was the match which kindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not in France merely, but in Germany as well, its phrases became the language of all ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... insignificant world, while Dory Hargrave had been born a citizen of the big world, the real world—one who understands human beings, because his sympathies are broad as human nature itself, and his eyes clear of the scales of pretense. He was an illustration of the shallowness of the talk about the loneliness of great souls. It is the great souls that alone are not alone. They understand better than the self-conscious, posing mass of mankind the weakness and the pettiness of human nature; but they also appreciate its other side. And in the pettiest creature, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... of the serious work he must do, of the opening festival of all the united Korps at the beginning of the term, of his own responsibilities as the head of the association to which he belonged, of the pleasant hours he would spend in discussing with youthful shallowness the deepest subjects that can occupy the human mind, deciding, between a draft of brown ale and a whiff of tobacco, that Schopenhauer was right in one point, and that Kant was wrong in another. But, for the present, at least, none of those things could by mere anticipation distract ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... We were told that we were quite at liberty to speak to the Ambassador if we desired, but unofficially we were warned to think twice before we took such a step, the hint being thrown out that it would be better for us to refrain from talking to him unless first questioned. The shallowness of the official decree was vividly brought home to us when we were forcibly confined to barracks, and this frequently occurred while the ambassadorial visitor was ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... the drought of uneventful years. But the poisonous nettles of memory were the only harvest that had sprung from the presence of Mrs. Robson's sisters, and Claire was glad to uproot the arid product of their shallowness. ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the Little River was effected with much toil and difficulty, from the shallowness of the water. We entered Lake Nipissing on the 10th; descended French River, a rapid and dangerous stream, without accident, and entered Lake Huron on the morning of the 12th. The guide pointed ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... governmental hostility in the unfriendliness of Bonaparte, whose rejection alike of Gall and of Fulton, who wished to introduce steam navigation, demonstrated that great military and political ability may co-exist with great shallowness of mind in reference to all things new, original, and philanthropic. So it has always been, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge, but to force upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects; of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not; of considering an acquaintance with the learned names of things and persons, and the possession of clever duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent lecturers, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... wives or between lovers. Such gushing terminations as Your Own Darling, Your own Dovey and other pet and silly endings should be avoided, as they denote shallowness. Love can be strongly expressed without dipping into the nonsensical ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... grace flecked by the evening sun. These were moments, he knew, that could never come again; that are unique in a man's history. He tried to hold and taste them as they passed; tormented, like all lovers, by what seems, in such crises, to be the bitter inadequacy and shallowness of ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... controversy about Homer, which had then been recently carried on in France between La Motte and Madame Dacier. This account was delivered with an air of teaching, which was very little in harmony with its excessive shallowness. Pope, who sustained the part of pupil in this interlude, replied in a manner that exhibited a knowledge of the parties concerned in the controversy much superior to that of the duke. In particular, he characterized the excellent notes upon ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... manners are true, but not sufficiently elevated above the range of every-day life; he has exhausted the surface of life; and as there is little progression in his dramas, and every thing turns usually on the same point, this adds to the impression of shallowness and ennui, as characteristic of the existing state of society. Willingly would he have abolished masks altogether, but he could hardly have compensated for them out of his own resources; however, he retained only a few of them, as Harlequin, Brighella, and Pantaloon, and limited ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... not using oars. That would have been impossible in a channel so narrow. They were pushing the boat through the water by means of a long pole, but it was not very easily managed, because of the shallowness of the water and the bushes that grew ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... overhead and flock after flock flying about the shore, which grew more beautiful each minute; but before they had glided far over the lagoon, Carey's attention was taken up by the shallowness of the water, and he reached out over the side to gaze in wonder through the perfectly limpid medium at what seemed to be a garden of flowers of the most beautiful and varied tints. There were groves, too, of shrubs, whose branches were ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... European with a medicine chest can get the same kind of cortege round his tent. These people, who hung upon Him thus, were those of whom He had afterwards to say that it would be 'more tolerable for Sodom, in the day of judgment, than for them.' But though He knew the shallowness of the impression, He was not deaf to the misery; and, with power which knew no weariness, and sympathy which had no limit, and a reservoir of healing virtue which the day's draughts had not emptied by a hairs-breadth, He healed them all. Remarkable is the prohibition of the demons' speech, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... will embark five miles below this place, and three miles higher up than the Point where General Howe landed. There will be more room for the arrangements of our vessels, and the shallowness of the water insures us against the enterprise of any vessel of force. In this situation we may wait for intelligence from our friends. The State of Maryland have made to me every offer in their power. I will improve this opportunity ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... you have neither the genius, the learning, nor the judgment to qualify you for literature.'" In the same magazine for June, 1874, Paul Hamilton Hayne condemned severely the provincial literary criticism which had prevailed, — "indiscriminate adulations, effervescing commonplace, shallowness and poverty of thought." "No foreign ridicule," he said, "however richly deserved, nothing truly either of logic or of laughter, can stop this growing evil, until our own scholars and thinkers have the manliness and honesty to discourage instead of applauding such manifestations of artistic ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... herself by entangling herself too promiscuously. She had lovers by the score, yet none could boast of having really won her heart. A woman of superficial emotions, she was entirely without depth, yet so long as it suited her purpose, she was able to conceal this shallowness and profess for the admirer of the moment the greatest affection and devotion. This is an art and she was an adept at it. Sensually she quickly attracted men, and it was not long before she became a prime favorite in the select ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... recognising the label and overlooking the thing, of seeing intellectually instead of seeing emotionally, accounts for the amazing blindness, or rather visual shallowness, of most civilised adults. We do not forget what has moved us, but what we have merely recognised leaves no deep impression on the mind. A friend of mine, a man of taste, desired to make some clearance in his gardens, encumbered as they were with a multitude of trees; unfortunately most of his ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... other never have wanted, a Book of which they can say, This is our Creed and Code,—or rather Anti-creed and Anti-code. And Strauss seems perfectly secure against the sort of answer to which Voltaire's critical and historical shallowness perpetually exposed him. I mean to read the Book through. It seems admitted that the orthodox theologians have failed to give any sufficient answer.—I have also looked through Michelet's Luther, with great delight; and have ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... speculation and newspaper reading is, that people have got in the way of not thinking much for themselves; of regarding as truth whatever is printed, and of not opening their eyes wide enough to discover the shallowness of the reasonings and falsehoods that are put forth at the behests of speculators, or of those who are managing corporations for speculative purposes. The American people have had an amazing experience in losses from following advice thus ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... here shallow, presented, according to its depth or shallowness, the colours of ultra-marine or sky. The broadest parts were the palest, because the most shallow; and here and there, in the shallows, you might see a faint tracery of coral ribs almost reaching the surface. The island at its broadest might have been three miles ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... on the eastern side of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein, and the ragged sounds or "Bodden" that indent the Baltic shore of Germany from the Bay of Lubeck to the mouth of the Oder River.[450] Although the shallowness of the bordering sea and the sand-bars and sand reefs which characterize all flat coasts here also exclude the largest vessels, such coasts have nevertheless ample contact with both land and sea. They tend to develop, therefore, the activities appropriate to both. A fertile soil ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... of sense with all his fanaticism One of his sayings is preserved "Odious is contentiousness in Kings, more odious vexation in judges uncomprehending a case; yet more odious is shallowness of doctors in religions and most odious are avarice in the rich, idleness in youth, jesting in age and cowardice in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... man, at whom the street woman smiles, to feel flattered, though he knows full well what she is and her dire necessity. She could not doubt that he was speaking the truth, yet she could not believe that conceit could so befog common sense in a man who, for all his slowness and shallowness, was ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... curious—and scores of Tom Van Dorn's friends wondered at it then and have marveled at it since, that in the six months which elapsed between his divorce and his remarriage, he did not fathom the shallowness and pretense of Margaret Fenn. But he did not fathom them. Her glib talk taken mechanically from cheap philosophy about being what you think you are, about shifting moral responsibility onto good ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... sent to the land of Punt the famous expedition which covered her with glory and brought gold to the god Amun. To me most feminine she seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with its brightness and its suavity; its pretty shallowness and sunshine; its white, and blue, and yellow, and red, and green and orange; all very trim and fanciful, all very smart and delicate; full of finesse and laughter, and breathing out to me of the twentieth century the coquetry ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... intention of criticising themselves, being perfectly happy and self-satisfied, like Zarathustra's triumphant pigs. The whole of life is summed up in their own infinitesimal ego; and by their spirit of shallowness it is that I am infected. Ah, well! when you are with wolves you've got to howl. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... the selfish shallowness of that relative, loved her mother, tried to take her hand. At a shadow of sympathy she would have laid before Mrs. Hanway-Harley the last secret her bosom hid. There was no sympathy, nothing of mother's love; Mrs. Hanway-Harley, in ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... and Mr. Peridon asunder: and in the uniting of them Colney is interested, because it would have so pleased the woman of the loyal heart no longer beating. He let Victor's end be his expiation and did not phrase blame of him. He considered the shallowness of the abstract Optimist exposed enough in Victor's history. He was reconciled to it when, looking on their child, he discerned, that for a cancelling of the errors chargeable to them, the father and mother ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... John Stuart Mill, for no better reason than that nature sometimes drowns men and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed by such an argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness of man. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to measure the attributes and limit the greatness of ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... ordered to the vessels already there. Subsequent information, however, has removed these apprehensions for the present. To secure our commerce in that sea with the smallest force competent, we have supposed it best to watch strictly the harbor of Tripoli. Still, however, the shallowness of their coast and the want of smaller vessels on our part has permitted some cruisers to escape unobserved, and to one of these an American vessel unfortunately fell a prey. The captain, one American seaman, and two others of color remain prisoners with them unless exchanged under an agreement ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... came to. She would have come back from the edge of the grave to shield silk from water. Finally she wreathed her arms round Lucy, and kissed her so tenderly, warmly and sobbingly, that Lucy got over the shock of her shallowness, and they kissed and cried together most joyously, while Baldwin, after a heroic attempt at jubilation, retired from the room with a face as long as your arm. A bas les revenants!! She went to the housekeeper's room. The housekeeper persuaded her ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... to the settlement, young Clarendon followed the regular trail, over which he had passed scores of times. Not far from the house he crossed a broad stream at a point where the current (except when there was rain) was less than two feet deep. Its shallowness led to its use by all the settlers within a large radius to the southward, so that the faintly marked trails converged at this point something like the spokes of a large wheel, and became one from that ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... descending into the garden, Giovanni failed not to look at his figure in the mirror,—a vanity to be expected in a beautiful young man, yet, as displaying itself at that troubled and feverish moment, the token of a certain shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character. He did gaze, however, and said to himself that his features had never before possessed so rich a grace, nor his eyes such vivacity, nor his cheeks so warm ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... this should have her youth burdened with any secret; it was scarcely wonderful that she grew impatient and spoke harshly to Elizabeth when she insisted upon forcing trouble on her mind, which left to itself she was able, out of the very shallowness of her nature, ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... Separatists au naturel—are somewhat disconcerted, and try to minimise the effect of the meeting by sneering and contumely; but it will not do. They affect hilarity, but their laughter is not real. Perhaps nothing shows the shallowness of men more than the tricks they think sufficient to deceive. And then the leaders are accustomed to a credulous public. The place is eminently religious. Cork is the Isle of Saints—with a port and a garrison to enhance ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... leaning her shoulder against the wall, remained motionless; only her bosom heaved convulsively and her eyes moved restlessly, and the breath came with a faint moan from her white lips. I realised that it was no slight trouble that had brought her to me; I realised, for all my youth and shallowness, that at that instant before my eyes the fate of a whole life was being decided—a bitter and ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... your books, notwithstanding you are his father, and that it is his duty to know what you have said. Should he have done so, he would neither have written so much nonsense nor would he have shown the shallowness of his knowledge, which, by the way, he derives from some little books, which, to propagate and maintain obscurantism, were published in Cataluna, [8] by ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... their thoughts clearly, is far from true; and what perspicuity can be found among them proceeds not from the easiness of their language, but the shallowness of their thoughts. He that sees a building as a common spectator, contents himself with relating that it is great or little, mean or splendid, lofty or low; all these words are intelligible and common, but they convey no distinct or limited ideas; if he attempts, without ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... in his own peculiar snobbery. But of anything like companionship between father and daughter there had existed very little. While railing, wherever he found ears into which to rail, against the vicious luxury and sordid shallowness of the upper middle classes, his instinctive desire to shine above his poorer associates had sent Phyllis to an upper middle class school. Now Gedge had a certain amount of bookish and political intelligence. Phyllis inheriting the intellectual equipment of her sentimental ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke |
