"Shortsighted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plebiscites in East Prussia and in upper Silesia. On the other hand, the refusal to permit the incorporation of the new, lesser Austria within Germany was at once unjust and unwise—a concession to the most shortsighted of old-style diplomatic principles. ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
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... spoiled" seemed to meet with general acceptance. The smattering of an education which the negroes had received—it would be difficult to call it more—seemed to have improved neither their efficiency nor their morals. As a result there were many white people so shortsighted that they would starve their own children rather ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
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... despair; but at last they hit upon a remedy. They would be distinguished by hook or by crook, and the only way left now was always to go on foot. So they walked the pavement—wet or dry, nothing could induce them to enter the door of a carriage. Item: they gave up being shortsighted; the few who for reasons distinct from fashion could not resign the habit concealed it, as if it was a defect ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
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... shortsighted, though I never lets on. Rhoda, 'ow can you 'ave let on to the gentleman as I'm deficient? As to knowing Mr. Wrent, I'd do so well enough," said Mrs. Bensusan, tossing her head, "with his long white beard and white 'ead, let alone ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
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... was very shortsighted and inconsiderate when he gave way to this burst of vexation before any woman—still more before ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
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... lines to be scanned?" Ans.—On internal evidence, we question whether the lines are MILTON's. In the absence of our Poet, who is out for a holiday, we can only reply, that if shortsighted, you can scan them by the aid of a powerful glass—of your ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
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... distorting spectacles; not see beyond one's nose; dare pondus fumo[Lat]; get the wrong sow by the ear &c. (blunder) 699. give a bias, give a twist; bias, warp, twist; prejudice, prepossess. Adj. misjudging &c. v.; ill-judging, wrong-headed; prejudiced &c. v.; jaundiced; shortsighted, purblind; partial, one-sided, superficial. narrow-minded, narrow-souled[obs3]; mean-spirited; confined, illiberal, intolerant, besotted, infatuated, fanatical, entete[Fr], positive, dogmatic, conceited; opinative, opiniative[obs3]; opinioned, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
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... fault, the fault of your maternal selfishness. I feel that I am incapable of working, of making something of myself, and yet I was not intended for a secluded, simple life, lonely enough to kill one, to which I have been condemned by your shortsighted affection.'" ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
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... and death—are, as we know, the consequences, just and equitable, of original sin, it is a shortsighted faith and a defective vision that find in these crosses only chastisement for sin. Truly, they should not have been, had we never sinned; but as God, in His mercy, draws good out of evil, so has He made these inevitable results of our transgression serve a higher purpose and ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
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... knew Mr. Lasher he was undoubtedly unfortunate. He was shortsighted, but no one had, as yet, discovered this, and he was, therefore, blamed for much clumsiness that he could not prevent and for a good deal of sensitiveness that came quite simply from his eagerness ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
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... good of the greatest number; but an altruistic as well as an egoistic impulse may stand in the way of that end. Our altruistic inclinations are often perverted, non-representative, a matter of instinctive and irrational sympathy or shortsighted impulse. And so, while one of the great tasks of moral education is to make men unselfish, that alone is not enough; unselfishness must be directed by reason and tact, rendered far-sighted ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
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... served to open the way to a repetition of the very crime they deplored. I felt myself under the same fascination. I wanted to test the mechanism; to follow out then and there the instructions given with such shortsighted minuteness and mark the result. But a sense of decorum prevented. It was clearly my duty to carry so important a discovery as this to the major and subject myself to his commands before making the experiment suggested by the scroll I had so carefully deciphered. Besides, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
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... be used to overawe the capital—just as if overaweing were not the very thing needed to make a bigoted government enter on the path of progress. Never did a man in repute for statesmanship show himself more shortsighted. His blunder led to the renewal of the war, and its continuance ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
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... who are shortsighted now, mother. I tell you, you would manage him better if you just put on your old grey shawl and one of your bonny white mutches, and went in half smiling and half timid and said, "I am the mother of him that writes about the Auld Lichts, and I want you to promise ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
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... middle-aged for the reward of being made a fool by a chorus girl or an adventuress. That belongs to yellow-backed penny-dreadfuls and Sunday supplement tales of breach-of-promise suits. More often the daughter of the business man is both the victim and the vampire of his own shortsighted neglectfulness. The business man expresses it as "working like a slave to give her the best in the land." And sometimes, as in the case of Steve O'Valley, it is his own wife instead of a blonde soul mate who lures him to destruction ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
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... grow about the age of forty-five; and by the claims of actual life, which demand that even a reformer must live as man, mate, head of a family, and citizen. But those who crave that the individual continue his progress indefinitely are the shortsighted—particularly those who think that the cause must perish because the individual deserts it.... It is an open question, for that matter, whether Olof did not have a better chance to advance his cause from the pulpit of the reformed Greatchurch than ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
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... of the angle; but you are shortsighted. See, there she is ascending the other eminence in her white frock and green veil, as I told you. ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
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... them will say so when they know how I mean to cultivate this scroll-work, which is paying me twice as well already. I put it to you if I could do two things at once, and if it would be wise to sacrifice the more profitable for the less remunerative. Why it would be quite shortsighted and cowardly." ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
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... when a shortsighted crowd, incapable of judgment, and with their minds clouded with a few cheap phrases, expected from a quick and victorious war the strengthening of all the elements of Force, and feared to be left stranded. Even ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
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... darkness looked with anxious interest, who had been destined, before heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth should have passed away. Events which shortsighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes, had been ordained on his account. For his sake empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed his will by the pen of the evangelist, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
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... into the drawing-room, where the real lady of the house sat at a dainty writing-table, scratching away at a letter that was no doubt as affectionate as the one which my mother had received. She was shortsighted, which seemed to be the case also with most of the other ladies in the room; this, perhaps, was why they stared so hard at us, and then went on with the elaborate pieces of needlework on which all of them were engaged. ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
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... petition was exhibited. Nothing is more natural than that the labouring people should be deceived by the arts of such men as the author of this absurd and wicked composition. We ourselves, with all our advantages of education, are often very credulous, very impatient, very shortsighted, when we are tried by pecuniary distress or bodily pain. We often resort to means of immediate relief which, as Reason tells us, if we would listen to her, are certain to aggravate our sufferings. Men of great ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
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... possible that he had not seen me, but for some reason his attitude struck me as ominous. As far as I could see, he was looking straight at me, and he was not a shortsighted man. I could think of no reason why he should cut me. We had met on the links on the previous morning, and he had been friendliness itself. He had called me "me dear boy," supplied me with ginger beer at the clubhouse, and ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
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... blackberry vines, masses of wild flowers beneath them, and a bird for every bush. Some of the neighbours thought that to drive two rails every so often, lay up the fences straight, and grub out the shrubs was the way, but father said they were vastly mistaken. He said that was such a shortsighted proceeding, he would be ashamed to indulge in it. You did get more land, but if you left no place for the birds, the worms and insects devoured your crops, and you didn't raise half so much as if you furnished ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
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... is rash or wise, shortsighted or far-seeing, too fast or too slow, upon the profound and terrible question, "What is to be done with slavery?" You have been saying something about it, and I rather think, if I could see it, that I should very much agree ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
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... revising the Constitution was by no means unsatisfactory to Bonaparte. It afforded him an opportunity of holding out fresh glimmerings of liberty to those who were too shortsighted to see into the future. He was pretty certain that there could be no change but to his advantage. Had any one talked to him of the wishes of the nation he would have replied, "3,577,259 citizens have voted. Of these how many were for me? 3,368,185. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
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... number of very worthy citizens assumed that one would be passed. The fact seems to have been lost sight of that the tenderloin element opposes such legislation, and that the management of the so-called liquor interests organized as the "Royal Arch," takes a shortsighted view of Local Option provisions. The machine was thus interested. Its representatives in Senate and Assembly did not propose that any Local Option bill should pass. So the Local Option bill was smothered. The smothering process ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
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... times the worst so frequently remain the victors. The counter-revolution which is wont to follow on the heels of revolution, and with a corresponding violence, is a compensation only to the most shortsighted. It allows the disease, the familiarizing of the people with the infringement of law, to continue, until the hitherto sound parts are attacked. Hence, a people should, if they would have it go well with them, in the changes ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
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... she went to her room, she got out her papers, and carefully reread every one of her stories. Being a little shortsighted, Mr. Bhaer sometimes used eye glasses, and Jo had tried them once, smiling to see how they magnified the fine print of her book. Now she seemed to have on the Professor's mental or moral spectacles also, for the faults of these poor stories glared ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
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... a thread caused what appeared to be a gigantic blackbeetle to perform strange and unholy evolutions in my sitting-room. Worst of all, I was victimised by the presence of a blackbeetle in a plate of clear soup served me at my club. I backed my bill, but it was too late, for I am very shortsighted. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
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... to the shortsighted, the real TRUTH is this:—Justice reigns; the happiness of one person is not bought at the expense of another; the law of attraction brings us our own and holds to us our own in spite of all its efforts to get away; it never leaves us until, THROUGH SOME CHANGE ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
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... creates, so to speak, new nations in his progress, people must be struck, from one end of Europe to the other, by the remarkably prosperous state of France. Her Navy, formed in two years, after a ruinous revolution, and assuming at last a menacing attitude after so long, excited the scoffs of a shortsighted enemy." ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
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... in the boy," sighed the old man, as he mused on what had just occurred. "Alas! that it should have been so long overshadowed. A milder course might have done better. Ah, me! we are weak and shortsighted mortals." ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
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... shows a curious contrast between the political stagnancy and the great industrial activity. The great constitutional questions seemed to be settled; and the statesmen, occupied mainly in sharing power and place, took a very shortsighted view (not for the first time in history) of the great problems that were beginning to present themselves. The British empire in the East was not won by a towering ambition so much as forced upon a reluctant commercial company by ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
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... done well, Jessie, but you've been let alone and had no one to hold your hand or interfere. If my Mac had gone to sea as your Jem did, I never should have been as severe as I am. Men are so perverse and shortsighted, they don't trouble about the future as long as things are quiet and comfortable in the present," continued Mrs. Jane, quite forgetting that the shortsighted partner of the firm, physically speaking ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
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... portions of it—of course only those portions unfit for settlement—in a state of nature, not merely for the sake of preserving the forests and the water, but for the sake of preserving all its beauties and wonders unspoiled by greedy and shortsighted vandalism. These beauties and wonders include animate as well as inanimate objects. The wild creatures of the wilderness add to it by their presence a charm which it can acquire in no other way. ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
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... maltreat a priest without much danger of being called to account for his conduct. Of course such conduct was an offence in the eyes of the criminal law; but the criminal law of that time was very shortsighted, and strongly disposed to close its eyes completely when the offender was an influential proprietor. Had the incidents reached the ears of the Emperor Nicholas he would probably have ordered the culprit to be summarily and severely punished but, as the Russian proverb has ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
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... get up again and look down from her foothold of sunshine, down and away at the patterned, level earth, with its villages and its smoke and its energy. So shortsighted the train seemed, running to the distance, so terrifying in their littleness the villages, with such ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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... but shortsighted more than enough. It is of a piece with the wisdom which shrinks from telling children that God is love, lest they should not be sufficiently afraid of Him; which forbids their young hearts to expand freely towards their fellow-creatures: which puts into their ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
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... In extenuation of this decision, it may be said that the danger of war with France, which had forced the Adams Administration to double expenditures, had passed; and that Europe was at this moment at peace, though only the most sanguine and shortsighted could believe that continued peace was possible in Europe with the First Consul in the saddle. It was agreed, then, that the expenditures for the military and naval establishments should be kept at about $2,500,000—somewhat below the normal appropriation before the recent war-flurry; and ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
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... then directs its attention to profits, because, from mere economic necessity, profits are the criterion of the true success of the enterprise, that is, its serviceability to mankind. Here we distinguish between the shortsighted man, who aims at immediate returns, and the farsighted man, whose eye is fixed on the future, who verily desires the profits, but desires them in the long run. But this is only a manifestation of human nature as we find it in ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
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... that his readers will perform theirs he by no means feels assured. The vulgar—among whom I would not be understood to mean merely the rabble—the vulgar I say (between ourselves) extend their influence far around, and unfortunately—set the fashion. Too shortsighted to reach my full meaning, too narrow-minded to comprehend the largeness of my views, too disingenuous to admit my moral aim—they will, I fear, almost frustrate my good intentions, and pretend to discover in my work an apology for the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
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... was silenced, but she wondered what Bluebell could do that her shortsighted mother would not be satisfied with. Meantime the object of the discussion had escaped from the room. She had no wish to spend the afternoon in the dim parlour, stuffy with stove heat and the lingering aroma of baked mutton; and a fancy had occurred ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
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... about gardening is that when it is bad you can always—you and time—you and year after next—make it good. It is very easy to think of the plants, beds and paths of a garden as things which, being once placed, must stay where they are; but it is shortsighted and it is fatal to effective gardening. We should look upon the arrangement of things in our garden very much as a housekeeper looks on the arrangement of the furniture in her house. Except buildings, pavements and great trees—and ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
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... it across Helene's back. Helene stooped forward to make room, and looked round with a smile. She was, as always at evening parties, wearing a dress such as was then fashionable, cut very low at front and back. Her bust, which had always seemed like marble to Pierre, was so close to him that his shortsighted eyes could not but perceive the living charm of her neck and shoulders, so near to his lips that he need only have bent his head a little to have touched them. He was conscious of the warmth of her body, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
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... more than a tendency in the early days of the automobile to regard the selling of a machine as the real accomplishment and that thereafter it did not matter what happened to the buyer. That is the shortsighted salesman-on-commission attitude. If a salesman is paid only for what he sells, it is not to be expected that he is going to exert any great effort on a customer out of whom no more commission is to be made. And it is right ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
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... Shortsighted, undersized and weak, Intolerant yet self-distrusting, There could not well have been a "beak" Less fitted for the nice adjusting Of his peculiar point of view To that of forty-odd years later, Less eager to acclaim the New, Less apt for Georgian ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
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... country becomes more settled, ponds are more and more likely to become contaminated and hence unfit for a water-supply, and this possibility must be taken into account in planning for a water-supply. It would be most shortsighted to carry a long line of pipe from a house to a pond several miles away, only to have the pond made unfit for use within a few years by the growth of the community around the pond. The possibility of cooeperation ought not to be overlooked, however. It is quite possible that half a dozen householders ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
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... Nevada, to prepare a Reclamation Bill. The only obstacle to the prompt enactment of the bill was the undue insistence upon State Rights by certain Congressmen, "who consistently fought for local and private interests as against the interests of the people as a whole." In spite of this shortsighted opposition, the bill became law on June 17, 1902, and the work of reclamation began without an instant's delay. The Reclamation Act set aside the proceeds of the sale of public lands for the purpose of reclaiming the waste areas of the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
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... the Bishop mildly, putting on his spectacles and gazing down. 'I am a little shortsighted, you know. It is the size of the ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
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... selfish as to be unwilling to part with their daughter, preferring their own happiness to hers. Others are so silly as to think no ordinary man good enough for her, and therefore, if they had their own way, would have her to become an old maid. Fortunately, such shortsighted people ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
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... her poniard-point sharply tipped and deadly. 'Why should people take themselves seriously?' she would say, with a shrug of her shoulders. 'Surely, we are a common enough species!' And then the green-grey eyes would narrow themselves in their shortsighted way, and Mrs. Ogilvie's voice, charmingly refined and well-bred, would with a few words lightly prick the falsely sentimental and self-inflated wind-bag of oratory that had presented its unprotected surface to ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
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... numbers of men and women who have learned to find rest, health, and recreation in the splendid forests and flower-clad meadows of our mountains. The forest reserves should be set apart forever for the use and benefit of our people as a whole and not sacrificed to the shortsighted greed ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
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... certainly,' said M. Zola. 'At a low calculation I daresay a thousand women passed me in the streets yesterday; just one of them recognised me, and she, you say, was Mrs. Spalding. Shortsighted as I am, not having seen her, too, since I was in England, a few years ago, I had no notion she was the person who turned as she passed along, and said, "There's ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
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... a man in middle age, immersed in disheartening struggles, and fighting recurrent ill health. Superficial critics have called Fielding a realist because his figures are so full-blooded and alive that we feel we have met them but yesterday in the street; to eyes so shortsighted life itself must seem merely realistic. As none but an idealist could have conceived Parson Adams, so the creator of Sophia again announced himself an idealist in the Dedication of Tom Jones. Here, in language of pure symbolism, he contends ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
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... not be doubtful. He followed the traditions of his family. Indeed, it is now well established and universally admitted that the patriots of the American Revolution were not in fact arrayed against England. They were engaged in a struggle which was but a part of the great conflict waged against shortsighted and obstinate tyranny by Englishmen on both sides of the ocean, and in which the victory for liberty was won on this side sooner than on the other. What the Coopers and their kind achieved here was applauded openly in the mother country ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
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... produce stuffs not only beautiful and quaint in design, but also adapted for every-day service, and decorous in humble and secluded life. And you must remember always that your business, as manufacturers, is to form the market, as much as to supply it. If, in shortsighted and reckless eagerness for wealth, you catch at every humour of the populace as it shapes itself into momentary demand—if, in jealous rivalry with neighbouring States, or with other producers, you try to attract attention by singularities, novelties, and gaudinesses—to make every design ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
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... of Deputies. As, in the event of the new Civil List being discussed, I was particularly anxious to avoid the question of the continuation of the court theatre being treated in the ignorant and shortsighted radical fashion, which was to be feared above all, I did not despair of making the acquaintance of some of the most influential among the new members of parliament. In this wise I found myself suddenly ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
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... princes is shortsighted," he said; "the salvation of the Church must come from the Italian republic, as Leo XIII believes and wishes; but the Church will not be saved in the manner which this pious Machiavelli thinks. The revolution will make the Pope lose his last sou, with the rest of his patrimony. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
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... lay hold of the stick at the other end. Let Pseudo-Philosophy set the means above the end, and fix its shortsighted eyes on Labor and Capital, omitting Life. (What does it profit a file-cutter if he gains his master's whole capital and loses his own life?) But you and I, Mr. Little, are true philosophers and the work we are about to enter on is—saving ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
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... of fertilization, therefore, consists of supplying any or all of these elements in which the soil is deficient. The aim of fertilization, as a rule, is merely to increase crop production. But this may prove to be not merely shortsighted, it may turn out to be a social crime. It is criminal, indeed, as a great many diseases are directly traceable to ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
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... to imitate his own generous and obliging deportment to others; he had to reprove them perpetually for mean shortsightedness, and when he died he virtually left no successor, for his sons are both narrowminded, mean, shortsighted creatures, without dignity or honour. All they can say of their forefathers is that they came from Lualaba up Luamo, then to Luelo, and thence here. The name seems to ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
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... Mr. Dowling was shortsighted, and in any case it would never have occurred to him to associate nervousness, or any form of emotion, with his responsible manager. The beautiful lady leaned back in her chair. Her lips were parted in a slight but very ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
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... just like any other man, money and a pretty face would cover up a good many failings." Mrs. Graves was the mother of three sensible, modest girls, who would have made capital ministers' wives. Why will ministers be so shortsighted? ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
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... the greatest interest in you, charming young lady, and in your country, but I have an orderly mind and would be really pleased to see those corners straightened out. Use your influence, which I am sure must be great, with that shortsighted body of gentlemen, ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
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... and of pardon. You will believe what I have imperfectly written, for you ever trusted my faith, if you have blamed my faults. I am now comparatively happy—a word from you will, make me blest. And Fate has, perhaps, been more merciful to both, than in our shortsighted and querulous human vision, we might, perhaps, believe; for now that the frame is brought low—and in the solitude of my chamber I can duly and humbly commune with mine own heart, I see the aspect of those faults which I once mistook for virtues—and ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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... she used to say, wagging her head like a profound and thoughtful bird; "this is all very foolish and shortsighted on my part. Five years from now that gutter-godling of yours will be doing work that will make people forget poor little me ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
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... generous design of paying the whole tribute out of my own pocket, and of disestablishing in Neopalia what seems to be the only institution in no danger of such treatment here—the tax-gatherer. If they understood that intention of mine, they would hardly be so shortsighted as to set me adrift in my shirt like a second Baron d'Ezonville, or so unjust as to kill poor old Stefanopoulos as they had killed his ancestor. Besides, as I comforted myself by repeating, they were a good-hearted race; unsophisticated, of course, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
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... look pretty sordid. Yet there is a soul in this giant. Consider its power to call forth the keenness in men and to give endless zest to their toil and sharp trials to their courage. It is grimy, shortsighted, this master—but it has ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
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... taking her eyes off him. "I wonder, I wonder" she ceased, her chin upon her hand, still looking at him. A bell chimed behind them, and Richard raised his head. Then he opened his eyes which wore for a second the queer look of a shortsighted person's whose spectacles are lost. It took him a moment to recover from the impropriety of having snored, and possibly grunted, before a young lady. To wake and find oneself left alone with one was ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
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... we exact a degree of morality from our fellowmen precisely in proportion to its apparent importance to ourselves. It is a purely practical and even a rather shortsighted matter with us. Our friend's private conduct, so far as it does not concern us, is an affair of small moment. He can be as much of a roue as he chooses, so long as he respects our wives and daughters. He can put through a gigantic commercial robbery and we will acclaim his nerve and audacity, ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
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... what I am talking about?" he repeated, with his eyes fixed attentively, not on my mother-in-law, but on me. "You shortsighted old woman! where are your spectacles? Look at her! Do you see no resemblance—the figure, not the face!—do you see no resemblance ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
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... there the door opened noiselessly, and the doctor came out, peering with shortsighted eyes over his lowered glasses. When he ran against Nicholas he coughed uncertainly and drew back. "Well, well, if it isn't the governor!" he said. "We have been looking for Tom—but our friend the judge is better—much better. I tell him he'll live ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
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... truthful and does not dissemble, is perhaps an impossibility. In a court of justice women are more often found guilty of perjury than men.... Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and shortsighted.... Women are and remain, taken altogether, the most thorough and incurable Philistines; and because of the extremely absurd arrangement which allows them to share the position and title of their husbands they are ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
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... admiration. In Aehrenthal's and Berchtold's time Hungarian policy settled the Serbian disputes; it made an alliance with Roumania an impossibility; it accomplished the food blockade in Austria during the war; prevented all internal reforms; and, finally, at the last moment, through Karolyi's petty shortsighted selfishness, the front was beaten. This severe judgment on Hungary's influence on the war remains true, in spite of the undoubtedly splendid deeds of the Magyar troops. The Hungarian is of a strong, courageous, ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
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... invented by an American, and bought of him. Our countryman, Bigelow, went to England to study carpet-weaving in the English looms, supposing that all arts were generously open for the instruction of learners. He was denied the opportunity of studying the machinery and watching the processes by a shortsighted jealousy. He immediately sat down with a yard of carpeting, and, patiently unraveling it thread by thread, combined and calculated till he invented the machinery on which the best carpets of the Old and the New World are woven. No pains which such ingenuity and energy can render ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
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... was not an eternal revolution through identical situations! Only the shortsighted, seeing no farther beyond, as they contemplated this movement, could imagine that it was the only one. The earth itself was the image of life. It ever rotated through determined spaces of time; days and seasons were repeated, as, in the history of mankind, greatness ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
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... sold to a private person. A great deal of restoration, justifiable and otherwise, has taken place, the decay of the local sandstone having made large repairs necessary. In 1861 much renewal of the external stone work was carried out. Unfortunately shortsighted ideas of economy led to the use of the same poor stone and much has recently had to be done over again, this time with the harder Runcorn stone used also at St. Michael's. The interior was restored in 1875, galleries erected ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
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... was in a manner a soldier by inheritance. My short sight, indeed, presented some little obstacle, but did not by any means discourage me, as I reckoned to supply that defect by coolness and intrepidity. I had read, too, that Marshal Schomberg was remarkably shortsighted, and why might not Marshal Rousseau be the same? My imagination was so warm by these follies, that it presented nothing but troops, ramparts, gabions, batteries, and myself in the midst of fire and smoke, an eyeglass in hand, commanding with the utmost tranquility. Notwithstanding, when the country ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
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... It was doubtless shortsighted and ungrateful in these nobles to attempt to deprive Caesar of his laurels and his promised consulship. He had earned them by grand services, both as a general and a statesman. But their jealousy and hatred were not unnatural. They feared, not unreasonably, that the successful general—rich, proud, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
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... indicates the situation of the empire at that period; it was this—"To enrich the soldiery at any price, and to regard the rest of their subjects as so many ciphers." But, as a critical historian remarks, this was a shortsighted and self-destroying policy; since in no way is the subsistence of the soldier made more insecure, than by diminishing the general security of rights and property to those who are not soldiers, from whom, after ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
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... European races, and shoals of European settlers were thrust forth upon its shores. These sometimes displaced and sometimes merely overcame and lived among the natives. They also, to their own lasting harm, committed a crime whose shortsighted folly was worse than its guilt, for they brought hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form immense populations in certain portions of the land. Throughout the continent we therefore find the white, red, and black races in every stage of purity and intermixture. One result of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
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... up her weary eyes with a dangerous phosphorescence, under their brown fringes. Equally acceptable was Miss Chubb, her friend and traveling companion; a tall, well-bred girl, with faint salmon-pink hair and complexion, that darkened to a fiery brown in her shortsighted eyes. ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
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... results of our unique system of free enterprise was the rewarding of men in exact proportion to their merits and abilities. The war, bringing disruption and bankruptcy to so many shiftless and shortsighted people, made of Consolidated Pemmican one of the country's great concerns. The organization welcoming General Thario was far different from the one which had hired his son. I now had fourteen factories, stretching ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
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... of the victors, while a Helot feeling, compounded of awe and hatred, is but too often discernible in the children of the vanquished. Neither of the hostile castes can justly be absolved from blame; but the chief blame is due to that shortsighted and headstrong prince who, placed in a situation in which he might have reconciled them, employed all his power to inflame their animosity, and at length forced them to close in a grapple ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
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... their vices and their abominable tyranny) from taking the shortest cut towards securing for herself the easiest possible existence. She had even the right to go out of existence without considering anyone's feelings or convenience since some women's existences were made impossible by the shortsighted ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
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... the truest philosophy of life ever spoken. but let us be quite sure when we speak of Christianity that we mean Christ's Christianity. Other versions are either caricatures, or exaggerations, or misunderstandings, or shortsighted and surface readings. For the most part their attainment is hopeless and the results wretched. But I care not who the person is, or through what vale of tears he has passed, or is about to pass, there is a new life for him along ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
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... without taking off their greatcoats, drank a couple of glasses of vodka each. Before drinking the second glass, Vassilyev noticed a bit of cork in his vodka, raised the glass to his eyes, and gazed into it for a long time, screwing up his shortsighted eyes. The medical student did not understand his ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
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... reflection. A new peace maddens England to the same paroxysm as a new war maddens France. She hath sent over hither her minister ... or rather her prime minister himself is come to transact all the business ... the most ignorant and most shortsighted man to be found in any station of any public office throughout the whole of Europe. He must be treated as her arbiter: we must talk to him of restoring her, of regenerating her, of preserving her, of guiding her, which (we must protest with our hands within ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
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... said none too amiably with an arch glance from her shortsighted eyes. I know who is Tommy's sweetheart. Gerty ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
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... Ber had been kept very busy since the spinning began. Madame thought schooling shortsighted business except for boys who would be traders by and by, and must learn how to reckon correctly and ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
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... hiding-place, nor by Margaret's ready wit; but by a good impulse in one of his captors, by the bit of humanity left in a somewhat reckless fellow's heart, aided by his desire of gain. So mixed and seemingly incongruous are human motives, so shortsighted our ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
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... a shortsighted and material view of political questions is also a disturbing sign of the times. This is due to the fact that when, three centuries ago, spiritual power was abolished, all social questions were given over to ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
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... progress of so tremendous a war, in which, notwithstanding its origin and cause, the insurrectionary States have strangely been enabled to command foreign capital, together with the sympathy and even the indirect assistance of foreign powers, it would have been shortsighted in the extreme to have anticipated that slavery would escape attack. Though made the pretext for violence, and prominently put forward as the justification of rebellion, it was evidently the weakest point in the rebel cause, and was, therefore, alike from the choice of the rebels as from the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
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... transgresses the rights of nations to govern themselves; furthermore because thereby, the unity and strength of Germany would be weakened and her foreign relations seriously and permanently injured, we oppose the plans in that direction cherished by shortsighted conquest-politicians.[87] ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
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... Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, had been driven out of his capital to make way for Joseph Bonaparte, who entered Naples on February 15, and the exiled monarch took refuge in the island of Sicily. In accordance with the shortsighted policy of small expeditions, a British force under Sir John Stuart was landed in Calabria to raise the peasantry, and on July 4, defeated the French at the point of the bayonet in the battle of Maida. This action shook the confidence of Europe in the superiority ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
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... friend, mount up to the highest summit of wisdom, Be not deterred by the fear, prudence thy course may deride That shortsighted one sees but the bank that from thee is flying, Not the one which ere long thou ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
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... Empires, because their sympathies and interests are universal, because they can lose themselves in timeless abstractions, because their kingdom is not of this world, they alone in times of division and calamity and shortsighted passion can keep the flame alive. Thus do they unintentionally serve the State. So far as they are concerned their beneficence is quite adventitious, their service supererogatory. For they do not live ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
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... was recaptured from the king, a garrison was thrown into Apollonia, and the Macedonian camp was stormed. Thereupon Philip passed from partial action to total inaction, and notwithstanding all the complaints of Hannibal, who vainly tried to breathe into such a halting and shortsighted policy his own fire and clearness of decision, he allowed some years to ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
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... you may well ask such questions. War is always wrong; going to war is necessarily a phase of a shortsighted policy; every wrong act is, of course, an ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
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... it teaches that every single part of every single book is inspired. It might seem that rulings, of which the actual product in the way of doctrinal propositions was so small, were hardly subjects for any keen interest. But it would be shortsighted to regard the matter in this way. In the first place, whatever may have happened as yet, it is manifestly a serious thing for Church of England doctrine to have been thrown, on a scale which is quite new, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
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... true, comes much of the bad. Berlin is unquestionably the present goal for needy and unscrupulous adventurers of the worst sort. Not a few pessimists, native and foreign, have made the fact a text for dismal prognostications of the city's future degeneracy. Yet this is taking a shortsighted and unjust view of things. The great mass of the population is still sound to the core. The unsettled state of monetary and social relations cannot but be transitory, and compulsory education and military ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
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... littered with the debris of explosions until it resembled an ice-floe under pressure. She made her way but slowly, and it looked continually as though she must break her legs. But the old lady persevered, bent and withered though she was, with her shortsighted eyes fixed on ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
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... merging their local character in extensive combinations. Owners of short lines were inclined by tradition to resist even the imperative necessities of war and their stubborn conservatism was frequently encouraged by the shortsighted parochialism of the towns. The same pitiful narrowness that led the peasant farmer to threaten rebellion against the tax in kind led his counterpart in the towns to oppose the War Department in its efforts to establish through railroad lines because they threatened to impair ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
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... consider their duty, and not go out hunting any game species that has been slaughtered by a hard winter, until it has had at least five years in which to recover. Any other course is cruel, selfish, and shortsighted; and a word to the humane should ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
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... who are incapable of appreciating his noble qualities seem inclined to allow it to return to the same condition in which he found it. I heard Captain Frankland speak very strongly on the subject, and he said it would be a disgrace to England, and the most shortsighted policy, if she withdraws her support from the province, and refuses to recompense Sir James for the fortune which he has ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
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... declaration of independence, the maritime states, at least, will find it their interest (which always secures the question of inclination) to protect a people who can be so advantageous to them. So that those shortsighted politicians, who conclude that this step will involve us in slaughter and devastation, may plainly perceive that no measure in our power will so naturally and effectually work our deliverance. The motion of a finger of the Grand ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
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... if you once begin this sort of thing, there's no end to it. It's so insidious. The more they have, the more they want; and all the time they're losing fighting power. I've thought pretty deeply about this. It's shortsighted; it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
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... Mr. Glennie, being shortsighted, did not see who 'twas; but as his visitor drew near, ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
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... our treasure in earthen vessels," said Mr Morgan, somewhat sternly, from where he stood, under shelter of the heavy gallery. Mr Wentworth was shortsighted, like most people nowadays. He put up his glass hastily, and then hurried forward, perhaps just a little abashed. When he had made his salutations, however, he returned ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
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... her shortsighted eyes to his face, and looked coolly and disconcertingly at him through her glasses, as if she had just become aware of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
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... to the English army, and by the doubtful aid of Conrade of Montserrat and the military orders of the Temple and of Saint John, who, though they were sworn to wage battle against the Saracens, were at least equally jealous of any European monarch achieving the conquest of Palestine, where, with shortsighted and selfish policy, they proposed to establish independent dominions ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
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... Have some bread and butter. You won't? then I will. I want it, after your father's lavish hospitality. (HEDVIG goes to fetch bread and butter.) My daughter—a poor shortsighted ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various
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... datum; and he insisted that 'the flux of individuals at any moment in existence in a country is there for the value of the State, far more than the State for them, though both positions are true proportionately.' In other words, Coleridge pressed the evolutionary view against the sharp set, shortsighted Utilitarian propositions; and he would have agreed that antiquated prejudices are absurd only to those who have not looked back to their origin, when they can be found to proceed in logical order from natural causes. He had not been always a ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
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... the Danes and pursued them; but that was not easy, for the ships lay so thick together that they scarcely could move. Earl Fin Arnason would not flee; and being also shortsighted, was taken ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
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... from me, Mrs. Hollister had connected! Uh-huh! Not with any last fall outfit, nor yesterday's. About day after to-morrow's, I should call it. And if there wa'n't zipp and scream to it, then I'm shortsighted in the eyes. My guess is that it's a mixture of the last word in Byzantine effects, with a Cleopatra girdle and a Martha Washington polonaise. Anyway, if there ain't much above the waist line but gauze and strips of fur, there's plenty of flare below, as far as the ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
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... "I'm very shortsighted," I rejoined, "and I thought you did. It is our foolish little vanities which prevent us acting as we should. But let me know if I can do anything for you. If you want me, I'll ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
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... been cursed with the sight of his face! But I am no weak, silly child like Gertrude Powell; I know what my duty is, and I am strong enough to conquer, and if necessary to crush my foolish heart. Oh! I know you, Mr. Murray, and I can defy you. To-day, shortsighted as I have been, I look down on you. You are beneath me, and the time will come when I shall look back to this hour and wonder if I were temporarily bewitched or insane. Wake up! wake up! come to your senses, Edna Earl! Put an end to this sinful folly; ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
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