"Stolidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... presently engaged in a frightful duel. The white legs of the gunners scampered this way and that way, and the officers redoubled their shouts. The guns, with their demeanours of stolidity and courage, were typical of something infinitely self-possessed in this clamour of death that ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... Arrow stood equally aloof, intrenched in her stoicism, but I think the root motives of the two were different, though the outside index was the same. Indeed, we all had different wellsprings for our composure. Pierre's stolidity was largely training. Starling's quiet might mean instinctive imitation, but I feared it was something more sinister. While mine—— But I had no composure. I swaggered and shrugged and played ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... Chinese Charley at the ranch. He has been with Mrs. Kitty twenty-five years; he wears American clothes; he speaks English with hardly a trace of either accent or idiom; he has long since dropped the deceiving Oriental stolidity and weeps out his violent Chinese rages unashamed. Yet even now Mrs. Kitty's summing up is that Charley is a ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... within my fences and say nothing—though indeed I never could do that, being far too much interested in every one who came my way—and the invader was soon repelled. There is nothing so resistant as the dull security of possession the stolidity ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... incredible stiffness and the incurable honesty of the race that belonged over yonder on those white chalk cliffs dimly visible along the horizon. Gone were the phlegm and stolidity of those people who manifest emotion only on the occasions when they stand up ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Alexander Gordon did so with an air of indifference, as if hunting Whigs were much the same to him as cleaving firewood. He did his duty with a stupid unconcern which successfully imposed on the soldiers; and as soon as they allowed him to go, he fell to his wood-chopping with the same stolidity and rustic boorishness that had marked ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the History of Mankind once only. Stranger theory of society, completely believed in by a clear, sharp and altogether human head, incapable of falsity, was seldom heard of in the world. For King: open your mouth, let the first gentleman that falls into it (a mass of Hanover stolidity, stupidity, foreign to you, heedless of you) be King: Supreme Majesty he, with hypothetical decorations, dignities, solemn appliances, high as the stars (the whole, except the money, a mendacity, and sin against ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... lighted, the two men surveyed each other with mutual interest. They were not unlike in physique, for the Colonial, was, as is usual with his kind, lean and wiry. His quick, restless movements suggested nervous energy, but when advisable, he could assume the bovine stolidity which, though foreign to his real nature, the Canadian bushman occasionally adopts for diplomatic purposes. Thurston, however, still retained certain traits of the Insular Briton, including a curtness of speech and ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... violence on Tom's part. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps it was just because he was so quiet that she was afraid. She had always looked on him contemptuously as an amiable, transparent lout, and now he was puzzling her. She got an impression of something formidable behind his stolidity, something that made ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... they have wrought with the kaleidoscopic transformations in Europe and America, China appears the most stationary of nations. She has moved less in centuries than western peoples have in decades. The restless Anglo-Saxon is alternately irritated and awed by this massive solidity, not to say stolidity. There is, after all, something impressive about it, the impressiveness of a mighty glacier which moves, indeed, but so slowly and majestically that the duration of an ordinary nation's life appears insignificant as compared with the almost timeless majesty ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... with straws sticking in them, and glasses partially filled with bits of ice. Bar-keepers in spotless white linen prepared the famous American drinks, innumerable in variety, with a dexterity bordering on art and a stolidity out of ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... differently. It is better to leave him as he is than to teach him whining. It is better that he should go without the cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysing sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight against that hide-bound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and they will learn for themselves to sympathise; but let us see to it, above all, ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would be to see her taking it!' whispered Bertha into Phoebe's ear, unheard by Augusta, who, in her satisfied stolidity, was declaring, 'No, I could not undertake that. I am the worst person in the world for ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in him, but care again had clouded his brow. I think our early ancestors must have been much like Landers in this dance, strong, and merry for the time, seeking the woman in pleasures, fiery in movement for the nonce, and relapsing into stolidity. I can see why Landers, who takes what he will of womankind in these islands, still dominates in the trading, and bends most people his way. The animal way is the way here. The way of the city, of mere subtlety, of avoidance of issues, of intellectual control, is not the way of Polynesia. Bulk ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Macleod had no pride in her triumph. He was glad when the piece ended—when the honest-hearted Englishman so far recovered speech as to declare that his confidence in his wife was restored, and so far forgot his stolidity of face and demeanor as to point out to the villain the way to the door instead of kicking him thither. Macleod breathed more freely when he knew that Gertrude White was now about to go away to the shelter and quiet of her own home. He went back to his rooms, ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... at me with inscrutable stolidity as we shook hands, and at once handed me over to a tall, ungainly man whom he addressed as Ernest, but whose surname I never learned. Ernest in turn introduced me, with a shy and clumsy courtesy, to the two remaining guests. They ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... post-coach for Dover, he arrived on the channel shore just in time to learn that the very coach in which he rode brought the news to the authorities there that all intercourse between the two nations was indefinitely suspended. The characteristic taciturnity and formal stolidity of his fellow-travellers—all Englishmen, mutually unacquainted with each other, and occupying different positions in life—having prevented his ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... stonily set. They are past the commiseration, the curiosity, or the jeers of their fellow-beings. Years of matrimony, of continuous compulsory canine constitutionals, have made them callous. They unwind their beasts from lamp posts, or the ensnared legs of profane pedestrians, with the stolidity of mandarins manipulating the ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... Nordlanders one and all spoke of them, in answer to my questions, with mingled distrust and contempt, and my own limited experiences most assuredly did not tend much toward impressing me with a more favorable opinion. The countenances of most of the Laps present a combination of stolidity, low cunning, and obstinacy, so as to be decidedly repulsive; yet it is undeniably true, that crimes attended with violence rarely occur among them, though I take that as no decided proof of the mildness ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... is this man altered from the formal stolidity of his usual manner!he grows wanton under adversitySed pereunti mille figurae."He then proceeded aloud"Sir Arthur, we must necessarily speak a ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... eyes were mere long glimmers of vision in thick folds of flesh; the mouth, upturned at the corners, lent a fixed, mechanical smile to the whole. It was a countenance on which the passage of time and thoughts had left no mark; its stolidity had been moved by no feeling. His body was heavy and sagging. It possessed, Woolfolk recognized, a considerable unwieldy strength, and was completely covered by a variously spotted ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... display of passion, with the numb stolidity of one whose inner fires have burned out, the selectman got up and threw a cuspidor through the window at his counsellor, and then seated himself ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... giving his daughter to the Prince of the Asturias. He particularly wished to prevent that Prince marrying Mademoiselle de Tascher, the niece of Josephine, a marriage for which M. de Beauharnais, then Ambassador of France at Madrid, was working with all his might. Lucien also, with his Republican stolidity, submitted without too much scruple to the idea of having a Bourbon King as son-in-law. It was also during this journey of Napoleon that he ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... thoroughly comfortable,—as comfortable as a truly pious fat man deserves to be, and all the work he had to do was to preach twice on Sundays, to a quiet, primitive, decently ordered congregation, who listened to his words respectfully though without displaying any emotional rapture. Their stolidity, however, did not affect him,—he preached to please himself,—loving above all things to hear the sound of his own voice, and never so happy as when thundering fierce denunciations against the Church of Rome. His thoughts seemed ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... quickly and looked over his shoulder. Across the uneven ground, straight towards them, came the figure of Mrs. Pember. The tenseness of her expression had further yielded to resolution, which had in turn taken on a stolidity which declared itself unassailable. No one of the three spoke as she seated herself on a bit of timber near them, and, folding her hands, waited with the immobility and the apparent impartiality of Fate itself. At last Mellony spoke, for of the three she ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... in the hands of fate is in some sort conducive to courage. Doubtless many an act of valor which has won the world's applause was precipitated in a degree by desperation and the lack of an alternative. The appearance of stolidity with which the cluster of witnesses—those whose testimony was yet to be given as well as those who had told the little they knew—noted the uncontrolled agitation, the wild eyes, the hysteric sobs, with which Narcissa Hanway ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... but she came in a very good second-best in most of the harum-scarum escapades. She could always be relied upon for support, could keep a secret, and had a peculiarly convenient knack of baffling awkward questions by putting on an attitude of utter stolidity. When her eyes were half-closed under their heavy lids, and her mouth wore what the girls called its "John Bull" expression, not even Miss Beasley herself could drag information out of Aveline. The Sphinx, as she ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... from his corner as if somebody had touched a spring. He seemed to be of the opinion that if you are a cyclone, it is never too soon to begin behaving like one. He danced round the Kid with an india-rubber agility. The Cosy Moments representative exhibited more stolidity. Except for the fact that he was in fighting attitude, with one gloved hand moving slowly in the neighbourhood of his stocky chest, and the other pawing the air on a line with his square jaw, one would have said that he did not realise the position of affairs. He ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... congenial part, in which he easily surpassed his achievement as author. Mr. TOZER as a slum-parson was extremely probable with his quiet sincerity. But our chief consolation came from Miss RACHEL DE SOLLA as the maiden aunt, a reactionary type of the most confirmed stolidity, with a weakness for diamonds and indigestion. Miss MARIE LOeHR had many clever things to say, but it didn't matter what Miss DE SOLLA ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... Madelon was too stolid to weep for her husband. But even her stolidity was not proof against the fiery influence of jealousy, and, waking and sleeping, her visions were of veiled damsels of Orient assailing the too inflammable heart ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... into the open space, he raised his eyes to the great cross at the foot of which we were standing, and straightway bent the knee and crossed himself. Some few of the Indians likewise made the sign upon their breasts, though the greater part contained themselves with the same stolidity that had marked ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... having reeled round with a thousand oaths, to the manifold amusement of the crowd, he suddenly began to smoke like a Prussian. Nothing could be more admirable than the look of complacent and pompous stolidity with which he accompanied each puff of his pipe. The applause was continued; and the one-eyed Bohemian serjeant, delighted at the ridicule which was heaped on his military rival, actually ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... eyes, and the number of plum puddings and the amount of Welsh rarebit he devours annually would send the best of us to his grave in half that time. We have not enough constitutional inertia and stolidity; our climate gives us no rest, but goads us day and night; and the consequent wear and tear of life is no doubt greater in this country than in any other on the globe. We are playing the game more rapidly, and I fear less thoroughly and ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... on the quarter-deck. The two children amused themselves very well talking to Alphonse, the steersman, and Adolphe, the engineer, thick-set, thick-witted men, who combined the picturesqueness of organ-grinders with the stolidity of agriculturalists; Nature had plainly intended them for the plough, and Circumstance had ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... Miss Hepsy with a business-like stolidity inexplicable to Carrie Goldthwaite's warm heart, "an' she's left two children, which Josh an' me'll hev to take, I reckon, seein' their parents is both dead now. We'd a letter to-day from the minister there—Mr. Penn he calls hisself, ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... The unreasonable inferences of the Commissioners — their false conclusions - their too positive assertions, were received with repeated marks of disapprobation. Some of the academicians started from their seats, and apostrophising the Commissioners, accused them of partiality or stolidity. The Commissioners replied; until, at last, the uproar became so violent that an adjournment of the sitting was moved and carried. On the following day the report was concluded. A stormy discussion immediately ensued, which certainly reflected no credit upon the opponents ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... whether to strike or not, father," said Sadie, in a flippant manner. She raised a hand and adjusted a stray lock of hair as she spoke, then she straightened her ribbon stock. Her father said nothing, but his face assumed a stolidity of expression. ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... spoke to the youth and the girl in her native tongue. They listened quietly; Oteo with an almost expressionless stolidity of face, but with his soft, dog-like eyes fixed upon his mistress; Eena with heaving breast and trembling limbs. When Lylda paused they both fell upon their knees before her. She put her hands upon their heads and smiling wistfully, said ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... the cupidity of foreign adventurers which will command capital to any amount, and the best skill of English engineers and builders will be enlisted to make the enterprise successful—a skill not embarrassed by bureaucratic inertia and stolidity. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... them King Henry IV! I want to have the same thing at Coalworth for the winter—not in summer. I could not ask them to spend a minute, they can help, out of the free air and light; but in winter I cannot see those fine young men and boys dozing themselves into stolidity.' ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shy a bird would make some attempt at concealment. It was a well-constructed domicile, composed of grass, twigs, and moss, but without mortar. The shy owner was nowhere to be seen, nor did she make any outcry, even though I stood for some minutes close to her nest. What stolidity the mountain birds display! You could actually rob the nests of some of them without wringing a chirp from them. On two later visits to the place I found Madame Thrush on her nest, where she sat until I came quite close, when she silently flitted away and ensconced herself among ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... that the worst shocks of life are often received without outcries, without gestures, without a flow of tears and the convulsions of sobbing. The insatiable governess missed these signs exceedingly. This pitiful stolidity was only a fresh provocation. Yet the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... enough refrigerator space," said Charley. One of the deck-hands whirled round instantly; but stolidity sat like adamant upon the faces of the others as Charley turned in their direction, and we continued our tour of the Hermana. Thus the little banker let me see his little soul, deep down; and there ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... reminding her that her dining-room windows commanded as comprehensive a view of the next house as did the front steps, and after a time her housewifely duty so far prevailed over her indignation at the man's unwholesome stolidity that she followed him down the hall to preside over the meal, not, however, to partake largely ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... even the jasper-tinted tropical soil is beautiful, climbs through the glorious woods to the chief Sanatorium of the Malay Peninsula. A free fight among the coolies before starting demands a lengthy exercise of that stolidity with which the Western pilgrim must invest himself, as the invulnerable armour needed by the conflict of daily life. As a mere matter of personal convenience, this quality bears scant resemblance to the weapons ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... of the butcher-bird's stolidity we may set the inquisitive, garrulous temperament of the white-eyed vireo and the yellow-breasted chat. The vireo is hardly larger than the goldfinch, but let him be in one of his conversational moods, and he will fill a smilax thicket with noise enough for two or three ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... has announced his intention of having a "big talk," he immediately lights his pipe and relapses into silence until the big talk shall break out accidentally and naturally. But Julia, having neither the pipe nor the Indian's stolidity, found herself under the necessity of beginning abruptly. Every minute of delay made her position worse. For every minute increased her doubt of ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... our army, but of the intentions of the government. They say Lynchburg and East Tennessee now occupy the mind of Gen. Lee; and they know every disposition of our forces from day to day sooner than our own people! What imbecile stolidity! Will we thus blunder ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast. If not for Love's sake, then for fear; if not for justice or for human pity, then for sheer desire of self-preservation; I appeal to the wise and to the wealthy to set their hands to the cure of social evil, ere stolidity gives place to passion and dull patience ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... or awe, that they paid no heed to Him, and suspended their work to make sure of their perquisites,—the poor robes which they stripped from His body. Thus gently Matthew hints at the ignominy of exposure attendant on crucifixion, and gives the measure of the hard stolidity of the guards. Gain had been their first thought, comfort was their second. They were a little tired with their march and their work, and they had to stop there on guard for an indefinite time, with nothing to do but two more prisoners to crucify: so they take a rest, and idly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... hypocrisy, stolidity, inhumanity, or vice finds its way into the chambers of disease through the would-be 365:27 healer, it would, if it were possible, convert into a den of thieves the temple of the Holy Ghost, - the patient's spiritual power to resuscitate him- 365:30 self. The unchristian practitioner ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... ever had before. Broad-browed and strong-chinned, with a fineness in the honest gray eyes that were like Kerry's, Burne was a man who gave an immediate impression of bigness and security—stubborn, that was evident, but his stubbornness wore no stolidity, and when he had talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had in it no quality ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... running on ahead of mother, he looked quite young. There was so much life and movement in his whole figure that I could only detect the treachery of age when I came close up behind and saw beneath his cap a fringe of close-cropped silver hair. Instead of the staid dignity and stolidity of a general, I saw an almost schoolboyish nimbleness; instead of a collar sticking up to his ears, an ordinary light blue necktie. Mother and my uncle were walking in the avenue talking together. I went softly up to them from ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... cracked and broke away the formidable husks which enveloped divine kernels in the hearts of some of the wretches, and she frequently wept at the stories of victories gained over monsters whose defences of silence and stolidity had suddenly fallen into ruin above the slow but persistent sapping of constant kindness. Acute tinglings and chilling thrills would pervade her entire body when she read that on Christmas every wretch seemed to become for that day, at least, a gracious ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... penniless with two boys. Lord Chesterfield was above all things a practical philosopher, as hard and as exquisitely rounded and polished as a granite column. He accepted the vanishing of his lifelong dream with the admirable stolidity of a fatalist, and in those last days of his radically artificial life he disclosed a welcome tenderness, a touch of the divine, none the less so for being common duty, shown in the few brief letters to his ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the scones in the centre of the table, and gathered together the soiled plates with a wooden stolidity. To all appearances she might not have heard a word that had been said. Margot seized the hot-water-jug, and shivered ostentatiously, trusting to pity to prevail where guile had failed; and sure enough the pale blue eye turned on her ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, recognises ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... permitted to pervert the proper influences and benevolent operations of this mystic disturber to her own mischievous propensities; and thenceforth a malignant spirit troubled the house, heretofore guarded by a saint of true Catholic dignity and stolidity. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... appeared to be greatly affected by the thrilling account; but her phlegmatic husband listened to the recital with a stolidity which betrayed either a strange indifference or a wonderful control over his ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... for their art, though at the same time they were not enthusiastic. A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... as a native observed to me, "olluz spread 'mselves inter bulges." Mollychunkamug and her fellows are the bulges of the Androscoggin; Moosehead, of the Kennebec. Sluggish streams do not need such pauses. Peace is thrown away upon stolidity. The torrents of Maine are hasty young heroes, galloping so hard when they gallop, and charging with such rash enthusiasm when they charge, hurrying with such Achillean ardor toward their eternity of ocean, that they would never know the influence, in their heart of hearts, of blue cloudlessness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... had remained silent in his chair, with a stolidity that aroused no sympathy for him. Not once was he seen to lift his eyes to the judge; and but once, when Tess was being maligned by Dominie Graves, did the bible-back rise and fall as if the heart beneath were beating wildly. Skinner had not been allowed to testify in his own defense, ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... Jews, the more they multiplied and grew. The behalot of 1754, 1764, and 1793 were repeated in 1833 and 1843; the missionary propaganda only strengthened the devotion of the faithful; and the denial of the means of support only increased the stolidity of the sufferers. And if, like some stepchildren, they were first beaten till they cried, and then beaten because they cried, like some stepchildren they rapidly forgot their lot in the happiness of home and the studies of the bet ha-midrash, ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... near, the canine regiment not actually called to fight rested immobile, its members suffering themselves to be kicked by foot passengers, trodden on by cattle, and rolled over by wheels with an astonishing stolidity. ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... blow to her vanity to find that no deputation from Holly House was in waiting to receive Patricia O'Shaughnessy with the honours she deserved. No one took any notice of her at all. When the cabman, when directed to drive to Holly House, preserved an unmoved stolidity of feature, and had no remark whatever to offer on the subject. How different from dear, friendly, outspoken Bally William, where each man was keenly interested in the affairs of his neighbour, and the poorest ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in the days when Prof. Horky and his colleagues refused to look through the telescope of Galileo. Is not this utter neglect of Psychometry for forty-five years (because it has not been forced upon their attention) as great an evidence of perpetuated stolidity as was the conduct of the Professors of Padua 280 years ago in shunning the inspection of Galileo's telescope, when the demonstration has been so often repeated that Psychometry is a far greater addition than the telescope ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... attempt to go far beyond their predecessors in rendering the character of the gods according to the form consecrated by tradition. Even in the expression of the face the same process is to be traced. In early works we find sometimes no expression at all, or an apparent stolidity which is really the absence of expression; in the archaic smile we see an attempt to enliven the face, and possibly also, as we have noticed, to express and even to induce the benignity of the deity. But this attempt, made with inadequate artistic resources, ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... intention of producing a ludicrous effect; in both cases the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the "Nencia da Barberino" from the genius of Lorenzo, in the "Morgante Maggiore" from the stolidity of Pulci. The "Morgante," of which parts were probably written as a mere sample to amuse a supper party, became interesting to Pulci, in the mere matter of inventing and stringing together new incidents; and despite its ludicrous passages, it must have been more seriously ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... were not wool-gathering, and when Slatin said to him, "If I escape, I will try to arrange yours," Macnamara replied, with a respectful but placid stolidity: "Right, sir. Where does the old ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... him, I faced him, I smiled. He was the same as he had been. A little stouter, perhaps, his pale hair and square-cut beard looking as though it had been carved from some pale honey-coloured wood, the thick stolidity of his long body and short legs, the squareness of his head, the coldness of his eyes and the violent red of his lips, all were just as they had been—the same man, save that now he was in civilian clothes, in a black suit with a black bow tie. There was a smile on his lips, that same ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... the droll humour and stolidity of Khalid, are shaken, aroused, by the ghoulish greed, the fell inhumanity of these sharpers. And Shakib from his cage of fancy lets loose upon them his hyenas of satire. In a squib describing the bats and the voyage he says: "The voyage to America is the Via Dolorosa of the emigrant; ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... like influences, happened that, whereas one generation of the devoutly intentioned sat stolidly under the reproach of an enormous and thickly populated area without a church, later generations with the same stolidity sat under the reproach of an enormous church, an enormous rectory and an infinitesimal stipend, in an area which a man might walk all day without ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... their value, and so on. He began to wish he could bid; but he had no money, just a little pocket change. The auctioneer noticed him standing almost directly under his nose, and was impressed with the stolidity—solidity—of the boy's expression. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... effects throughout the world, and the most graceful, as well as the most grotesque, buildings, from the many-shafted fantasy of the Alhambra (a building as beautiful in disposition as it is base in ornamentation) to the four-legged stolidity of the Swiss Chalet:[60] nor these only, but great part of the effect of our cathedrals, in which, necessarily, the close triforium and clerestory walls are superimposed on the nave piers; perhaps with most majesty where with greatest simplicity, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... is this. We are inside, and the Boche is outside! Fenced by a mighty crescent of prosaic trenches, themselves manned by paladins of an almost incredible stolidity, Ypres still points her broken fingers to the sky—shattered, silent, but inviolate still; and all owing to the obstinacy of a dull and unready nation which merely keeps faith and stands by its friends. Such an attitude of mind is incomprehensible ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... a bit clashy," said the man, with stolidity, stopping to spit into his hands a moment, before resuming ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... outbreak into speech. It was the kind of day that bred reflection; one could put anything one liked into the picture with a certainty of its fitting the frame. We were putting a certain amount of regret into it; for though Villerville has seen us depart with civilized indifference or the stolidity of the barbarian—for they are one, we found our own attainments in the science of unfeelingness deficient: to look down upon the village from the next hill top was like facing ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... he demanded in Ojibway. "Where you get your blankets? Where you get your grub? How you make the Long Trail? What you do when we go far and fast? What we do with you now?" Then meeting nothing but the stolidity with which the Indian always conceals pain, he flung her aside. ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... of great strength but little alertness; the stray glimpses I had had of them, revealing a breadth of back that was truly formidable, if it had not been joined to a heaviness of motion that proclaimed a certain stolidity of mind that was ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... packed. The younger children, the boys with great frilled collars, the girls with ill-fitting shoes cramping their feet, leaned from the sides of buggy and carry-all, eating bananas and "macaroons," staring about with ox-like stolidity. Tied to the axles, the dogs followed the horses' hoofs with lolling tongues coated ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... whatever? For the soldiers of the North, in this disastrous series of blunders, fought with constancy and courage. Beaten day after day by unfailing troops in strong works, they ever came again straight at those impregnable positions, against which obstinate stolidity, or blind rage for blood, drove them to the slaughter. Hancock's men especially seemed to catch inspiration from their chivalric leader. Broken and beaten at the Wilderness—decimated at Spottsylvania, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... impersonations. The little judge—described in the book as "all face and waistcoat"—was presented to view upon the platform as evidently with no neck at all (to speak of), and as blinking with owl-like stolidity whenever he talked, which he always did under his voice, and with apparently a severe cold in the head. On the night more particularly referred to, Sam Weller, being at the moment in the witness-box, had just replied to the counsel's suggestion, that what ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... late as these days, they remain entangled with our heart-strings, and might often have influenced our national cause like the tiller-ropes of a ship, if the rough gripe of England had been capable of managing so sensitive a kind of machinery. It has required nothing less than the boorishness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a great ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... For our purpose it is enough that the contrast between Miss Widdicombe's vivacity and the deadly stolidity of the County families, between her youth and the maturity of her vanquished competitors, entirely won the heart of Mr. St John Deloraine. He saw—he loved her—he was laughed at—he proposed—he was accepted—and, oh, shame! the County had to accept, more or less, ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... Steinmetz, with the Teutonic stolidity of manner which sometimes came over him. "But the ladies—what ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Hilda Merritt whom she had known, and in her place was a queen with a crown! She smiled at her reflection and nodded. For once she was swayed from her stillness and stolidity. She loaded her long hands with rings, and held them to her cheeks; then, struck by the contrast of her white linen sleeve, she rummaged in one of the big closets, and threw on the bed a drift ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... even longer pause. Pitiable, ridiculous infants were pondering, somewhat vaguely but very solemnly, over certain mysteries of existence, which most of us have learned to accept with stolidity. We were young, and to us the miraculous insecurity and inconsequence of human life was still a little impressive, and we had not yet come to regard the universe as a more or less comfortable place, well-meaningly constructed anyhow—by ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... Studien. He really succeeds in finding the crux of the situation in recognizing that these features are inherent in Plautus' style and are frequently employed solely for comic effect, though he is often overcome by a natural Teutonic stolidity. He aptly points out that Plautus in his selection of originals has in the main chosen plots with more vigorous action than Terence. We shall have occasion to quote him at intervals, but desire to ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... native province in China might have been an aggressively, sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to except in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen per day. And he gave no more than he got. It is to be presumed that if he suffered ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... rather than of any hoary and romantic yesterday, holds the interest of the modern man. Player Number One, even though he sits patiently in the background in seeming stolidity, is big-boned, brawny, hairy, thirsty Russia. Russia wants water, both here and in the far East. His whole being cries from parched depths for the taste of the salt waters of the Mediterranean and the China Sea. At present his ships may not pass through the Dardanelles: ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... drink the poor Indians are not very violent, and get intoxicated with surprising stolidity and quietness. Amongst the half-breeds, especially where the Negro element exists, there are often quarrellings and rows, when they slash away at each other with their long knives or "machetes," and get ugly cuts, which, however, heal ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Esther was settling into the stolidity of the obstinate when they are crowded too far; yet she still remembered she must ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... through the customary daily round. When it became necessary to tell the women that the preparations for the wedding must be stopped and that the invitations to the two big dinners that were to be given in honor of Colonel Ashley had been withdrawn she gathered from small signs—the feigned stolidity of some of them and the overacted astonishment of others—that they had probably been even better informed than Drusilla Fane. After that the food they brought her choked her and the maid's touch on her person was like fire, while she still found herself ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... for the brush of a Hogarth to depict the gallery of faces with which I came in contact as I went along. They were all different, yet all alike; different in their degrees of beefiness, stolidity, and self-sufficiency, but plainly of the same parentage—British to the backbone; British of the wrong kind, with a sprinkling of Welshmen, Irishmen, and Jews. Not a Scotsman discoverable in that whole mob of complacent office-jacks. My countrymen ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... N. want of -intelligence &c. 498, want of - intellect &c. 450; shadowness[obs3], silliness, foolishness &c. adj.; imbecility, incapacity, vacancy of mind, poverty of intellect, weakness of intellect, clouded perception, poor head, apartments to let; stupidity, stolidity; hebetude[obs3], dull understanding, meanest capacity, shortsightedness; incompetence &c (unskillfulness) 699. one's weak side, not one's strong point; bias &c 481; infatuation &c. (insanity) 503. simplicity, puerility, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... With the stolidity of their race the Britishers did not show any surprise, as, some time afterward, they strolled down toward Tom's big craft, after supper, and looked it over. Soon they went back to their own camp, and a little later, Koku, who walked ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... of one's family, one's country, and one's nation," how constant is her defence of the people, the peasant, against her Republican friends. Her Republican friends were furious with the peasant; accused him of stolidity, cowardice, want of patriotism; accused him of having given them the Empire, with all its vileness; wanted to take away from him the suffrage. Again and again does George Sand take up his defence, and warn her friends of the folly and danger of their false estimate ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... not, and, of course, she didn't want to; she liked coming to Mr. Stone so much. And she got on very well, and she liked London, and she liked the shops. She mentioned neither Hughs nor Mrs. Hughs. In all this rigmarole, told with such obvious purpose, stolidity was strangely mingled with almost cunning quickness to see the effect made; but the dog-like devotion was never quite out of her eyes when they were fixed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... other people cannot help but be governed. Such absolute callousness to the feelings which govern the majority of mankind as we read of every now and then in the trial of some desperate criminal, is not infrequently associated with abnormally low intelligence, the sodden stolidity of the traditional criminal type. Where it appears, as it sometimes does, in criminals of high intelligence, it is regarded by psychiatrists as a specific abnormality, comparable to color-blindness or a ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... outraged into a chronic state of secret ever-ready hatred. Here are innocent, small countries, defenceless through their position and size. Here is France rich, careless, super-modern and cynic. Here is England comfortable to stolidity, prosperous and secure to dullness in her own half belief in a world civilization, which no longer argues in terms of blood and steel. And here—in a well-entrenched position in the midst of it all—within but a few ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett |
