"Stupidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... basket and come with me, John," said Mr. Williams, to the oldest boy, who was gazing on with indifference or stupidity. ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... honourable employment on the land. We had a maid named Vashti, and she was quite shy about mentioning it at her first interview with my wife. In all country neighbourhoods there is a special place with the unenviable reputation of stupidity; such was "Yabberton" (Ebrington, on the Cotswolds), and Vashti was somewhat reluctant to admit that it was her "natif," as a birthplace is called in the district. Among the traditions of Yabberton it is related that the farmers, being anxious to prolong the summer, erected hurdles to wall ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... so much more primitive, so much earlier sanctioned, abiding so originally among the instincts! Oh yes! if we are lightly esteemed it is because we are bad exponents. The ideal has dignity enough. They charge us, in their unimaginable stupidity, with failing to appreciate our lines, especially when they are Shakespeare's—with being unliterary. You might—good Heavens!—as well accuse a painter of not being a musician! Our business lies behind the words—they are our mere medium! Rosalind ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... and the girl were entirely concealed by the darkness, the seven moved cautiously along the shadow of the palisade toward the north campong. There was murder in the cowardly hearts of several of them, and stupidity and lust in the hearts of all. There was no single one who would not betray his best friend for a handful of silver, nor any but was inwardly hoping and scheming to the end that he might alone possess both the ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rushed in where he had no business, and where he never was before, and never will be again, the following poem would not have been written. It is not impossible that it may be as good as his own, seeing that it cannot, by any species of stupidity, natural or acquired, be worse. The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegade intolerance, and impious cant, of the poem by the author of "Wat Tyler," are something so stupendous as to form the sublime of himself—containing the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... thought, that an architect, if anyone, might have known the difference between the right side of a house and the wrong; but presumed that youth and inexperience could always be pleaded as excuse for stupidity. I cannot myself see why Robina should have been so much annoyed. Labour, as Robina had been explaining to Veronica only a few hours before, exalts a woman. In olden days, ladies—the highest in the land—were proud, not ashamed, of their ability ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... had suggested that the mail would be delivered aboard ship, and I had not had sense enough to guess it. I did not make any explanations to the quartermaster and his clerk, however, because an intuition warned me not to add tangible evidence to a general belief in civilian stupidity. I merely swallowed my snubbing ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... can do, Billy; but I'm bound to do something. My whole family appear to have gone mad over that old horse. I can't help their stupidity; but maybe I can help you out a very little. Whatever I do, remember what I said, only a few days ago, that I'd like the chance to fight for you, to show that I'm a friend in something ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... adopts him henceforth. He buries the hatchet as it regards his friend, and they hunt and feast and make maple-sugar together. "Metals unite from fluxility; birds and beasts from motives of convenience; fools from fear and stupidity; and just men at sight." If Wawatam would taste the "white man's milk" with his tribe, or take his bowl of human broth made of the trader's fellow-countrymen, he first finds a place of safety for his Friend, whom he has ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... under perfect conditions; one who is not wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger. Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron's personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible. ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... A.M. and thus was the American army saved (by an interposing providence from a probable total destruction.). I may be asked wherein this particular interposition of providence appears, I answer, first, in the stupidity of the British general, in that he did not early on the morning of the 20th send a detachment and take possession of the post and stores at Whiteplains, for had he done this we must then have fought him on his own terms, and such disadvantageous terms on our ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... them—can you deny it? It's our duty, as the leading Power of the world! Hundreds of millions of poor miserable barbarians. And"—he shouted—"what else are the Russians, if you come to that? Can they civilise China? A filthy, ignorant nation, frozen into stupidity, and downtrodden by ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... its moral quality. Talent turned to intrigue, and character was the toy of the scheming and flexible brain. The maxims of La Rochefoucauld were the rule of life. Wit counted for everything, the heart for nothing. The only sins that could not be pardoned were stupidity and awkwardness. "Bah! He has only revealed every one's secret," said Mme. du Defand to an acquaintance who censured Helvetius for making selfishness the basis of all human actions. To some one who met this typical woman of her time, in the gay salon of Mme. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... with a red- coated man at the back, blowing a horn. The roof of it was crowded with people curiously dressed; they all looked down on me as they came abreast, and their faces had a sort of strange roughness. I saw them as clearly as all that—a coarseness, it was—a kind of cruel stupidity. Several of them seemed to be pock-marked, too. It struck me; I wondered how a coach-load of such people had been gathered together; and I might have wondered longer; but one of them laughed, a great neighing guffaw of a laugh, as the coachman ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... of being deceived. Though her jealousies and fears were troublesome, I think they were useful. Sometimes she had light and comfort; oftener otherwise. In her twentieth year she had a fever, and from the first she thought she should not live, complained of her stupidity of mind, impenitence and unbelief. I came home from afternoon exercise, found her so ill that her mother thought herself obliged to tell her, upon which she thanked her for her kindness, but quickly ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... he did it I know not; but the thing certainly happened, somehow. That he made pregnant utterances as a legislator may be taken as proved by the keen philosophy of the travels and tales he has since tossed to us; but the House, strong in stupidity, did not understand him until in an inspired moment he voiced a universal impulse by bluntly damning its hypocrisy. Of all the eloquence of that silly parliament, there remains only one single damn. It has survived the front bench speeches of the eighties ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... considers the undoubted fact that the only intelligent and practical way to convey a limited quantity of water such great distances would be by a system of water-tight and air-tight tubes laid under the ground. The mere attempt to use open canals for such a purpose shows complete ignorance and stupidity in these alleged very superior beings; while it is certain that, long before half of them were completed their failure to be of any use would have led any rational beings to cease ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Bayne takes a view of our duty to criminals with which we agree, and he quotes the fact that the majority of those who belong to the criminal class are found to have abnormal brains and often diseased bodies. He also treats just in the way we might expect the dictum that stupidity means badness. The last meaning of that, we almost fear, Mr. Bayne has not quite caught; as John Bunyan meant it, and as Carlyle means it, it is surely true. Again, it seems doubtful if Mr. Bayne, in taking up Kant's complaint that, while there is so much kindness in the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... I feel myself a blockhead whenever I am in their company. I am very far from placing them in the same class with those men whom we call stupid, for the latter are stupid only from deficient education, and I rather like them. I have met with some of them—very honest fellows, who, with all their stupidity, had a kind of intelligence and an upright good sense, which cannot be the characteristics of fools. They are like eyes veiled with the cataract, which, if the disease could be removed, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... "Sealers." The impression from this seal represents a man upon his knees, with his hands tied behind him, and a sword pointed at his throat. The ass is identified with Typhon not only because of his colour, but also because of his stupidity and the sensuality of his disposition. The Persian king Ochus was nicknamed the "Ass," which made him to say, "This ass shall dine upon your ox," and accordingly he slew Apis. Typhon is said to have escaped from Horus by a flight of ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... character had offered a sort of passive resistance to his ideas. I had let what I did not care to welcome pass over my mind in the curious density that children adopt in order to avoid receiving impressions—blankly, dumbly, achieving by stupidity what they cannot achieve by argument. I think that I had frequently done this; that he had been brought up against a dead wall; although on other sides of my nature I had been responsive and docile. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... soon after the splendid gesture in which Redmond had offered the sword of Ireland to the allied cause. And there seems little doubt that in making this offer Redmond had with him, for the last time, the people of Ireland. Recruiting began well but that awful fate of stupidity that seems to overtake every Englishman dealing with Ireland even now was overwhelming the two countries. Sir Francis Vane, an Irish officer in the British Army, described in a series of articles in the New Witness the blunders made in the recruiting campaign: such things as prominent Protestant ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... well-known—her face and name being public property—she is followed, she is spied upon, humiliated, and all, no doubt, on account of some silly mistake, or malicious false information. Ah, it is shameful, Monsieur! I wonder the police of Paris can stoop to such stupidity, such meanness." ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... upon the spectacle of a noble and primeval race like the Iroquois tribe of Indians dying before the advance of our Anglo-Saxon civilization, but with characteristic Anglo-Saxon inconsistency and stupidity we are quite loth to feel sorry for ourselves, doomed to death before the advance of a Mongolian civilization unless we put a stop ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... such a letter, written with well-simulated asinine innocence and gush would have gotten his ignorance and stupidity an amount of newspaper abuse worth six fortunes to him, and not purchasable for twice ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the newly made woman lies quivering with mental agitation and physical pain, which not a few describe as resembling the tearing out of a back-tooth, and yet he insists upon repeating the operation, never supposing in his stupidity, that time must pass before the patient can have any sensation of pleasure and before the glories and delights of the sensual orgasm bathe her soul in bliss. Hence complaints, dissatisfaction, disgust, mainly caused ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... sight, and in pointed contrast to the graceful Californians on their groomed steeds, handsomely trapped, curvetting and rearing and prancing as lightly as if on the floor of a circus. Kearney cursed his own stupidity, and Pico laughed in his face. Beale felt satisfaction and compunction in saturating the silk and silver of one fine saddle with the blood of its owner. The point of the dying man's lance pierced his face, but he noted the bleaching of Kearney's, as one dragoon after another was flung ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... in the encyclopedia from what Prof. Rigl told her last year." I was saved. Dora can act splendidly; I've noticed it before. In the evening she rowed me, and said: "You little goose, will you never learn caution; first that stupidity about Viktor and to-day this new blunder! I've helped you out of a hole once but I shan't do it again." And then she spent all the time writing a letter, to him of course—! Hella and I have just been reading a lot of things in the encycl., ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... a boulevard table impressed him as the height of stupidity. He chafed under the enforced inaction of the situation. "How many more wasted hours must he ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... stagnation, nor stupidity, nor blundering in the handling of Irish affairs whilst his hand was on the helm. It was only later that the creeping paralysis of inefficiency and incompetence exhibited itself and that a people deprived of his genius for direction and control sank ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... because of my sentimental stupidity by moonlight. Had I profited by the night, the solitude and the occasion, Louise had not left me; she saw clearly that I loved her, and was not displeased at the discovery. Women are strange mixtures ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... only the instrument of a Will or Life Force which uses him for purposes wider than his own, may puzzle you. If so, that is because you are walking either in artificial Darwinian darkness, or to mere stupidity. All genuinely religious people have that consciousness. To them Undershaft the Mystic will be quite intelligible, and his perfect comprehension of his daughter the Salvationist and her lover the Euripidean republican natural and inevitable. That, ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... being held by Sir Frank at the floor, and was still screaming, fully convinced that her captor was a burglar, in spite of having recognized him by his voice. Random was so exasperated by her stupidity that ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... her fairness toward Lily that amazed him; it made him reproach himself for his stupidity in not having confessed to her long ago! "Why was I such a fool, Eleanor, as not to know that you were a big woman? Mrs. Houghton knew it. Why, even Edith knew it! She told me you'd ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... went to the prison next day I, for the first time, bottomed the depths of human stupidity. The wretched man was pinioned and led up to the scaffold. I pray God I may never see such a sight again. The man was just one shake of horror. The prison chaplain, who had primed himself rather too freely with brandy—it was his first experience of this duty—walked in front of the prisoner reciting ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... black eyes of a remarkable activity, and Lieutenant Willoughby, an officer of quite a different stamp. A round forehead, a thick snub nose, and a pair of vacant and protruding eyes gave to him an aspect of invincible stupidity. He spoke but seldom, and never to the point, but rather to some point long forgotten which he had since been laboriously revolving in his mind; and he continually twisted a moustache, of which the ends curled ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... "Goodness is not good when it puts up with evil; on the contrary, it is bad when it allows evils to go on which it can, and should, prevent. Gentleness in such a case is not gentleness, but weakness and cowardice. Patience in such a case is not patience, but absolute stupidity. ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... assuring madame that she had not inconvenienced him. She accused her maid, whose stupidity was in fault; and because each one looked to the other rich and prosperous they were extremely polite to one another. Even then, though her ladyship snapped at me, "What has come over you, Elise? You're as clumsy as ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... 66th Congress had been secured. This belief was shared by prominent Democrats, who from that time on spared no effort to make unfriendly Democratic Senators realize the folly of their position in leaving the victory for a Republican Congress. Only the stupidity of extreme conservatism or a thoroughly provincial point of view can account for their failure to yield, unless we are to suppose that more sinister forces were at work.... On the eve of his sailing for Europe December ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... stupidity. The inexplicable load he felt on his spirits seemed to have redoubled in weight. When he reached the street, he felt it impossible to go home, but went toward the main guard and said to the officer on duty, "My friend, I invite ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... first made known to his western friends that he had fixed his abode in Nithsdale. "I am here," said he, "at the very elbow of existence: the only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity and canting; prose they only know in graces and prayers, and the value of these they estimate as they do their plaiden-webs, by the ell: as for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... cannot be denied, and the fact surprised no one so much as herself. The nuns, accustomed to all sorts of children of every variety of temper, of every shade of docility and wilfulness, of cleverness and stupidity, found nothing astonishing in one more perverse little specimen, but Madelon could not understand it at all. She was not used to feeling naughty, and did not know what it meant at first. In her life hitherto, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... better. But against the former, his own brethren, Luther had to complain of base ingratitude to God for the signal benefits He had vouchsafed them. Thus the peasantry, in particular, he taxed again and again with their old selfish and obstinate indifference and stupidity; the burghers with their luxury and service of Mammon; and his fellow-countrymen in general with their gluttony and their coarse and carnal appetites. It pained him most to see these sins prevail among his nearest fellow-townsmen and followers, his Wittenbergers; ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... retorted his wife with great sharpness, as if in contempt of her husband's stupidity; "sold good leather—of course he did. That was part of his plan to make people believe he was an honest man. Besides, if he hadn't, how could he have got rid of his stock as he did. Do you recollect," she proceeded with increasing asperity, as became a Cowfold matron, "as it was him as got up ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... were aunts and uncles, a special attitude of mind may be allowed. They treated us, indeed, with kindness enough as to the needs of the flesh, but after that with indifference (an indifference, as I recognise, the result of a certain stupidity), and therewith the commonplace conviction that your child is merely animal. At a very early age I remember realising in a quite impersonal and kindly way the existence of that stupidity, and its tremendous influence in the world; while there grew up in me, as in the parallel ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... fully in my book "The Tragedy of St. Helena," and have contented myself here with pointing out how the crass stupidity and blind prejudice of his opponents have helped largely to bring about the world-war of our own times. I have also endeavoured to contrast the statesmanlike attitude of Napoleon with the short-sighted policy ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... were gratified, my female pride was dreadfully mortified by what she says of the ladies of England; in fact, she could not judge of them. They were afraid of her. They would not come out of their shells. What she called timidity, and what I am sure she longed to call stupidity, was the silence of overawed admiration, or mixed curiosity and discretion. Those who did venture, had not full possession of their powers, or in a hurry showed them in a wrong direction. She saw none of them in their natural state. She asserts that, though there may be ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... come of money, hid away from everybody but himself? Why didn't he tell his mother? If her thoughts had been round about his siller, it would not have gone an ill road. A man who hides away his money is just a miracle of stupidity, for the devil knows where it is if no decent ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... importance. Until the moment when public sincerity and the public passion for excitement is stimulated, the vague art interests of America will go on in their dry and conventional manner. The very acute discernment of Maurice Vlaminck that "intelligence is international, stupidity is national, art is local" is a valuable deduction to make, and applies in the two latter instances as admirably to America as to any other country. Our national stupidity in matters of esthetic modernity is a matter for ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... possible by way of repayment. Mr. Gladstone wants to put England's head on the block, to hand an axe to her sworn enemy, and to say, 'I'm sure you won't chop.' People who have common sense stand amazed, dumbfounded at so much stupidity." ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... into a corner, and hissed, "You do not know what passes in a soldier's mind; I grew up in the field, and a man like me troubles himself little about a million men." The Austrian statesman further reported the French emperor to have characterized his second marriage as a piece of stupidity, and to have charged his ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... in England seems to have enjoyed so unenviable a reputation for some centuries for the folly and stupidity of its inhabitants, that I am induced to send you the following Query (with the reasons on which it is founded) in the hope that some of your readers may be able to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... closely allied to mania: in sleep, the brain loses blood, in intellectual excitement, attracts blood; in the illumination of the death-bed, or the delirium of drunkenness, the circulation through the brain is quickened; in torpidity, melancholy, stupidity, the circulation ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of his doctrines led me to try to ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... said Mrs Skewton, 'of consigning a child, even to you, my dear Dombey, is one of the most excruciating imaginable, and combined with a naturally delicate constitution, and the extreme stupidity of the pastry-cook who has undertaken the breakfast, is almost too much for my poor strength. But I shall rally, my dear Dombey, In the morning; do not fear for me, or be uneasy on my account. Heaven bless you! My dearest Edith!' she cried ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... each looked at the other; Melick elevated his eyebrows, and Oxenden shrugged his shoulders, but each seemed unable to find words to express his amazement at the other's stupidity, and so they took refuge ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... such a beauty, too! It is too bad! I suppose it is the result of the stupidity of the young man in whose hands I placed it. I told him plain enough it was for you, and your name, with mine, was on the card," answered Annie, really ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... respect to the object of my attachment. No, herself alone shall have power to persuade me that even goodness equal to that of an interceding saint will restore me to the place in her affections which I have most unworthily forfeited, by a stupidity only to be compared to that ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... peddler had no further use for her services. After a few preliminary conditions on the part of the wary housekeeper, the arrangement was concluded; and making a few more piteous lamentations on the weight of her own losses and the stupidity of Harvey, united with some curiosity to know the future fate of the peddler, Katy withdrew to make the necessary preparations for the approaching funeral, which was to take ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... it is to reproach or ridicule a child for stupidity, is evident when we reflect that any supposed inferiority in his mental organization can not, by any possibility, be his fault. The question what degree of natural intelligence he shall be endowed with, in comparison with other children, is determined, not by himself, but by his ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... the French warships from Toulon to a Spanish port, or of making preparations for burning them. Whereas Pitt, who regarded Toulon, not as a windfall, but as a base of operations for a campaign in Provence, maintained that such conduct must blight their prospects. With phenomenal stupidity, Langara allowed his secret instructions on this topic to leak out, thereby rousing the rage of the Toulonese and the contempt of his British colleagues. The Duke of Alcudia (better known as Godoy) expressed sincere regret for this betise. But the mischief was done. The French royalists ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... accompaniment of street scenery. In our own country, which has the amplest means of any other in the world, of carrying these objects of public taste into execution, there seems to be an infatuation—amounting to hopeless stupidity—respecting the uniform exclusion ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... obscurity, and was not regarded favourably by the Athenians, who thought that he was disorderly and given to wine, and altogether resembled his grandfather Kimon, who was called Koalemus because of his stupidity. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... couldn't help it. And her sister was worse: she was perfectly pecky, and shut up with a click. And as for the large Miss Baker—why, you knew how large she was, and it would be quite ridiculous! Besides, her stupidity! ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... my possession of a white nurse the theme of envious congratulation; as usual, I had to hear the habitual senseless complaints of the inefficiency of coloured nurses. If you are half as tired of the sameness and stupidity of the conversation of my southern female neighbours as I am, I pity you; but not as much as I pity them for the stupid sameness of their most vapid existence, which would deaden any amount of intelligence, obliterate any amount of instruction, and render torpid and stagnant ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... which I took it, arose; but I assure you that I have rather omitted some of the prince's words than ascribed to him any of my own; all that is mine is the arrangement, and a few observations, whose ownership you will easily recognize by their stupidity.—Note of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... to the fighting point, at the amazing stupidity of some of the remarks concerning the bell. To him it was more than an emblem, it was ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... bourgeois, envelops him softly in satire as in cotton-wool, dandles him like a great baby; and Coquelin is without bitterness, stoops to make stupidity heroic, a distinguished stupidity. A study in comedy so profound, so convincing, so full of human nature and of the art-concealing art of the stage, has not been seen in our time. As Mascarille, in "Les Precieuses Ridicules," Coquelin becomes delicate and extravagant, a scented whirlwind; his parody ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... that he was unusually sharp and crafty, and felt great contempt for the stupidity of the man whom he had overreached. The time was not far off when he had occasion to doubt whether he had not overrated ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... rusty. Dress uncouth. Women and children at his heels. Attracted attention. Was eyed from head to foot. Was asked on which side he voted. Whether he was Federal or Democrat. Rip was dazed by the question. Stared in stupidity. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... held with tenacity to the traditions of his childhood in having always a cold supper on Sunday evenings, instead of the usual elaborate dinner, also in having the cloth removed for dessert, to display the mahogany, of which, alas! few of our tables are now made. With stupidity, or anything thereto approaching, he was apt to be impatient; neither could he stand young men who affected indifference to, or boredom with, the events and sights of the day. I often used to think, however, he frightened ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... Common, and down Winter Street to Hovey's, and now and then by way of adventure take the car to the Back Bay, and that I felt all the while as if I were getting the cream and pick of everything, I am astonished at my own stupidity. Rose, are you not glad I did not let you catch whooping cough from Margaret Lyon? you were bent on doing it, you remember. If I had given you your way we should not ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... sometimes laughed since at my stupidity, yet there might be found some excuse for it. During my absence from Lima I had often thought of my little playmate, but it had never occurred to me that time would change her as well as myself. And now, instead of the merry child with whom I had romped and played, there appeared ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... world any more detestable form of human habitation than huts like that. Mine was not unique. There were hundreds of them in those camps. They were, I am told, the invention of a man who succeeded in palming off these fruits of stupidity and malice on the War Office. They were called by his name. If I knew how to spell it I should set it down here for public execration. I expect he made a fortune out ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... UPON HIMSELF ALL THE GUILT OF HIS PREDECESSORS: The right to be free is a truth planted in the hearts of men, and acknowledged so to be by all who have hearkened to the voice of nature, and disproved by none but such as through wickedness, stupidity, or baseness of spirit, seem to have degenerated into the worst of beasts, and to have retained nothing of men but the outward shape, or the ability of doing those mischiefs which they have learnt from their ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... "Let's stick to the point. It's a lucky thing for the progress of the world that riches often take to the wing. It may happen to any of us at any time. The amount of stupidity that sweating humanity applies to the task of making a living is colossal. In about a million years we'll learn that making a living consists in knowing how to do well any necessary thing. It's harder for a gentleman ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... relatives and intimate friends of the two elder sons of Brutus, induced them to take part in the conspiracy, holding out to them the hope that they might ally themselves to the great house of Tarquin, soon to be restored to the throne, and would rid themselves of their father's stupidity and harshness. By harshness, they alluded to his inexorable punishment of bad men, and the stupidity was that which he himself affected for a long time, in order to conceal his real character from the tyrant, which was made matter of reproach ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... at him; and he instinctively put his head back, as if it were in danger. "You do not understand, then?" she said. "I will test the genuineness of your stupidity by an appeal ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... shaft wherever it went, in addition to any other work on which it might happen to be employed. I do not recollect among any living beings, except Renaissance architects, any instance of a parallel or comparable stupidity: but one can imagine a savage getting hold of a piece of one of our iron wire ropes, with its rings upon it at intervals to bind it together, and pulling the wires asunder to apply them to separate purposes; ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... are no such things as submarginal land, and problem areas. There are only submarginal people and problem people. Land does not destroy itself nor is squalor self-created. Human qualities create both conditions. Therefore the problem to be tackled is the ignorance, cupidity or stupidity of those who create ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... sure that, however others may have referred it to stupidity, ignorance, or lunacy, you took it as the sign of a modest, simple, unspoiled, unsophisticated soul. Absolute confidence in such matters comes dangerously near audacity and impudence. My first wish would be to make no such blunder; my second that, if I did, the resulting ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... the rumours which reached him respecting Carnot and Berthier. He one day said to me: "What gross stupidity, is this? It is very well to say to a general, 'Depart for Italy, gain battles, and sign a peace at Vienna;' but the execution that is not so easy. I never attached any value to the plans which the Directory sent me. Too many circumstances ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... a mind as free as any can possibly be from stupidity and prejudice. One might almost say that Cherbuliez knows all that he wishes to know, without the trouble of learning it. He is a calm Mephistopheles, with perfect manners, grace, variety, and an exquisite urbanity; and Mephisto is a clever jeweler; and this ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stupidity of Aristotle's logic, and its power to belittle and benumb the intelligence of its reverential students has been shown in every college where this effete study is kept up. We have no better illustration of late than its effect on ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... well. We stop: inquiries and replies go round: "Where do you hail from?" "Whither are you bound?" There as he stood, impassive as a clod, I pull at his limp arms, frown, wink, and nod, To urge him to release me. With a smile He feigns stupidity: I burn with bile. "Something there was you said you wished to tell To me in private." "Ay, I mind it well; But not just now: 'tis a Jews' fast to-day: Affront a sect so touchy! nay, friend, nay." "Faith, I've no scruples." ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... subject of my own unimportant affairs, the astuteness and knowledge of the world she had shown, and the clearness with which she had put the situation, did not strike me. Nothing struck me but the alarming sense of my own stupidity, which was as keen as I have ever felt it. What man in a public position, however humble, has not political enemies? The image of O'Meara was wafted suddenly before me, disagreeably near, and his face wore the smile of victory. All of Mr. Cooke's money ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sees people who could be very happy, and who yet with incredible blindness and stupidity are running their heads against stone walls (or feather beds!) and destroying all chance of peace for themselves, ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... elegant grandeur of a finished pile. This criticism is universal, and therefore it is reasonable to believe it at least in a degree just; but Mr. Savage was always of a contrary opinion, and thought his drift could only be missed by negligence or stupidity, and that the whole plan was regular, and the parts distinct. It was never denied to abound with strong representations of nature, and just observations upon life; and it may easily be observed that most of his pictures have an evident tendency to illustrate ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... friendship. I have set down only a few odd fragments to show those who care to know what sort of a man he was. Lies and lives will be written of him; plenty of both. Enough should be said to defeat the malice and stupidity of detractors. Those who want to know what he was in himself should read the poems. The poems are the man speaking. They are so like him that to read them is to hear him. ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... intolerable. It will cause your highness to commit faults which I shall prevent, for the simple reason that I am happy enough not to be a father; a thing on which I congratulate myself daily, when I see the misfortunes and stupidity of those who are." ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... men lying in unmarked graves in African soil to-day who ought to be alive and well, others who have been done to death by the crass ignorance, the appalling stupidity, the damnable conceit which will brook no teaching. I have seen men die like dogs, men who left comfortable homes in the old land to go forth to uphold the power and prestige of our nation's flag. I have seen them gasping out their lives like stricken sheep, just in the springtide of ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... honesty,—by precept out of stupidity. There is no real conviction in it, begotten by thought." This little bit of criticism, harsh as it was, had the effect, and the Prime Minister became less miserable than he ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... defence and attack in that holy war, all taken together, make up one of the most remarkable pages in the whole history of the Church of Christ. Her difficulties with Rome, with the Inquisition, with her more immediate superiors, confessors, and censors, and, most of all, with the ignorance, the stupidity, the laziness, the malice, and the lies of those monks and nuns whose reformation she was determined on: her endless journeys: her negotiations with church-leaders, landowners, and tradesmen in selecting and securing sites, and in erecting new religious houses: the adventures, the accidents, ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... wielded by the Council depended on the personal character of the monarch. Henry VIII was always master; Elizabeth was more guided than guiding; the Councils of the Valois and Hapsburgs profited by the preoccupation or the stupidity of their masters to usurp the royal power for themselves. In public opinion the Council occupied a great place, similar to that of an English Cabinet today. The first Anglican prayerbook {478} contains petitions for the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... for the most part irregular Shiverings, the Pulse low, soft, slow, quick, unequal, concentrated; a Heaviness in the Head so considerable, that the sick Person could scarce support it, appearing to be seized with a Stupidity and Confusion, like that of a drunken Person; the Sight fixed, dull, wandering, expressing Fearfulness and Despair; the Voice slow, interrupted, complaining; the Tongue almost always white, towards the end dry, reddish, black, rough; the Face pale, Lead-coloured, ...
— A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles - Its Symptoms and the Methods and Medicines Used for Curing It • Francois Chicoyneau
... peoples of Europe were Christian; by the thirteenth century the power of the Church was enormous and the nations of Europe were settled and civilised. But neither then nor at any later period did Christianity perceive the crime and stupidity of the prevailing system. The perception is even now only faint and partial. It is this long toleration of the military system, the thousand-year silence on what is now acclaimed as one of the greatest applications ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... intellectual repute, does the Turkey deserve his name for stupidity? He does not appear to be more limited than another. Audubon depicts him as endowed with certain useful ruses, in particular when he has to baffle the attacks of his nocturnal enemy, the Virginian Owl. As for his actions in the snare with the underground ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... from them one passes so easily into the Laurentian Library, founded by Cosimo Vecchio, and treasured and added to by Piero and Lorenzo il Magnifico, but scattered and partly destroyed by the vandalism and futile stupidity of Savonarola and his puritans in 1494. Savonarola, however, was a cleverer demagogue than our Oliver (it is well to remember that he was a Dominican), for he persuaded the Signoria to let him have such of the MSS. as he could find for the library of S. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... followed her advice and went to the public gardens, which were so near to Everything, and meditated with annoyance on the stupidity, the obstinacy, and ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... unjust Pretence can you usurp the Name of Moderns, if you sing in a most Ancient Stile? Perhaps, you think that these overflowings of your Throat are what procure you Riches and Praises? Undeceive yourselves, and thank the great Number of Theatres, the Scarcity of excellent Performers, and the Stupidity of your Auditors. What could they answer? I know not. But let us call them to a ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... abounding in various birds and graced with blossoming trees. And, O king, immediately on seeing that mass of energy, flaming and brilliant as fire, seated with upraised arms, facing the sun, my friend, the graceful lord of the Rakshasas, Maniman, from stupidity, foolishness, hauteur and ignorance discharged his excrement on the crown of that Maharshi. Thereupon, as if burning all the cardinal points by his wrath, he said unto me, 'Since, O lord of treasures, in thy very presence, disregarding ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Lord, any of soul so great, and cleaving to Thee with so intense affection (for a sort of stupidity will in a way do it); but is there any one who, from cleaving devoutly to Thee, is endued with so great a spirit, that he can think as lightly of the racks and hooks and other torments (against which, throughout all lands, men call ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... speculative Harrington, there is one which he might have borrowed from this speech. The people, says he, cannot see, but they can feel. It is not much to the honour of the people, that they have the same character of stupidity from their enemy and their friend. Such was the power of our authour's mind, that he looked through life in all ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... on hand two that were unable to get their bread, and two that were unwilling. The unable ones were, 1, Giles, a dwarf, of the wrong sort, half stupidity, half malice, all head and claws and voice, run from by dogs and unprejudiced females, and sided with through thick and thin by his mother; 2, Little Catherine, a poor little girl that could only move on crutches. She lived in pain, but smiled through it, with her marble face and ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... dumb, glum, and penitential, like naughty schoolboys on the bench of disgrace? 'Tis an Omorcan superstition; a rule without a reason; a venerable, idiotic fashion invented to repress lively spirits and put a premium on stupidity. ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... known it was going to rain like old boots, all the time. I don't mean, of course, the authorities at Cape Coast, because I don't suppose any of these things could have been picked up there; but we should have been told, when we got our orders, that such things were essential. Really, the stupidity and thoughtlessness of the War Office ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... to have chilled us all into stupidity. Dinner languished; and afterward, Guy, after trying at first to be laboriously civil—the sense of duty was painfully evident—lapsed into silence, passing the claret rather faster than usual, so that Mr. Raymond, to his intense ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... have let that out, ought I?" said Jack, remorseful. "The less he knows about you, the better; and as Lady Turnour has no idea of pronunciation, if it hadn't been for my stupidity—" ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... perfectly soundless, and for the time, at least, lonely; the splendid afternoon had begun to fade, and there was a fascination in the object I had come to see. It came to pass that at the same time I discovered in it a certain stupidity, a vague brutality. That element is rarely absent from great Roman work, which is wanting in the nice adaption of the means to the end. The means are always exaggerated; the end is so much more than attained. The Roman rigidity was apt to overshoot the mark, and I suppose ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... flashed a sidelong glance at Rotherby, who had turned to stare at his father, and in his heart he cursed the stupidity of my Lord Ostermore. If this proposed to be a member of a conspiracy, Heaven help that ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... taking it to yourself you grab it with both hands and pluck it up by the roots. You have offended her and she won't see you again. You'll see, you won't be admitted to the house!" The old man almost cried as he thought of his temerity, his folly, his stupidity. He walked faster and faster in his excitement. "I must curb my unfortunate tongue; I must, I will, if I ever get another chance!" He sighed deeply. "And yet—why should she press my hand and ask me to come to-morrow and be sure not to forget the hour? She has forgiven ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... that doesn't affect the point that the right time is now yours. The right time is ANY time that one is still so lucky as to have. You've plenty; that's the great thing; you're, as I say, damn you, so happily and hatefully young. Don't at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Of course I don't take you for a fool, or I shouldn't be addressing you thus awfully. Do what you like so long as you don't make MY mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!" ... Slowly and sociably, with full pauses and straight dashes, Strether had so delivered himself; holding little Bilham ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... that something like a mutiny occurred, and in answer came a document ordering that the two chief culprits, Vasilieff and the tramp Don'tremember (an application given to some tramps and jail birds who, to conceal the identity, with characteristic ingenuity and stupidity make that answer to all questions relating to their names), be ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... invention-ridden country; for we see every day how the good gifts of those nineteenth century fairies, Science and Industry, instead of proving blessings to mankind, are being turned by ignorance and stupidity into veritable afflictions. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... it so, and stood astonished for a minute at her invention, her piety, her charity, and at thine and mine own stupidity ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... in the forms of grammar. Grammar therefore is made in our public schools the business of a twelvemonth. Rules are heaped upon rules with laborious stupidity. To render them the more formidable, they are presented to our youth in the very language, the first principles of which they are designed to teach. For my own part, I am persuaded the whole business of grammar may be dispatched in a fortnight. I would only teach the ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... way with Nature," replied the countess; "she always distributes her gifts with an impartial hand. Stupidity and beauty go hand in hand, and wit and ugliness are seldom separated. I have an example of this in my own family. A few days ago a great-grandniece was sent to me, a child under ten years old, that has no other relative. She is as tawny ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... fall back upon; but it is worse still in a great company to become aware that wife and mother-in-law are talking nonsense, and that one cannot depend upon oneself for a happy piece of wit to carry off the stupidity ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... I started forward to stop its motion, but I was too late. Before I could reach the crystal globule, it had fallen off the edge of the table on to the floor at Woodville's feet, and smashed in falling. As it smashed, he was looking down, wondering, no doubt, in his stupidity, what the pother was about,—for I was shouting, and making something of a clatter in my efforts to prevent the catastrophe which I saw was coming. On the instant, as the vapour secreted in the broken ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... and Carmencita looked into each other's eyes, then with a leap Carmencita was out of the room and down the steps and at the telephone. With hands that trembled she turned the pages of the book she was holding upside down, then with disgust at her stupidity she righted it and ran her finger down the long line of V's. Finding at last the name she wanted, she called the number, then closed her eyes and prayed fervently, feverishly, and ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... of home, her hat only showing that she had come from a distance. For years her cheeks had been very pale; in this moment her whole face was white as marble. Her delicate beauty made strange contrast with the faces on each side and in front of her—faces of rude intelligence, faces of fathomless stupidity, faces degraded into something less than human. But all were listening, all straining towards her. There were a few whispers of honest admiration, a few of vile ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... when the human intellect is being used up for some other purpose there is a temporary cessation; there is never any decay of architecture. The putting up of ugly buildings is merely a sign of growing stupidity, not of declining intellect or decaying taste. Jerry-building is the successful competition of dishonesty against competency. Do not imagine that because the good architects do not get commissions to put up useful or beautiful buildings they ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... schooling when he had a bit of money ahead, passed the test very well, according to Mr. Britt's notion. Young Mr. Vaniman had secured a business education piecemeal, and was a bit late in getting it, but Mr. Britt promptly perceived that the young man had not been hung up by stupidity or sloth. So he hired Vaniman, finding him a strapping chap ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day |
