"Vapid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to retrieve your characters by coming into my house and sitting mute for two hours. Heaven forbid that your blood should be found on my skirts! but I believe I shall kill you, if you do. The only reason why I have not laid violent hands on you heretofore is that your vapid talk has operated as a wire to conduct my electricity to the receptive and kindly earth; but if you intrude upon my magnetisms without any such life-preserver, your future in this world is not worth a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... poet's fancy, but founded on the natural impulses and habitual prejudices of the characters he has to represent. There is an inveteracy of purpose, a sincerity of feeling, which never relaxes or grows vapid, in whatever they do or say. There is no artificial, pompous display, but a strict parsimony of the poet's materials, like the rude simplicity of the age in which he lived. His poetry resembles the root just springing from the ground, rather than the full-blown flower. His muse is no "babbling ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... is the most arrogant, self-opinionated, self-complacent, vapid piece of humanity in this town or any other town. She irritates me to the point of impoliteness. She never sees that people don't want her. ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail;—when the most vapid satires have become the objects of a keen public interest, purely from the number of contemporary characters named in the patch- work notes, (which possess, however, the comparative merit of being more poetical than the text,) and because, to increase the stimulus, the author has sagaciously ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... fulness in my throat nearly choked me; my temples throbbed, my hands trembled, and whether it was shame, or the sickness of despair, I cannot say; but the words would not come, and all that I could get out was some flattery of my wife's beauty, or some vapid eulogy upon my own cleverness in securing such a prize. To give you in one brief sentence an idea of my state, Harry—know, then, that though loving Mary with all my heart and soul, as I felt she deserved to be loved, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... asleep. Now she stretched luxuriously beneath the crisp white sheet that the vapid August heat decreed. From memory to memory her dream-fogged mind drifted, and to the yet-to-be. It was good to remember, and to imagine, and to ...
— Moment of Truth • Basil Eugene Wells
... authorship. He has had but two competitors for this fame,—it is remarkable that they were both women,—De Sevigne in France, and Lady Wortley Montague in England; yet, how utterly inferior are De Sevigne's feeble sketches of court life, and vapid panegyrics on the "adorable Grignan;" or the Englishwoman's rambling details of travels and tribulations, to the pungent pleasantry and substantial vigour of Walpole! The Frenchwoman's sketches are like ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... liquor, and make it turn mouldy. Then, though the bottles should be clean and dry, yet if the corks be not new and sound, the liquor will be damaged; for if the air can by any means penetrate, the liquor will grow flat, and never rise. As soon as a cask of liquor begins to grow vapid, and to lose its briskness, while it is on the tap, it should be drawn off immediately into bottles; and in order to quicken it, put a piece of loaf sugar into every bottle, about the size of a walnut. ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... highest poetry of these people becomes, in the very process of utterance, the finest music; while the utterance of base sentiments, or of fustian, becomes, by the very nature of the language, discordant, or at best vapid ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... evaporated; arid, parched; anhydrous; droughty; barren, uninteresting, jejune, vapid, tedious, prosaic, tame; sharp, keen, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... to pity, from pity to anger, from anger to public zeal, and then instantly to irony and ridicule, implies a lightness of touch which, not unreasonably, surprises us as having endured for so many hundred years. That poetry should remain to us, even lines so vapid as some of those in which Ovid sung of love, seems to be more natural, because verses, though they be light, must have been labored. But these words spoken by Cicero seem almost to ring in our ears as having come to us direct from a man's lips. We see the anger gathering ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... still satisfied with the shape of affairs—or made pretence to be. For, watching lynx-eyed, Mahony fancied each time the fat man propelled his paunch out of the sickroom it was a shade less surely: there were nuances, too, in the way he pronounced his vapid: "As long as our strength is well maintained ... well maintained." Mahony doubted Polly's ability to bear much more; and he made bold to know his own wife's constitution best. Rogers was shilly-shallying: what if he delayed too long and Polly slipped through his hands? Lose Polly? Good God! the very ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... and he said, frankly, that he should be glad to see the red hat go to him. The lady's husband was appointed to a foreign Embassy, and they were both soon thrown into an Ultramontane atmosphere, where clerical intrigues had long furnished one of the chief amusements of a vapid and corrupt Court. The lady, who, of course, could not have realized the impropriety, made known the President's regard for Archbishop Ireland. She even had letters to herself beginning "Dear Maria," to prove the intimate terms on which she and her husband stood with Mr. Roosevelt, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... the daughter of the regiment by the six hundred brave men, who each loved her as his own; they were the mementoes of a year in Dora Darling's life, of such vivid experiences that it threatened to make all the years that should come after pale and vapid in comparison. ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... though excellent hyson, is necessarily weaker and more insipid in the last cup. Now, as I think the one is by no means improved by the luscious lump of half-dissolved sugar usually found at the bottom of it, so I am of opinion that a history, growing already vapid, is but dully crutched up by a detail of circumstances which every reader must have anticipated, even though the author exhaust on them every flowery epithet ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... constitution or frame-work of society, in which its scheme might be traced through the various ramifications. On the contrary, we have two volumes of essays of no consecutive interest, but well written, and in some cases abounding with turns of scholarly elegance. They seldom flag, or grow vapid, notwithstanding they are on subjects of common life and experience, upon which moralists have rung the changes of words for centuries past. Occasionally, however, there are some new positions and little conceits which have more of prettiness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... graceful, and mild, and adorned with all the resources of a most accomplished and creative spirit, required not the distractions of society. It would have shrunk from it, from all its artificial excitement and vapid reaction. The days of the Herberts flowed on in one bright, continuous stream of love, and literature, and gentle pleasures. Beneath them was the green earth, above them the blue sky. Their spirits were as clear, and their hearts ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... a Lyricist.—Lyric poetry is the artistic expression of the poet's individual sentiments and emotions, hence it is subjective. The action is usually vapid, the verse musical, the time quick. Unlike the Epic and Drama, it has no preferred verse or meter, but leaves the poet free to choose or invent appropriate forms. In this species of verse Arnold was not wholly at ease. As has been said, one searches in vain through ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... senses. Something of this rapture in the sheer release of control must have been in Charles Lamb's mind when he wrote to Coleridge about the "pure happiness" of being insane. "Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... master is made an excuse for finical incoherencies in the disciples; the quaint, ingenious, and unexpected collocations of the original degenerate in the imitators into a trick of unmeaning surprise and vapid antithesis; and his pregnant sententiousness set the fashion of a sententiousness that is not fertility but only hydropsy. This curious infection, which has spread into divers forms of American ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... it was not surprising, for Doris looked adorably pretty and winsome, and many a wiser man might have shared his pleased anticipation. Moreover, Doris was not in the least stupid or vapid, however selfish and shallow her nature; and if she chose she could ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... sublime or vapid, Flow'd like a rill in the morning beam, Perchance not deep, but intense and ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... them constantly. However, for all the heat, the man was stone cold and ashen grey, and his nostrils were pinched and dilated, while his breath came in gasps, forty to the minute. Yet, as I say, he was talkative, and his stream of little, vapid remarks, at his end of the sheet, did much to drown the clicking and snapping of clamps on the other side of it, where the surgeons were working to give him ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... something wrings your heart sharply: for there are nerves in these black carcasses, thicker, more quickly stung to madness than yours. Yet if any savage longing, smouldering for years, was heating to madness now in his brain, there was no sign of it in his face. Vapid, with sordid content, the huge jaws munching tobacco slowly, only now and then the beady eye shot a sharp glance after Dorr. The sentry had told him the Northern army had come to set the slaves free; he watched the Federal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... House (startling the tide-waiters with the novelty), hoisted into a ship. Conceive it pawed about and handled between the rude jests of tarpaulin ruffians—a thing of its delicate texture—the salt bilge wetting it till it became as vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some superstition about sentiments) of being tossed over in a fresh gale to some propitiatory shark (spirit of Saint Gothard, save us from a quietus so foreign ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... still more involved, to the effect that her presence would make a god out of the most unworthy mortal. It was all vapid, unreal, ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... soul, I have thee unconditionally then!— Fate hath endow'd him with an ardent mind, Which unrestrain'd still presses on forever, And whose precipitate endeavor Earth's joys o'erleaping, leaveth them behind. Him will I drag through life's wild waste, Through scenes of vapid dulness, where at last Bewilder'd, he shall falter, and stick fast; And, still to mock his greedy haste, Viands and drink shall float his craving lips beyond— Vainly he'll seek refreshment, anguish-tost, And were ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... — ne'er a hill! Inexorable, vapid, vague and chill The drear sand-levels drain my spirit low. With one poor word they tell me all they know; Whereat their stupid tongues, to tease my pain, Do drawl it o'er again and o'er again. They hurt my heart with griefs I cannot name: ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... LOUISA,—This accompanies Harold the Dauntless. I thought once I should have made it something clever, but it turned vapid upon my imagination; and I finished it at last with hurry and impatience. Nobody knows, that has not tried the feverish trade of poetry, how much it depends upon mood and whim. I {p.139} don't wonder, that, in dismissing all the other deities ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... We rejoice in the reflection that we have stores of novelty yet unexhausted, which may be opened when repletion shall call for change, and gratifications yet untasted, by which life, when it shall become vapid or bitter, may be restored to its former sweetness and sprightliness, and again irritate the appetite, and again sparkle ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... mother brings the dinner and her tawny brood of nestlings. A shady spot is selected for the feast. The father dips his wooden spoon first into the vapory bowl, and mother and babes follow with grave decorum. Idle loungers passing these patriarchal groups, on their way to a vapid French breakfast at a restaurant, catch the fragrance of the olla and the chatter of the family, and envy the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... allowance for the absence of the country people, specially wont to visit the town when the quarterly court was in session, but now all dutifully in place voting in their own remote districts. The dust, the suffocating heat, the stale, vapid air, the indescribable sense of a lower level—all these affected her like a veritable burden, accustomed as she was to the light and rare mountain breeze, to the tempered sun, the mist, and the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... tame and vapid acquiescents are not to be found in literature. Sometimes they furnish material for literature. Their principal use in life is to kindle the souls of reformers with the resentment of which great ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... I say that I, a plain, prosaic lieutenant in the republican service have done the incredible things here set out for the love of a woman—for a chimera in female shape; for a pale, vapid ghost of woman-loveliness? At times I tell myself I dare not: that you will laugh, and cast me aside as a fabricator; and then again I pick up my pen and collect the scattered pages, for I MUST write ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... self-indulgence, to the infinitely deeper, the infinitely higher pleasures that come to those who know the toil and the weariness, but also the joy, of hard duty well done, why, that race or that individual must inevitably in the end pay the penalty of leading a life both vapid and ignoble. No man and no woman really worthy of the name can care for the life spent solely or chiefly in the avoidance of risk and trouble and labor. Save in exceptional cases the prizes worth having in life must be paid for, and the life worth living must be a life of ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... better? He had certainly sighed for the gauds which he had left. While his young wife was living he had kept his sighs down, so that she should not hear them; but he had been forced to acknowledge that his new life had been vapid and flavourless. Now he had been tempted back again to the old haunts. Would the Countesses' cards ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... poem; but one of the faces was so supreme in its mute anguish that he thought of Reni's "Cenci," and of a wan "Alcestis," and a desperate "Cassandra," he had seen at Rome; and, in comparison, the description of the poet seemed almost vapid,— ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... civilisations; I read little but Greek and Latin. That brought me out of the track I had laboriously made for myself I often thought with disgust of the kind of work I had been doing; my novels seemed vapid stuff so wretchedly and shallowly modern. If I had had the means, I should have devoted myself to the life of a scholar. That, I quite believe, is my natural life; it's only the influence of recent circumstances that has made ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... of the low murmurs of Nan's beautifully modulated voice in his ears, he found his anger slowly rising, not against any one in particular, but against the vulgar ostentation in which these people moved and the vapid assumption of superiority with which they evidently looked out upon ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... them pass, seeing Mr. Holmes's face in the carriage as she did so. He did not look at her; had his head turned towards the gray distance. Lois's vivid eye caught the full meaning of the woman beside him. The face hurt her: not fair, as Polston called it: vapid and cruel. She was dressed in yellow: the color seemed jeering and mocking to the girl's sensitive instinct, keenly alive to every trifle. She did not know that it is the color of shams, and that women like this are the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Theodora. 'I know how vain, and vapid, and weary everything seems, as if the sap of life was gone, but if we are content to remain in the wilderness, it begins to blossom ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of perplexed, delicious colour: tones of miraculous subtlety seem to be flowing into an enchanted pool and chasing one another there. From this pool emerge gradually forms which appear sometimes vaporous and sometimes tentative, but never vapid and never woolly. When we have realized that the pool of colour is, in fact, a design of extraordinary originality and perfect coherence our aesthetic appreciation is at its height. And not until this excitement begins to flag do we notice ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... in which exempt From our tired selves long hours we lie, Our vapid worthlessness undreamt, And our poor spirits saved ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... dinner, visitors came in: a vicar-general of the diocese of Paris, two canons, two former mayors of Paris, and one of the ladies who distributed the charities of Notre-Dame. No cards were played; but the conversation was gay, without being vapid. ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... cold and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and common-place, these only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... philosophy to the dogs in a moment of paroxysmal indignation, despite physiognomies trained to resemble their own, have these fellows casked up in tubs without lanterns, but with the appropriate "snuffers," fit emblems of their faiths, and dropped far outside Sandy Hook. A proper finale to the vapid utterance made by one of these gentry that all "Reformers should be annihilated," Imagine Plato or Epicurus offering such a ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... Goosedubs, and the great chimney-stalk of St Rollox; it is impossible to predict how boldly the municipal pulse may bound beneath the pressure of a dexterous finger. Next, you must compose some stanzas, as vapid as you please, to be sung by the leading virgin in pantaloons; or, what is better still, a few parodies adapted to the most popular airs. I see a fine field for your ingenuity in the Jacobite relics; they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... state of rawness or burnt to a cinder; and the glasses of pale sherry; and the red worsted doyleys and blue finger-glasses; and the almonds and raisins, and crisp biscuits, that nobody ever eats; and the dreary, dreary funereal business of dinner, when we all talk vapid nonsense, with an ever-present consciousness of the parlourmaid. I am tired of the dull dinners, and of mamma's peevish complaints about Ann Woolper's ascendancy downstairs; and of Mr. Sheldon's perpetual newspapers, that crackle, crackle, crackle all the evening through; ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... ideal. Our gilded youth want such examples as this of Motley, not a solitary, but a conspicuous one, to teach them how much better is the restlessness of a noble ambition than the narcotized stupor of club-life or the vapid amusement of a dressed-up intercourse which too often requires a questionable flavor of forbidden license to render it endurable to persons ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... this time untidy, unkempt, sickly, remarkable for his extreme thinness and the almost yellow tint of his visage, which was, however, lit up by "two eyes sparkling with keenness and will-power"—evidently a Corsican falcon, pining for action, and fretting its soaring spirit in that vapid town life. Action Buonaparte might have had, but only of a kind that he loathed. He might have commanded the troops destined to crush the brave royalist peasants of La Vendee. But, whether from ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... rooted here among the groves, But languidly adjust My vapid vegetable loves [4] With anthers ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... talents as she could possibly have been if they had made him Lord Chancellor. She had as firm a belief in the sweetness and propriety of his manners as she could possibly have had if he had been Lord Chamberlain. The poor little old man knew some pale and vapid little songs, long out of date, about Chloe, and Phyllis, and Strephon being wounded by the son of Venus; and for Mrs Plornish there was no such music at the Opera as the small internal flutterings and chirpings wherein he would discharge himself of these ditties, like ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... because they are not used to it; when one sees the young ladies who return home unable to take any interest in American life, and who shut themselves away from its society, which to them is most unpolished and vapid, because they have had a European education; when one sees the hundred follies which a glimpse of Europe will put into the heads of people whom before one had had every reason to think sensible enough,—one feels inclined to ask one's self the question, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... Lady Joan Fitz-Warene, who was gratified by the devotion of the Cupid of May Fair. He uttered inconceivable nothings, and she replied to him in incomprehensible somethings. Her learned profundity and his vapid lightness effectively contrasted. Occasionally he caught her eye and conveyed to her the anguish of his soul in a ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... adore women. I value their good opinion. There is much in them to applaud and imitate. There is much in them to elicit faith and reverence. If, only, one could see their good alone, or, seeing their vapid and vicious ones, could contemplate them with no touch of tenderness for the owner, life might indeed be lovely. As it is, while I am at one moment rapt in enthusiastic admiration of the strength and grace, the ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... his unfriendly critics a judgment of his own style, in a criticism made by Fadladeen of the young poet's story to Lalla Rookh;—"it resembles one of those Maldivian boats—a slight, gilded thing, sent adrift without rudder or ballast, and with nothing but vapid sweets and faded flowers on board." "The effect of the whole," says one of his biographers, speaking of Lalla Rookh, "is much the same as that of a magnificent ballet, on which all the resources of the theatre have been lavished, and no expense spared in golden clouds, ethereal ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... qualities of courage and resolution in both men and women, of scorn of what is mean, base and selfish, of eager desire to work or fight or suffer as the case may be provided the end to be gained is great enough, and the contemptuous putting aside of mere ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere avoidance of toil and worry. I do not know whether I most pity or most despise the foolish and selfish man or woman who does not understand that the only things really worth having in life are those the acquirement of which normally ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... been poor, is that reason why I may not one day be rolling in wealth? Number you among your friends my superior in education, in intellect? Is it in the ranks of these empty-headed officers or these brainless, vapid sons of vice and luxury that make up the men of your social circle, you are to be mated? I tell you that this movement means revolution, that within this very week the long-oppressed people shall be paramount, and we who reap shall ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... worth visiting. Still, enough remains in the un-restored churches of Ravenna to captivate the attention of every student of history and every lover of early Christian art. It is only necessary to shut our eyes to the vapid and tasteless work of recent embellishers, as we should close our ears to the whispers of vulgar gossipers while listening to some noble and entrancing piece of ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... on a broad basis is strictly philosophical. A frail being should labour to be gentle. But when forbearance confounds right and wrong, it ceases to be a virtue; and, however convenient it may be found in a companion, that companion will ever be considered as an inferior, and only inspire a vapid tenderness, which easily degenerates into contempt. Still, if advice could really make a being gentle, whose natural disposition admitted not of such a fine polish, something toward the advancement of order would be attained; but if, as might quickly be ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... democracy, and which are filled with photographs of "prominent" persons at race meetings, horse shows, and resorts, and with actresses, dancers,—and mannequins. Janet's eyes fell on the open page to perceive that the coiffure her sister so painfully imitated was worn by a young woman with an insolent, vapid face and hard eyes, whose knees were crossed, revealing considerably more than an ankle. The picture was labelled, "A dance at Palm Beach—A flashlight of Mrs. 'Trudy' Gascoigne-Schell,"—one of those mysterious, hybrid names which, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to me to have admired Shakespeare more heartily and intelligently than ninety-nine out of a hundred modern supporters of Shakespeare societies; though these gentlemen are never happier than when depreciating English eighteenth-century critics to exalt vapid German philosophising. Fielding's favourite play seems from his quotations to have ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... to, not a substitute for, this primary work. The partnership should be one of equal rights, one of love, of self-respect, and unselfishness, above all a partnership for the performance of the most vitally important of all duties. The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all that ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... mother-of-pearl, and papier-mache, with broken hinges; faded fans and chipped paper-weights; gorgeous picture-books with loosened covers, and a magnificent portrait-album which had been deflowered and had nothing left in it but the old and ugly, the commonplace middle-aged, and the vapid young; with many other things besides, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... at the trouble of driving over to the Soudrys' merely to hear the vapid talk of its visitors and to see a Parisian monkey in the guise of an old woman, Rigou, far superior in intelligence and education to this petty society, never made his appearance unless business brought him over to meet the notary. He excused himself from ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... "Vapid sentimentalists and timid souls deprecate these annual reunions, fearing they may arouse old strifes and sectional animosities. But a war in which 500,000 men were killed, and 2,000,000 were wounded, in which states were devastated and money spent equal to twice England's gigantic ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... a scornful voice; 'they come to see Sara, and I hate them so, flimsy stuck-up creatures, with their white ties and absurd little moustaches. Each one is more stupid and vapid than the other. And Sara must think so too; for she ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... herself sufficiently to wish to do so; but like her queer gowns and her dyed red hair her creed suited Mrs. Ogilvie. There was a congruous incongruity about her which set many people puzzling to find out her real character. Pompous persons and snobs detested her. Stupid or vapid people saw nothing in her, or saw merely that she dyed her hair and was dressed by Paquin. Narrow-minded people disapproved of her, and clever people considered her one of the most striking, if not ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... is full, I daresay we shall meet some one we know at the table d'hote to-day. It is extraordinary that the only travellers we have encountered, since we left Paris, have been one horribly vapid Englishman and wife whom we dropped at Basle, one boring Englishman whom we found (and, thank God, left) at Geneva, and two English maiden ladies, whom we found sitting on a rock (with parasols) the day before yesterday, in the most magnificent part of the Gorge of Gondo, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... "Words, vapid words! Empty, worthless as last year's nests. My lover," she laughed scornfully, "is quite safe even from your malevolence. If indeed 'one touch of nature makes the whole world kin,' one might expect some pity ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... "Very true," says Vapid, "but this will regulate itself."—Will it, indeed? Be good enough to tell me how! All the potent individual agencies now affecting it are attached by self-interest to the wrong side. The Capitalists, the Employers, the Exporters, engaged in the Silk trade, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... This vapid conversation was solely intended to induce his right-hand neighbor to speak; but she, silent and absent-minded, paid not the least attention. The officer had in store a number of phrases which he intended should ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... sweetest ease. The sedentary stretch their lazy length When custom bids, but no refreshment find, For none they need: the languid eye, the cheek Deserted of its bloom, the flaccid, shrunk, And withered muscle, and the vapid soul, Reproach their owner with that love of rest To which he forfeits even the rest he loves. Not such the alert and active. Measure life By its true worth, the comforts it affords, And theirs alone seems worthy of the name Good health, and, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... know, but had seen on the beach, became interested in baby, who took no notice of them, and hiccupped. But, then, his eyes were too beady to have any human expression; perhaps it was more this than a contempt for vapid compliment that made him seem unsympathetic. The young lady, however, congratulated him on his personnel and on the variety of his attainments; and this interested Miss Gwendolen, who continued not to roar, and presently volunteered a statement ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... beautify the hortus siccus of dissent. A sermon from a noble duke, or a noble marquis, or a noble earl, or baron bold, would certainly increase and diversify the amusements of this town, which begins to grow satiated with the uniform round of its vapid dissipations. I should only stipulate that these new Mess-Johns in robes and coronets should keep some sort of bounds in the democratic and levelling principles which are expected from their titled pulpits. The new evangelists will, I dare say, disappoint the hopes that are ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... points of the case, to say nothing of his utter ignorance of Hariot's biography and true position as an English man of science, one feels justified in rejecting it as worthless : as one also is compelled to do the vapid conclusions drawn from Montucla which have since found their way into many recent biographical dictionaries and into many pretentious articles in learned encyclopdias respecting Hariot and his works. The truth seems to be that Hariot was unlucky ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... course, much can be accomplished with persistent practice, and a latent gift may be awakened, but it is certainly not given to all to become able technicalists. Again some become very proficient from the technical standpoint, but are barren, soulless, uninspired and vapid when it comes to the artistic and musicianly interpretation ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... is completely separated from all fixed saline matters, and consequently from all hardening matters. Distilled water, however, has a vapid and unpleasant taste, due partly to deficient aeration and partly to the presence of traces of volatile organic matter; and though filtration through animal charcoal will remove this, and the aeration can begin chemically, the process is too expensive, except in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... the initiated as single Gloucester. There was also a pewter mug for each, three-parts filled with small beer. It certainly gave me, it was so small, a very desponding idea of the extent to which littleness might be carried; and it would have been too vapid for the toleration of any palate, had it not been so sour. As I sat regardless before this repast, in abstracted grief, I underwent the first of the thousand practical jokes that were hereafter to familiarise me with manual jocularity. My right-hand neighbour, jerking ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Chicago wind until it was strange there was any of her left in one piece, she had had front doors—yes, and back doors too, slammed in her face, she had been the butt of the alleged wit of menials and hirelings, she had been patronised by vapid women as the poor girl who must make her living some way, she had been roasted by—but never mind—she had had a beat or two! And now she was to wind it all up by marrying Joseph Tank, who had made a great deal of money out of the manufacture ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... attention wandered, and she gazed at the audience, or the organ, or the architecture. Much did she censure the attenuated Cupids who encircle the ceiling of the Queen's Hall, inclining each to each with vapid gesture, and clad in sallow pantaloons, on which the October sunlight struck. "How awful to marry a man like those Cupids!" thought Helen. Here Beethoven started decorating his tune, so she heard him through once more, and then she smiled at her cousin Frieda. But Frieda, listening ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... fraud asleep again. And to-morrow he'll print half a column of vapid reminiscence and call it criticism. It's a wonder his paper stands for him. Because ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... not so purely ridiculous as one might be tempted to think. Its basis is to be found in this very knowledge of human nature which is so essential, although the superstructure is often nothing more than vapid futility. In addition to this the ideal doctor should possess a trained scientific mind, and, of the two, the former is infinitely the more important, although the latter is very valuable, not only for itself, but for the training which it gives ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... of course, too imaginative a turn of mind to leave facts in their native nakedness, but this tendency of his is too apparent to need pointing out. What betrays him is the wonderful family likeness of his portraits, a kind of vapid esprit, not distantly related to silliness, with which the limner endows his unfortunate sitters, Chopin as well as Liszt and Tausig. Indeed, the portraits compared with the originals are like Dresden china ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... time, he told himself, in foolish spiritualistic seances with his own shadow. He had too much before him, and too short a time in which to do it. His troubles, when he came to face them, would be realities, and not a train of vapid and morbid self-vaporings. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... nest. Is it not singular that even Diderot sometimes failed to remember that Mars and Venus are dead, that they can never be the source of a fresh and natural inspiration, and that neither artist nor spectator can be moved by cold and vapid allegories in an extinct dialect? If Diderot could have seen such a treatment of La Grenee's subject as Landseer's Peace, with its children playing at the mouth of the slumbering gun, he would have been the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... real John Wesley is apt to be presented to us in a very one-sided fashion. Moreover, his character has suffered from the partiality of injudicious friends quite as much as from the unjust accusations of enemies. It is peculiarly cruel to represent him as a faultless being, a sort of vapid angel. We can never take much interest in such a character, because we feel quite sure that, if the whole truth were before us, he would appear in a different light. John Wesley's character is a singularly interesting one, interesting for this very reason, that he was such a thorough ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... one," said he, at the same time throwing himself into the chair, but not offering to move his hat. He continued during the whole of the dinner the same disgusting superiority, and the subordinate officers several times called out silence to the adjoining table, that they might better hear the vapid remarks of their commander. The waiters, and even the whole table d'hote seemed in great awe of these military gentlemen; and one fellow excused himself for leaving a plate before me by hastily alleging that the commander was looking around him for something. I was still more disgusted by ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... like stolen fruit; then it was served up on golden salvers and people sat down to it at a table. It is because pleasure was not vile or bestial. This woman holding a bouquet in her hand in this grand columnar saloon has not the vapid smile or the wanton and malicious air of an adventuress about to commit a bad action. The calm of evening enters the palace through noble architectural openings. Under the pale green of the curtains lies the figure on a white sheet, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... Blighted Fraus. When I told those eight phlegmatic souls I was going, they all said 'So!' much as they had said 'So!' to every previous remark I had been moved to make to them. 'So' is capital garnishing: but viewed as a staple of conversation, I find it a trifle vapid, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... collection of the speeches of Follett has been made; none will ever be attempted; no speech he delivered is read, except perchance as part of an interesting trial, and essential to its story, and then the language is felt to be poor, the cadences without music, and the composition vapid and spiritless; although, if studied with a view to the secrets of forensic success, with a 'learned spirit of human dealing,' in connexion with the facts developed and the difficulties encountered, will supply abundant materials for admiration of that unerring skill which induced the ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... carrying him beyond a peculiar rising inflection towards the middle of a verse, and a remarkable lingering fall into deep bass at the end, we soon regarded it as a praiseworthy attempt to give variety to his previous vapid utterances, and came rather to like it, as it gave the church somewhat of a cathedral flavour. The old pew-opener and sextoness said that to hear him publish the banns was almost as good as listening to the ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... face was uplifted, delicately lighted by the moon. Her eyes shone dark with those fluttering, sweet wraiths of thoughts which we may not prison in speech, which words only deaden and crush into vapid sentimentalism. Life, held in a great unutterable calm, seemed to lie out there in the radiant, vague distance, asleep and smiling cryptically ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... had acquired great influence over Hancock, and that vapid young man was fond of being seen in the company of the older one. Adams was anxious to secure Hancock for the revolutionary cause, and soon had him so hopelessly entangled that there was no escape for him. On the anniversary ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... few moments the young man tried to find relief in furious riding, and in bullying his spirited horse. Then he pulled quickly up. What was he doing? What was he going to do? What foolish, vapid deceit was this that he was going to practice upon that noble, queenly, confiding, generous woman? (He had already forgotten that she had always distrusted him.) What a fool he was not to tell her half-jokingly that ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... give a groat for that man's knowledge in pen-craft, who does not understand this,—That the best plain narrative in the world, tacked very close to the last spirited apostrophe to my uncle Toby—would have felt both cold and vapid upon the reader's palate;—therefore I forthwith put an end to the chapter, though I was in the middle of ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... our characters have their entrances, Lady Betty is revealed to us through the medium of the lively dialogue quoted a few pages back, and then there is another stir. In comes Lord Foppington, otherwise Colley Cibber, in all the vapid glory of fine clothes, and a great periwig. A very prince of coxcombs, with his soft smile and conscious air of superiority—a mere bag of vanity, whose emptiness is partly hidden by gorgeous raiment, gold embroidery, ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... incompetent servant, by whomsoever employed, is always against his employer. Even those born governors, noble and right honourable creatures, who have been the most imbecile in high places, have uniformly shown themselves the most opposed (sometimes in belying distrust, sometimes in vapid insolence) to THEIR employer. What is in such wise true of the public master and servant, is equally true of the private master and servant ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... and Virginia', which he had read in his boyhood. I remember that he one day tried to read 'Les etudes de la Nature', but at the expiration of a quarter of an hour he threw down the book, exclaiming, "How can any one read such silly stuffy. It is insipid and vapid; there is nothing in it. These are the dreams of a visionary! What is nature? The thing is vague and unmeaning. Men and passions are the subjects to write about—there is something there for study. These fellows are good for nothing under any government. I will, however, give them pensions, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... blandness; tastelessness &c adj.. V. be tasteless &c adj.. Adj. bland, void of taste &c 390; insipid; tasteless, gustless^, savorless; ingustible^, mawkish, milk and water, weak, stale, flat, vapid, fade, wishy-washy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... man it would not have been easy to attribute any just notion of the claims of religion to him. He looked as if all his motions, except those of physical strength, were vapid and paltry. Still, this was what he said, and ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... relationship of sex above all objective facts. The desires and feelings and sentiments are set up in opposition to historical experience and communal tradition. We hear much, and especially in the writings and talk of women, of such vapid phrases as "Self-realisation in love," "The enhancement of the individual life," and "The spiritualising of sex." Such personal views, which exalt the passing needs of the individual above the enduring interests of the race, ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... such as legalizing the sale of heroin to break the world-wide criminal control on the distribution of drugs—that your vapid Puritan morality wouldn't permit. Millions of dollars for enforcement, and to punish the sick, but not one cent for prevention, and almost nothing to find out why people become addicts in the first place, and ...
— Revenge • Arthur Porges
... sedition, they will venture to affirm, that no production of merit has been defrauded of its due share of applause. On the contrary, they have cherished with commendation, the very faintest bloom of genius, even when vapid and unformed, in hopes of its being warmed into flavour, and afterwards producing agreeable fruit by dint of proper care and culture; and never, without reluctance disapproved, even of a bad writer, who had ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... compliments, whilst Gino presided, courteous, but delightfully familiar. Philip would have a spasm of horror at the muddle he had made. But the spasm would pass, and again he would be enchanted by the kind, cheerful voices, the laughter that was never vapid, and the light caress of ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... with Lola, the "Baby-Talk Lady," a vapid little flirt. To woo her in a manner worthy of himself (and of her) he steals his father's evening clothes. When his wooings become a nuisance to the neighborhood, his mother steals them back, and has them let out to fit the ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... commonly felt and conceived, so far from rational courses and has attached it to vapid objects has been the initial illegitimacy of all governments. Under such circumstances, patriotism is merely a passion for ascendency. Properly it animates the army, the government, the aristocracy; from those circles it can percolate, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... been a failure, and he knew it. On going back to the sacristy the Reverend Golightly congratulated him with a simper and a vapid smile. The canon was more honest but more vain. He mingled lofty advice with gentle reproof. Mr. Storm had taken his task too lightly. Better if he had written his sermon and read it. Whatever might serve for the country, congregations in London—at All ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... for he felt the justice of his neighbour's description: Cousin Maria's good sense was incontestable, magnificent. She took an affectionate, indulgent view of most of the persons mentioned, and yet her tone was far from being vapid or vague. Madame de Brives usually remarked that they were coming very soon again to see her, she did them so much good. 'The freshness of your judgment—the freshness of your judgment!' she repeated, with a kind of glee, and she narrated that Eleonore (a personage unknown to Raymond) had ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... How vapid, meagre, frigid, and unaffecting has been the performance of this part since Mr. Kemble's reign. According to his institutes, Macbeth closes the door with the cold unfeeling caution of a practised house-breaker, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... earth her shadowy pinion throws. Hail, sleep, restorer of the tortured mind, Balm of the soul, and friend to human kind! The toils and tumults of our earthly scene Subside, and melt into thy sway serene. Life's sweetest cup, with purest blessings fraught, Were, without thee, a vapid joyless thought! My fellow captives all thy pleasures taste; Their fears, their sorrows, all in sleep are past; } Oh! be it peaceful still, for this may be the last! } Now, borne in vision to those airy plains } Where fancy undisturb'd ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... aye, empress of the sea! Fairest in art as clime, yet sunk so low Beneath the despot Teuton's rule, I see Thy halls deserted, fallen, yet in thee Much splendour to admire there still exists. Well could I quit my native land, and flee The rugged northern clime, the vapid mists, With thee to dwell, did I ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... held it now for some years, to allow himself to be crushed at once because he had made a mistake. If the world, his world, chose to go to war with him, he would be ready for the fight. As for Butterwell,—Butterwell the incompetent, Butterwell the vapid,—for Butterwell, who in every little official difficulty had for years past come to him, he would let Butterwell know what it was to be thus disloyal to one who had condescended to be his friend. He would show them all at the Board that he scorned them, and could be their master. Then, ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... life. There is a certain charm in good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and disgusting, that makes Horace even perilously fascinating, so that the guardians of the public morals may well be thankful that for the young the approach to him is warded off by the formidable barriers of grammar ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... then been mistress of the occasion. She had had her own way, and in stinting herself had found her own reward. But now—the tea had no flavour now that it was made in the kitchen and brought to her, cold and vapid, by a man in livery whom she half feared to keep waiting while she ministered to her ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... shine wherever they go, to catch every eye and bewilder every passer-by, they fancy they are in the upper-ten of womanhood. Vain! The peacock, whose little heart is one beating pulse of vanity, is not half so vain as they. Giddy, trifling, empty, vapid, cold, moonshine women, whose souls can perch on a plume, and whose only ambition is to be a traveling advertisement for the men and women who traffic in what they wear, are many who flaunt in satins and glitter in diamonds. ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... without mercy. I confess I was surprised at hearing the SIZE of the Americans sneered at by POCKET-HANDKERCHIEFS, as I remember to have read that the NOSES of the New Yorkers, in particular, were materially larger than common. When the supercilious and vapid point out faults, they ever run into contradictions and folly; it is only under the lash of the discerning and the experienced, that we betray by our writhings the power of the ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... sure she is. Vapid and flabby she certainly is not. She is full of fun, and is quite as witty as a woman ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... contrast to the rather vapid sentimentalism and abstract theorizing of many of the periodicals controlled by the Sinn Feiners was his own sheet, the Irish Volunteer. It was the most practical of all the periodicals, and, beyond ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... necessity of killing for the fair widow's entertainment. We pass over the relation of the circumstances which, as the lady discovers, render her mission fruitless, and which are detailed in a strain of the most vapid silliness—and proceed to the interview which brings about the union of Mabel and Sir Hubert. The latter, some time after these occurrences, pays ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... subjects that would have told her more than she feared already, taking refuge in themes she had once considered vapid and inane. To miss nothing, she hurried homeward on that May afternoon, so as to be beside her tea-table in the drawing-room before any one appeared. And yet, the minute came when she cast ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... far I regard this as your masterpiece! You are really perfect in the great art of reducing simple & dignified speech to clumsy & vapid commonplace. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... time to drop him so much as two or three lines to say that they had arrived safely, and were hoping to see him soon. Of course, as he told himself, there was no very particular reason why anyone should have written so very vapid and commonplace a piece of intelligence as that they had arrived home safely, for it might be taken for granted that they had done so: the trains in Cuba travelled too slowly, and the traffic was too meagre, to admit of the possibility of an accident—and, moreover, there had been no news ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... is not stuffed with sawdust and tricked out in the rags of the green-room. Fortunately, there is scant opportunity for idle tears in Tristram Shandy.... Yet no occasion is lost.... Yorick's death is false alike to nature and art. The vapid emotion is properly matched with commonness of expression, and the bad taste is none the more readily excused by the suggestion of self-defence. Even the humour of My Uncle Toby is something: degraded by the oft-quoted platitude: 'Go, poor devil,' ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... chattering, vapid girls I know," pursued Jim, "you stand utterly alone, you with your ambitions, and your wiseness! By George! when I think what you have made of yourself, I could get down and worship you. I feel like a big spoiled kid ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... vapid fury of mortal mind - expressed in earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity - and this so-called mind is self-destroyed. 293:24 The manifestations of evil, which counterfeit divine justice, are called in the Scriptures, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... strange thing to me to-day. I was remarking that the talk in the recreation-room was so often vapid and foolish—all about such little matters: we never seemed to take an interest in any great or ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... the information that it is true, is not, therefore, the way to recommend it. Your hearer's life, and those of his friends, are enough true stories for him; what he wants of you is merciful fiction. Destiny, to his apprehension, is always either vapid, or clumsy, or brutal; and he feels certain that, do your worst, you can never rival the brutality, the clumsiness, or the vapidity of destiny. If you are silly, he can at least laugh at you; if you are clumsy or brutal, he has his remedy; and meanwhile there is ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... mind is agitated. But what matters a few failings? Need we be angels, male or female, in order to be worshipped as such? Let us admire the diversity of the tastes of mankind; and the oldest, the ugliest, the stupidest and most pompous, the silliest and most vapid, the greatest criminal, tyrant booby, Bluebeard, Catherine Hayes, George Barnwell, amongst us, we need never despair. I have read of the passion of a transported pickpocket for a female convict (each of them advanced in age, being repulsive in person, ignorant, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... futile, shadowy, unsatisfying, baseless, idle, trifling, unserviceable, bootless, inconstant, trivial, unsubstantial, deceitful, ineffectual, unavailing, useless, delusive, nugatory, unimportant, vapid, empty, null, unprofitable, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... far from watering-places Of note and name I'd keep, For there would vapid faces Still throng me in my sleep; Then contact with the foolish, The arrogant, the vain, The meaningless—the mulish, Would sicken ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... message, and would then have ordered him fresh breakfast; but he declared if I was fidgety he should have no comfort, and insisted on my sitting quietly down, while he drew a chair by my side, and made his own cold tea, and drank it weak and vapid, and eat up all the miserable scraps, without suffering me to call for plate, knife, bread, butter, or anything for replenishment. And when he had done, and I would have made some apology, he affected me for him a good deal by gravely ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... vanity, and solemn trumperies of pride,— Harmful copings with the better, and empty-headed apings of the worse; Vapid pleasures, the weariness of gaiety, the strife and bustle of the world; The hollowness of courtesies, and substance of deceits, idleness and pastime— All these and many more alike, thick conveying fancies, Flit in throngs about my theme, as honey-bees ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... are not. Therefore, I'll deign to instruct you. Ben de Laney has a father and a mother. The father is pompous, conceited, and a bore. The mother is pompous, conceited, and a bore. The father uses language of whose absolutely vapid correctness Addison would have been proud. So does the mother, unless she forgets, in which case the old man calls her down hard. They, are rich and of a good social position. The latter worries them, because they have to ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... ways. He had savoir faire enough and mild literary interests, but of hard intellectual robustness he had nothing. The studies of the place were indeed not of a nature to encourage it. The most successful boys were graceful triflers with ancient literatures; to write a polished and vapid poem of Latin verse was Hugh's highest accomplishment, and he possessed the power of reading, with moderate facility, both Latin and Greek; add to this a slender knowledge of ancient history, a slight savour of mathematics, and a few vague conceptions of science; such was the dainty intellectual ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... justified when Carlyle soothed his mind with The King's Own or Newton Forster. To please is to serve; and so far from its being difficult to instruct while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly without the other. Some part of the writer or his life will crop out in even a vapid book; and to read a novel that was conceived with any force is to multiply experience and to ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nor brother, nor any other kind familiar face, to look upon his gentleness in love, or to sympathize with his affections, unapprehended, unappreciated: so—while Mrs. Tracy was the showy, gay, and vapid thing she ever had been, and Julian the same impetuous mother's son which his very nurse could say she knew him—Charles grew up a shy and silent youth, necessarily reserved, for lack of some one to understand ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... heads with hearts of jelly, spawned under the sign of Aquarius, incapable of Bacchus, and therefore cold, washy, spiteful, bloodless. Elia shall string them up one day, and show their colors,—or rather, how colorless and vapid the whole fry,—when he putteth forth his long-promised, but unaccountably hitherto delayed, 'Confessions of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... occurred to Sidwell to debate with her mother on subtle questions of character and motive, but the agitation of her nerves made it difficult for her to keep silence under these vapid outcries. She desired to be alone; commonplace discussion of the misery that had come upon her was impossible. A little more strain, and she would be on the point of tears, a weakness she was resolute ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... spectacle; and that to make it interesting you must make it vivid, you must show it as something that is intense and passionate. And he is also aware of the fact that the feeling of intensity and passion may be elicited from a sense of the monotonous, the trivial, and the vapid; that tragic effect may be gained by the spectacle of men seeking an ideal which is beyond their powers, or grasping at an ideal which proves unworthy, or indifferent to an ideal which we see to be within ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... was fulfilled when they were sent by aunt to niece, by uncle to nephew, by friend to hapless friend. They were "gift-books" in the exclusive sense of the word. Thackeray was wont to declare that these vapid, brightly bound volumes played havoc with the happy homes of England, just as the New Year bonbons played havoc with the homes of France. Perhaps, of the two countries, France suffered less. The candy soon disappeared, leaving only impaired digestions in its ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... was absolutely different from the type she had imagined. Always she had seen her as one of those vapid, pretty little creatures who had become old long before her time; peevish, spoiled, inclined to be flirtatious, refusing to give up her youth, still living in the recollection of ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... of the translator of poetry, which Coleridge defined as "the best words in the best order," is manifestly very different. A phrase which is harmonious or pregnant with fire in one language may become discordant, flat, and vapid when translated into another. Shelley spoke of "the vanity of translation." "It were as wise (he said) to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... are the signs and indications of great changes taking place upon the visible planes of the lives of men. Hand in hand march the visible and the imponderable forces of this earthly life. Ignorance and vapid superstitions can no longer block the ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... (heaping up) and making one's pile; between taking umbrage (the shadow) and being thrown in the shade; between ejaculating and throwing out a remark; between being on a tension and being highstrung; between being vapid and having lost steam; between insinuating (winding in) and worming in; between investigating and tracking; between instigating (goading on or into) and prodding up; between being incensed (compare ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... though it had the originality of first observation, and a grace of expression so great that more met the ear than was meant, was still so wanting, either in insight or reflection, as to be poor and vapid as small-beer after the first sparkle is gone. The manner was all in Mrs. Lewis, but that was ever varying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Lufton, for you say that it is very dangerous for young ladies to know young gentlemen. But I do know enough of him to understand that he ought not to like such a girl as Griselda Grantly. He ought to know that she is a mere automaton, cold, lifeless, spiritless, and even vapid. There is, I believe, nothing in her mentally, whatever may be her moral excellences. To me she is more absolutely like a statue than any other human being I ever saw. To sit still and be admired is all that she desires; and if she cannot get that, to sit still and not be admired would almost ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... those driven who maintain the divine authority of the system of Mr. Newman. Assuredly the thirst for "something deeper and truer than satisfied the last century," will not be allayed by a draught so scanty and so vapid; but after the mirage has beguiled and disappointed him for a season, the traveller presses on the more eagerly to the true ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... the subject. The straightforward meaning, and the ironical, are both good; anything between them, in which the real meaning is merely to leave alone, and severely is no more than an echo, is pointless and vapid and in print intolerable. Examples follow: (1, straightforward) You must show him, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, your detestation of the crime; (2, ironical) Fish of prey do not appear to relish the sharp spines of the stickleback, and usually ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... 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 any amount of natural energy and vivacity. I would rather die—rather a thousand times—than live the lives of these ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... philosophy, and other occasional work, followed the publication of the 'Vicar'. But towards the middle of 1766, he was meditating a new experiment in that line in which Farquhar, Steele, Southerne, and others of his countrymen had succeeded before him. A fervent lover of the stage, he detested the vapid and colourless 'genteel' comedy which had gradually gained ground in England; and he determined to follow up 'The Clandestine Marriage', then recently adapted by Colman and Garrick from Hogarth's 'Marriage A-la-Mode', with another ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... realize much profit. They are plucked when quite hard, and then placed in boxes till they gradually soften; but the flavor of fruit thus treated is very inferior to that of a peach or nectarine ripened by the sun. Seed-fruits, such as strawberries, come very vapid in four or five hours after they have been picked, if they were ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... including spare time. What's a holiday to anybody who has never done a stroke of work? You and I know the difference; we can appreciate the fun of loafing between spells of work; but these people have got no standards to measure their fun by, so it's all the same to them—flat, vapid, monotonous, unless they season it up with cocktails and carrying on; and even that gets to have all the same flavour of tastelessness after a while. That's why so many of these women are going ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... untouched faces, had a deliciously fresh, flower-like look which is wholly lacking in their sisters of to-day. A young girl's charm is her freshness, and if she persists in coating her face with powder and rouge that freshness vanishes, and one sees merely rows of vapid little doll-like faces, all absolutely alike, and all equally artificial and devoid of expression. These present skimpy draperies cause one to reflect that Nature has not lavished broadcast the gift of good feet and neat ankles; possibly some ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... being possessed of the demon of affectation, strive to set themselves apart from the common herd, imagine that they are inhabitants of a sublimated ether, and look down with pitying contempt on all who profess an inability to detect a meaning in their vapid and mystical jargon. 'These be truths;' and our readers will bear us witness that months ago, with but little variation of terms, we promulgated them ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... wild-flowers, of moonlight shining through autumn mists upon the river and the fields; yet, by contrast with the higher order of beauty I had just momentarily been in touch with, she seemed almost ugly. How dull her eyes, how thin her voice, how vapid her smile, and insipid ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood |
