"Witless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... original language and expressions; but if so, what a world of verbiage must have been retained. The Indians are prolix, and attach value to many minutiae in the relation which not only does not help forward the denouement, but is tedious and witless to the last degree. The gems of the legends—the essential points—the invention ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... was my bride. There were no barriers to break down, no protests to overcome. We were both of an age and of an experience where formalities lose their significance. The goddess had descended to me and here was I a witless fool. Finally there flashed into my mind what she had said to me in Rome: "My friend, for this once be Orpheus—Orpheus was once Dionysius. Orpheus, tranquil and inspired, touched the quiet lyre surrounded by the Muses. Orpheus had ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... I with pennoned spear, To prance upon a bold destrere: I will not have black Care prevail Upon my long-eared charger's tail, For lo, I am a witless fool, And laugh at Grief and ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... wound a blast so strong That it shook both bush and tree, And to his side came witless Will, And Jem of Netherbee; With all the worst of Robin's band, ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... foolish one, witless on whose side the gods were fighting that day, discharged yet other missiles, wavering and wide of the mark; for his wind had been taken with the first clod, and he shot wildly, as one already desperate and in flight. I got another clod in at short range; we clinched on the brow of the hill, and ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... thou shalt not be craven or witless, if indeed thou hast a drop of thy father's blood and a portion of his spirit; such an one was he to fulfil both word and work. Nor, if this be so, shall thy voyage be vain or unfulfilled. But if thou art not the very seed of him and of Penelope, ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... and when I have shown it to you, I will leave the rest to your own thoughts. Meanwhile I will say thus much: The man who refuses consideration and weight to a Plenary Council, brought to a conclusion in due and orderly fashion, seems to me witless, brainless, a dullard in theology, and a fool in politics. If ever the Spirit of God has shone upon the Church, then surely is the time for the sending of divine aid, when the most manifest religiousness, ripeness of judgment, ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... styles it, has had a far larger number of supporters than any other. Unfortunately, the opinions of others have not the slightest weight with Mr. Massey, and words are too weak to express his scorn of this theory and its supporters. Mr. Brown wraps things in a winding sheet of witless words (delicious alliteration!); he leaves the subject dark and dubious as ever; his theory has only served to trouble deep waters, and make them so muddy that it is impossible to see to the bottom; in short, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... Ho thou! Wilt thou plead some errand hither from my sister? Dost thou deem me so witless as not to know that if she had sent thee hither thou wouldst not have come in this plight? Nay, I know; thou hast stolen thyself from her: thou art a thief, and as a thief shalt ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... a white man's conception by the midnight visitation of ladrones within a half-mile of their village, cowed, witless, they were reassured merely by the uniforms the two riders wore—the red-piped uniform of the small, scattered force of five thousand Filipinos, who, ably officered, highly trained, intrepid, have never tasted defeat: have wiped out every murderous band that ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... generous, undistinguishing love. Only he always forgot what he was going to do. He was much more sensitive than Maria, more shy and reluctant. But his shyness, his sensitiveness only made him more aimless and awkward, a tiresome clown, slack and uncontrolled, witless. All day long his mother shouted and shrilled and scolded at him, or hit him angrily. He did not mind, he came up like a cork, warm and roguish and curiously appealing. She loved him with a fierce protective ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... in the throng, Do Thee, most Holy! wrong, Be Thy grace granted for that witless sin! For Thou art, now I know, Father of all below, Of all above, of all ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... privilege of connecting various threads of action in one plot, disregarding chronology, and hazarding an ethical solution of motives which mere fidelity to fact hardly warrants. He shows us Vittoria married to Camillo, a low-born and witless fool, whose only merit consists in being nephew to the Cardinal Monticelso, afterwards Pope Paul IV.[9] Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, loves Vittoria, and she suggests to him that, for the furtherance of their amours, his wife, the Duchess Isabella, sister ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... subject. When Justice can take no place by process of law at home, sometimes she may be enforced to take new means abroad." But he had left hostages in Henry's hands. "Pity that the folly of one witless fool," Cromwell wrote ominously, "should be the ruin of so great a family. Let him follow ambition as fast as he can, those that little have offended (saving that he is of their kin), were it not for the great mercy and benignity ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... pasture, stretching away leafless, treeless, without bud or flower, herd or herdsman, church or cottage, to the shadowed horizon, looming dark as the twilight deepened, was in sympathy with the gloom which had come upon me as Martin Hall ceased to speak. I had thought the man a fool and witless, flighty in purpose and shallow in thought, and yet he seemed to speak of great mysteries—and of death. In one moment the jester's cloak fell from him, and I saw the mail beneath. He had made a great impression upon me, but I concealed it from him, ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... will believe thy word? If thou hast need of aught, none shall satisfy thee. What sane man will venture to join thy rablle rout? Ill indeed are thy revellers to look upon, young men impotent of body, and old men witless in mind: in the heyday of life they batten in sleek idleness, and wearily do they drag through an age of wrinkled wretchedness: and why? they blush with shame at the thought of deeds done in the past, and groan for weariness at what is left to do. During their youth they ran ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... houses had amplest accommodations, and that the rich could best afford to be bounteous? If in all these spacious mansions there was no little nook for him, if out of their luxuries not a blanket or crust could be spared, what could he hope from the poor? You see, he was not altogether witless, if he was a—Fessenden's. Another proof: At whatever house he applied, he never committed the vulgarity of a detour to the back-entrance, but advanced straight, with bold and confident port, to the front-door. ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... slow, And Vesper, risen star, began to throe In the dusk heavens silvery, when they Thus sprang direct towards the Galaxy. Nor did speed hinder converse soft and strange— 490 Eternal oaths and vows they interchange, In such wise, in such temper, so aloof Up in the winds, beneath a starry roof, So witless of their doom, that verily 'Tis well nigh past man's search their hearts to see; Whether they wept, or laugh'd, or griev'd, or toy'd— Most like with joy gone ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... Hopeless or witless! Not one heeds, As lavish Time comes down the way And tosses in the suppliant hat One ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... youth, a witless youth, That fills the place where she should be; We'll send him o'er to his native shore, And ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... of the other Gods, and anon the Immortals bethink them of harp and minstrelsy. And all the Muses together with sweet voice in antiphonal chant replying, sing of the imperishable gifts of the Gods, and the sufferings of men, all that they endure from the hands of the undying Gods, lives witless and helpless, men unavailing to find remede for death or buckler against old age. Then the fair-tressed Graces and boon Hours, and Harmonia, and Hebe, and Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, dance, holding each by the wrist the other's hand, while among them sings one neither unlovely, nor of body ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... he was well known by repute for twenty years as a witless man that journeyed without rest to all the shrines of England. The old man sits, Saxon fashion, head between fists. We Normans rest the chin on the left palm. '"Who answers for him?" said I. "If he fails in his duty, who will pay ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... a witless thing, Of all under heaven must needs be king, King of kings, and lord of lords, Swayer of souls as well as of swords, Ruler of speech, and through speech, of thought; And hence to his brain was a madness brought. He madden'd in East, he madden'd in West, Fiercer for sights of men's unrest, ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... we meet with him once more, the smouldering fire of his quarrel with the Harveys had burst again into flame. "Have with you to Saffron Walden," 1596, is devoted to the chastisement of "the reprobate brace of brothers, to wit, witless Gabriel and ruffling Richard." No fresh public outburst on Harvey's part seems to have led to this attack; but he bragged in private that he had silenced his licentious antagonists. Nash admits that his opponent's last book "has been kept idle by me, in a bye-settle out of sight amongst old shoes ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... of a fool, gentlemen, that we now find ourselves, and the case is all the more curious, all the more interesting, seeing that, in many points, it recalls the insanity of the unfortunate prince who recently died, of the witless king who reigned platonically over Bavaria. I shall hence designate ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... he often discussed these matters of life. Nancy herself had not been spared the common fate. Being now a mere graceless rudiment of humanity, all spindling arms and legs, save for a puckered, freckled face, she was past the witless time of expecting to pick up a bird with a broken wing and find it a fairy godmother who would give her three wishes. It was more plausible now that a prince, "all dressed up in shiny Prince Clothes," would ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... volumes which stand, appropriately enough, upon the flank of Borrow. They are the three volumes of "Pugilistica," given me years ago by my old friend, Robert Barr, a mine in which you can never pick for half an hour without striking it rich. Alas! for the horrible slang of those days, the vapid witless Corinthian talk, with its ogles and its fogles, its pointless jokes, its maddening habit of italicizing a word or two in every sentence. Even these stern and desperate encounters, fit sports for the men of Albuera and Waterloo, become dull and vulgar, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hope, but in one instant's scrutiny she saw that this had vanished, too. Some terrible thought had sobered and engrossed him. Now he was eyeing her like a witless thing, his features drawn, his eyes burning. The moment was charged ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... special accent with which he had ranked himself among imperishable things. He wondered a little if he hadn't at last, balancing always on the stretched tight-rope of his wit, fallen over on the wrong side. He had never before, of a truth, been so nearly witless, and would have to have gone mad in short to become so singularly simple. Perhaps indeed he was acting only more than usual in his customary spirit—thoughtfully contributing, for Nick's enlivenment, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Hector! Look how thou diest. Look how thy eye turns pale. Look how thy wounds do bleed at many vents. Hark how Troy roars; how Hecuba cries out; How poor Andromache shrills her dolours forth; Behold distraction, frenzy, and amazement, Like witless antics, one another meet, And all cry, Hector! ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... Happiness and freedom of action are restricted to a sphere where they do not interfere with the happiness and freedom of others; the common weal becomes an essential part of individual welfare. In short, even if under the most perfect conditions "Witless will always serve his master," man aims to escape from his place in the animal kingdom, founded on the free development of the principle of non-moral evolution, and to establish a kingdom of Man governed upon the principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a moral ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... and hurt his head, and as he grew up into boyhood, and showed that his wits had been addled by his fall, his family knew not what else to do with him, and so sent him off to the Monastery of St. Michaelsburg, where he lived his simple, witless life upon a sort of sufferance, as though he were a tame, ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... close that I could not see beyond them. The wind blew over pleasantly and it was a curiously protected and hidden place, sheltered and quiet, with its one small crop of cider apples dropping ungathered to the ground, and unharvested there, except by hurrying black ants and sticky, witless ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the string and one head. In August bears come down to an ancient and now brushy bark-peeling near by for blackberries. But the creature that most infests these backwoods is the porcupine. He is as stupid and indifferent as the skunk; his broad, blunt nose points a witless head. They are great gnawers, and will gnaw your house down if you do not look out. Of a summer evening they will walk coolly into your open door if not prevented. The most annoying animal to the camper-out ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... noble with conquering Frank was of older date; and in this century it has been made the master-key to modern history. When Thierry discovered the secret of our national development in the remarks of Wamba the Witless to Gurth, under the Sherwood oaks, he applied to us a formula familiar to his countrymen; and Guizot always defined French history as a perpetual struggle between hostile nations until the eighteenth century made good the wrong that was done ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... a pitiful seer is this, that has not the wit to conceive even what children know, how that no maiden will say a word of sweetness or love to a youth when strangers be near. Begone, sorry prophet, witless one; on thee neither Cypris nor the gentle ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... Dean's "Frequent reproaching the [132] Animadverter with the Character of a Wit, tho join'd with such ill-favour'd Epithets, as his witless Malice has thought fit to degrade it with, as that he is a spiteful Wit, a wrangling Wit, a satirical Wit, and the WITTY, subtle, good-natur'd Animadverter, &c. the Dr. says, that tho there be but little Wit ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... "witless of the size, the sum, The value in proportion of all things, Or whether it be little ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... blighting breath of the false gods, stupid conventions, traditions, examples, your lapses from that consistency? His Seigneurie, at all events, delightfully, hadn't the least real idea of what any John Berridge was talking about, and the latter felt that if he had been less beautifully witless, and thereby less true to his right figure, it might scarce have ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... Slosson had become a sort of Greek chorus. He anticipated all the possible phases of drunkenness that awaited his companions. He went from silence to noisy mirth, when his unmeaning laughter rang through the house; he told long witless stories as he leaned against the bar; he became melancholy and described the loss of his wife five years before. From melancholy he passed to sullenness and seemed ready to fasten a quarrel on Yancy, but the latter deftly evaded any ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... whose beautifully fluted rims are of regular and uniform height, and all are equally filled with clear, still water. A great number of these basins are said to have been destroyed by an ax in the hands of a poor witless creature for the gratification of a burst of temper, and a magnificent stalagmitic column, too heavy for one man to lift, lay detached and broken, in proof that his body did not share the feebleness ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... to the cold-blooded statement. The shock of it produced a beating in the head, and a sickness. And I felt foolish, as though I might do something lunatic, like giving a witless shout, or running amok with a table-knife. I touched Doe, and whispered: "I'm going to get out of this. The old fool doesn't know what ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... Ere mated with his being. Conscious then Of his high theme alone, he smiled again Straight back upon himself in many a hue And tint, and light and shade, which slowly grew Enfeatured of a fair girl's face, as when First time she smiles for love's sake with no fear. So wrought he, witless that behind him leant A woman, with old features, dim and sear, And glamoured eyes that felt the brimming tear, And with a voice, like some sad instrument, That sighing said, "I'm dead ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... judge, but there was a break in her voice, a swift movement, and she suddenly said "this arm," with a little shudder in which she could not meet my eyes; for, such as the arm was, she had finished her speech from within it. Close I held her, like a witless moonling, forgetting all resolves, all lessons, all treaties—all but that she was not a ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... experience-lectured ever care * Fool-like to thrust his head in lion's lair? I'm none of those whose wits to love succumb * Nor witless of the snares my foes prepare: Wert thou my sprite, I'd give thee loyally; * Shall sprite, from body sundered, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... instant all faith and the next all despair. One moment he was filled with his unworthiness and wonder that so noble a creature as a woman should bend her heart and lips from her heaven down to his earth. The next he could not conceive any man should be such a witless ass as to stake his happiness on the steadiness of so manifest a weathercock as a woman's favour. It was all very strange talk; it opened to me, just as when a fog lifts and rolls down again, a momentary vision of a world of colours in which I had no share; and to tell the truth it left me ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... words be heard again, in this twentieth century, twice dyed in blood ere half over: No nation that can produce ten men, great in the eyes of the Unbribable Judge, shall know extinction. Heeding such persuasions, India has proved herself not witless against the thousand cunnings of time. Self-realized masters in every century have hallowed her soil; modern Christlike sages, like Lahiri Mahasaya and his disciple Sri Yukteswar, rise up to proclaim that the science of yoga is more vital than any material advances to ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... that is," he muttered. "It's Wamba, son of Witless, the Jester of Ivanhoe. I've been trying to catch him for seventy-two years, and if I ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... his mother bore him. For in battle perished Gamuret: From like untimely hero's death To save her offspring, strange to arms She reared him a witless ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... twilit gloom. The horror of the life gathered about him is no more grim than is the condition of his witless brain. Over hills and through brakes; in valleys and along winding tracks made by the forest lords; now pushing his way through close-growing scrub, now passing like a fierce shadow among the bare, ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... but, Malcolm, you merit something from the damsel. You are ten times the man you were when she flouted you. If women were not mostly witless, you would be much to be preferred to any mere Ajax or Fierabras; and if this damsel should have come to the wiser mind that it were pity to be buried to ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 's a witless azzy!" blurted Hodge. "If a 's so great a man amongst the lords and earlses, a 'd na come back to Stratford. An' I say a 's ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... no chiding. So, at favorable times, he, in a wary manner, and not indelicately, would venture in private interviews gently to make distant allusions to this questionable propensity. She divined him. But, in her cold loveless way, said it was witless to be telling one's dreams, especially foolish ones; but if the unfortunate man liked connubially to rejoice his soul with such chimeras, much connubial joy might they give him. All this was sad—a touching ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... admit,—is that of Lazarus, whose firm conviction rests that he was dead (in fact they buried him) and then restored to life by a Nazarene physician of his tribe, who afterwards perished in a tumult. The man Lazarus is witless, he writes, of the relative value of all things. Vast armaments assembled to besiege his city, and the passing of a mule with gourds, are all one to him; while at some trifling fact, he'll gaze, rapt with stupor, as if it had for him prodigious import. Should his child sicken ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... power and wealth I sought, But found no trace of him, And all the costly offerings I had brought With sudden rust and mould grew dim: I found his tomb, indeed, where, by their laws, All must on stated days themselves imprison, Mocking with bread a dead creed's grinning jaws, Witless how long the life had thence arisen; Due sacrifice to this they set apart, Prizing it more than Christ's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the Stunner contemptuously. "Of course I seemed, and the difficulty it required to seem! Do you think I was so witless as to let my manoeuvres be seen? I wonder at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... presented. Imagine a girl of the period versed in the loose expressions of the day. She goes away; but, after an absence of five years in a country where she hears little except in a foreign tongue, she returns, and with her comes her slang. How common, how witless, her talk appears! Her slang has long since gone out of fashion. The best of ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... sin?) And those two Truths, each gazing upon each, Embraced like sisters, thenceforth one. For her No arduous thing was Faith, ere yet she heard In heart believing: and, as when a babe Marks some bright shape, if near or far, it knows not, And stretches forth a witless hand to clasp Phantom or form, even so with wild surmise And guesses erring first, and questions apt, She chased the flying light, and round it closed At last, and found it substance. "This is He." Then cried she, "This, whom every maid should love, Conqueror self-sacrificed of sin and death: ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... feast and its surfeits; we have even seen Moliere's doctor reappear, such need has this man of sarcasm and grotesqueness. The further you advance in the Shagreen Skin—vices, lost virtues, poverties, boredom, deep silence, dry-as-dust science, angular, witless scepticism, laughable egotism, puerile vanities, venal loves, Jewish second-hand dealers, etc.—the more astonished and pained you will be to recognize that the nineteenth century in which you live is so made up. The Shagreen Skin is Candide with Beranger's notes; it is poverty, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... thrust in hot water half a minute, then the candles withdrawn by help of the reeds. They were cooled a bit, to save the softened outside, then nubbed of surplus wick, and laid in a dish outside. Careless or witless molders, by laying candles still soft upon the pile, ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... consequences of his disobedience to the rules of discipline and order. For years he had wanted a "new" experience of life. No one would give him what he sought. To him the "social" round was ever the same dreary, heartless and witless thing, as empty under the sway of one king or queen as another, and as utterly profitless to peace or happiness as it has always been. The world of finance was equally uninteresting so far as he ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... secret where, To ruminate upon her discontent, Within her eyelids sate the swelling tear, Not poured forth, though sprung from sad lament, And with this craft a thousand souls well near In snares of foolish ruth and love she hent, And kept as slaves, by which we fitly prove That witless pity ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... to sit there in the crisp October air, with the brook seemingly humming tender legends of the woods, which witless men could not translate, with an uncertain breeze playing through the newly fallen maple-leaves, now turning them one by one in lazy curiosity, then of a sudden making them caper and swirl in a scarlet merry-go-round. ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... sat. Of the term now used, the best explanation I can give is this, that in the selection of books—other questions, such as rarity or condition, being set aside or equally balanced—a general preference is to be given to those which are the most witless, preposterous, and in every literary sense valueless—which are, in short, rubbish. What is here meant will be easily felt by any one who chooses to consult the book which Dibdin issued under the title of "The Library Companion, or the Young Man's Guide ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Two years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for a man to be tied down and gnawed by rats. The stupid brutes of guards were rats, and they gnawed the intelligence of me, gnawed all the fine nerves of the quick of me and of the consciousness of me. And I, who in my past have ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... "Auberge des Adrets," in which the characters of two robbers escaped from the galleys were introduced—Robert Macaire, the clever rogue above mentioned, and Bertrand, the stupid rogue, his friend, accomplice, butt, and scapegoat, on all occasions of danger. It is needless to describe the play—a witless performance enough, of which the joke was Macaire's exaggerated style of conversation, a farrago of all sorts of high-flown sentiments such as the French love to indulge in—contrasted with his actions, which were philosophically unscrupulous, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... confidently as we adjured him to use caution, and then slipped back along the track so that he could climb to the level of the one-eyed person's perch before attempting to creep upon him. We sat down to await developments. The witless one was evidently a lookout, and it was advisable to wait and see the success of Maru's expedition ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... masked ball! Indifference and pique swung Ryder towards a geisha girl, but a trace of irritation lingered and he found her, "You likee plink gleisha?" singularly witless. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... began after awhile with that indefinable interjection of displeasure which defies all spelling. "You talk like the witless creature that you are. Didn't I tell the lad, two years ago, Michaelmas was, that the day he could pay off the mortgage on the farm, he should have you and the farm too? And eight hundred and fifty ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... humour as water is like unto wine. Still, when a monarch jests, if you are wise, if you have a favour to sue, or a position at Court to seek or to maintain, you smile, for all that the ineptitude of his witless wit be rather provocative ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... I, who had been so witless as to let this come upon us! Moa's weapon prodded me. Her voice hissed at me with all the venom of a reptile enraged. "So that was your game, Gregg Haljan! And I was so graceless as to admit love ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... writings. He bids his children to be careful how they offend princes, and, offence being given, never to flatter themselves that it has been pardoned; to live joyfully as long as they can, for men are for the most part worn out by care; never to take a wife from a witless stock or one tainted with hereditary disease; to refrain from deliberating when the mind is disturbed; to learn how to be worsted and suffer loss; and to trust a school-master to teach children, but not to feed them. One of the dicta is a gem of quaint wisdom. "Before ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... as he noticed this brilliant and singular decoration, "an emblem of the fraternity, I suppose, meaning ... what? Salvation and Immortality? Alas, they are poor, witless builders on shifting sand if they place any hope or reliance on those two empty words, signifying nothing! Do they, can they honestly believe in God, I wonder? or are they only acting the usual worn-out ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... &c. n.; wonder whether; not know what to make of &c. (unintelligibility) 519; not pretend to take upon, not take upon one self to say. Adj. ignorant; nescient; unknowing, unaware, unacquainted, unapprised, unapprized[obs3], unwitting, unweeting|, unconscious; witless, weetless[obs3]; a stranger to; unconversant[obs3]. uninformed, uncultivated, unversed, uninstructed, untaught, uninitiated, untutored, unschooled, misguided, unenlightened; Philistine; behind the age. shallow, superficial, green, rude, empty, half-learned, illiterate; unread, uninformed, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Jacky," coaxed his poor witless wife. "He's struck wi' her—you can see that. He called her Coz! He'll marry her, most likely, and make a lady of her; and then she'll be ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... upon earth in peace and happiness were it not that the devil cannot suffer it. He must divide hearts and alienate love, allowing no one to take pleasure in another. He who is illustrious, of noble birth, or has power or riches, feels bound to despise others as silly geese or witless ducks. ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... eternal garb of woe; And yet I owe you thanks for one sweet hour Of healthy human intercourse and peace. 'T is not for me to tarry by the way. Farewell!" The impetuous, remorseful boy, Seeing sharp pain on that kind countenance, Fell at his feet and cried, "Forgive my words, Witless but innocent, and leave me not Without a blessing." Moved unutterably, The pilgrim kissed with trembling lips his head, And muttered, "At this moment would to God That I were worthy!" Then waved wasted ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... ever luckless, godless, graceless, witless child, Hast thou Drupad's virtuous daughter thus insulted ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... die were witless, When Death, who with his fatal finger taps At princely doors, as freely as he gives His summons to the serf, may at this instant Have sealed the only life that throws a shade Between us ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... wine-tinted, ribbon-like leaves, and the air is alert with rich and spicy odour, there is ample apology ever ready for the season and the direct results thereof. The trees are manifestly over-exerting themselves, in a witless competition with others which may never boast of painted, scented fruit. There is not a sufficient audience of aesthetics to tolerate the change of which ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... a wailing cry from the north, a howl of witless fear. The singers stopped in mid-note, the drummer paused, his hand uplifted. Dane darted forward in a plunge which carried him to that man. The Khatkan did not have time to rise from his knees as the barrel of the fire rod struck his head, sending him spinning. Then the drum was cradled ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... Pitied by the planters, despised even by the negro slaves, this small colony held itself aloof, starved, and married none but members of their own colony. They are now mere shadows of men, with puny bodies and witless minds, living in brush or wooden hovels and eating nothing but a ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... have been lately made acquainted' [and so I have by Betty, and she by my brother] 'with the weak and wanton airs he gives himself of declaiming against matrimony. I severely reprehend him on this occasion: and ask him, with what view he can take so witless, so despicable a liberty, in which only the most abandoned of men allow themselves, and yet presume ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... incapable of mental culture and moral improvement:' to this I can only reply, that if they are incapable of profiting by instruction, I do not see the necessity for laws inflicting heavy penalties on those who offer it to them. If they really are brutish, witless, dull, and devoid of capacity for progress, where lies the danger which is constantly insisted upon of offering them that of which they are incapable. We have no laws forbidding us to teach our dogs ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... great souls with vision unobscured Thou wert by Pride unswayed, and so didst tread The gray and sombre way by Duty marked; Seeking the springs of Wisdom, unallured By shallower sources which the witless tempt. Afar o'er arid plains didst thou behold An empty sky, and mountains desolate Barring thy way to fairer scenes beyond; But faith was thine, and patience measureless, Making thee equal to thy destiny. Hail to thy ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable excitement, witless mischief, and waste of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Shall I to woman be a friend? I deal with man, and when I can Reclaim with interest all I lend. Who but a witless gambler plays For farthing stakes these golden days? No, woman—woman—woman— Must only play ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... arouse the village to their help. One of the women therefore essayed the journey; but was so clumsy as to attract the enemy's attention. She was seized and made to confess how the house was protected and where it was most likely to fall before a sharp assault. Being a witless wench, she told them truly, and Master Ford then bade her help them collect sticks and leaves in order that they might be able to fire the place as ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... eyes were open, but she still beheld, Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep: There was a painful change, that nigh expelled The blisses of her dream so pure and deep. At which fair Madeline began to weep, And moan forth witless words with many a sigh While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep; Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye, Fearing to move or speak, she ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... forms a ludicrous contrast between "witless Gabriel and ruffling Richard." The astronomer Richard was continually baiting the great bear in the firmament, and in his lectures set up atheistical questions, which Nash maliciously adds, "as ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... which deluges him with its expectation, and resents a scarcity of the supernatural. Mr. Sludge is not so much to blame: the people at length push the thing so far that he is obliged to cheat in self-defence. And when a man tasks his wits successfully, if it be only to mislead the witless, he has a sense of satisfaction in the effort akin to that of the rhetorician and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... to me on many grounds. I left the happy pair tete-a-tete, in their princely parlor together, little fancying that there was another argument which had been prepared to overthrow my feeble virtue. But all this had been arranged by the small cunning of this really witless couple. I was left to find my way down stairs as I might; and just when I was about to leave the dwelling—vexed to the heart at the desperate stolidity of the miserable man, whom avarice and weakness were about to expose to a loss which might be averted ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... "Witless thou waxest," said Siggeir, "nor heedest the wise man's saying; 'Slay thou the wolf by the house-door, lest he slay thee in the wood.' Yet since I am the overcomer, and my days henceforth shall be good, I will quell them with no death-pains; let the young men ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... prevent marriage; everything to accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly vulgar and entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. But is it? I defy any one here to say ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... "Witless spoke thus even in the days of this person's remote youth—only the virtuous did not then open and close their hands suddenly in the Ways on dark nights. Is aught reported of the inner affairs of Shen Yi, a rich ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... Impious counterfeits! Prating of heaven, for earth their bosom beats! Grasping at weeds, they lose immortal palms! God needs not iteration nor vain cries: That man communion with his God might share Below, Christ gave the ordinance of prayer: Vague ambages and witless ecstasies Avail not: ere a voice to prayer be given, The heart should rise on wings ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... those who know it intimately as the most stupid and witless of birds, and yet before leaving its eggs exposed to the hot African sun, the parent bird knows enough to put a large pinch of sand on the top of each of them, in order, it is said, to shade and protect the germ, which always rises to the highest point of the egg. This act certainly cannot ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... to the brave show of the sky over the sunken sun; "the knights fled and the sheriff dead: two of the lawyer kind slain afield, and one hanged: and cruel was he to make them cruel: and three bailiffs knocked on the head—stout men, and so witless, that none found their brains in their skulls; and five arbalestiers and one archer slain, and a score and a half of others, mostly men come back from the French wars, men of the Companions there, knowing no other craft than fighting for gold; and this is the end they ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... the morning's birth And lovelier than all smiles that may be smiled Save only of little children undefiled, Sweet, perfect, witless of their own dear worth, Live rose of love, mute melody of mirth, Glad as a bird is when the woods are mild, Adorable as is nothing save a child, Hails with wide eyes and lips his life on earth, His lovely life with all its heaven to be. And whoso reads ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... out, too witless to see that this same hero of his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whose life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary for making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in some dark league against him—"hell ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... returned his wife. "Once a witless fool, always a witless fool!" and giving free rein to her vexation and ill-temper she continued to upbraid her husband until his anger also was stirred, and he had wellnigh made a second bid and ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... cognomen of hell), to hasten, with what force he could collect, to his relief. It happened to be Midsummer-day, when a great fair was held at Chester, the humours of which, it should seem, the worthy constable, witless of his lord's peril, was then enjoying. He immediately got together, in the words of my authority, "a great, lawless mob of fiddlers, players, cobblers, and such like," and marched towards the earl. The Welsh, although a musical people, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various
... but as I am learned, Madam," said Hugh modestly. "I am younger even than you, methinks, and far more witless. But I have heard them say that have been deep skilled, as methinks, in the ministeries [mysteries] of God, that wherein it is said that 'He mai save withouten ende,' it scarce ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... into the pool outside—cannot you hear them, Jac Hallen?" Impatience came to his voice; in truth, I must have been staring at him witless. "Maidens out there, Jac Hallen, who are seeking handsome youths like yourself for escort. Must I speak plainly? You ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... their wraps, their filthy rugs, and tattered rags, and were as warm as possible. The tents had many advantages over a brick house. Besides having no draughts, there was no accumulation of snow upon the tops of the tents; and so these witless people were content to endure poverty, hunger, cold, and dirt for the sake of minimising their contribution to the general good of the whole commonwealth. The poorest working man in London who does an honest week's ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... the fashion among fools of both sexes to sneer at Susan B. Anthony and use her name to point witless jokes. But it seems to us—and we differ from her most emphatically on the question of woman suffrage—that her brave, unselfish life reflects a credit on womanhood which the follies of a thousand others ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... like a witless man, I saw our couch, I saw our quiet room, Its shadows heaving by the fire-light gloom; And o'er my lips a subtle feeling ran, 10 All o'er my lips a soft and breeze-like feeling— I know not what—but had the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... spread out before him now like a deserted sea washing the mountains with long grey waves, but while he was looking at it, it began to fill again with a flowing broken witless life that was a part of itself, and arms and pale heads covered with tossing hair appeared in the greyness. It rose higher and higher till it was level with the edge of the steep rock, and then the shapes grew to be solid, and a new procession half lost in mist passed very slowly with ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats
... giving each other a sympathetic, if transitory, regret—one sorry that another "should be foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack." Words which seem to exhaust man's deepest sentiment concerning death and life are put on the lips of a gilded, witless youth; and the saintly Isabella feels fire creep along her, kindling her tongue to eloquence at the suggestion of shame. In places the shadow deepens: death intrudes itself on the scene, as among other [175] things "a great disguiser," blanching the features of youth ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... family history. Beyond him Pickle goes on springs, cracking jokes like a little internal combustion engine. And David, now very tanned and wide awake, finishes our four. Without looking, we know the voice of each of our neighbors behind or in front, even so far as the witless stutterer some squads ahead, or the flat-voiced constant querist somewhere behind. But now when he raises his song ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... were scant, my offerings few, While witless wisdom fool'd my mind; But now I trim my sails anew, And trace the course I left behind. For lo! the Sire of heaven on high, By whose fierce bolts the clouds are riven, To-day through an unclouded sky His thundering steeds ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... these things, and reverence My mother Thetis in divine Olympus. Ay, that she is a Goddess shalt thou know When to thine heart the brazen spear shall pierce Sped by my might. Patroclus' death I avenged On Hector, and Antilochus on thee Will I avenge. No weakling's friend thou hast slain! But why like witless children stand we here Babbling our parents' fame and our own deeds? Now is the ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... notes are numerous and lengthy, constituting a quarter to a third of the book, but are replete with padding, pointless babble and occasional puerile inaccuracies. They are largely attempts to explain and to moralize upon Yorick's emotions,—averbose, childish, witless commentary. The Wortregister contains fourteen pages in double columns of explanations, in general differing very little from the kind of information given in the notes. The Allgemeine Litteratur Zeitung[30] ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... wife. As I once related to you, I recently went to New York, and there encountered sundry adventures, not all of them of a diverting nature. One you know, and it reeks in my memory with stale cigars, witless talk, and all the other monotonous symbols of Bohemia. Ah, that blessed Bohemia, whose coast no man ever explored except gentle Will Shakespeare! It is no-man's-land; never was and never will be. Its misty, alluring signals have shipwrecked many an artistic mariner, and—but pshaw! ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... facade might presently confess. It is the constant error of youth to over-estimate the Will in things. I did not see that the dirt, the discouragement, the discomfort of London could be due simply to the fact that London was a witless old giantess of a town, too slack and stupid to keep herself clean and maintain a brave face to the word. No! I suffered from the sort of illusion that burnt witches in the seventeenth century. I endued her grubby disorder with a sinister and magnificent ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... some ostentation in his charities. When a poor ruined fellow at his elbow saw him win at a throw L200, and murmured 'How happy that would make me!' Nash tossed the money to him, and said, 'Go and be happy then.' Probably the witless beau did not see the delicate satire implied in his speech. It was only the triumph of a gamester. On other occasions he collected subscriptions for poor curates, and so forth, in the same spirit, and did his best ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... how I love thee best, And all my thoughts of thee shall be confess'd And none withheld, not e'en the witless one Which late I harbor'd when the mounting sun Burst from a cloud,—the moon a mile away, As if in hiding from the lord of day,— As if, at times, the moon were like thyself, And fear'd the semblance of a ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... window looking out, And the rain came down like silken strings That Swithin's day. Each gutter and spout Babbled unchecked in the busy way Of witless things: Nothing to read, nothing to see Seemed in that room for her ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... closer sense, Carnival is the Carnival in the Corso, or was; for it is dead beyond resuscitation, and such efforts as are made to give it life again are but foolish incantations that call up sad ghosts of joy, spiritless and witless. But within living memory, it was very different. In those days which can never come back, the Corso was a sight to see and not to be forgotten. The small citizens who had small houses in the street let every ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford |
