"Brainless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cause my death, you ecclesiastical idiot. The principal thing for you is to enjoy yourself; my sweet carcass, a thing accessory. Your pleasure will be my death, and then you'll canonise me perhaps? Ah, you have the plague, and you would give it to me. Go somewhere else, you brainless priest. Ah! touch me not," said she, seeing him about to advance, "or I will stab ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... conviction, that it was not worth a second thought, but this did not prevent him from thinking of it again and again. What manner of undertaker could hope to obtain business by giving away foolish handbills in the street? Really, the whole thing had the air of a brainless practical joke, yet his intellectual fairness forced him to admit that as far as the man who had given him the bill was concerned, brainlessness was out of the question, and joking improbable. There had been depths ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... refutes the notion that the doctrine of justification by faith encourages Antinomianism. Liberty does not mean licence. St. Paul was quite alive to the fact that skilful opponents and brainless admirers would misrepresent his doctrine, which was also Christ's. He therefore takes great pains to show that the connection between the righteousness of Christ and the righteousness of a Christian is not arbitrary or fictitious. ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... thy ambidextrous part, Nor always filch. It was but yesterday, Blundering, they nearly caught thee in the fact; None of thy balls had livers, and the guests, In horror, pierced their airy emptiness. Not even the brains were there, thou brainless hound! If thou art hired among the middling class, Who pay thee freely, be thou honourable! But for this day, where now we go to cook, E'en cut the master's throat for all I care; "A word to th' wise," and show thyself my scholar! There thou mayst filch and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... thy terrors. My fame is worse than my real character. I have wooed thee for reasons known to myself, and to be known soon to thee. Thou didst love Geordie Dempster; and thy love was weak indeed, if it is to be scared by brainless tongues or tongueless skulls. Wilt thou consent to be the lady of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... champagne than was good for him. Also, the general of Monaco had brought a pack of cards with him, and was spoiling the harmony by trying to induce Prince Ping Pong Pang to find the lady. And the brainless laugh of the ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life—production, politics, and education—rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... Nick was a brainless block, While those who've seen him waving His bright sharp razor, o'er scap'd chins, Declare he was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... wonder, more than wonderful, As if some monster sent from the Mogul, Some elephant from Africa, I had been, Or some strange beast from the Amazonian Queen. As buzzards, widgeons, woodcocks, and such fowl, Do gaze and wonder at the broad-faced owl, So did these brainless asses, all amazed, With admirable Nonsense talked and gazed, They knew my state (although not told by me) That I could scarcely go, they all could see, They drank of my beer, that to me was given, But gave me not a drop to make all ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... abnormally big without the slightest suggestion of being either too big or awkward. He's simply magnificent. Most men of that size are just leggy and gawky: he is neither. Again, other men built as he, are usually rather brainless and weak, or probably made so much of by women that they become wrapped up in themselves, and are always expecting admiration. Alymer Hermon has the freshness of a delightful boy, with the fine face and courtly manners of a charming man. If you can't ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... dress-maker knew how, and looked up to show her fine eyes, and down to show her long eye-lashes, and held up her dress and hopped over little imaginary puddles, to show her pretty feet; and smiled to show her white teeth; and danced to show her fine form—and was as brilliant and as brainless as a butterfly. ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... betted on his brother's riding, as though he had the Bank of England at his back. Indeed, save that the lad had the hereditary Royallieu instinct of extravagance, and, with a half thoughtless, half willful improvidence, piled debts and difficulties on this rather brainless and boyish head, he had much more to depend on than his elder; old Lord Royallieu doted on him, spoilt him, and denied him nothing, though himself a stern, austere, passionate man, made irascible by ill health, and, in his fits of anger, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... away the restless, careworn, sorrowful look which was fast becoming habitual, and now, at twenty-six, Edith St. Claire was pronounced by the world the most strikingly beautiful woman of her age. Poets had sung of her charms, artists had transferred them to canvas; brainless beaux, who would as soon rave about a married woman as a single one, provided it were the fashion so to do, had stamped them upon their hearts; envious females had picked them all to pieces, declaring her too tall, too black, too hoydenish to be even pretty; while little Dick ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... of a baneful habit on which I scarce can bring my tongue to dwell. (The Stage darker; blind at back illuminated.) Oh, CONRAD, there are children—think of it!—so lost to every sense of decency that, in mere wantonness or brainless sloth, they obstinately suck forbidden thumbs! (CONRAD starts with irrepressible emotion.) Forgive me if I shock your innocence! (Sadly.) Such things exist—but soon shall cease to be, thanks to the measure ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... those walls where Folly holds her throne, And laughs to think Monroe would take her down, Where o'er the gates, by his famed father's hand, Great Cibber's brazen brainless brothers stand, One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye. The cave of Poverty and Poetry. Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, Emblem of music caused by emptiness. Hence bards, like ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... and demanded honesty, and honesty was there. The enormous majority of decent people woke from a discontented apathy and took charge. Men sprang into place naturally and served the nation. The old log-rolling, brainless, greedy public officials were thrown into the junk-heap. As if by magic the stress of the war wrung out the rinsings and the scourings and left ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... asked Carlyle, what was the secret of success. His reply was, "Energy; whatever you undertake, do it with all your might." Had it not been for the possession of energy, I might now have been working as a servant for some brainless fellow who might be able to command my labour with his money, or I might have been yet toiling in chains and slavery. But thanks to energy, not only for my being to-day in a land of freedom, but also ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... a higher order and exercise of power than to strike out in a way and with a stock entirely new. And so the absorbing, quickening, creative efficacy of Shakespeare's genius is best seen in this, that, taking the Drama as it came to his hand, a thing of unsouled forms and lack-lustre eyes, all brainless and meaningless, he at once put a spirit into it, tempered its elements in the proportions of truth, informed its shapes with grace and virtue, and made it all alive, a breathing, speaking, operative power. ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... don't know anything, Little Brick," he said, "at least tell me what you think: and don't be too learned; remember I'm only a brainless fellow." ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don't flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... and brainless, Alden. I can't imagine a boy like my Joey falling in love with a woman like that. He ought to know better. Just ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... Nora had made in the years of her sojourn at Tunbridge Wells. They had little in common beyond the fellow-feeling that binds those in bondage. Miss Pringle was also a companion. Her task mistress, Mrs. Hubbard, was in Nora's opinion, about as stolidly brainless as a woman could well be. Miss Pringle was always lauding her kindness. But then Miss Pringle had been a companion to various rich women for thirty years. Nora had her own ideas as to the value of the opinions of any woman who had been in ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... Mr Pilkington. "We feel that the time has come when the public is beginning to demand something better than what it has been accustomed to. People are getting tired of the brainless trash and jingly tunes which have been given them by men like Wallace Mason and George Bevan. They want a certain polish. . . . It was just the same in Gilbert and Sullivan's day. They started writing at a time when the musical stage had reached a terrible depth of ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... Dahlia had sprung from altogether another. He could not help imagining the sort of appearance she would make there; and the thought even was a momentary clog upon his tongue. How he used to despise these people! Especially he had despised the young men as brainless cowards in regard to their views of women and conduct toward them. All that was changed. He fancied now that they, on the contrary, would despise him, if only they could be aware of the lingering sense he entertained of his being in bondage under a sacred ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cares of the household; your brother has suspended his studies for his approaching examination, and your elder sister her labours at the East End—on purpose to devote our combined intelligence to the subject. And are we to be told that we are no better than the brainless multitude who speculate on horse-racing! I am not angry, my child, I am only—(Enter ROBERT, the Page, with a paper in a postal wrapper.) Tiddler's Miscellany—ha, at last! Why didn't you bring it up before, Sir? You must have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... miracles ever occur is a question of common sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any final physical experiment. One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions" in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are asking whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous to insist that it shall ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... is supreme. When we cease toadying to brainless nabobs, and quit imitating them as soon as we get the money, we will be on the road to reformation. As it is, most poor people are just itching to live as the rich do. The average servant-girl who gets married quits work ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... as you call it—pouf!" said the Russian scornfully. "Carnes, a brainless fool who does only as you tell him, a few half-wits in the Bureau of Standards, some of them already in my pay, and one renegade girl. She shall learn what it means to betray the ...
— The Great Drought • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... idlers and listen to stuffy stories from stuffier individuals? Do you think that stale tobacco smoke, and the idiotically reiterated click of billiard balls, and the vacant stare of the fashionably brainless, and the meaningless exchange of banalities with the intellectually aimless ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... to me clearly: both removed their cloaks, and there was 'the Varens,' shining in satin and jewels,—my gifts of course,—and there was her companion in an officer's uniform; and I knew him for a young roue of a vicomte—a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely. On recognising him, the fang of the snake Jealousy was instantly broken; because at the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... daughter, why this solemn aspect? I have glad news for thee. Thou knowest of old The weary jealousies, the bloody feuds, Which 'twixt our Cherson and her neighbour City Have raged ere I was born—nay, ere my grandsire First saw the light of heaven. Both our States Are crippled by this brainless enmity. And now the Empire, now the Scythian, threatens Destruction to our Cities, whom, united, We might defy with scorn. Seeing this weakness, Thy father, wishful, ere his race be run, To save our much-loved Cherson, ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... of the geese who saved the Capitol," he said, "a brainless man obsessed with one idea. It is queer how often these fanatics discover the truth. That reminds me," he added, taking a small memorandum book from his waistcoat pocket and glancing it through. "His Grace has a meeting to-night at the Holborn Town Hall. I ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... asses and the brainless women belonging to a certain West End set, sir," said Kerry savagely. "They go in for every monstrosity from Buenos Ayres, Port Said and Pekin. They get up dances that would make a wooden horse blush. They eat hashish ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... mount in a manner which could only bring ruin and disaster upon a minister of the gospel who throughout a protracted career of usefulness had sapped his intellectual manhood in the useless effort to support in silly idleness a family of brainless and maddening fools. Miss Alicia had heard her character, her unsuccessful physical appearance, her mind, and her pitiful efforts at table-talk, described in detail with a choice of adjective and adverb which had broken into terrified fragments ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... bald head, his diminutive stature, his ample pot-belly, and ampler nose, was a man of fine feelings. Nature was outraged when he became a barber. He most assuredly was never destined by her to shave beards, and manufacture perukes for heads more brainless, many of them, than his own blocks. He ought to have been a professor of metaphysics or logic in some famous university, such as Heidelburg, Gottingen, or Glasgow;—but why lament over cureless evils? ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... permit this thing in pantaloons and whiskers, this brainless, un-ideaed cub, whom a thousand years will not suffice to lick into a bear, longer to impose upon your good-natures? If so, we shall conclude you have lost all of that spirit so characteristic of true ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... generally be, a trial of the candy on the first premonitory symptoms of a cough or influenza. The degree to which this system of advertising has since been carried has rendered it a bore and a nuisance. The usual result of almost any great and original achievement is, the production of a shoal of brainless imitators, who ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... whiskey-faced coachman half-asleep in a great hammercloth, be sure it belongs to some snob who has not a sentence of good English in his head. Yes! perhaps a soap-chandler, an oil-dealer, or a candy-maker. Brainless people always creep into plush-always! People of taste and learning, like me, only are entitled to liveries and crests." This Madame says, inviting her guests to take seats at her banquet-table, at the head of which ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... is it but folly to sit up night after night, until the small hours of the morning, waltzing with brainless young men?" ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... to think of a magter deprived of his symbiote," she said. "If his system can stand the shock, I imagine there will be nothing left except a brainless hulk. This is one series of experiments I don't care to witness. I rest secure in the knowledge that the Nyjorders will find the most ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... We are living a simple and brainless life. No field-days, of course, and for this relief much thanks. We don't know in the least what is happening. Troops come and troops go, and guns go by during the night, and Red Cross waggons go hither and thither, and ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... appreciated. Mendelssohn, for instance, was rather repelled than attracted by it; at any rate, in his letters there are to be found frequent expressions of antipathy to Chopin's music, which seemed to him" mannered "(see letter to Moscheles of February 7, 1835). But even the heartless and brainless critic of the Musical World whose nonsense I quoted in Chapter XXXI. admits that Chopin was generally esteemed by the "professed classical musicians," and that the name of the admirers of the master's compositions was legion. To the early popularity ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... The brainless families of representative men, must of course monopolise attention, if all the rest went to eternal perdition, and what does it matter how vexedly a fellow tugs his moustache over the insipid drawl ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... silly bird of waddling gait On a common once was bred, And brainless was his addle pate As the stubble on which he fed; Ambition-fired once on a day He took himself to flight, And in a castle all decay He nestled out of sight. "O why," said he, "should mind like mine "Midst gosling-flock be lost? "In learning I was ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... at this brow, furrowed with the folds of idle learning! Aim at this liberty cap, which trembles on the brainless head before every breath from the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hang some of them. But you can't touch me with the law. 'Tis me that's a crippled creature of circumstance, too weak to raise a hand against any man—a feather blown about by the windy contention of men strong in their back an' brainless in ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... Desdemony, in fact, don't have to git the water to wash her own hands with. But a low cuss named Iago, who I bleeve wants to git Otheller out of his snug government birth, now goes to work & upsets the Otheller family in the most outrajus stile. Iago falls in with a brainless youth named Roderigo & wins all his money at poker. (Iago allers played foul.) He thus got money enuff to carry out his onprincipled skeem. Mike Cassio, a Irishman, is selected as a tool by Iago. Mike was ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... hard for some of our friends to realize that the silly gossip and idle curiosity which so entirely fill the lives of the brainless majority on earth can have no place in the more real life of the disciple; and so they sometimes enquire whether, even without any special wish to see, a clairvoyant might not casually observe some secret which another person was trying to keep, in the same way as ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... the annals of this earth of ours have taught us, it seemed written in the book of the world's destinies that Germany was bound to win. It was not only, as we are too ready at the first glance to believe, the megalomania of an autocrat drunk with vanity, the gross vanity of some brainless buffoon; it was not the warlike impulses, the blind infatuation and egoism of a feudal caste; it was not even the impatient and deliberately fanned envy and covetousness of a too prolific race close-cramped on ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... are not becoming from any one, and certainly not from me. Besides," she added, a little bitterly, at the thought of such a brainless, frivolous girl as Addie Marchmont enchaining a man like Harcourt, "people do not get their ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... stood shrinking against the cutbank with his hands pressed to his face. He was blubbering openly, the sound issuing from between the crushed lips in a low-pitched, moaning tremolo—a disgusting sound, coming from a full-grown man—like the pule of a brainless thing. ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... pampas in the extreme north of the Argentine Republic, where Bolivia, the Argentine, Paraguay and Brazil unite, was the place of sacrifice. Thousands of acres, white with the bones of those whom the monsters had engulfed. Brainless, devoid of intelligence, sightless, because even the sense had not become differentiated in them, yet by some infernal instinct the Earth Giants had become aware that this was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... are designated the members of the Indian Civil Service by lesser mortals, such as army officers—who in return are contemptuously termed "brainless military popinjays" ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... examinations have revealed, bound up in four packages and either replaced in the cavity of the stomach or laid in four vases beside the mummy. It is absurd to attribute, without clear cause, to an enlightened people the belief that these stacks of brainless, eviscerated mummies, dried and shrunken in ovens, coated with pitch, bound up in a hundredfold bandages, would ever revive, and, inhabited by the same souls that fled them thirty centuries before, again walk the streets of Thebes! Besides, a third consideration demands notice. By the theory of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... compared me to many obnoxious things, but never till tonight have I been called a crocodile. Possibly Mr. Randolph has been reading of the crocodiles recently dissected at Paris. It has been discovered that they are almost brainless, and, being without reason, are probably animated by a violent instinct of destruction. I believe, however, that the power of their ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... for a plain man like me. Tush! that is the trader's thought all over. Have I brought no fresher feeling out of my fair village-green? Would it not be sweet to work for her, and rise in life, with her by my side? And these girls of the city, so prim and so brainless!—as well marry a painted puppet. Sibyll! Am I dement? Stark wode? What have I to do with girls and marriage? Humph! I marvel what Marmaduke still thinks of her,—and ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... everybody seems to know all about it, there's no need to try to keep it dark. The old boy turfed me out, Bertie, because he said I was a brainless nincompoop. The idea was that he would give me a remittance on condition that I dashed out to some blighted locality of the name of Colorado and learned farming or ranching, or whatever they call it, at some bally ranch or farm or whatever it's called. I didn't fancy the idea a bit. I should have ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... hold her," said Holmes. "Don't pay any attention to the other one, of course. We've nothing to do with her, and we don't want to be bothered by her. She's a silly, brainless little thing, anyway." ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... the fluctuating determination of the young, went to bed that night fully resolved that he would not quit a good job just because untoward circumstance compelled him to herd with a bunch of brainless clowns. He, who had a definite aim in life, would not permit that aim to be turned aside because various and sundry roughneck punchers thought it was funny to go around yelping like a band of coyotes. Mary V, too—he did not neglect to include ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... The sweet constancy and gentle fortitude of a Beatrice and a Mellida remain in the memory more clearly, leave a more life-like impression of truth on the reader's mind, than the light-headed profligacy and passionate instability of such brainless and blood-thirsty wantons as Franceschina and Isabella. In fact, the better characters in Marston's plays are better drawn, less conventional, more vivid and more human than those of the baser sort. Whatever of moral credit may be due to a dramatist who ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... English! over this the brainless loons That cannot spell Esaias from St. Paul, Make themselves drunk and mad, fly out and flare Into rebellions. I'll have their bibles burnt. The bible is the priest's. Ay! fellow, what! Stand staring at ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... of the second floor were illumined: she was up there. Doing what? Sharply then he realized what a partial life she led, the decayed middle-class associates of the boarding-house, tired, brainless, and full of small talk, the lonesome evenings, the long days. He became more agitated, and climbed the stoop, unlocked his way into the house, went up the dim, soft, red-cushioned stairs, past the milky gas-globe in the narrow hall, and ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... Pavlovian response. mimicry, aping (imitation) 19. moron, imbecile, idiot; fool &c 501; dumb animal; vegetable, brain dead. Adj. unendowed with reason, void of reason; thoughtless; vegetative; moronic [Sarc.], idiotic [Sarc.], brainless [Sarc.]. Adv. instinctively, like Pavlov's dog; vegetatively. V. mimic, ape (imitate) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... guilders are we out of pocket," cried both these great men. "Was ever such a brainless ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before seen a woman. Caliban becomes the most sordid of clowns, and is allotted a sister, Milcha, who apes his coarse buffoonery. Ariel, too, is given a female associate, Sycorax, together with ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... move a further doubt, And as for York's part allege an elder right: O brainless heads that so run in and out! When length of time a state hath firmly pight, And good accord hath put all strife to flight, Were it not better such titles still to sleep Than all a realm about the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... haps to be got Which after proves an idiot When folk perceive it thriveth not, The fault therein to smother, Some silly, doting, brainless calf That understands things by the half, Say that the Fairy left this oaf And ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... writers, we say, find that the native is a creature something more than a monkey but much less than a man, an anthropoid, dull-witted, stupid, timid, dirty, cringing, grinning, ill-clothed, indolent, lazy, brainless, immoral, etc., etc. ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... the sham conventionalities current with society girls. I could stand anything better than that. I am in earnest; I have always been in earnest; and I saw from the first, through all your light, graceful disguises, that you were not a shallow, brainless, heartless creature,—that a noble woman was waiting to be wakened in your nature. Give me time; give yourself time. This is not a little affair that can be rounded off according to the present code of etiquette; it ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... compliment to Mr. Sinclair, for Dr. Lambert was rather severe on the young men of the day. "I don't know what has come to them," he would remark irritably; "young men nowadays call their father 'governor,' and speak to him as though he were their equal in age. There is no respect shown to elders. A brainless young puppy will contradict a man twice his age, and there is not even the same courtesy shown to the weaker sex either. I have heard young men and young women—young ladies, I suppose I ought to say—who address each other in a 'hail-fellow-well-met' sort of ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive,—to be fitted with a colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaides might not keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to ramble brainless in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal, perceptions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have often cost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out of a man, fret, wear, worry him,—to ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... repercussions and reporter. The kingdom yields not such another man; Wonder of men he is; the player can And bookseller prove true, if they could know Only one drop, that drives in such a flow. Are they not learned beasts, the better far Their drossy exhalations a star Their brainless admirations may render; For learning in the wise sort is but lender Of men's prime notion's doctrine; their own way Of all skills' perceptible forms a key Forging to wealth, and honour-soothed sense, Never exploring truth or consequence, ...
— English Satires • Various
... cantos,—an imitation, in manner, of Goldsmith's "Double Transformation." The title is happy. The decline of Miss Harriet Simper from bellehood to an autumnal marriage, in Canto III., is more tiresome than the progress of Tom Brainless from the plough-tail to the pulpit, in Canto I. The Reverend Mr. Brainless, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... lot. It may be that in a crowded assemblage of wealth and fashion she may see one of her masterpieces in the dress-making art, torn into shreds under the clumsy heel of a Cabinet Minister, or a Duchess may speak unkindly in her hearing of her latest devices in floral decoration. Or, some brainless nincompoop may, in his ignorance of her profession, cast aspersions on the general character and behaviour of all who keep shops. And it may be that friends, after a prolonged period of non-payment, will desert her, and speak ill of her business. But she will be able ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... columns nothing eternal was ever evinced. Everywhere exist these agents of custom and convention, wielded by a power behind them, and holding long no one direction, but varying in every wind. Some breeze of general policy, however, prescribes the law of these alterations, while only a weak and brainless sensibility, blowing from every source, commonly occasions the continual veering of our private word. Through what manifold phases a good conversationist has dexterity to pass! Quarterings of the uncertain moon, the lights ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... brainless, blind creature concealed within the body. He was helped by the somatically-generated radar it employed to steer it past obstacles. When he came to the Rue des Nues, he slowed it down to a trot. There was no use ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... merely to be near her. To this very day an attack of indigestion will always recreate her image in my mind. Another was a thin, sallow girl, but with magnificent eyes, I met one afternoon in the South Kensington Museum. She was a brainless, vixenish girl, but the memory of her eyes would always draw me back to her. More than two- thirds of our time together we spent in violent quarrels; and all my hopes of eternity I would have given to make her my companion for life. But for Luck, in the shape of a well-to-do ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... the matter. If it would hate me, I could bear it. If it would attack me, if it would try to do me some dreadful harm, I should become a man again. I should be braced to fight against it. But this gentleness, this abominable solicitude, this brainless worship of an idiot, persistent, sickly, horribly physical, I cannot endure. What does it want of me? What would it demand of me? It nestles to me. It leans against me. I feel its touch, like the touch of a feather, trembling about my heart, as ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... at her, utterly at a loss. He did not begin to grasp what she meant. To him she was just "fickle woman" always changing her mind. He had, all his life, generalized about woman; he had never known a woman who was not rather vapid, rather brainless; he had the same idea of women as Professor Kraill had ventilated in his lectures—that they were the vehicles of the race, living for the race but getting all the fun they could out of the preliminary canter, since the race was a rather strenuous, rather joyless thing for them. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... dickens with your city Where they herd the brainless brats, On a range so badly crowded There ain't room to cuss the cat. This life is not so sumptuous, I'm not longing for a change, For there is no place so homelike As a cow ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... baffling the inquisitor, foreseeing his wiles by intuition, evading his masked pitfalls by instinct. She was terribly afraid of him, yet more afraid of herself, afraid that she would break down and become a brainless, weeping thing. It was the sincerity of her fight against this weakness that made her so dangerous to the prosecuting attorney. He wanted to compel her to admit that her son had confessed his deed to her. She sought to avoid this ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... boy then—was mad on card-playing at that time. And I was real worried about him. I knew he would get into a hole sooner or later, and I begged my surly Englishman to keep an eye on him. Oh, I was a fool! I was a brainless, chattering fool! And I'm not much better ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Marcus Ordeyne, sit by watching her, a most contented philosopher of forty. A dingo dog could not be so contented. That young fellow, I unhesitatingly assert, must be the most brainless of his type. I suffer fools gladly, as a general rule, but if I see much of this one I shall ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... unknown! What tho' a brainless rout Usurp the sacred title of the Bard— What tho' the chilly wide-mouth'd chorus From Styx or Lethe's oozy Channel croak: So was it, Peter, in the times before us When Momus throwing on his Attic cloak Romp'd with the Graces and each tickled Muse ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the Channel into Life, for which they had been prepared by a course of lectures on the Dangers of Paris. There also went the confidential secretaries, the clerks and shorthand typists, in their hundreds; degreeless, brainless beings, but wise in ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... knights of the olden time, storm heaven and earth because my wife has a lover. I am a philosopher. For a noble wife, who had made me happy in her love, I might perhaps feel and act differently. I, however, married a heartless fool, and it would have been mad folly to risk my life with a brainless ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... for intellectual brilliance, it's the British Army! Do you think it's a refuge for fools? Do you think any born imbecile is good enough to outwit the German Headquarters Staff? Do you think the lives of hundreds of his men—and perhaps the fate of thousands—can be entrusted to any brainless ass? An officer can't have too much brains. We're clamouring for brains. It's the healthy, brilliant-brained men like Randall that the Army's yelling for—simply yelling for," I repeated, bringing my hand down on the arm of ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... many of her simple companions, whom she despises as weaklings, succeed from the very simplicity with which they follow the instinctive sagacity of pure and honest feeling. Colonel Rawdon Crawley, a brainless sensualist, whom Becky marries, and in some degree reforms, but who, by having an occasional twinkle of genuine sentiment in his heart, always was her superior, is drawn both with a breadth and a nicety of touch which is rare in such delineations. The exact amount of humanity ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... "That brainless Skeet Wigglesworth!" ejaculated T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., who, arrayed like a lily of the field, reposed his splinter-structure on the bench with his comrades. "In some way, he managed to miss that train from Baltimore! ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... such a supposition; upon which the comment of some foolish critic is," The sharpness of the satire is said to have stung the man so much that he never forgave it. "We have heard of the sting in the tail atoning for the brainless head; but in this doggerel the tail is surely as stingless as the head is brainless. For, 1st, Ten in the Hundred could be no reproach in Shakspeare's time, any more than to call a man Three-and-a-half-per-cent. in this present year, 1838; except, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... perpendicular, vertical, plumb, erect, upright. Strange, singular, peculiar, odd, queer, quaint, outlandish. Strong, stout, robust, sturdy, stalwart, powerful. Stupid, dull, obtuse, stolid, doltish, sluggish, brainless, bovine. Succeed, prosper, thrive, flourish, triumph. Succession, sequence, series. Supernatural, preternatural, superhuman, miraculous. Suppose, surmise, conjecture, presume, imagine, fancy, guess, think, believe. Surprise, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... journeying from here to Hades, I am also, nat-u-rally, a prodid- Gious favorite with all the pretty ladies. I know nothing, but say a mighty deal; My elevated nose, likewise, comes handy; I stalk around, my great importance feel— In short, I'm a brainless ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... born without heads; they just have necks that grow up and are covered with hair. These brainless mollusks are now telling the people that the Sultan of Sulu is to capture Texas and that Japan is to invade Indianapolis; Germany is to capture Quebec, and France is ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... and disgusted at this woman. Oh, how she longed to tell her something that she would not soon forget. How she was tempted to place Jasper and Sammie side by side and compare them; the one an insignificant, brainless, useless, overdressed nincompoop; the other a strong, self-reliant, masterful man, fighting against fate with face to the front and ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... ignoramus, the lethargic, the brainless, everything that savours of enthusiasm is a craze. The politician who throws himself heart and soul into a political contest is "off his head," is seized with a craze. The philanthropist who builds and endows ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... paintings, from a daub of yellow mud, to the great works which now adorn the galleries of the world. I saw also their sculpture, from the rude god with four legs, a half dozen arms, several noses, and two or three rows of ears, and one little, contemptible, brainless head, up to the figures of to-day—to the marbles that genius has clad in such a personality that it seems almost impudent to ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... But it is a new skull. Almost I fancy at times that there is life lurking in the eyeless sockets, where the red firelight from the pitch-weighted logs plays in grewsome flashes; and I fancy, too, that in the brainless cavities of the skull there must still be some of the old passion, stirred into spirit life by the very madness of this night. A hundred times I have been sorry that I kept the thing, but never more ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... temptation: "Thou hast heard," would Satan say, "a voice proclaimed in the air, that Thou wast the beloved Son of God, in whom His soul was pleased; but mayst Thou not be judged more than mad, and weaker than the brainless fool if Thou believest any such promise? Where are the signs of His love? Art Thou not cast out from comfort of all creatures? Thou art in worse case than the brute beasts, for every day they hunt for their prey, and the earth produces grass ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... to her. She first frightened me by remarking that duels were the pastime of brainless young men. Her next remark, in answer to my repeated attempts to shield my antagonist from a capital charge: 'But only military men and Frenchmen fight duels!' accompanied by a slightly investigating glance of timid surprise, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... forgotten or ever ceased to practise, and combining their hosts of slaves, lashed them onward to scare this stranger, Freedom, from the earth, even as in our times of intelligence they have done, and will do; and the brainless slaves, so lashed, shouted and went forward to the murderous work which rivetted their own fetters, even as in our time they have done, and will again do in times ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... There are so many lonely things in the universe! And it seems to me that the loneliest are always the loveliest and grandest. It is only stupid ephemera that are gregarious. Worms crawl along in masses,—mites swarm in a cheese—flies stick in crowds on jam—and brainless people shut themselves up all together within the walls of a city. I'd rather be an eagle than a sparrow,—a star than one of a thousand bonfire sparks,—and as a mere woman, I would rather ten thousand times live a solitary life by myself till I die, than ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... her hand, her eyes looking steadily ahead, enthralled by the music. Suddenly she turned and looked squarely into his eyes, as if impelled by the magnetism they unconsciously employed. A little flush mounted to her brow as she quickly resumed her former attitude. Chase cursed himself for a brainless lout. ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... of my satires, say, What do you down at Pedum far away? Are you composing what will dim the shine Of Cassius' works, so delicately fine, Or sauntering, calm and healthful, through the wood, Bent on such thoughts as suit the wise and good? No brainless trunk is yours: a form to please, Wealth, wit to use it, Heaven vouchsafes you these. What could fond nurse wish more for her sweet pet Than friends, good looks, and health without a let, A shrewd clear head, a tongue to speak his mind, A seemly ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... happy chance I succeeded in parrying the stroke with the blow-pipe which I held in my left hand, and then, springing in upon him, I dealt him so tremendous a blow with my heavy, knotted, hard-wood club that his skull crashed under it like an egg-shell, and he fell a brainless corpse at my feet. ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... had an idea of how much she knows," he muttered. "Did I act like a brainless idiot when I ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... woods and meadows, with a garland on his head and a friend to set the pace; the scent of new leaves is upon them; they rejoice in the freshness of spring; over their heads the plane-tree whispers to the elm, perhaps the most glorious invitation to the brainless life that has ever ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... 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, luxury, faith, mockery; it is the heartless breast, the brainless cranium of the nineteenth century—the century so bedizened and scented, so revolutionary, so ill-read, so little worth, the century of brilliant phantasmagorias, of which in fifty years' time nothing will be seizable except Monsieur ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... by sustaining the President of the United States preparatory to his assault upon me. Now, sir, if he is a defender of the President of the United States, all I have to say is, God save the President from such an incoherent, brainless defender, equal in valor in civil and in military life. His military record—who has read it? In what volume of history is ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... rage. "I told you, you brainless slob, to leave Hanlon alone, and by Jupiter, I mean it! Cut it out! One more stunt, and you go into irons, then back to Sime for an interview with His Highness. You go back next trip anyway. ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... said about him. But since a woman is the creator, and one, moreover, with the well-won reputation of Miss STELLA CALLAGHAN, what is there to say? After all she must know. As a portrait of futility, Jacynth is the most mercilessly realistic thing that I have met for some time. Pretty, brainless, egotistical, utterly unable ever to understand even the least of the men who loved her—this was Jacynth. The picture is so unsparing that (though I am not calling the book a masterpiece or free ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... eminence of an unapproachable historical axiom. That no statement coming from our quarters can ever hope to be given consideration so long as it has to be supported on the ruins of reigning hobbies, whether of an alleged historical or religious character. Yet pleasant it is, after the brainless assaults to which occult sciences have hitherto been subjected—assaults in which abuse has been substituted for argument, and flat denial for calm inquiry—to find that there remain in the West some men who will come into the field like philosophers, and soberly and fairly ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... speak of her in the same breath with that brainless beast of Balzac's, hang it all!" expostulated the champion. He turned eagerly to the Colonel. "Now you've seen her, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the course of organic evolution, we see the unfolding of a great drama, or tragedy, in which, for millions upon millions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless forms of life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during other millions upon millions of years, a savage carnival of huge bestial forms upon the land, amphibian monsters and dragons of the land and air, devouring ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... I've noticed is that if anyone listens to you readily and takes your pamphlets at once, he is sure to be of an undesirable, brainless sort. Or you may chance upon some frightfully talkative individual who can do nothing but keep on repeating some favourite expression. One such nearly drove me mad; everything with him was "production." No matter what you said to him he came out with his "production," damn him! ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... small deposits that were meant for brains. Yet the proud fabric in the morning's sun Stands all unconscious of the mischief done; Still the red beacon pours its evening rays For the lost pilot with as full a blaze,— Nay, shines, all radiance, o'er the scattered fleet Of gulls and boobies brainless at its feet. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... father is one of those brainless fools who imagine every one must bend the knee to them. What rank does he occupy ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... now in wind-swept bleak Japan as our sore throats we muffle, We see thy senseless pudding face and irritating shuffle; As you go slopping thro' the streets of your foul-smelling city, You're far too common to be rare, too brainless to be witty. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... hath done like Caesar. Fair and just Is his award, against these brainless creatures. 'Tis not the wholesome sharp morality, Or modest anger of a satiric spirit, That hurts or wounds the body of the state; But the sinister application Of the malicious, ignorant, and base Interpreter; who will ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... extract, "you come to your senses and give me my freedom ... I am going with a man of parts who knows how to give a woman the attentions she craves, and is himself glad to shake off a young chit of a wife who is too brainless to appreciate him." ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not practise it:—However much thou art read in theory, if thou hast no practice thou art ignorant. He is neither a sage philosopher nor an acute divine, but a beast of burden with a load of books. How can that brainless head know or comprehend whether he carries on his back a ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... for the pacification of the unreasonable contentions of Poland. I have to do there with brainless heads, each of which, instead of contributing to the common peace, on the contrary, throws impediments in the way of it by caprice and levity. My embassador has published a declaration adapted to open their eyes. But it is ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... point, nor was its position strengthened by her assertion (unsupported by Mrs. Markham), that she was directly descended from Queen Elizabeth. Consequently, it was trying to Mrs. Thursby—who, as every one knows, was one of the brainless Copleys of Copley—that Mrs. Alwynn, who in the lottery of marriage had drawn an honorable, should take precedence of herself. To obviate this difficulty, Mrs. Thursby, with the ingenuity of her sex, had at one time introduced ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... in binding and clasps, and everything but the text—that was illegible; a silk scarf from Benares; a gold chain from Delhi, six feet long or nearly; a Maltese necklace, a ditto in exquisite filagree from Genoa; English brooches, a trifle too big and brainless; apostle spoons; a treble-lined parasol with ivory stick and handle; an ivory card-case, richly carved; workbox of sandal-wood and ivory, etc. Mr. Lusignan's City friends, as usual with these gentlemen, sent the most valuable things. Every day one ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... brainless living child that sucks, cries, moves arms and legs, and distinguishes pleasure from displeasure, has indisputably an individuality, an ego. We must, then, of necessity admit two egos in the child that has ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... the brainless Robert Redmayne, brought his niece to spend her school holiday with him and I discovered in the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl a magnificent and pagan simplicity of mind, combined with a Greek loveliness of body that created ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... thing has the only reasoning mind in the mound. Look at those two guards at the door, for instance. There's no earthly need for them to keep guard as eternally as they do. We can't even move, let alone try to escape. They're utterly brainless, commanded to guard the entrance with their mandibles, and continuing to guard it accordingly although the ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... vouchsafe residence in the leaden gravity of any money-monger; in whose profession all serious subjects are concluded. But he that shuns trifles must shun the world; out of whose reverend heaps of substance and austerity I can and will ere long single or tumble out as brainless and passionate fooleries as ever panted in the bosom of the most ridiculous lover. Accept it, therefore, good Madam, though as a trifle, yet as a serious argument of my affection; for to be thought thankful for all free and honourable favours is a great ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... in zeal's bonnet, so Jurymen in haste! What are the claims of comfort, health, common-sense or taste, Compared with those of brainless Noise, our new evangelist, And the tow-row, tow-row, tow-row ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... moment she would have given worlds—had she possessed them—if she could but have dissociated herself from her brother-in-law's future altogether. Though she was an empty-headed, brainless kind of woman, she was not by nature a wicked one. Necessity had driven her into linking her fortunes with those of Sir Marmaduke. And he had been kind to her, when she was in deep distress: but for him she would probably have starved, for her beauty had gone and her career as an actress had been, ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... miles away," said her husband drily. "I don't think even William——" He rang up fiercely. "Confound these brainless police! Hallo! Any news? A boy and girl and supper for twenty can't disappear off the face of the earth. No, there had been no trouble at home. There probably will be when he turns up, but there was none before! ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... himself, in more ways than one. Though so really fret and independent, he prided himself in his songs on being a reactionist and a Jacobite—on persistent sentimental adherency to the cause of the Stuarts—the weakest, thinnest, most faithless, brainless dynasty that ever ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... That is his maddest dream. I have heard him boast of it to his friends—the brainless boys who alone look up to him—I have even heard him rave of it ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... two more in quick succession. There was no answer. He knocked again in precisely the same manner, and then a footstep sounded from within, and the door was flung open. "Fools!" growled Shluker in greeting, as they stepped inside and the door was closed again. "A pair of brainless fools!" ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... to bestow upon you the greatest of boons, namely to open up the Rhine, and bring back prosperity to Frankfort, which you brainless, cowardly merchants have allowed to slip through your fingers, blaming now the Barons, now the Emperor, now the Electors; censuring everybody, in fact, except the real culprits ... yourselves. You speak of the money as a favor, but it is merely an advance for a few ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... concise and lucid essay on a timely subject, reviewing ably the cause and responsibility of the present war. It is especially valuable at this season of incoherent peace discussion, for it explodes very effectively that vague, brainless "neutrality" which prompts certain pro-German pacifists to cry for peace before the normal and final settlement of Europe's troubles shall have been attained by the permanent annihilation of the Prussian military machine. "Twilight," by Chester Pierce Munroe, is a beautiful bit of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... devotes itself steadfastly to this end, and abjures extravagant aims. The genius, on the other hand, is at bottom a monstrum per excessum; just as, conversely, the passionate, violent and unintelligent man, the brainless barbarian, is a ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... by a barely human lout. The lout was free—the brainless, soulless bovine lout was free in God's beautiful world—and Ross-Ellison, soldier and gentleman, lay in a stone cell, and in quarter of an hour would dangle by the neck in a pit below a platform—perhaps suffering unthinkable agonies—who could ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... talked about men lowering themselves by marrying actresses. I was a guest at a supper-party last night at which an actress was present. And a more charming, sensible girl I never wish to meet. Not one of your silly, brainless chits who don't know the difference between lobster Newburg and canvas-back duck, and who prefer sweet champagne to dry. No, sir! Not one of your mincing, affected kind who pretend they never touch ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse |
