"Crudity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought this must be why the Lord seems to regard with so much indifference the many falsehoods uttered of and for him. When a man, he said, agonized to get into other hearts the thing dear to his own, the false intellectual or even moral forms in which his ignorance and the crudity of his understanding compelled him to embody it, would not render its truth of none effect, but might, on the contrary, make its reception possible where a truer presentation would stick ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... brought together in Jackson's work clearly suggests that at a very early period in human history, long before the ideas that found expression in the Osiris story had materialized, men entertained in all its literal crudity the belief that the external organ of reproduction from which the child emerged at birth was the actual creator of the child, not merely the giver of birth but also the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... good to be alive in this wonderful new world under these wonderful new conditions working out the age-old problem of right and wrong that had defied solution since time began! She did not mind the crudity. And if I am to be frank, she did not mind the rudity. It was not a boiled shirt-front, kid-glove world. In fact, at that moment she saw her hero stage driver shooting out tobacco squids at the innocent granolithic, which showed no target because so many other contributors ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... beautiful to me. The gaudy-coloured child and dog irritates me, I confess; but I have watched a grimy, inartistic personage, smoothing it affectionately with toil-stained hand, while eager faces crowded round to admire and wonder at its blatant crudity. It hangs to this day in its cheap frame above the chimney-piece, the one bright spot relieving those damp-stained walls; dull eyes stare and stare again at it, catching a vista, through its flashy tints, of the far-off land of art. Christmas Waits annoy me, and I ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... cat-calls at the smallest slip. Beneath it all she saw two people who understood each other as well as any two persons in the world. Did they understand each other so well that they could afford to trifle? She had an idea that their silences were eloquent, and that they might well be lavish of the crudity of speech. Oh, they pretended very well! The young girl found something admirable in the hard, polished surface which her aunt presented to the world: her rouge and her diamonds, her little bird-like air of living only in the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... life. Let him make him put what he has learned into a hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own, taking instruction of his progress by the pedagogic institutions of Plato. 'Tis a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed; the stomach has not performed its office unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it to concoct. Our minds work only upon trust, when ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... phenomenon to the best of my knowledge—and you know what my knowledge is—unprecedented and unique in the history of mankind; the arrival of a nation at an ultimate stage of evolution without having passed through the mediate one; the passage of the fruit, in other words, from crudity to rottenness, without the interposition of a period of useful (and ornamental) ripeness. With the Americans, indeed, the crudity and the rottenness are identical and simultaneous; it is impossible to say, as in the conversation of this deplorable young man, ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... clandestine. Mrs. Levitt was unique; irreplaceable. He couldn't think of any other woman who would be a suitable substitute. There was little Barbara Madden; she had been afraid of him; but his passions were still too young to be stirred by the crudity of a girl's fright; if it came to that, he preferred the reassuring ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... composite character of our American civilization, in which so many different nationalities are mingled, several of which maintain as long as possible their own language and customs, there is a certain crudity in the national life and a want of ripeness which as yet has prevented the development of what properly can be called an American school of musical composition. Almost all our composers have been educated in Germany, many of them at Leipsic, and their compositions do not differ in a striking ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... however, his rage passed all bounds, and it was only Paulina's tearful entreaties that induced him to continue to act as her agent, and not even her tears had moved him had not Paulina solemnly sworn that never again would she allow her blundering crudity to insert itself into the delicate finesse of Rosenblatt's financial operations. Thenceforward all went harmoniously enough, Paulina toiling with unremitting diligence at her daily tasks, so that she might make the monthly payments upon her house, ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... so that if he is theatrical here, it is not because he inevitably would be, given his chance. It is rather because he must, at all costs, make this climax of his story conclusively tell; and in order to do so he is forced to use devices of some crudity—for him they are crude—because his climax, his scene a faire, has been insufficiently prepared for. Becky, Rawdon, Steyne, in all this matter that has been leading up to the scene, have scarcely before been rendered in these immediate terms; and now ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... Billy said gloomily, "but the show would have started her arguing about this whole moving-picture proposition,—its crudity, and its tremendous sacrifice of artistic values, and so on ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... material—the trumpery things in the shops, the extreme bad taste of the dress of the women, the cheapness and baseness of every attempt at decoration in the cafes and railway-stations, the hopeless frivolity of everything that pretends to be a work of art—all this modern crudity runs riot over the relics of the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... with a sword to smite first, then argue if she can find time to do so. Sophocles' Clytemnestra is a woman, lost as soon as she begins to reason out her misdeeds. She prays to Apollo in secret, for fear lest Electra may overhear her prayer and make it void. But the crudity of Aeschylus' resources did not satisfy Sophocles, whose taste demanded a contrast to heighten the character of his heroine and found one in the Homeric story that Agamemnon had a second daughter. Aeschylus' stern ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... policy to be pursued by our friends is, to throw the weight of their interest into the scale of the popular party. For myself, I condescend to no dissimulation; nor do I at present see the party or the scheme that commands my full assent. In all alike there is crudity and confusion of ideas, and of all the twenty men who are my colleagues in the present crisis, there is not one with whom I do not find myself in ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Abner's dinner with the Whylands was that Medora, thus formulated by the sympathetic and appreciative Edith, now became definitely crystallized in his mind; the second was that he changed his boarding-house. Mere crudity for its own sake no longer charmed. The curtains and bedspreads at the farm had served as the earliest prompters to this step, and the furnishings of the Whyland interior now decided him to take it. Mrs. Cole's stained and spotted lambrequin ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... a few hours at Carcassonne; but those hours had a rounded felicity, and I cannot do better than transcribe from my note-book the little record made at the moment. Vitiated as it may be by crudity and incoherency, it has at any rate the fresh- ness of a great emotion. This is the best quality that a reader may hope to extract from a narrative in which "useful information" and technical lore even of the most general sort are completely absent. For Carcassonne is moving, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... was still, somewhere, alive, in the hope of being remunerated for her good news. It may be imagined with what sentiments toward his wife Benyon had emerged from this episode. To-night his memory went further back,—back to the beginning and to the days when he had had to ask himself, with all the crudity of his first surprise, what in the name of wantonness she had wished to do with him. The answer to this speculation was so old,—it had dropped so ont of the line of recurrence,—that it was now almost new again. Moreover, it was only approximate, for, as I have already said, he ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... University agreed with the ideals he had received in his long study of European methods and his personal experiences in German schools. He determined to make a real university in the West; he fixed his glance upon the opportunities for future development rather than the bareness and inevitable crudity of pioneer life. For the first time he found his cherished ideas embodied in the provision for a state university; and though he realized they had not been made effective, he believed that in the West, if anywhere, was his opportunity to put them into actual practice, unhampered by ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... observation in which they may seem to have originated. To those who regard them as grounded in some knowledge of history and of the present political and social condition of those nations, corrected and modified indeed by the personal observation aforesaid, their crudity and audacity will be somewhat less astounding. No one will doubt that other travelers in Europe have been far better qualified to observe and to judge than I was, yet I see and think, and am not forbidden ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... and a certain natural crudity; and what he lacked in experience and development she easily balanced with the extraordinary physical attraction that had never ceased to ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... 98, by the west wall, have an exhibit which shows that their march toward civilization includes well-grounded ambitions of art. Mentality, feeling, spirit, all reveal themselves in the canvases. Crudity is apparent, but it comes more from an untutored hand than from failure to grasp the significance of the subject. Many pictures are flamboyant, some are melodramatic, nearly all are big subjects handled with great boldness; ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... annoying that the lady in question should be young and pretty; for it was a sad proof of the crudity of human nature that the mere residence of a free man and a free woman under the same roof could not pass without comment among their friends. For himself it was a matter of no importance; and as for her, a woman who has her living to earn must often ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... have been, as it has been quite killed by the white marble which has been mixed with them. The glaring white marble in the floor of the presbytery has been inlaid with biblical scenes filled in with black cement. It is possible from the triforium to get a general idea of the crudity and tastelessness of the pavement, which is so composed and arranged that time—the softener of all things—can never make it look ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... beloved beyond all others, but reverenced also. The impression she received was of outrage, almost of blasphemy. The cruelty of life lay uncovered, naked and open to her appalled and revolted consciousness. She received a moral, in addition to a physical shock, utterly confounding in its crudity, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... realistic touches, slight though they are; (2) the non-emphasis of the comic possibilities of the situations; (3) the somewhat unsystematic arrangement of incidents, the third demand and exchange (iron rod for dead dog) not appearing to be an upward progression; (4) the crudity of invention displayed in this same third exchange (though an iron-picketed fence seems modern). My reasons for thinking our story not imported from the Occident are the differences in beginning, middle, and end between it and the European versions cited by Bolte-Polivka (loc. cit.). ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... and my vulgar spirit revolts. He's an aristocrat, through and through. He comes and hoists his flag over a place. I felt all yesterday as if I were a rather unwelcome guest in his house, you know. It's a stifling atmosphere. I can't breathe or speak, because I instantly feel myself suspected of crudity! The truth is that Gladwin thinks you can live upon light, and forgets that you ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of his heart and the crudity of his experience, Lenny Fairfield had conceived it probable that Mr. Stirn would address to him some words in approbation of his gallantry and in sympathy for his bruises, he soon found himself wofully mistaken. That truly great man, worthy prime minister of Hazeldean, might perhaps pardon a ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pedagogue's soul was even more unchanged than his body. The same hilarious atheism, the same dogmatic disbelief, the same conviction of human folly combined as illogically, as of yore, with schemes of perfect states: time seemed to have mellowed no opinion, toned down no crudity. He was coming, he said, to make a last hopeless call on his famous pupil, the others were working. The others—he explained—were his little Klaartje and his newest pupil, Kerkkrinck, a rich and stupid youth, but honest ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... following of models. And we shall seldom be very wide of the mark if in our estimation of youthful productions we place more reliance on their departures from what has been already done, than on their resemblances to the best artists. An energetic crudity, even a riotous absurdity, has more promise in it than a clever and elegant mediocrity, because it shows that the young man is speaking out of his own heart, and struggling to express himself in his own way rather than in the way he finds in ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... "Evenings on a Farm near the Dikanka (Veillees de l'Ukraine)," appeared early in the thirties, and, with all its crudity and excrescences, was a literary sunrise. It attracted immediate and wide-spread attention, and the wits of Petersburg knew that Russia had an original novelist. The work is a collection of short stories or sketches, introduced ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... and all effects in our complex modern State are complex, but in this particular matter there can be little doubt that the key to the difficulty lies in the crudity and simplicity of our method of election, a method which reduces our apparent free choice of rulers to a ridiculous selection between undesirable alternatives, and hands our whole public life over to the specialised manipulator. Our House of Commons could scarcely ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... total effect lacked convincingness. In Cleo all such characteristics were fused into her general magnificence; in Mary and Alice they seemed to exist at random, failing to give any sense of harmony, but only one of irritation. The airs and graces they assumed did but emphasise their crudity. It was, indeed, an illumining perception when it struck Morgan that their absurd movements and struttings and the queen-like way in which they tried to hold their heads bore a singular resemblance to the stage-gestures of "The Basha's ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... the Puritan world of the seventeenth century, and how a better state of things has grown out of it, we must endeavour to distinguish and define the elements of wholesome strength in that theocracy no less than its elements of crudity ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... Henry, in his absence, and invariably paid her partner at dinner, or the kind old lady who remembered her grandmother, the compliment of believing that there was meaning in what they said. For the sake of the light in her eager eyes, much crudity of expression and some untidiness of person were forgiven her. It was generally felt that, given a year or two of experience, introduced to good dressmakers, and preserved from bad influences, she would be an acquisition. Those elderly ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... from a score of others. Its counterpart might be found to this day in the parlour of any inn. A couple of china figures disfigured it, to be sure, but Mitchelbourne could not bring himself to believe that even their barbaric crudity had power to produce so visible a discomposure. He inclined to the notion that his companion was struck by a physical disease, perhaps some recrudescence of a malady contracted in those foreign lands of ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... head is one thing; the lady of Family who sits beside you at a boarding-house and discusses the weather and the journey is quite another. They were prepared to hear Mrs. Brice rail at the dirt of St. Louis and the crudity of the West. They pictured her referring with sighs to her Connections, and bewailing that Stephen could not have finished his course ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... visiting-cards indicates crudity. The trend of fashion is toward restricting the quantity of paste-board, and employing cards always when they are required, never when ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... instance, in the essay on Hallam, of the licence of the Restoration, seems to us a coarse and vulgar picture, whose painter took the most garish colours he could find on his palette, and then laid them on in untempered crudity. And who is not sensible of the vulgarity and coarseness of the account of Boswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a great writer ... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,' and so forth, in which the shallowness of the analysis ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... gentlemen," cried Nelly O'Neill, facing them in all the dazzle of her flesh and the crudity of her stage-paint, and her over-lustrous eyes, "don't mind me. Which of you is ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... method of business dealing involving an air of candor and almost primitive good nature—an American method—had attracted Captain Palliser's attention for some time. A certain Yankee rawness of manner played a part as a factor, a crudity which would throw a man off guard if he did not recognize it. The person who employed the method was of philosophical non- combativeness. The New York phrase was that "He jollied a man along." Immense schemes had been carried through in that way. Men in London, in ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... not be released because his remarks were painful to the feelings of his pious fellow townsmen. Now it happens that this very Home Secretary has driven many thousands of his fellow citizens almost beside themselves by the crudity of his notions of government, and his simple inability to understand why he should not use and make laws to torment and subdue people who do not happen to agree with him. In a word, he is not a politician, but a grown-up schoolboy who has at last got a cane in his hand. And as all the ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... insisted upon the acceptance of such dogmas. But this baneful cloud of ignorance and barbaric thought is gradually lifting, until even now the intelligent minds in the Church refuse to accept or teach the doctrine in its original crudity, they either passing it over in silence, or else dressing it in a more ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... poems as 'The West Wind' and 'The Cloud' is that, in the prose of the notes appended to 'Queen Mab', with their disquisitions on physiology and astronomy, determinism and utilitarianism, the scientific skeleton is explicit. These notes are a queer medley. We may laugh at their crudity—their certainty that, once orthodoxy has been destroyed by argument, the millennium will begin; what is more to the purpose is to recognise that here is something more than the ordinary dogmatism of youthful ignorance. There is a flow ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... coin, which was in his possession—scrawls of an animal and of a warrior, or of a cat and a goldfish, whichever be convenient—that they had been neither stamped nor engraved, but "looked as if etched with an acid." That is a method unknown in numismatics of this earth. As to the crudity of design upon this coin, and something else—that, though the "warrior" may be, by due disregards, either a cat or a goldfish, we have to note that his headdress is typical of the American Indian—could be explained, of course, but for fear that we might ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... work—is that of the Middle Ages, the early Gothic, because that is when the art became a considerable one in Europe. It is a time of romance, of chivalry, of deep religious feeling, and yet seems like the childhood of modernity. Is it the fault of crudity in pictorial art, or the fault of romances that we look upon those distant people as more elemental than we, and thus feel for them the indulgent compassion that a child excites? However it is, theirs is to us a simple time of primitive emotion and romance, and ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... money gathered so ruthlessly elsewhere was thrown about with a lavish hand. Nothing that wealth could provide was denied Mrs. Willoughby or her boy; and though she had been poor when she married, money, in the mere crudity of having it to spend, had long since lost its novelty. To-day, beyond the pride of having it, and beyond the luxury and ostentation it could buy, money possessed for her a far greater significance in its power to make one powerful. In that she had already tasted the illogical ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... had not the true spirit of romance in him. We meet our old acquaintances, the thinly disguised Vice and the rude clown of uncouth dialect, under the names of Subtle Shift and Corin; abstractions also reappear in Rumour and Providence. The crudity of the verse will be sufficiently illustrated in ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... torn it out of him had failed to destroy his life, to shatter his body. It was there unscathed. I stared at the broad line of his shoulders, his dark head, the amazing immobility of his limbs. At his feet the veil dropped by Miss Haldin looked intensely black in the white crudity of the light. He was gazing at it spell-bound. Next moment, stooping with an incredible, savage swiftness, he snatched it up and pressed it to his face with both hands. Something, extreme astonishment perhaps, dimmed my eyes, so that he seemed ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... but have produced a cleaner slate, she might by this time have pulled it off with Mr. French. Yes, he let her in that way sacrifice her honorable connection with him—all the more honorable for being so completely at an end—to the crudity of her plan for not missing another connection, so much more brilliant than what he offered, and for bringing another man, with whom she so invidiously and unflatteringly compared him, into her ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... only five notes left, thus I know there were five "Quills" in the set. I thought a tune played on a "Big Set" might be of interest and so I am giving one of those also. If there be those who would laugh at the crudity of "Quills" it might not be amiss to remember in justice to the inventors that "Quills" constitute a pipe organ in ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... learning—and this is more true of Europe than of America and was more true of the sixteenth than it is of the twentieth century—a classical education offers a man exceptional facilities for delicately impressing inferiors with their crudity. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... huge country carts piled with clothes, furniture, food, and pets. Frightened cows with heavy swinging udders were being piloted by lithe middle-aged women. There was one girl demurely leading goats. In the full crudity of curve and distinctness of line she might have sat for Steinlen,—there was a brownness, too, in the atmosphere. Her face was olive and of perfect proportions; her eyelashes long and black. She gave me a terrified side-glance, and ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... isn't that—more or less secretly? But whatever their secret, it was manifest to me that it was neither subtle nor profound. They were a good, stupid, earnest couple and very much bothered. They were that—with the usual unshaded crudity of average people. There was nothing in them that the lamplight might not touch without the ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... expressed. He who takes for his hypothesis the notion that it is the permanent form of the world is what I call a radical empiricist. For him the crudity of experience remains an eternal element thereof. There is no possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact. Real possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... him romantic and pleasing, in spite of its crudity. He detected in it the skilful hand of Pep and the grace of Margalida. He noticed the whiteness of the walls, the neatness of three chairs and of the deal table, all scrubbed by the daughter of his former tenant. Fish nets were draped upon the walls like tapestry; beyond hung the gun and a bag ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... least remarkable of his published visions is that in which he relates his journeys through the Astral Regions; his descriptions cannot fail to astonish the reader, partly through the crudity of their details. A man whose scientific eminence is incontestable, and who united in his own person powers of conception, will, and imagination, would surely have invented better if he had invented at all. The fantastic literature of the ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... dramatic criticism, it is "well made," and that is what makes it so thin, so bloodless, and so unprofitable to remember, in spite of its easy narrative and its "punch." Its success as literature, curiously enough for a new literature and a new race like ours, is limited, not by crudity, or inexpressiveness, but by form, by the very rigidity of its carefully perfected form. Like other patent medicines, it ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... perfect parade of all his teeth, in which it seemed to her she could read the disgust he didn't quite like to express at this departure from the pliability she had practically promised. But before she could attenuate in any way the crudity of her collapse he gave an impatient jerk which took him to the window. She heard a vehicle stop; Beale looked out; then he freshly faced her. He still said nothing, but she knew the Countess had come back. There was a silence again between them, but with a different shade of embarrassment ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... and that ripening of knowledge, taste, and character, which are summed up in culture, work finds its true interpretation. A man puts himself into his work in order that he may pass through an apprenticeship of servitude and crudity into the freedom of creative power. He discovers, liberates, harmonises, and enriches himself. Through work he accomplishes his destiny; for one of the great ends of his life is attained only when he makes ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... act is pure comedy of a kind to compare with the meeting in Ibsen's An Enemy of Society; the last act is melodrama with a large admixture of remarkably interesting social philosophy; the intervening acts betray the poet that always underlay the dramatist in Bjornson. The crudity, again, of the melodramatic appearance of the wraith of Clara's father in the third act, contrasts strangely with the mature thoughtfulness of much of the last act and with the tender charm of what has gone before: And—strangest incongruity of all in ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... fear of depreciating its value, I thought that bills issued similar to those in circulation in the Provinces, and lodged in a public bank in Europe, might be accepted as a pledge or deposit for money borrowed by the United States. I beg pardon for the crudity of the idea, and would not have mentioned it here, but that having hinted at it in general conversation, people thought it might, on ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... The horrible crudity, as we are fain to call it, of the notions thus rhetorically set forth must be obvious to every reader acquainted with the history of the rise and growth of states in general, however little attention he may ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... plan works—obviously, your extemporized words will lack somewhat of polish, but in such a pass crudity is better than failure. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein |
