"Dullness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is likely," snarled the usurer with a contemptuous sort of pity for his visitor's dullness of apprehension; "I say it is possible; and I like to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... on the mysterious confines of life and death. That tomb you led me to, of which I knew nothing—as I know nothing, or scarcely anything, concerning her whom it covers—brought back to me emotions which were unique in my life, and which seem in the dullness of that life like some light gleaming upon a dark road. The light recedes farther and farther away as the journey lengthens; I have now almost reached the bottom of the last slope; and, nevertheless, each time I turn to look back I see the glow as ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... is introduced, as at Zechariah i. 9, 19, by the Prophet's question of its meaning. His angelic teacher is astonished at his dullness, as indeed heavenly eyes must often be at ours, and asks if he does not know so familiar an object. The Prophet's 'No, my Lord,' brings full explanation. Ingenuously acknowledged ignorance never asks Heaven ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... their beasts and putting their effects in order, settling themselves in the different open rooms which look upon the square of the caravanserai. A dervish, and a story-teller too, was a great acquisition, after the fatigue and dullness of a journey across the Salt Desert; and when we had made a hearty meal he collected them on the square platform in the middle of the court, making them sit round, whilst he took his station in the midst. He then ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... and examining it with a new criticism. The attitude of "Pooh! Bah!" of Early Victorian times is no longer the mark of superiority. It is now, as it was then, the mark not only of ignorance but stupid dullness. The frame of mind which used to dismiss everything with the word "impossible" is now recognized not as science but ignorance. The researches of a Crookes, of a Sir Oliver Lodge, Myers, Gurney, Rochas, Gabriel Delanne, Lombroso, in the region of the occult command serious ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... merely a fact in the case, it is the whole case. Let me reinforce my weaker appeal by a passage from the wisest pen in contemporary English letters, that of Mr Chesterton. There is in his mere sanity a touch of magic so potent that, although incapable of dullness, he has achieved authority, and although convinced that faith is more romantic than doubt, or even sin, he has got himself published and read. Summarising the "drift" of Matthew Arnold, ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... gives an account of the original dispute over the Rehearsal. By the substitution of Cibber for Theobald as hero of the Dunciad, much of the satire lost its point. Cibber's faults certainly did not include dullness. A new edition contained a prefatory discourse, probably the work of Warburton, entitled "Ricardus Aristarchus, or the Hero of the Poem," in which Cibber is made to look ridiculous from his own Apology. Cibber replied in 1744 with Another Occasional Letter ..., and altogether he ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Persians are of a happy disposition and bright imagination, doubtless produced by the dry, clear air of their high tableland, which relieves from dullness and depression. They enjoy a joke and laugh heartily, and they are able to see that most things have their comic side. The late Shah was quick to show the merry look of appreciation when something amusing was said. At the Nauroz ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... the white forehead, had drawn forth his deepest pity, and roused him to some approach to tenderness. But with the occasion the feeling had passed; and the tenderness, born of so piteous a sight, returned no more. Her own dullness afterward deprived him even of the chance of finding her an agreeable companion. He saw that she was deeply melancholy. Yet what could he do? Even if he had wished it he could not have forced himself to love this woman, notwithstanding her devotion to himself. And this he did not ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... afraid," he said, as the hostess gave the signal for the ladies to rise, "you will long look back upon this dinner as one of unprecedented dullness." ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... of those which shall hereafter be the substitutes of the wretched resources of drinking, obscene conversation, and games of chance, to which men have had recourse that they might rouze their minds: being rather willing to suffer the extremes of misery than that dullness, and inanity, which ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... [wrote "Fiona Macleod"] has a vital and great part to play. We have a most noble ideal if we will but accept it. And that is, not to perpetuate feuds, not to try to win back what is gone away upon the wind, not to repay ignorance with scorn, or dullness with contempt, or past wrongs with present hatred, but so to live, so to pray, so to hope, so to work, so to achieve, that we, what is left of the Celtic races, of the Celtic genius, may permeate the greater race of ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Pandavas are about to become mad. If, O monarch, these thy brothers were in their senses, they would then have immured thee with all unbelievers (in a prison) and taken upon themselves the government of the earth. That person who from dullness of intellect acts in this way never succeeds in winning prosperity. The man that treads along the path of madness should be subjected to medical treatment by the aid of incense and collyrium, of drugs ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... such a word as 'teapoy'; it is NOT 'teapot' and it means a three-legged table. 'Dullness' was consistently spelled 'dulness' and is left thus. 'Decrepit' was consistently spelled 'decrepid' and is left thus. 'Dote, dotes,' etc. was consistently spelled 'doat, doats,' etc. and is left thus. 'License' is spelled once thus and once 'licence.' The word 'speciality' ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... much alone, as M. Fille had said to Judge Carcasson. Her spirits had moments of great dullness, when she was ready to fling herself into the river—or the arms of the schoolmaster or the farrier. When she first came to St. Saviour's, the necessity of adapting herself to the new conditions, of keeping faith with herself, which she had planned on the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... course of severe infections, is only preliminary, for as soon as the tissues of the body have become thoroughly saturated with the toxins, the nerves become dulled and semi-narcotized, so that they no longer respond with the pain-cry. As the patient settles down into the depression and dullness of the regular course of the fever, the headache usually subsides into little more than a sense of heaviness, or oppression ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... saloon there runs a code, the only possible code, the final code; and it is observed. If it is not observed, the infraction causes pain, distress. Another marked characteristic is its gigantic temperamental dullness, unresponsiveness to external suggestion, a lack of humour—in short, a heavy and half-honest stupidity: ultimate product of gross prosperity, too much exercise, too much sleep. Then I notice a grim passion for the status quo. This is natural. Let these people exclaim ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... late in life that man would arrive at the knowledge of God. The second reason is, in order that the knowledge of God may be more general. For many are unable to make progress in the study of science, either through dullness of mind, or through having a number of occupations, and temporal needs, or even through laziness in learning, all of whom would be altogether deprived of the knowledge of God, unless Divine things were brought to their knowledge under ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... Haywood. But a statement of high moral purpose from the author of "The Dunciad" was almost inevitably the stalking-horse of an unworthy action. Mr. Pope's reasons, real and professed, for giving Mrs. Haywood a particularly obnoxious place in his epic of dullness afford a curious illustration of his unmatched capacity ostensibly to chastise the vices of the age, while in fact hitting an opponent below ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... for study in his youth; a fact which grieved his father much. All efforts to induce him to become more studious failed; his brothers called him "the butcher's boy," as a term of reproach for his dullness; and finally, in anger, his father drove him ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... are to be seen hawking at insects; they are distinguishable from adults by the dullness of the plumage and the fact that the median tail feathers ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... opinion of any matter,—oftentimes the force of dullness can no farther go. You stand silent, incredulous, as over a platitude that borders on the Infinite. The man's Churchisms, Dissenterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, College Philosophies, Fashionable Literatures, are unexampled in this world. Fate's ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the tediousness of the voyage, and the dullness of her own circle, invited Ishmael and his party to spend the evening and play whist in the ladies' cabin—forbidden ground to all gentlemen who had no ladies with them, unless indeed they should happen, as in this case, ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... mind of Euripides; and hence that art which in Sophocles was learned in more miscellaneous and active circles, and moulded by a more powerful imagination, in Euripides often sickens us with the tricks of a pleader, the quibbles of a schoolman, or the dullness of a moralizing declaimer. But as, in the peculiar attributes and character of his writings, Euripides somewhat forestalled his age—as his example had a very important influence upon his successors—as he did not exhibit till the fame of Sophocles ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had reconciled herself long since to the dullness of her life-partner; he could not help it and she had willfully married him in the face of as imposing a phalanx of family and friendly opposition as ever attempted to stand between a girl and ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... the opinions of mankind," as well as common courtesy to great and friendly nations, required that sufficient time be given not only to Servia, but to the other nations, to concert for the common good, especially as the period was one of Summer dullness and many of the leading rulers and statesmen were absent from their ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... political and intellectual activity in this country, however, still exist as influential organs. The Quebec Gazette was, some years ago, merged into another Quebec paper—having become long before a memorial of the past in its appearance and dullness, a sort of Rip Van Winkle in the newspaper world. The Canadien has always had its troubles; but, nevertheless, it continues to have influence in the Quebec district, and the same may be said of the Journal de Quebec, though ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... no complaint now of Filippo's dullness. He soon learned all that the painter-monks could teach him, and as years passed on the prior would rub his hands in delight to think that here was an artist, one of themselves, who would soon be able to paint the ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... course; he thinks it would be out of order and tradition. So it would. And he's a long way keener on order and tradition than he is on spiritual progress. A born Pharisee, he is really, and yet with Christianity struggling in him here and there; and that's why he's rather interesting, in spite of his dullness. ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... the charged battery to generate the current. Interest begets interest. It is as contagious as whooping cough—if a class is exposed it is sure to catch it. The teacher who constantly complains of a dull class, very likely is simply facing a reaction to his own dullness or disagreeableness. "Blue Monday" isn't properly so named merely because of the drowsy pupil. The teacher inevitably sets the pace and determines the tone of his class. Many a teacher when tired, ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... absolute and unconcealed adoration was very natural; what innocent young creature could have resisted, in any circumstances, the charm and the devotion of such a man? But, in her situation, there was a special influence which gave a peculiar glow to all she felt. After years of emptiness and dullness and suppression, she had come suddenly, in the heyday of youth, into freedom and power. She was mistress of herself, of great domains and palaces; she was Queen of England. Responsibilities and difficulties she might have, no doubt, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... heiress, as in her father's, might be noted a shade of surprise at finding two gentlemen instead of one. But though the Count instantly perceived his superfluity, and though it had been his greatest ambition throughout his life to add no shade to the dullness with which he frequently complained that life was overburdened, yet his sense of obligation to his friend was so strong that he preferred to bore rather than desert. As the only compensation he could offer, ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... place I have considerably toned down the various exciting peculiarities of the original theory and have reduced it to a greater conformity with the older physics. I do not allow that physical phenomena are due to oddities of space. Also I have added to the dullness of the lecture by my respect for the audience. You would have enjoyed a more popular lecture with illustrations of delightful paradoxes. But I know also that you are serious students who are here because you really want to know ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... conferring with Baron Sonnino and the Premier. What were they offering? We know now that at this last moment of the eleventh hour Austria had wakened to the real gravity of the situation, and with Teutonic pertinacity and Teutonic dullness of perception made her first real offer—the immediate cession and occupation of the ceded territories she had set as her maximum, a thing she had refused all along to consider, insisting that the transfer be deferred to the vague settlement time of the "Peace." ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... confirmed invalid, and a widowed sister, Mrs. Holmes, the mother of those wonderful nephews and nieces whose ignorance on the subject of dirt-pies had so much impressed Emily Phillips. Brandon had always been very glad to go to see them, and to stay a short time, but the intolerable dullness of the place had always driven him back to London. Australians generally prefer a large town as a residence, and London most of all; for though their relatives in small country towns or rural neighbourhoods fancy that it must ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... haut-ton in London, and where little but names were to be found, to seek relief from the ennui that overpowered me, in a cider cellar! and have found there more food for speculation than in the vapid circles of glittering dullness ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... was doing. It was all very well for him, who was to spend only one day at Les Tourelles; but Vixen made up her mind that she would boldly avow her indifference to all creeds and all theologians, from Confucius to Swedenborg. She might consent to live for a time amidst the dullness and desolation of Les Tourelles, but she would not be weighed down and crushed by Miss Skipwith's appalling hobby. The mere idea of the horror of having every day to discuss a subject that was in its very nature inexhaustible, filled ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... religiosity, instead of the cheerful, real religion which, however formal, is the soul of the Rik. In the Br[a]hmanas there is no freshness, no poetry. There is in some regards a more scrupulous outward morality, but for the rest there is only cynicism, bigotry, and dullness. It is true that each of these traits may be found in certain parts of the Rig Veda, but it is not true that they represent there the spirit of the age, as they do in the Brahmanic period. Of this Brahmanic stoa, to which we now turn, the Yajur Veda forms ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... thinnest and most effective of all the coverings under which duncedom sneaks and skulks. Most of the men of dignity, who awe or bore their more genial brethren, are simply men who possess the art of passing off their insensibility for wisdom, their dullness for depth, and of concealing imbecility of intellect ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... cabman, who asked not a penny more than his fare; he departed with thanks; the facetious footman closed the door, told her to take a seat, and went away full of laughter, to report that the young person had brought a large library with her to enliven the dullness of ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... lobby to put on my snow boots and then—as is usually the case with me—my mind won. I thought of tea, crumpets and comfort. Oliver has gone without me, he simply bursts with health and extraordinary dullness. Personally I shall continue to ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... Stanton, joining her at the foot of the stairs, "I perceive, even from your manner of descending to our lower world, that you are destined to vanquish the dullness of this rainy day. Don't you ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... prefigurement, he might still wring from life a measure of the sharp pleasures of tempestuous youth and manhood; he might still dance to the piping of the senses. With Lettice in Greenstream he would rapidly sink into the dullness of increasing age. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... it is not so. All things that are worth doing in art, are interesting and attractive when they are done. There is no law of right which consecrates dullness. The proof of a thing's being right is, that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us. I do not say that it has influence over all, but it has over a large class, one kind of ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... and this indeed did shame Paul a little, to find himself being used so lovingly for a sorrow which he was hardly feeling. But he said to himself that sorrow must come unbidden, and that it was no sorrow that was made with labour and intention. He was a little angered with himself for his dullness—but then song was so beautiful, that he could think of nothing else; he ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... farmers was greatly in excess of their use at the present time. In the early winter the country farmers from New Hampshire and Vermont going to Boston, with butter, cheese, pork and poultry, patronized the taverns, and gave the town an appearance of business which contrasts with the aspect of dullness that it now wears. The prices for entertainment at the taverns were moderate, and none of the proprietors ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... as important as the quality. Appetite would be a sure guide in both respects were it not so often perverted and diseased. As a general rule, we eat too much. It is better to err in the other direction. An uncomfortable feeling of fullness, or of dullness and stupor after a meal is a sure sign of over-eating, so whatever and whenever you eat, eat slowly, masticate your food well, and DO NOT EAT ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... at a time when nonsense, dullness, lewdness, and all manner of profaneness and immorality are daily practised on the stage, I have prevailed on my modesty to offer to your lordship's protection a piece which, if it has no merit to recommend it, has at least ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... amusing in the beginning and attracted large crowds of spectators who stood along the side of the road and laughed. But soon this business of tree-hawing grew tiresome and the Greeks thought dullness an evil only comparable to ugliness or sickness. They asked for something more entertaining. Then an inventive young poet from the village of Icaria in Attica hit upon a new idea which proved a tremendous success. He made one of the members of the goat-chorus ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... would be a relief after the busy life he had led, and was just the change he needed! So, in answer to Alice's remark, he said he should probably remain at home some time, that he always found it rather pleasant at Snowdon, though as a boy he had, he supposed, often chafed at its dullness; but he saw differently now. Besides, it could not now be dull, with the acquisition it had received since he was there before; and he bowed gracefully toward the young lady, who acknowledged the compliment with a faint blush, and then turned toward the group of "noisy, ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... that his blowhard sentence was the frosty air of satire. He was the representative of a class. To him all clearness of expression was shallowness of thought, and brightness was the essence of frivolity. He soon found another place, for some of the Chicago newspapers still set a premium upon windy dullness. ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... feasts on holy-days and high-days, rich and succulent.—And in this last connection, as he reflected, much was to be said for the geographical position of Marychurch; since if river mists and white dullness of sea fog, drifting in from the Channel, were to hand, so, also, in their season, were fresh run salmon, snipe, wood-cock, flocks of wild duck, of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... know I slept all the morning, but I'm not suffering from dullness. I'm imagining things. I'm imagining how much worse off we'd be if we didn't have flint and steel. I can always find pleasure in ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... o'clock when they reached the top of the hill. Had it been clear they might have seen for many miles around them, but now the dullness in the sky hid what was ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... from experience that Mr Weekley would contrive to avoid unnecessary dullness even if he was compiling a railway guide, but that he would also get the trains right."—Mr J. C. SQUIRE in The Observer. Crown 4to. L2. ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... circle, however, the countenances were not so gloomy. There a real or affected joy seemed to enliven the usual dullness of these parties; some actors were repeating patriotic verses in honour of the victor; while others were singing airs or vaudevilles, to inspire our warriors with as much hatred towards your nation as gratitude towards our Emperor. It is certainly neither philosophical nor philanthropical ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... you are right, Gray. With your smooth highways, and plenty of schools, and churches, and libraries, and meetings for young people, you would make country life a paradise, and I tell you what you would do, too; you would empty the slums of the cities. It is the slowness and dullness of country life, and not their poverty alone, that keep the poor in dirty lanes and tenement houses. They want stir and amusement, too, poor souls, when their day's work is over. I believe they would come to the country if it were made ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... happens with crowds, the dullness and depression wears off after a while, exhausts itself, so to speak, and is succeeded gradually by a blind resentment directed against the first object which offers itself as a handy target. A sort of mob intoxication sets in, as unreasoning as it ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... the ladies, as foreign dress materials could no longer be purchased. Mrs. Wingfield made a point of always attending with her daughters at these entertainments, which to the young people afforded a cheerful break in the dullness and monotony of their usual life; for, owing to the absence of almost all the young men with the army, there had been a long cessation of the pleasant interchange of visits, impromptu parties, and social gatherings that had formed a feature in ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... A dullness seemed to fall on the Sand Club members present. Not only was Marjorie their ringleader and moving spirit, but somehow King's uneasiness impressed all of them, and soon Dick Craig ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... Auberly, "would become of the fine arts if all men delighted in dirt, dust, dullness, and desks? Depend upon it, John, that our tastes and tendencies are not the result of accident; they were given to us for a purpose. I hold it as an axiom that when a man or a boy has a strong and decided bias or partiality for any particular work that he knows something ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... thought she had shocked him by what he might think was harshness to a child. Even a week afterward, as they journeyed up to Green Hill in a dusty accommodation train, there was an uneasy memory of that cloud—black with Maurice's dullness, and livid with the zigzag flash of Eleanor's irritation—and then the little shower of tears! ... What had brought the cloud? Would it ever return? ... As for those twenty dividing years, they ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... come and put an end to her suspense. She was now as much concerned to escape the ordeal of Mr. Pomeroy's visit as she had been earlier in the day to see him. And she had her wish. He did not come; she fancied he might be willing to let the dullness and loneliness, the monotony and silence of her prison, work their effect ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... of dullness—learned dullness and ignorant dullness. We think the latter preferable, for it is apt to be more spicy. You cannot measure the length of a man's brain, nor the width of his heart, nor the extent of his usefulness by the size of ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... your dullness," laughed Rackliff. "You heard me coaching. You heard me calling out for the batters to 'get into it,' 'hit it out,' 'drop on it,' 'give it a rise,' and ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... of thoroughly pure air must be emphasized from first to last. Some think that the dullness felt by many people in the early morning is due to the impure air of cities, and to the failure to open windows. A lady once said to me, "When I am in the country I always sleep out of doors. Then I have not the slightest disinclination to get up. I do it as naturally ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... grudgingly sent, and about to be stopped. Therefore nearly penniless, but perfectly free from the smallest debt or degradation—elegant, accomplished, fastidious, yet truthful, generous, gallant and aspiring—Thurston left the elegant salons and exciting scenes of Paris for the comparative dullness and dreariness of his native place and ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... a man that has a bad wife, and makes him look down with great composure on the crosses of the world. It promotes insensible perspiration, dissolves all phlegmatic and viscous humors that are apt to obstruct the narrow channels of the nerves. It helps the memory, and would quicken even Helvetian dullness. 'Tis friendly to the lungs, much more than scolding itself. It comforts the stomach and strengthens the bowels, preventing all colics and fluxes. In one word, it will make a man live a great while, and very well while he does live; and, what ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... rare type made up to the trainers for the dullness of their average pupils. He learned with bewildering ease. He never ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... averseness, unwillingness, disinclination, hesitancy; inaptness, dullness; lateness, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... excitement had driven him close to the line where reason and his own will wavered in their decisions, and his irregular, tottering steps became the type of the whole man. His eyes were wild and bloodshot. A ghastly pallor gave his haggard face the look of death. A damp dullness pervaded the heavy air of the room, which in his unrest he had greatly disordered. The fire had died out, and he had not even tried to kindle it again. His broodings had been so deep and painful during the earlier part of ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... scandal nor love-making; no news of the fashions, no visits from silk-mercers or jewellers, no Monsu to curl her hair and tempt her with new lotions, or so much as a strolling soothsayer or juggler to lighten the dullness of the long afternoons. The only visitors to the castle were the mendicant friars drawn thither by the Marchioness's pious repute; and though Donna Laura disdained not to call these to her chamber and question them for news, yet ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... their speaking eyes. Study this expression until its forcefulness is felt. The camel is notorious for its unresponsive dullness; indeed its general apathy to its surroundings is all that accounts for its apparent docility. De Quincey, therefore, is speaking by the book when he describes these brutes as "without the affections or sensibilities of flesh and blood." ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... the infancy of Chatterton, parents may be satisfied that an inaptness to learn in childhood, is far from being a prognostic of future dullness. At the age of five years, he was sent to the school of which his father had been master, and was found so incorrigibly stupid, that he was rejected by the teacher, whose name was Love, as incapable of profiting by his instruction. ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... several commissaries with their servants, horses, etc. After a passage of twenty-four hours, we entered the harbour of Ostend at one o'clock the following day. Ostend, once so flourishing and opulent, has long since fallen into decay; its usual dullness is however just now interrupted by the bustle of troops landing to join the allied army. Cavalry, infantry, artillery, horses, guns, stores, etc., are landed every minute. The quays are the only parts of this city which can boast of handsome buildings; ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... through the woods. The excessive hilarity of the morning had faded from her spirits. There was something indescribable about Mittie that annoyed and pained her. The gleam of kindness with which she had greeted her had all gone out, and left dullness and darkness in its stead. She could not get near her heart. At every avenue it seemed closed against her, and resisted the golden key of affection as effectually ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... for publishing the "Free-thinker", the Premier of England was William Ewart Gladstone. And if you wish to know what an established church can do by way of setting up dullness in high places, get a volume of this "Grand Old Man's" writings on theological and religious questions. Read his "Juventus Mundi", in the course of which he establishes a mystic connection between the trident ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... without a purpose. The peasant had a son, to whom the flame had been passed on; for he aimed at the priesthood. This has ever been a refuge of ambitious minds that cannot rise by any other means above the dullness of the peasant's life, which is the more endurable the more the man is able to place himself upon the animal level of his plodding ox. The son was being educated in a seminary, but he was now home for the holidays. Presently he appeared. He was a youth of about nineteen, wearing a blouse like ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... love you?" she asked; "not only what is fine in you, but what isn't? Why do I love your dullness, your arrogance? For I do. To—night I love the very raindrops on ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... die of dullness if I did! You'd be positively bored to tears. No, we all have our talents, and I consider my mission in life is to keep things humming and cheer you all up. I may do it at some ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... as the night had passed. Save for an occasional halt to rest his horse and refresh his body with food, nothing broke the dullness of the journey. The wolves alone were silent, waiting for the night. As the afternoon wore on Sigurd could see their gaunt forms skulking among the trees, casting many a hungry sidelong glance that way, and licking their ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... about the future, it would be rest rather than dullness,' said John; 'but I think a good deal of his trouble is caused by Manby's verdict, and for that perhaps the best cure would be letting him ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stenches arising from the gases of the belly and from outhouses, which to their smell are more fragrant than thyme. The approach and touch of these close up the interiors of their mind, and open the exteriors pertaining to the body, from which come their quickness in worldly things and their dullness in spiritual things. ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... bit her lip and lashed a weed with her quirt. "All of this is none of my doing," she added, with a dullness in her voice that may have meant either regret or resentment. "You hate my father, and you are mad because I canna side with you and hate him too. I am sorry the trouble came up, but I canna see how you expect me to go on coming to see your ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... includes the process of digestion, the subsequent vital changes involved in the conversion of food into blood, and its final transformation into tissue, causes mental languor and dullness, as well as bodily exhaustion, is attested by universal experience. A torpid condition of the liver, one of the most inveterate of chronic derangements, is indicated by sullenness, melancholy, despondency, loss of interest in the affairs of life, sluggishness, etc., and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... forth in the waters. Men were busy at the stern of the ships watching the wooden kites that are made so as to catch the mines by the hawser that is slung between the two steamers. The slightest sign of a ball-like piece of steel in the sea and the dullness of sweeping is relieved, for then the skipper knows that he has unhooked one of the mines. Along came a submarine, flying the white ensign of the Royal Navy. The mine-sweepers realise that these men have no arm-chair job, and admire the commander and crew of the under-water boats ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... retained their popularity even in the Augustan age, and were acted as late as the reign of Diocletian. Life, bustle, surprise, unexpected situations, sharp, sparkling raillery that knew no restraint nor bound, left his audience no time for dullness or weariness. Although Greek was the fountain from which he drew his stores, his wit, thought, and language were entirely Roman, and his style was Latin of the purest and most elegant kind—not, indeed, controlled ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... seem to be wandering from my story, let me say here that my father had been in treaty with this Mr. Peter Walpole concerning my apprenticeship to him in Norwich. After moping a long time at the dullness of my life in Brandon I had plucked up courage to tell my father that I would fain be abroad. He heard me less unkindly than I had feared, and contrived this plan for settling me away from home for a few years, after which, he was pleased to say, I might have sense ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... gray heads of the elderly men in the congregation oppressed him; they made him lethargic with a sense of long lives of repellent dullness. But he should have been grateful to the lady with the artificial cherries upon her hat. His gaze lingered there, wandered away, and hopelessly returned again and again, to be a little refreshed by the glossy scarlet of the cluster of tiny globes. He was not so ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... priests was being educated on more thoroughly Irish lines, and they went forth to their duties with the inspiration, as it were, of a new call. A crusade was started against emigration, which was fast draining the country of its reserves of brain, brawn and beauty. The dullness of the country-side, an important factor in forcing the young and adventurous abroad, was relieved by the new enthusiasm for Irish games and pastimes and recreations—for the seanchus, the sgoruidheacht, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... no effect of a beneficial replacement of passive unintelligent people by active intelligent ones. One felt that a smaller but more enterprising and intensely undignified variety of stupidity had replaced the large dullness of the old gentry, and that was all. Bladesover, I thought, had undergone just the same change between the seventies and the new century that had overtaken the dear old Times, and heaven knows how much more of the decorous British fabric. These Lichtensteins ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... slave—so interpenetrated with her charms that, like Una's lion, he would crouch at her feet, come and go at her pleasure, live on her smiles, and be sad when she gave him none. She would make a gentleman of him, then leave him to dream of her! It would be a pleasant and interesting task in the dullness of their winter's banishment, with the days so short and the nights so unendurably long! The man was handsome!—she would do it!—and would proceed at once to ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... characteristic notion of modern society to associate goodness with dullness, and consequently, I suppose, to connect badness with all that is gay, interesting, and diverting. There is nothing more perverted, absurd, and contemptible than that notion in the whole ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... adenoids are mouth breathing, restlessness at night, snoring, recurring colds, nasal discharge, swelling of the glands of the neck, poor nutrition, loss of appetite, bed wetting, impaired hearing, lack of attention, and mental dullness. The removal of adenoids is neither a serious or difficult procedure, and they may safely be removed ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... of carved ivory. This one is the god monkey who sees no evil, his hands cover his eyes; this one is the god monkey who hears no evil, his hands cover his ears; and this one is the god monkey who speaks no evil, his hands cover his mouth. Half ashamed of our own dullness an old lesson came back with new significance,—be blind, deaf, ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... Regan told me. I don't know what or where it is, but I'm ready for a start if it's a cannibal isle. Anything is better than dying of dullness here. Where are you off ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... grim with one another. Indeed, the mansions and their inhabitants were so much alike in that respect, that the people were often to be found drawn up on opposite sides of dinner-tables, in the shade of their own loftiness, staring at the other side of the way with the dullness of ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... very simple truths? Well, as simple as they seem to you, reader, you shall yet see others which surpass them in dullness and simplicity. For our course is the reverse of that of the geometricians: with them, the farther they advance, the more difficult their problems become; we, on the contrary, after having commenced with the most abstruse propositions, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Phil accused herself of dullness in not having thought earlier of the photograph gallery. Her father must have been conducting himself very quietly there or she would have heard him before. It had been a bright day and he had undoubtedly been ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... returned by his companion, since none could be given; and when Venn left, a few minutes later, Clym had passed from the dullness of sorrow to the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... familiar with the inside of palaces; if I revealed some of the secrets I learnt, they might prove of interest to the statesmen of Europe. I intend to do neither of these things. I should be between the Scylla of dullness and the Charybdis of indiscretion, and I feel that I had far better confine myself strictly to the underground drama which was being played beneath the surface of Ruritanian politics. I need only say that the secret of my imposture defied detection. I made mistakes. I had bad minutes: ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... Givens seldom had sight of her, and set it down to pride and contempt of her husband's origin. (He had been a weaver's son from Falkirk, who either had won his way to the Marischal College of Aberdeen by strength of will and in defiance of natural dullness, or else had started with wits but blunted them in carving his way thither.) She rarely set foot beyond the manse garden, the most of her time being spent in a roomy garret under the slates, where she ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... begin!' said he, sighing. 'Only fools are favored by the gods; and I am filled with wisdom from my wig to my two naked heels. If in my heart a grain of dullness lurks, it is perhaps my inability to squander, and I should not even know how to set about a work so ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... mature uses. Asher and Virginia had already peopled the valley with imaginary settlers, each one of a certain type, and they adapted their pastime to the particular neighbors whom they chose to invite for the evening. How little the helpless folk in the city, bored with their own dullness, and dependent on others for amusement—how little could such as these cope with the loneliness of the home on the plains, or comprehend the resourcefulness of the ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... The dullness of the church life, so conspicuous at present in many of the churches, is only partly due to the fact that the Christians are tired of the services. It is true that these services no longer afford them that mental and spiritual stimulus ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... down by his side, his pipe hung from his mouth on to his breast, and his eyes, turned up to the ceiling, were lighted almost with inspiration. Men there at the congress, Mr. Chaffanbrass, young Staveley, Felix Graham, and others, had regarded him as an impersonation of dullness; but through his mind and brain, as he sat there wrapped in his old dressing-gown, there ran thoughts which seemed to lift him lightly from the earth into an elysium of justice and mercy. And at the end of this elysium, which was not wild in its beauty, but trim and orderly in its gracefulness,—as ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... Western Hemisphere that will lead to a world congress. There are the two most hopeful sources of that great proposal. It is the tradition of British national conduct to be commonplace to the pitch of dullness, and all the stifled intelligence of Great Britain will beat in vain against the national passion for the ordinary. Britain, in the guise of Sir Edward Grey, will come to the congress like a family solicitor among the Gods. What is the good of shamming ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... talking of the bees his face had lost its dullness; he had not looked stupid at all, and scarcely ugly. She would try and ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... most trifling act which is marked by usefulness to others is nobler in God's sight, than the most brilliant accomplishment of genius. To teach a few Sunday-school children, week after week, commonplace simple truths—persevering in spite of dullness and mean capacities—is a more glorious occupation than the highest meditations or creations of genius which edify or instruct only our own ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... I make Carden out," he wrote about this time, "he's a slow-minded, unimaginative, commercial Briton, with as much nimbleness as an elephant. British commerce is his deity, British advantage his duty and mission; and he goes about his work with blunt dullness and ineptitude. That's his mental calibre as I read ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... poking one's finger after a sliver,—and had caught now and then, over the still air, the laughter and bird-notes that came together from among the pines. One of the Miss Haughtleys had sat with them; but that only "stiffened out the dullness," as Etty had declared, the instant the ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Netherlands, and the heir of Austria. His election as emperor made him, at the age of nineteen, the {427} greatest prince of Christendom. To his gigantic task he brought all the redeeming qualities of dullness, for his mediocrity and moderation served his peoples and his dynasty better than brilliant gifts and boundless ambition would have done. "Never," he is reported to have said in 1556, "did I aspire to universal monarchy, although it seemed well within my power to attain it." Though ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... was the evening before the marriage—the dullness, as a matter of course, reached ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... and inspiring, but he expected and exacted rather too much work from the average student. His own ready and affluent mind sympathized keenly with the apt, bright scholar, to whom his praise was warmly given, but he scarcely made sufficient allowance for the dullness or lack of previous preparation which failed to keep pace with him in his long and rapid strides; hence his censures were occasionally severe. His methods of examination furnished the very best kind of mental discipline, fitted alike to ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... hear a woman's fretful voice, and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy of the homecoming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... a hard-working man, after his daily toil, or in its intervals, there is nothing," says Herschel, "like reading an interesting book. It calls for no bodily exercise, of which he has had enough or too much. It relieves his home of its dullness and sameness, which, in nine cases out of ten, is what drives him out to the alehouse, to his own ruin and his family's. It accompanies him to his next day's work, and, if the book he has been reading be any thing above the very idlest and lightest, gives him something to think ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... delight in the pleasant looks and bright talk of the young ladies who, as the French say, "preside" at these establishments. But should not the Victorian apostles of abstinence go further? It is well to replace girls by men, and thus subdue the bar to masculine dullness; but could not the Act of Parliament go on to declare that none save plain, grim-visaged males should be tolerated as assistants? The most inveterate toper might hesitate to enter twice if he were always met by the ugly aspect of some dark, forbidding countenance. A kind of competition ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... characters of their mind will show themselves; wit will flash, and thought will answer thought spontaneously; but every effort to make the stupid agreeable, by giving a direction of a pretending intellectual nature to their efforts, is only rendering dullness more conspicuous by exhibiting it in contrast with what it ought to be to be clever, as a bad picture is rendered the more conspicuous by an ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... said against it was that the author's dread of inspiration had made it grievously dull, but it was the publisher's opinion that after a glut of sensational fiction the six-shilling public had come to regard dullness as the hall-mark of literary merit. He had no illusions as to its possible success, but, on the other hand, he knew that he could not lose any money on it, so he wrote a letter to the author ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... the farmer's boys, who, discontented at home, leave it for something more congenial to their feelings and tastes, do so simply because of the excessive dullness, and want of interest in objects to attract them there, and keep them contented. Boys, in America at least, are apt to be smart. So their parents think, at all events; and too smart they prove, to stay at home, and follow the beaten track of their fathers, as their ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... only was sometimes amused at the fresh treatment I would give an author's subject, but, when I gave some new and sudden turn to the plot of the story, often grew interested and even excited in listening to hear what kind of a denouement I would bring about. But I am sure this was not due to dullness, for I made rapid progress in both my music and ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... in revelling roundelays, Belched out with hickups at bacchanal Go, Bellowed, till heaven's high concave rebound the lays, Are all for college carousals too low. Of dullness quite tired, with merriment fired, And fully inspired with amity's glow, With hate-drowning wine, boys, and punch all divine, boys, The Juniors combine, boys, in friendly HIGH-GO. Glossology, by William Biglow, inserted in Buckingham's ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... of love in Keith's feelings toward Johan, nothing emotional. The tenderness that was such a marked feature of his character did not come into play at all. In fact, he rather looked down on Johan, who frequently annoyed him by his dullness and his lack of personal neatness. The truth of it was that he played with Johan merely because he was the only other boy in sight, and in so far as that particular game was concerned, Johan was simply an accessory to it in same way as his ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... an "allegorical vision of the encounter of True and False Wit," he discovers, "in a very dark grove, a monstrous fabric, built after the Gothic manner and covered with innumerable devices in that barbarous kind of sculpture." This temple is consecrated to the God of Dullness, who is "dressed in the habit of a monk." In his essay "On Taste" (No. 409) he says, "I have endeavored, in several of my speculations, to banish this Gothic taste which has taken possession ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... The dullness and obscurity of the last part of the poem, however, and the obvious similarity to the homilies of the time make it very unlikely that the whole poem was written by ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... to think of it before. He was not, however, a man to be put down by clamour; he was sustained by the fervour of his convictions, and it was too late for remonstrance. His lectures had all been carefully prepared, and he went steadily on with them. The unusual charge of dullness, which had been made against some passages in his opening discourse, was never made again. The lectures became a leading topic of conversation, and a subject of fierce attack. Without fear, and in defiance of his critics, he dashed into the reign of Henry VIII., "the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... do you expect me to take?" was the retort in the listless voice. Yet, now, in the dullness ran a ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... clutched at his blazing head in the very desperation of his feelings, and she could not account for the difference in his demeanor. Mike was usually such a merry good companion. Perhaps it was herself that scattered her sadness and dullness all about her; or was Mike sick? She ventured ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... and all the morning at the office, among other things with Cooper the Purveyor, whose dullness in his proceeding in his work I was vexed at, and find that though he understands it may be as much as other men that profess skill in timber, yet I perceive that many things, they do by rote, and very dully. Thence home to dinner, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... alternative spellings—for example, "arn't" rather than "aren't", "dulness" rather than "dullness", both "shan't" and "sha'n't"—which have been left unchanged. There are also some unusual grammatical structures in places, which probably result from the author's intention to render the translations as literally as possible. These ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... hustling into matrimony. It seemed to her now as if that precipitate taking of Arthur Alce had been at the bottom of all her troubles; she had been only a poor little schoolgirl, a raw contriver, hurling herself out of the frying-pan of Ansdore's tyranny into the fire of Donkey Street's dullness. She knew better now—besides, the increased freedom and comfort of her conditions did not involve the ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... brought his wife to the North. Grace is sunshine embodied. She makes her old, irritable, and sometimes gouty father happy in spite of himself. It was just like her to accept of your offer last evening, for to banish all dullness from her father's life seems her constant thought. So if you wish to grow in the young lady's favor don't be so attentive to her as to neglect ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... know what, Shatushka?" She shook her head. "You may be a very sensible man but you're dull. It's strange for me to look at all of you. I don't understand how it is people are dull. Sadness is not dullness. I'm happy." ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... passion does afford such a basis. If we can imagine an artist confining himself to this single issue, relying on no finenesses outside it, then we might have a work of art which men and women, representing in other respects any degree of imagination and dullness, might all almost equally enjoy. In practice it is seldom that an artist is content to confine himself so exclusively to this issue; it is not in the nature of the imaginative temperament to limit itself ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... as dramatic as in the highest social world, but a story of human life; the nobility, the meanness, the pathos of it in hopelessly commonplace surroundings, where the fight is not a hand-to-hand struggle with bitter poverty or crime, but with dullness and monotony. The characters in 'All Sorts and Conditions of Men' are possibly more typical than real, but one hesitates to question either characters or situation. The "impossible story" has become true, and the vision that the enthusiastic ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... principle of representative government. Few discussions of the sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith gave a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of Church and State as that to which Hoadly's bishopric contributed its name. De Lolme is the real parent of that interpretative analysis which has, in Bagehot's hands, become ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... this biographical sketch, every one will cry at once, "Why! this is the happiest man on earth, in spite of his ugliness!" And, in truth, no spleen, no dullness can resist the counter-irritant supplied by a "craze," the intellectual moxa of a hobby. You who can no longer drink of "the cup of pleasure," as it has been called through all ages, try to collect something, no matter what (people have been known to collect placards), ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... laid a heavy hand upon the innkeeper's fat shoulder. "Friend," he said, impressively, "I am one not noted either for dullness or lack of courage. I do perpend that to earn these pieces of which you speak one must perform some worthy business. Tell it to me, and you and Nottingham shall see then what Middle ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick |
