"Ignorance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... down on him with unfathomable disdain] YOU box! Slap an old woman with the back o your hand! You hadn't even the sense to hit her where a magistrate couldn't see the mark of it, you silly young lump of conceit and ignorance. Hit a girl in the jaw and ony make her cry! If Todger Fairmile'd done it, she wouldn't a got up inside o ten minutes, no more than you would if he got on to you. Yah! I'd set about you myself if I had a week's feedin in me instead o two ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... face to face with you alone after all I have suffered at your hands! There, set aside this miserable show of not knowing me! You recognised me that night of the ball. You knew me directly, though you tried hard to assume ignorance. Now, then, I don't want to be hard upon you. I have held back from going to lawyers, for I have felt that it would be better if we settled the matter ourselves. Do you dare to tell me that ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... wicked husbands are much more to be pitied: In early life the wives themselves are innocent; and, from the nature of things, their innocence is based upon ignorance. Here the value of the almost intuitive wisdom and perception of the gentler sex comes into full play. During courtship, when this perception is in its full power and vigor, it should be freely exercised. Scandal and common report, in themselves to be avoided, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... unsparingly, but she recognized also the strength he had wasted and the power he had abused. She saw life in broad vistas as he had believed he saw it; he was not above a stirring of pride that she appreciated him and appraised his gifts rightly. He had long played skillfully upon credulity and ignorance; he had frittered away his life in contentions with groundlings. It would be a relief, if it were possible, to deal with his peers, the enlightened, the far-seeing, and the fearless, who strove for great ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... in any sense of the word a dramatic critic. He was a man of letters; amongst the elect he was reckoned a master in his art. He occupied a singular, in many respects a unique, position. But in matters dramatic, he confessed to an ignorance which was strictly actual and in no way assumed. His presence at the New Theatre on that night, which was to become for him a very memorable one, was purely a matter of chance and good nature. The greatest of London ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... effect upon its victims. Three-fourths or more doubtless came to prison directly or indirectly through strong drink. True, in many cases, more remote causes lay back of this, a native inclination to sin, loss of parents, parental neglect, family infidelity, vicious associates, ignorance, Sabbath-breaking and the like. A very few had used no strong drink. A large share were young, some mere boys on their alternate sentence. Many, on entering, could neither ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... her own house—Lisbeth suspected the halter of domestic servitude; several times the Baron had found a solution of the difficult problem of her marriage; but though tempted in the first instance, she would presently decline, fearing lest she should be scorned for her want of education, her general ignorance, and her poverty; finally, when the Baroness suggested that she should live with their uncle Johann, and keep house for him, instead of the upper servant, who must cost him dear, Lisbeth replied that that was the very last way she ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... saloon, whence he could look out through the glass front and see the tumbling sea ahead. Through the glazed housing I could see him standing, hands in pockets, legs wide, gazing out in the simple confidence that all was well, and enjoying the tumult and excitement of it all in his boyish ignorance. ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... final sentence, where, in the impartial critic's eagerness to discredit even the value of the emotion awakened in such men as Jeffrey by such creations as Little Nell, he reverses all he has been saying about the cultivated and uncultivated, and presents to us a cultivated philosopher, in his ignorance of the stage, applauding an actor whom every uncultivated playgoing apprentice despises as stagey. But the bold stroke just exhibited, of bringing forward Dickens himself in the actual crisis of one of his fits of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... raised men, who, though many in number, were of no skill in war, being most of them mechanics and tradesmen, never bred to war. To whom Agesilaus answered, that he did not fear their numbers, but did fear their ignorance, which gave no room for employing stratagem against them. Stratagem only avails with men who are alive to suspicion, and expecting to be assailed, expose themselves by their attempts at defense; but one who has no thought or expectation of ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... states of the world; when we find ourselves in darkness and in adversity we may surely prophecy light and prosperity, and when we are in a state of happiness and discipline, doubtless we have to expect the advent of ignorance and distress. As in the case of Hermes Trismegistus, who, seeing Egypt in all the splendour of the sciences and of occultism, so that he considered that men were consorting with gods and spirits and were in consequence most pious, he made that prophetic ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... no use having a mould and metal unless you have a fire. It is no use having a perfect Pattern unless you have a motive to copy it. Men do not go to the devil for want of examples; and morality is not at a low ebb by reason of ignorance of what the true type of life is. But nowhere but in the full-orbed teaching of the New Testament will you find a motive strong enough to melt down all the obstinate hardness of the 'northern iron' of the human ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... entrance to this labyrinth which he desired to explore. How would Madame act, now that she knew he possessed her secret? Into many channels he passed, but all these were blind, and led him to no end. Madame had a purpose; to discover what this purpose was Fitzgerald must remain in ignorance. What a woman! She resembled one of those fabulous creatures of medieval days. And why was the countess on the scene, and what was her part ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... Thorpe pursued, with an accession of amiability. He visibly had pleasure in the disclosure of the other's ignorance. "They've been in London for two or three weeks. That is, Miss Madden has been taking flying trips to see cathedrals and so on, but Lady Cressage has stayed in town. Their long journeyings have rather ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... clutched it, and bounding with an exulting leap into the garden, he seized a large stone, and dashed the instrument into a thousand pieces. When called upon to explain his extraordinary conduct, he said to his friend, "Oh that I had remained in that happy state of ignorance wherein you first found me! Yet will I confess that, as my knowledge increased, so did my pleasure, until I beheld the last wonders of the microscope; from that moment I have been tormented by doubt ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... bestowed on me at least forty Boto a Christo's, had I pretended to assert Charles V. not to have held this whole universal globe in a string for four-and-twenty hours; and then it broke: though none had ever the good nature or manners to inform or correct my ignorance in genuine history, by letting me into the secret when that critical and slippery period of time was."[32] Naturally admirers so thoroughgoing made the most of the conquest of Tunis, the reduction of the formidable Goletta, the release of thousands of Christian captives, and, above all, the discomfiture ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... literature is likely to find occasion for. Such stories and parts of stories as are offensive to pure taste and good morals are not given. But such stories are not often referred to, and if they occasionally should be, the English reader need feel no mortification in confessing his ignorance of them. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... constitution, constitutsya, has a feminine termination. Many of the people, it is reported, who were shouting, "Constantine and the constitution for ever," thought that the constitution was the wife of Constantine. It must be admitted that such ignorance presents but a poor ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... London cab-horse after his life of hardship and cruel sacrifice; there is room for the innocent lamb that goes to the slaughter; there is room in those realms of infinity for every bird of the air and every beast of the field that either the necessity (that tyrant's plea) or the ignorance of man has condemned to torture, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... helmet. (I imagine the well-known Apple case has just been argued and decided.) "Hurt, forsooth! Do you suppose WE care for the opinion of that hobnailed lout of a Paris? Do you suppose that I, the Goddess of Wisdom, can't make allowances for mortal ignorance, and am so base as to bear malice against a poor creature who knows no better? You little know the goddess nature when you dare to insinuate that our divine minds are actuated by motives so base. A love of justice influences US. We are above mean ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with a pomp and state falling little short of the magnificence of royalty, not a few of the poorer clergy had scarcely the wherewithal to live at all,' where 'the superior clergy regarded the cures as hired servitors, whom in order to dominate it was prudent to keep in poverty and ignorance.' If the distribution of patronage on false principles and the inordinate love of preferment were abuses in England, matters were worse in France, where 'there was an open traffic in benefices; the Episcopate ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the tender respect which they do bear to his name (which ought to be very precious to them and all posterity, for his faithfull service in the great Work of Reformation in these Kingdoms, wherein the Lord was pleased to make him eminently instrumentall) and lest through the malice of some, and ignorance of others the said Pamphlet should gain belief among the weaker sort, They have thought fit to make known and declare concerning the same ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... to consider why it is they are ill. I know that some are so because of physical weakness over which they have no control, that some are suffering from the effects of carelessness, some from wilfulness, and more from simple ignorance of the rules of the game. There are so many rules that no one will ever know them all, but it seems that we live in a world of laws, and that if we transgress those laws by ever so little, we must suffer equally, ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... instant response—Willard Brockton. But she would die sooner. She would not confess defeat. The one being who really cared for her and to whom she could properly appeal was thousands of miles away, in complete ignorance of her plight. She could telegraph him for money, but he might not understand, and she was too proud to lay her actions open to misconstruction. No, she must have patience and wait. If she had to go out scrubbing she would hold out until John Madison came back ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... my part, though my visit to Europe was wholly undesired —was forced upon me, in fact, by dire circumstances," she added emphatically, glaring at Mr. Bundercombe—"since I am here I find so much work ready to my hand, so much appalling ignorance, so much prejudice, that I conceive it to be my duty to take up during my stay the work which presents itself here. I accordingly shall not ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... chair round the tower corner when she went to be churched.' They laughed at me with such torrents of scorn that I went home ashamed, and couldn't sleep for shame; and I cried that night till my pillow was wet: till at last I thought to myself there and then—'They may laugh at me for my ignorance, but that was father's fault, and none o' my making, and I must bear it. But they shall never laugh at my children, if I have any: I'll starve first!' Thank God, I've been able to keep her at school without sacrifice; and her scholarship is such ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... am forced to wander amid the shadows of each world, unrecognized by those either above or below me. Here I am shunned upon every hand, and, as you saw for yourself, I was equally avoided in Levachan. But that is not all; in the ignorance and selfishness of my grief, I yearned for my lost ones with a solicitude, a consuming fierceness and power of will which insanity only can equal. By nature I was intense; and even had I not committed the fatal act, my vitality would have burned ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... 'it's not an ungentle heart that finds it delightful to see the fleecy, silly people o' the fields in harmony. And the reflection on the stile's a fine bit o' pathetics. "I've been happy there," says the poor ignorance; "and I may never see it more." It's the etairnal hauntin' thoct o' man in all ages. "We've no abiding city here." "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth." "Never, never more," says poor Poe's raven. Listen, m'n! Ye'll hear Shakespeare's immortal thunder. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... puppet-show. They are called by names he knows—kings, bishops, judges, poets, priests, men of letters—but what a gulf between him and them! What motives, what beliefs, what embryonic processes of thought and morals, what bizarre combinations of ignorance and knowledge, of the highest sanctity with the lowest credulity or falsehood; what extraordinary prepossessions, born with a man and tainting his whole ways of seeing and thinking from childhood to the grave! Amid all the intellectual dislocation ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Carnival prevails. The conspirators resolved to take advantage of this public holiday, and of the excitement accompanying it, to carry out their scheme, and the Manchus appear to have been in total ignorance until the eleventh hour of the plot for their destruction. The discovery of the conspiracy bears a close resemblance to that of the Gunpowder Plot. A Chinese slave, wishing to save his master, gave him notice of the danger, and this Manchu officer at once ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... that he was either able or concerned to amend, but only the not carrying up of the ships higher, he meant; but he said, three or four miles lower down, to Rochester Bridge, which is a strange piece of ignorance in a Member of Parliament at such a time as this, and after so many examinations in the house of this business; and did boldly declare that he did think the fault to lie in my Lord Middleton, who had the power of the place, to secure the boats that ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... They were accustomed in Egypt to living in houses, they cultivated and cooked the cereals, and they fed on vegetables and bread. They did not live on flesh and milk as do the Bedouins; and, indeed, the chief difficulty Moses encountered in the exodus was the ignorance of his followers of the habits of desert life, and their dislike of desert fare. They were forever pining for the delights of civilization. "Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... ghosts, spirits, charms, miracles, and supernatural appearances. They all arise either from hallucinations of the mind or senses; from the mutual action of the natural, though invisible, powers of gaseous and ethereal fluids; from the delusions of ignorance, implicit faith, or the absence of ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... surprised his companion by his desire to learn the names of all the little articles and trinkets, even of the various kinds of grain. Dick, in fact, was continuing his preparations for his work. He knew that ignorance of any trifling detail which would, as a matter of course, be known to every native, would excite more surprise and suspicion than would be caused by a serious blunder in other matters; and he wrote down, in a notebook, ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... being a leader in the great movement for the revival of learning which marked the opening of the sixteenth century. He had delighted to gather at his court men of letters from every country. To his love of learning and his contempt for the ignorance and superstition of the monks was due, in part at least, the degree of toleration that had been granted to the reform. But, inspired with zeal to stamp out heresy, this patron of learning issued an edict declaring printing abolished all over France! Francis I. presents one among ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... had its origin in the first Pan American conference held at Washington in 1889, and it has been developed and improved in efficiency under the resolutions of the succeeding conferences in Mexico and Brazil. Its primary object is to break down the barriers of mutual ignorance between the nations of America by collecting and making accessible, furnishing and spreading, information about every country among the people of every other country in the Union, to facilitate and stimulate intercourse, trade, acquaintance, good understanding, fellowship, ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... was," says Mr. Arnold, "full of errors and mistaken inferences, and written in ignorance of many facts which it was the duty of the President to consider." Life of Lincoln, 254. But, per contra, Hon. George W. Julian says: "It was one of the most powerful appeals ever made in behalf of justice and the rights of man." Polit. Recoil. 220. Arnold and Julian were both members ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... 'Biologie.' However, I had studied Lamarck attentively and I had read the 'Vestiges' with due care; but neither of them afforded me any good ground for changing my negative and critical attitude. As for the 'Vestiges,' I confess that the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any influence on me at all, it set me against Evolution; and the only review I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless savagery, is one I wrote ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... previous to its arrival, a numerous army marched past on their way to Detroit. The sound of their drums was the first intimation we had of their approach, and our surprise was only equalled by our utter ignorance of the motive, until the arrival of the express at once explained the enigma. [Footnote: Fact.] In such a case, I maintain, we stand justified before God and man in availing ourselves ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... clear merit quite o'ercloud, And make her fatally unjust, And him desire a darker shroud; How senseless opportunity Gives baser men the better chance; How powers, adverse else, agree To cheat her in her ignorance; How Heaven its very self conspires With man and nature against love, As pleased to couple cross desires, And cross where they themselves approve. Wretched were life, if the end were now! But this gives tears to dry despair, Faith shall be blest, we ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... surrounded by an admiring throng, at the bridge where the main street crossed a little stream, and paddled up it, through a score of back yards and a stretch of reedy meadows, where the wild and tame ducks fed together, tempting the sportsman to sins of ignorance. We crossed the placid Lac Vert, and after a carry of a mile along the high-road toward Chicoutimi, turned down a steep hill and pitched our tents on a crescent of silver sand, with the long, fair water of Kenogami ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... and Thunder and Romance. You promised true, but we were very blind, And very young, and in our ignorance We never called to mind ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... knocked down by the door, which Federico pushed violently open. The waxlights fell to the ground; like a winged shadow, the student sprang past the astonished Count, reached the door before the latter recovered from his alarm, and would doubtless have got clear off, had he not, in hurry and ignorance, turned the wrong handle. The Count grasped his coat-skirt, and pulled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Our reviewer adds the remark, that, 'in the minor workshops, and especially in the work-rooms of tailors and seamstresses, the employers are still, for the most part, unawakened to the importance and imperativeness of this class of obligations. The health of thousands is sacrificed from pure ignorance ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... we could hear cries of: "The train was behind time!" "Your clock is fast!" "You are cheating us; you want it all for yourselves!" "We will have the law on you!" and other bitter adjurations unintelligible to me from my ignorance of the circumstances which called ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... therefore, that children can have no self-conscious faith, refuses to have them baptized, but exposes his ignorance of the divine procedure of grace as developed in the church, of the true moral relation between parent and child, and of the scripture idea of the Christian home. Why not for the very same reason refuse to teach them, to have them pray, ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... Doctor Arbuthnot with an impressive air that concealed well his utter ignorance of the ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... similar things have arisen from want of understanding and ignorance as regards both this sin and Christ, our Savior and they are truly heathen dogmas, which we cannot endure. For if this teaching were right [approved], then Christ has died in vain, since there is in man no defect ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther
... assure himself that the old days were over, and that there was no need to refer to them. And for a while he had imposed upon himself. But lately the falseness of his position had come home to him. He could not allow her to marry him, in ignorance of what he had been. It would be a villainous thing to do. Often he had tried to tell her, but had failed. He saw that it must be ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... upon a wooden tramway running at right angles to the road. My instructions were to proceed along it until I came to "Signpost Lane." Why it was so dubbed I was unable to discover, but one thing I was certainly not kept in ignorance of for long, and that was that it was perpetually under heavy shell-fire by the Germans. They were evidently under the impression that it was the route taken by our relief parties going to the trenches at appointed times during the ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... say something. Your mother hasn't heard." He announced Emily's ignorance of what he hadn't told her, as ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... dulcet period of my history, when the beauteous island of Manna-hata presented a scene the very counterpart of those glowing pictures drawn of the golden reign of Saturn, there was, as I have before observed, a happy ignorance, an honest simplicity, prevalent among its inhabitants, which, were I even able to depict, would be but little understood by the degenerate age for which I am doomed to write. Even the female sex, those arch innovators upon the tranquillity, the honesty, and gray-beard ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... distinction whatever. This explains the usage, retained till late in the fourteenth century, which assigned to the Lions of the Royal Shield of England the name of "leopards." They were so called, not by the enemies of England for derision and insult, as some persons, in their ignorance of early Heraldry, have been pleased both to imagine and to assert; but the English Kings and Princes, who well knew their "Lions" to be Lions, in blazon styled them "leopards," because they also knew that Lions in the attitude of their "Lions" were heraldic "leopards." When at ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... Their ignorance of that dark transaction gave him little comfort, nor was there any extenuation of his sin in the fact that the wife had fled to escape from her husband's brutality. He tried to console himself with the reflection that the thing had a ludicrous side. ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... foolish going for that walk, wasn't it?" says he, leading her to a low cushioned chair over which a gay magnolia bends its white blossoms. His manner is innocence itself; ignorance itself would perhaps better express it. He has decided on ignoring everything; though a shrewd guess that she saw something of his passages with Miss Maliphant last night has now become almost a certainty. "I thought you seemed rather played out last night—fatigued—done to death. I assure you I ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... he demanded, trying unsuccessfully to assume an air of ignorance and indifference at ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... the unfortunate John was as much surprised by this rencounter as the other two. Until this moment he had been in utter ignorance of the theatrical company and all that pertained to it. Moreover, much as he knew of Miss Johnson, he was not aware that she had ever been trained in her youth as an actress, and that after lapsing into straits and difficulties for a couple of years ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... angels see the essence of God; and yet do not know all things. For as Dionysius says (Coel. Hier. vii), "the inferior angels are cleansed from ignorance by the superior angels." Also they are ignorant of future contingent things, and of secret thoughts; for this knowledge belongs to God alone. Therefore whosoever sees the essence of God, does not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... group, I occupied the position of supernumerary officer and interpreter; but accustomed, as I had been, to wholesome American seamanship and discipline, I trembled not a little when I discovered the amazing ignorance of the master, and observed the utter worthlessness of our crew. These things made me doubly vigilant; and sometimes I grieved that I was not still in Regla, or on the paseo. On the tenth day out, a northwester began to pipe and ripen to a gale as the sea rose with it. Sail had ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... for the advance of education and for moral progress. Illustrations are multiplying on every side of the desire on the part of the progressive South to fulfil the duties and meet the heavy responsibilities thrust upon it by the masses of population submerged in ignorance. ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... not hands to speak with, swords to plead, For proof of peril, not of boisterous breath, Sea-wind and storm of barren mouths that foam And rough rock's edge of menace; and short space May lesson thy large ignorance and inform 660 This insolence with knowledge if there live Men earth-begotten of no tenderer thews Than knit the great joints of the grim sea's brood With hasps of steel together; heaven to help, One man shall break, even on their own flood's verge, ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to say,—no more, no less. And yet the child was hers! But as she tried to plan how she should put it, the idea eluded her. She would tell Dr. Lavendar thus and so: but even as she marshalled her words, that scene in the waiting-room of the railroad station ached in her imagination. Alice's ignorance of her existence became an insult; what she was going to say to Dr. Lavendar turned into a denunciation of Lloyd Pryor; he was vile, and cruel, and contemptible! But these words stumbled, too. Back in her mind, common ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... the breeze was just perfect and as steady as could be, and he knew nothing of the risks to which he was exposed. He sailed on by narrow gorge and ravine—openings in the great hills—in profound ignorance of the fact that through any of these a violent squall of wind might come with a whistle and shriek, catch the sail and lay it flat upon the water, while the boat filled ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... Serjeant-Major seized him round the waist, someone else led the pony forward, and A—— was left in the Serjeant-Major's arms and lowered to the ground. All this in front of the Brigade drawn up for a ceremonial parade!" The parade itself also had its amusing side, chiefly owing to the ignorance of certain Staff Officers on matters of drill. However, a friendly crump, arriving in the next field, put an end to the proceedings, and ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... the wages problem, then, with which we are to deal,—the wages of men and women; and we must look at it in its largest, most universal aspects. We must dismiss at once any prejudice born of the ignorance, incompetency, or untrustworthiness of many workers. Character is a plant of slow growth; and given the same conditions of birth, education, and general environment it is quite possible we should have made no better showing. We have to-day ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... malice, without a colour of probability or the shadow of a foundation, and that way, alas! I am driven in my fears by that Hungarian woman's prophecy; or, which but for my desponding heart I should be more inclined to think, the charge has grown out of my poor wife's rustic ignorance as to the usages then recently established by law with regard to the kind of money that could be legally tendered. This, however, was a suggestion that did not tend to alleviate my anxiety; and my ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... ignorance does not always or often matter. But in Darwin's case it did matter. If Darwin had really led the world at one bound from the book of Genesis to Heredity, to Modification of Species by Selection, and to Evolution, he would have been a philosopher and a prophet as well as an eminent professional ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... had said these things to some women who go abroad! It is safe for women who travel to read widely, for ignorance is quickly detected. Miss Mitchell said of Humboldt: "He is handsome—his hair is thin and white, his eyes very blue. He is a little deaf, and so is Mrs. Somerville. He asked me what instruments I ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... for Turkish scenery was unbounded, but his difficulties as a diplomat were due to his ignorance of the tongue, and his distrust of interpreters. But by the time his Government was ready to transfer him to another post—that of Minister to Russia (January 3, 1875)—he was heartily sick of his ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... like Sir Edwin Landseer and his brother Thomas. Surely a new edition of the Monkeyana is wanted for the rising generation. Oliver Goldsmith, that great writer, who was most feeble in knowledge of natural history from almost total ignorance of the subject, over which he threw the graces of his charming style, noticed, as remarkable, that in countries "where the men are barbarous and stupid, the brutes are the most active and sagacious." He continues, that it is in the torrid tracts, inhabited by barbarians, that animals are found with ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... diseases, scorbutum, plica, morbus Neapolitanus, &c. end all our idle controversies, cut off our tumultuous desires, inordinate lusts, root out atheism, impiety, heresy, schism and superstition, which now so crucify the world, catechise gross ignorance, purge Italy of luxury and riot, Spain of superstition and jealousy, Germany of drunkenness, all our northern country of gluttony and intemperance, castigate our hard-hearted parents, masters, tutors; lash disobedient children, negligent servants, correct these spendthrifts and prodigal sons, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the conclusion that he was a member of that notoriously intriguing family, of which the chief members were the Principal Souza, of the Council of Regency at Lisbon, and the Chevalier Souza, Portuguese minister to the Court of St. James's. Unacquainted with Portugal, our apologist was evidently in ignorance of the fact that the name of Souza is almost as common in that country as the name of Smith in this. He may also have been misled by the fact that Principal Souza did not neglect to make the utmost capital out ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... sounding-line dropping all the time, and came to a stop well out to sea, with our screws churning up the bottom and turning the sea all brown with sand from below. It had seemed to me that the ship stopped rather suddenly, and in my ignorance of the depth of the harbour entrance, that perhaps the sounding-line had revealed a smaller depth than was thought safe for the great size of the Titanic: this seemed to be confirmed by the sight of ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... the crocodile as our seamen by a shark, and they now display their feelings by looks and mutterings, and strictly prohibiting the use of the cooking-pot on that service again. Breakfast ready, all hands eagerly fall to, and feast away in happy ignorance of any danger, when suddenly confusion enters the camp, and, with the alarming cry that foes are coming, all hurry-skurry for the boat, some with one thing, some with another. The greater part of the kit is left upon the ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... a curious ignorance who set down our successes to this discipline, as though it were something of the prison order, although enforced without any of the power lying either behind the prison warder or the Catholic priest. On the contrary, wherever the discipline of the Army has been endangered, and its regular ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... not the correct appellation of the tribe. They have never yet acknowledged the name, though as such are officially recognized by the United States government. It was conferred upon them in the early days by the interpreters, either through ignorance of the language, or for the purpose of ridicule. The name which they themselves acknowledge, and they recognize no other, is in their language Ap-sah-ro-kee, which signifies the Sparrow ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... on which peace might be vouchsafed to the Teutons, and in these stipulations a spirit of magnanimity was displayed towards the enemy which at any rate served to show how little his temper was understood and how enormously his resources were underrated. Soon, however, the mist of ignorance began to lift, and saner notions of the stern interplay of the tidal forces at work were borne in upon the leaders of the allied peoples. One of the first discoveries to be made was the enormous consumption of ammunition ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... and that he stated the case as fairly as it can be stated. In an emergency or in trying circumstances the English boy would be readier and more self-reliant: but when you meet him where entertainment is wanted rather than resource, his ignorance will make you open your eyes. This, at any rate, is the kind of story told and believed of Englishmen in Germany. A student who was working at science in a German university had been there the whole winter, and though the city possessed many fine ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... all the usual preparations a gun was fired; he awoke with the report, and found that a noise in an adjoining room had, in the same moment, produced the dream and awakened him. The same want of any notion of the duration of time occurs, more or less, in all dreams; hence our ignorance when we awake of the length of the night. A friend of Doctor Abercrombie's dreamt that he crossed the Atlantic and spent a fortnight in America. In embarking, on his return, he fell into the sea, and, awakening with the fright, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... ordinary clothing, finding the air bracing but not uncomfortable. I could not understand how the Russians felt the cold when it did not affect me, and was a little proud of my insensibility to frost. Conceit generally comes of ignorance, and as I learned, wisdom I lost my ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... good side even to a bad habit, so there is a hatred which may rise to the heighth of a virtue. Hatred of vice IS virtue; hatred of tyranny is patriotism. It is this which has led the world from slavery to freedom, from ignorance to enlightenment, and inspired the words that have found immortality alike above the ashes of Bradshaw the regicide and of Jefferson the American. Rebellion to ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... meeting in the Toland library, when in one stunning flash he saw her as she was: beautiful, dignified, and charming, a woman to whom all eyes turned naturally and admiringly, grave, sweet, and wise in a world full of pretence and ignorance, selfishness ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... Dorry, with intense scorn of Donald's ignorance of baby ways—"babies only six weeks old playing pat-a-cake! I guess not. It's most likely we kicked and screamed ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... symbolism of Scripture, especially of this Gospel, 'darkness' is the name for the whole condition of the soul averted from God. So our Lord here is declaring that to follow Him is the true deliverance from that midnight of the soul. There are a darkness of ignorance, a darkness of impurity, a darkness of sorrow; and in that threefold gloom, thickening to a darkness of death, are they enwrapt who follow not the Light. That is the grim, tragical side of this saying, too sad, too awful for our lips to speak much of, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... moral service, vi. 6, is indistinguishable from Baal worship (ii.) and idolatry. Upon the calf, the symbol under which Jehovah was worshipped, and upon those who worship Him thus, Hosea pours indignant and sarcastic scorn, viii. 5, 6, x. 5, xiii. 2. Ignorance of the true nature of God is at the root of the moral and political confusion. It is this that leads the one party to coquet with Egypt and the other with Assyria, vii. II, viii, 9, xi. 5, xii. 1, and the price paid for Assyrian intervention ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... Roppe (as he waltzes). Oh, you needn't feel convicted of extraordinary ignorance, I assure you, Miss FEATHERHEAD. YOU would be surprised if you knew how many really clever persons have found that simple little problem of nought divided by one too much for them. Would you have supposed, by the way, that there is a reservoir in Pennsylvania containing a sufficient ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... printed on paper made from straw; the appendix is on paper made from wood alone. Both descriptions of paper have borne the test of time extremely well. Murray, in his Practical remarks on modern paper, speaks of Koops and his inventions with much ignorance and unfairness. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... Sleep. It would be curious, as illustrating the equality of sleep, to inquire how many of its phenomena are common to all classes, to all degrees of wealth and poverty, to every grade of education and ignorance. Here, for example, is her Majesty Queen Victoria in her palace, this present blessed night, and here is Winking Charley, a sturdy vagrant, in one of her Majesty's jails. Her Majesty has fallen, many thousands of times, from that same Tower, which I claim a right to tumble off ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... respect at a time when fiddling was voted effeminate and unmanly in England, and Britons were, every day, called upon by the patriotic prints to sneer at the frivolous accomplishments of your Squallinis, Monsieurs, and the like. Nobody in Britain is proud of his ignorance now. There is no conceit left among us. There is no such thing as dulness. Arrogance is entirely unknown... Well, at any rate, Art has obtained her letters of naturalisation, and lives here on terms of almost equality. If Mrs. Thrale chose to marry a music-master now, I don't ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reference to Catherine Hayes, the murderess, but which was at once applied to an interesting and celebrated Irish singer of the same name. The author must have anticipated this, and, perhaps, chuckled over the public ignorance, but the allusion was far-fetched. In the same fashion a dramatist once chose to dub one of his characters by my own rather unusual name, on which he protested that he never dreamt of it, that others bore it; still he, however, was ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... the royal Audiencia of your Majesty would pronounce him an exile from your kingdoms, banishing him for some days to an island six leguas from Manila. But as the governor has learned that his sin was one of ignorance, and that he was carried away so greatly by the prejudices of the orders, who have advised him to what has not been for his good, the governor has contrived to have the said royal Audiencia, in the exercise of kindness and clemency, return the archbishop to his church—as, in fact, has been ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... lip in thought. He was by no means a coward, and two alternatives presented themselves to him. One was to say nothing and pretend absolute ignorance; the other was to drop his hand into his coat pocket and fire the ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... dream?... This, then, is the new world called thought!... O beautiful world! thou hast long been to me cloudy and confused, like the milky way, which, they say, consists of thousands of glittering stars! It seems to me that I am ascending the mountain of knowledge from the valley of darkness and ignorance; each step opens to me views further and more extensive.... My breast breathes freer, I gaze in the face of the sun.... I look below—the clouds murmur under my feet!... annoying clouds! You prevent me from seeing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... star to us, all glimmer and glance, May teem with seraphim: A fancy to our ignorance May be a ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... must say in a word, that the Negroes will never be our friends, will never be men, until they are possessed of all our rights, until we are upon an equality. Civil liberty is the boundary between good and evil, order and disorder, happiness and misery, ignorance and knowledge. If we would make the Negroes worthy of us, we must raise them to our level by ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... and he was aways present at their meetings. With the accession of George I, however, a great change took place. His want of acquaintance with prominent men made it difficult for him to select a Cabinet himself, and his ignorance of English rendered his presence at its meetings wholly useless. For these reasons the new King adopted the expedient of appointing a chief adviser, or Prime Minister, who personally chose his own Cabinet from men of the political party to ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... provide an adequate compulsory course in which all women could be given at least a working knowledge of home making and the care and feeding of the babies; so that statement need not be repeated in this chapter. But we wish to add, in passing, that ignorance is the basis and the foundation of more unhappy homes, broken promises, panicky divorces, and shattered hopes, as well as of more deaths during the first year of infancy, than any other cause. And in speaking of its relationship to babycraft, we believe that ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... Of yours, each word of yours, with power to test And weigh them in the diamond scales of pride, Resolved the treasure of a first and last Heart's love shall have been bartered at its worth, —That now I think upon your purity And utter ignorance of guilt—your own Or other's guilt—the girlish undisguised Delight at a strange novel prize—(I talk A silly language, but interpret, you!) If I, with fancy at its full, and reason Scarce in its germ, enjoined you secrecy, If ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... he had not been entirely ignorant of the dishonorable methods of stock jobbers, but he had feigned ignorance in order to draw Basil Jerome out and lead him to fully expose the true inwardness of ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... of the lip, expressive of contempt at my ignorance of the general behaviour of policemen. "Ah! if you say 'bo!' to a Peeler he pulls you, and what's the consequence? Why, a month at the Steel!"—which hard name I understood to be given to the House ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... that he first began dimly to perceive the importance of the ground which he had unwittingly occupied. The truth is, that he had laboured many years in the Sabbath Schools with which he had connected himself, before he was aware that, in his combat with ignorance, he was wielding weapons that were comparatively new; and it was still longer, before he very clearly understood the principles of those Exercises which he found so successful. One investigation led to another; light shone out as he proceeded; ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... merely meant as a simile for doctoring the people with schools. The people are poor and ignorant—that we see as surely as the peasant woman sees the baby is ill because it screams. But in what way this trouble of poverty and ignorance is to be cured by schools is as incomprehensible as how the hen-roost affects the screaming. What has to be cured is what ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... whose shape, from exposure and bad usage, was utterly indescribable; a pair of corduroys, and Indian moccasins; which so metamorphosed me, that my friends, who perfectly recollected me the moment I mentioned my name, might have remained in ignorance to this day had I not enlightened them on ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... his "Unknowable"—the creation of which was the worst day's work he ever accomplished. It is only a big word, printed with a capital letter, to express the objective side of the relativity of human, knowledge. It connotes all that we do not know. It is a mere confession of ignorance; it is hollowness, emptiness, a vacuum, a nothing. And this nothing, which Mr. Spencer adorns with endless quasi-scientific rhetoric, is used as a buttress to prop up ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... he welcomed with a strong sense of relief and expectation the long- looked-for evening of the Princess's "reception," to which many of the visitors in Cairo had been invited since a fortnight, and which those persons who always profess to be "in the know," even if they are wallowing in ignorance, declared would surpass any entertainment ever ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... his travelling companion, who appeared a man of refined speech and habits, should frequent such an evil-looking place as this. But the habits of the dwellers in cities were as yet strange to him, and it might be his ignorance, he thought, which made it appear ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green |
