"Ignorant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the world I have not written to you, it was because of the high opinion I have ever entertained of your wisdom and prudence. How could I think that she stood in need of help on whom Heaven had showered its best gifts? You were able, I knew, by example as by word, to instruct the ignorant, to comfort the timid, to kindle ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... treats you worse than the worst the North can do; for, lacking the price, it denies you access to the abundance that mocks you in every shop window, and bars you out of the houses that line the streets. Here, everything needful is yours for the taking. If one is ignorant, or unable to convert wood and water and game to his own uses, he must learn how, or pay the penalty of incompetence. No, little person, I don't think the law of life is nearly so harsh here as it is where the mob struggles for its daily bread. It's more open and aboveboard here; ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Ignorant then of Mexico and its customs, I had fancied that when a proper hour arrived for a call on the Alcalde, Don Nemecio Garcia, I should have a chance to warm myself properly and had charitably asked my three mates to accompany me on the visit. ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... as a crime specially to be laid to the charge of the student in entomology; but some of the greatest workers in that science have been ladies and clergymen, as also laymen of the most humane and advanced scientific principles. A vast amount of ignorant ideas, carefully nursed, are used as weapons against the entomologist—the pet one of which is, that impalement of a living insect through the head constitutes the sole aim and end of ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... "Do you want to hear what I think? Don't I know how old she is; eight years old and ignorant of everything. They have told me that you refuse to send her to church and to school. She is my only sister's child, and I shall not bear it, for I am responsible. You do not care for her, how else could you be indifferent to such luck. You had better give way or I shall ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... at their drill and their manoeuvres, we follow each twist and turn of their politics, we watch their birth-rate, we write reams about their navy, and we can explain to any one according to our bias exactly what their system of Protection does for them. We are often sufficiently ignorant to compare them with the Japanese, and about once a month we publish a weighty book concerning various aspects of their ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... manoeuvre to avoid an encounter—for a lion reasons as a man does, though not to the same extent. Seeing the horsemen come that way, his reasoning powers were strong enough to tell him that they were not likely to return by the same path. It was more natural they should continue on. A man, ignorant of all the preceding events connected with their journey, would have reasoned much in the same way. If you have been at all observant, you have seen other animals—such as dogs, deer, hares, or even birds—act just as the ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... done by Alexander or Caesar. Nor would I consent to exchange my glory with theirs. They both did great things; but they were at the head of great nations, far superior in valour and military skill to those with whom they contended. I was the king of an ignorant, undisciplined, barbarous people. My enemies were at first so superior to my subjects that ten thousand of them could beat a hundred thousand Russians. They had formidable navies; I had not a ship. The King of Sweden was a prince of the most intrepid courage, ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... by an ignorant Physician. Not Fate or Death but doctor Rowe Advanced to give the deadly blow That smote me to the shades below. Had Death alone approached too nigh, Had Fate or Nature bid me die, I must have borne ...
— Quaint Epitaphs • Various
... Lear. We find in him an old man with a large heart, hungry for love, and yet not knowing what love is; an old man as ignorant as a child in all matters of high import; with a temper so unsubdued, and therefore so unkingly, that he storms because his dinner is not ready by the clock of his hunger; a child, in short, in everything but his grey hairs and wrinkled face, but his failing, instead of growing, strength. ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... only statesmen like Fox who had unconfused perception, and inveighed against the stupidity of ministers acclaimed by an ignorant public as demigods. Napoleon's starting-points were to "Surmount great obstacles and attain great ends. There must be prudence, wisdom, and dexterity." "We should," he said, "do everything by reason and calculation, estimating the trouble, the sacrifice, and the ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... therefore, one sees in this world, must be ascribed to these two causes. As regards the self also, O Yudhishthira, thou art not freed from that universal law. Do thou, therefore, cease to cherish doubts of any kind. If thou seest a learned man that is poor, or an ignorant man that is wealthy, if thou seest exertion failing and the absence of exertion leading to success. thou must always ascribe the result to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... accustomed to the wall of silence and seclusion which had already grown up about her, and they did not even seek to salute her when they met her going to and from church in the morning. To these simple citizens, ignorant but reverential, Sister Silvia's lowered eyelids were as inviolate as the pearl gates of the New Jerusalem. Besides, to help their reverence, there were the fierce black eyes and strange reputation of Matteo. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... science. He is execrated as a monster, and burned alive in expiation of his crime. Absurd inconsistency, trivial superstition! from which it is time that at least the scientific world were emancipated. Long enough has the ignorant rabble exercised brute tyranny over intellects towering above its comprehension. The time for concession is past, the moment has arrived for the savant to assume the sway that rightfully devolves upon him and ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... of the galleys hung on. Was this foreigner mad, or ignorant of the river channel, they wondered, that he would sink with every soul there upon the bar? They hung on, waiting for that leopard flag and those bursting sails to come down; but they never stirred; only straight at ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... times more numerous. If the countryside, the gentry, the educated, intelligent men, were ready for the Duke, or believed in his cause, they would join him. They do not join him. His only adherents are the idle, ignorant, ill-conditioned rogues of this county, who will neither fight nor obey, when it comes to the pinch. I do not love the present King, Martin, but he is a better man than this Duke. The Duke will never make a king. He may be very fit for court-life; but there ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... the whole the method of the church, as "a power of sweetness and patience," in dealing with matters like pagan art, pagan literature was even then manifest; and has the character of the moderation, the divine moderation of Christ himself. It was only among the ignorant, indeed, only in the "villages," that Christianity, even in conscious triumph over paganism, was really betrayed into iconoclasm. In the final "Peace" of the Church under Constantine, while there was plenty of destructive fanaticism in the country, the revolution was accomplished in the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... our quaker friend at Philadelphia, in favour of the solitary system, which was, that the prisoner's return to his friends became more easy, when none of them knew that he had been in prison, of which they could not well be ignorant if he had mixed with other prisoners in a public jail. It must be borne in mind, however, that the great demand in this country for work renders it much more easy for a person so circumstanced to obtain employment, even with a damaged character, than in England, ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... door of the saloon I was met by a person, who possibly might be the maitre d'hotel, but had more the air of one of the under secretaries, who told me the Duc de C- was busy.—I am utterly ignorant, said I, of the forms of obtaining an audience, being an absolute stranger, and what is worse in the present conjuncture of affairs, being an Englishman too.—He replied, that did not increase the difficulty.—I made ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... Did you ever see Sir Frederick Adam's notes on what the army was when, at the age of 14, he entered it.[Footnote: In 1795. These notes do not seem to have been published.] When the Duke of Wellington first went to the Peninsula, he gives a wretched account of the forces—ignorant officers and rascally men. One of the grandest services the Duke rendered to his country was that he raised the character of the army and made it a most admirable instrument. But that was long after ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... and the small kitchen turns out its gallons and buckets of liquid. Mrs. —— has been helping me with my work. It is good to see anyone so beautiful in the tiny kitchen, and it is quaint to see anyone so absolutely ignorant of how a pot is washed ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... beautiful verses, and possesses the same strain of sentiment and moral reasoning as the poem of "Man was made to Mourn." These verses first appeared in the Edinburgh edition; and they might have been spared; for in the hands of a poet ignorant of the original language of the Psalmist, how could they be so correct in sense and expression as in a sacred strain is not only desirable ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... She began to feel more and more that it might be merely an extension of Harman methods to cheap boarding-houses for young people. But faced with a mass of detailed concrete projects and invited to suggest modifications she was able to realize for the first time how vague, how ignorant and incompetent her wishes had been, how much she had to understand and how much she had to discover before she could meet Sir Isaac with his "I'm doing it all for you, Elly. If you don't like it, you tell me what you don't like and I'll alter it. But just vague doubting! One can't do ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... which was the due of the old family. These people hunted over their fields, jumped over the hedges, glanced at them superciliously, and seemed astonished if every hat was not raised when they came in sight. The farmers felt that they were regarded as ignorant barbarians, and resented the town-bred insolence of people who ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... I am grossly ignorant of military matters, and hardly know the names of regiments or the designations of their officers; yet, as I said at the beginning of these remarks, I am always very much struck by the sight of a uniform. War is a detestable thing, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... knowledge which novels and plays afford, for good or evil, according as the novel or the play elevates the understanding and ennobles the passions, or merely corrupts the fancy and lowers the standard of human nature. But of all that Roland desired him to be taught, the son remained as ignorant as before. Among the other misfortunes of this ominous marriage, Roland's wife had possessed all the superstitions of a Roman Catholic Spaniard; and with these the boy had unconsciously intermingled doctrines far more dreary, imbibed from the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... large commercial firm was once asked why he employed such an ignorant man for a buyer. He replied: "It is true that our buyer cannot spell correctly; but when anything comes within the range of his eyes, he sees all that there is to be seen. He buys over a million dollars' worth a year for us, and I cannot recall any instance ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... "I am quite sure that Lord Chandos was ignorant of the fact—it never occurred to him; if it had done so, he would have deferred his marriage until he ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... what he did, Mr. Viner!" he exclaimed. "There's no doubt whatever that the ring in question was Ashton's; there's also no doubt that this man did offer it to Pelver this morning. Either the fellow is a fool or singularly ignorant, to do such a mad thing! But—he did it! And I ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... The ignorant and superstitious feared it. The vicious, ambitious, and time-serving hated it, because it prevented the few from dominating and exploiting the many; liberating, as it does, the earnest seeker after truth and enlightenment from the bondage of ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... the purpose of gaining some intelligence respecting my present place of abode, I asked to which post-town she was to send or carry the letter, a stolid 'ANAN' showed me she was either ignorant of the nature of a post-office, or that, for the present, she chose to seem so.—'Simpleton!' ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... kitten pranced and paddled, fixing her gleaming eyes upon the great man's smirking countenance, and pursued his knotted handkerchief so swiftly that she tumbled head over heels, giddy with her own rapid evolutions. Then the judge, being but human, and ignorant of the wide gap which lies between a cat's standard of good taste and the lenient standard of the court-room, ventured upon one of those doubtful pleasantries which a few pussies permit to privileged friends, but ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... woods, seemed to throw a mist of sadness over the world. She had opened the casement, and for a time had puzzled over her uncle and his strange guests. Something must be going forward at the Abbey of which she was ignorant. Sydney Fellowes must know this, and there had been more meaning in his words than she had imagined. Why ought she not to be at the Abbey? And then her thoughts wandered to another man who had found her in a place where no woman ought to be, and she remembered all Lord Rosmore ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... understand me, Fanny, with your excellent sense and tact. Lucy is clever, and amusing, and all that; and Ludovic, like all young men, is perhaps ignorant that his attentions may be taken to mean ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... again, the other into the bush to where my dogs were tethered. If he was determined to follow up the latter and to trace me to my hiding, I was ready for him, and would have the advantage of knowing his whereabouts, whilst he was ignorant of mine. He must have been going through some such argument himself, for presently he whipped up his dogs and, with one last glance across his shoulder, continued on his journey. When he had vanished, and I had made ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... inclinations and wishes, to the necessity which would compel them to engage in political strife. We apprehend no one who has properly considered this question will doubt if female suffrage should be established that the more ignorant and less refined portions of the female population of this country, to say nothing of the baser class of females, laying aside feminine delicacy and disregarding the sacred duties devolving upon them, to which we have already ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... my Lord Archon (but that he had his senses to the last, and that his character, as not the restorer, but the founder of a commonwealth, was greater) are so exactly the same, that (seeing by men wholly ignorant of antiquity I am accused of writing romance) I shall repeat nothing: but tell you that this year the whole nation of Oceana, even to the women and children, were in mourning, where so great or sad a funeral pomp had never been seen or known. Some time after the performance of the obsequies a ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... leaves to those who survive him. And in truth one who spends his time in this manner, lives in quiet contemplation and without being molested by those ambitious desires which are almost always seen, to their shame and loss, in the idle and unoccupied, who are for the most part ignorant. And even if it comes about that our virtuous man is sometimes smitten by the malign, so powerful is the force of virtue that time covers up and buries the malice of the wicked, and the virtuous man, throughout the ages that follow, remains ever ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... shabbily. And yet—why did he use every effort that day to keep me ignorant of my own rightful affairs, only to come at me himself with a club, gibbering ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... Christianity. We are not to judge the Heathen; yet universal evidence gives the melancholy fact, that the light of nature does not lead the soul to God: and without judging of their destiny, we are bound to enlighten their minds. We know the great Being of whom they are ignorant; and well will it be for them and for us, in a day that awaits us all, if yet, though late, sadly late—yet not too late, we so give countenance and aid to the missionary, that the light of revealed truth may cheer the remaining period of their ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... were chiefly to blame. It is very hard for the strong to be just to the weak. The weakest creature, pressed hard, will strike back. White women and children were massacred in retaliation for outrages committed upon the ignorant Indians by white outlaws. Then there would be a sweeping destruction of Indians by the excited whites, who in those days made rather light of Indian shooting. The shooting of a "buck" was about the same thing, whether it was a male Digger or ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... from the table down upon the floor, and then flew by itself up to the cornice of the room, where it hung, fixed to the woodwork. Greatly amazed, I called for Rodolfo, and pointed out to him this marvel. He did not indeed see it fly up, and at that time I was ignorant as to what it might foretell, for I had no foreboding of the many ills which were about to molest me. But now I see that the meaning of this portent must have been that, after the approaching shipwreck of my fortunes, my bark would be sped along ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... strange; and among the fish there exists a species of shark, which is the only living representative of a genus that flourished in early geologic epochs. If, now, the modern fossiliferous deposits of Australia were to be examined by one ignorant of the existing Australian Fauna; and if he were to reason in the usual manner; he would be very unlikely to class these deposits with those of the present time. How, then, can we place confidence in the tacit assumption that certain formations in remote parts of the Earth ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... lived a life withdrawn from worldly employments are inflamed with the idea of their own merit, and are continually desiring heaven on that account, and thinking of heavenly joy as a reward, utterly ignorant of what heavenly joy is. When such are admitted into the company of angels and into their joy, which discards merit and consists in active labors and practical services, and in a blessedness resulting ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... as the motives of the discoverers must have been, like those of the crusaders before them, and probably, for the most part, self-interested, it is easy to imagine the surprise they must have felt at seeing ignorant people, who, to quote Peter ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... fingers of his right he felt laboriously for a lamp that had been revealed by the fitful flashes of the matches. It is not an easy matter to light a lamp when you have only one hand to work with, particularly when you are obliged to keep an eye on a mysterious prisoner of whose character you are ignorant; and it was several minutes before the job ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... said icily, "is no one's affair but my own. I am not wholly ignorant of the ways of the world. And I know whom ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... that basis. 'Hence,' says the author whom we are considering, and who makes, in the first pages of his book, substantially the same statements concerning the condition of Historical literature which are made here—'hence the singular spectacle of one historian being ignorant of political economy; another knowing nothing of law; another, nothing of ecclesiastical affairs, and changes of opinion; another neglecting the philosophy of statistics, and another physical science; although these topics are the most essential ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... were read in the court, in the presence of the Templars, who were required to say what they could allege in their defence. They replied that they were ignorant of the processes of law, and that they were not permitted to have the aid of those whom they trusted and who could advise them, but that they would gladly make a statement of their faith and of the principles of their order. This they were permitted to do, and a very simple and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... an ignorant old creature living on a well nigh uninhabited island off an isolated coast, with some mysterious means of information upon subjects that ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... to be, what they now are by the appointment of the dragon, the spirit of delusion and destruction, by whose inspiration they are executioners of the degraded people whose education has been neglected, and who would have become true republicans, if monarchs had become fathers and teachers of the ignorant. But obviously appears to be as absurd, as Mr. Belly's assertion, that God has constituted the monarchs, although it is manifest, that the dragon has constituted them, or they are constituted "according to a severe divine judgment," according ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... of the fate of Smerdis; they also knew that the Persians were ignorant of it, and that every one at court, including the mother and sisters of the prince, believed that he was still alive. Gaumata headed a revolt in the little town of Pasyauvada on the 14th of Viyakhna, in the early days of March, 521, and he was ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... set her down as an enamoured idiot or a creature not a whit less artful than her brother, was Countess Livia's debate. Her inclination was to misdoubt the daughter of the Old Buccaneer: she might be simple, at her age, and she certainly was ignorant; but she clung to her prize. Still the promise was extracted from her, that she would not worry the earl to fulfil the word she supposed him to mean ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hand, Al must have been wholly ignorant of Warfield's scheme to try and prove Lorraine crazy. It looked to Swan very much like a muddling of the Sawtooth affairs through over-anxiety to avoid trouble. They were afraid of what Lorraine knew. They wanted to eliminate ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... here, sir," he exclaimed. "Of your flight from the palace, of your speech to the people. It was only an hour ago that you declared yourself ignorant of the language. It seems that your statement ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... interrupted. "I am not speaking to you as one of ourselves. I am speaking as the representative of England in Berlin. You are supposed to be studying diplomacy. You have been guilty of a colossal blunder. You have shown yourself absolutely ignorant of the ideals and customs of the country in which you are. It is perfectly correct for young Prince Karl to behave, as you put it, like a bounder. The people expect it of him. He conforms entirely to the standard accepted by the military ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his secret treasure-room, opening the jewel coffers one after the other, the King remained quite ignorant of the disaster. For some time no sound reached him in his hidden retreat, because the door of the treasure-room was very thick and strong. Suddenly he heard behind him the sound of falling water, ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... interests of Europe, and he could not have heard with patience that the country of Grotius, the cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest repositories of all law, should be taught a new code by the ignorant flippancy of Thomas Paine, the presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, with his stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue and turbulency of Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet, in his insolent addresses ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... superiority of Turner, closing with what sounds a strange admission after such teachings and such arguments:—'Remember always that Turner's greatness and rightness in all these points successively depend on no scientific knowledge. He was entirely ignorant of all the laws we have been developing. He had merely accustomed himself to see impartially, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... precious book was entirely laid aside, so that I never read one single chapter of it, as far as I remember, till it pleased God to begin a work of grace in my heart. Now the Scriptural way of reasoning would have been: God himself has condescended to become an author, and I am ignorant about that precious book, which His Holy Spirit has caused to be written through the instrumentality of His servants, and it contains that which I ought to know, and the knowledge of which will lead me ...
— Answers to Prayer - From George Mueller's Narratives • George Mueller
... curious, moreover, to see how far I could rely upon his kindness and generosity, should circumstances ever compel me to depend upon him for a share of what he might procure. At night, therefore, I sat philosophically watching him whilst he proceeded to get supper ready, as yet ignorant whether I was to partake of it or not. After selecting the largest of the two animals, he prepared and cooked it, and then put away the other where he intended to sleep. I now saw that he had not ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... vicar's wife, the excellent and maternally minded Mrs. Ambrose. To accomplish this it would be necessary to ask the latter lady to spend a great part of her time at the Hall in taking care of the wretched Goddard, who would again be the gainer. But Mrs. Ambrose was as yet ignorant of the fact that he had escaped from prison; she must be told then, and an effort must be made to elicit her sympathy. Perhaps she and the vicar would come and stop a few days, thought the squire. Mrs. Goddard might then come ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... against our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land, that would render our dominions round and complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death, and make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. It is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice, when one prince desires the assistance of another, to secure him against an invasion, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... the rich traditions of a soul That hates to have her dignity profaned With any relish of an earthly thought: Oh, then how proud a presence doth she bear. Then is she like herself, fit to be seen Of none but grave and consecrated eyes: Nor is it any blemish to her fame, That such lean, ignorant, and blasted wits, Such brainless gulls, should utter their stol'n wares With such applauses in our vulgar ears: Or that their slubber'd lines have current pass From the fat judgments of the multitude, But that this barren and infected age Should set no difference 'twixt ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... also been rendered in writing letters for the great mass of ignorant soldiers to their families in the far-off Indian villages, miles away from a railway. Illiteracy, superstition, and false rumors existed at both ends of the line. Here is a man who has had no word from home since he left a year or more ago. He hears a baseless rumor or heeds some inborn fear ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... my father was an object of suspicion to the frontiersmen. Even as a child I knew this, and resented it. He had brought me up in solitude, and I was old for my age, learned in some things far beyond my years, and ignorant of others I should have known. I loved the man passionately. In the long winter evenings, when the howl of wolves and "painters" rose as the wind lulled, he taught me to read from the Bible and the "Pilgrim's ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the question what is implied by saying that a person "understands" a word, in the sense in which one understands a word in one's own language, but not in a language of which one is ignorant. We may say that a person understands a word when (a) suitable circumstances make him use it, (b) the hearing of it causes suitable behaviour in him. We may call these two active and passive understanding respectively. Dogs often ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... see, for the first time, the extent of the mischief slavery had done to me. Twenty-one years of my life were gone, never again to return, and I was as profoundly ignorant, comparatively, as a child five years old. This was painful, annoying, and humiliating in the extreme. Up to this time, I recollected to have seen one copy of the New Testament, but the entire Bible I had never seen, and had never heard of the Patriarchs, ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... sudden way in which all this had come upon her that affected her so greatly. While staying in Arundel Street she had been altogether ignorant that the story of the Lion and the Lamb had become public, or that her name had been frequent in men's mouths. When Mrs Buggins had once told her that she was thus becoming famous, she had ridiculed Mrs Buggins' statement. Mrs Buggins had brought home word from some tea-party ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... very rude,' he said, 'to keep on talking while I was singing, but I suppose, as you are only an ignorant weasel, you do not understand good manners, and therefore I will condescend so far as to inform you of the measures taken by my noble friend the rat to get you out. If you were not so extremely ignorant and stupid you would guess what ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... so if men in England now, had the like reuerend regard to learning skill and iudgement, and durst not presume to write, except they came with the like learnyng, and also did vse like diligence, in searchyng out, not onelie iust measure in euerie meter, as euerie ignorant person may easely do, but also trew quantitie in euery foote and sillable, as onelie the learned shalbe able to do, and as the Grekes and Romanes were wont to do, surelie than rash ignorant heads, which ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... principal cause of harm to the Indians. It is necessary to dispose what is to be done ... Although great care is now exercised in the treatment of the Indians their numbers grow less for all that, because just as they are ignorant of things concerning the faith, so do they ignore things concerning their health, and they are of ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... your Majesty that, if more auditors are to be sent, they may be persons of tried experience in Audiencia duties—to whom it would be well to give senior rank therein, for those who are in it now are totally ignorant of its procedure, never having had any experience in so responsible positions, so that they could know how to act. If they had only been able to learn from the licentiate Alcaraz, who was experienced and very prudent! ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... Betty commented. "Now, girls," she went on, "I don't know all the whys and wherefores, but I'm sure of one thing, and that is nice people don't live in that hut. I don't mean just poor, or unfortunate, or ignorant people, either," she went on. "I mean they aren't nice—or—or safe! There, ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... few days' sojourn in an Eastern city by a Western man to realize how sublimely ignorant the New Englander is concerning at least three-fourths of his native land. The writer was, on a recent occasion, asked, in an Eastern city, how he managed to get along without any of the comforts of civilization, and whether he did ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... following spring, when Vere was nearly two years old, he had paid a visit to Marechiaro, and, while there, had seen the contadino from whom Hermione had rented, and still rented, the house of the priest. The man was middle-aged, ignorant but shrewd, and very greedy. Artois made friends with him, and casually, over a glass of moscato, talked about his affairs and the land question in Sicily. The peasant became communicative and, of course, loud in his complaining. His ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... spiritual destitution which I have recently in my visitations found to prevail among the people. God help me! how much misery have I seen! The common folk, especially the villagers, know absolutely nothing of Christian doctrine, and alas, many of the parish priests are almost too ignorant or incapable to teach them!' He entreats therefore his brother clergymen to take pity on the people, to assist in bringing home the Catechism to them, and more particularly to the young; and to this end, if no better way commended itself, to take ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... cause for wonder, that under this cheerless influence our poetry is either silent or unsold? The true poet must be ignorant, for information is the thief of rhyme. And it ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... as those are wont to do, who have seen Nothing. But when we employ too long time in travell, we at last become strangers to our own Country, and when we are too curious of those things, which we practised in former times, we commonly remain ignorant of those which are now in use. Besides, Fables make us imagine divers events possible, which are not so: And that even the most faithfull Histories, if they neither change or augment the value of things, to render them the more worthy to be read, at least, they always omit the basest ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes
... carried out to an extent of which most persons are ignorant. On the Van Rensselaer manor, there were at one time, several thousand tenants, and their gathering was like that of the Scottish clans. When a member of the family died they came down to Albany to do honor at the funeral, and many were the hogsheads of good ale which were broached for ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... sword even in a canoe. And Tonty, his Italian friend and fellow adventurer—Tonty of the satins and velvets, graceful, tactful, poised, a shadowy figure; his menacing iron hand, so feared by the ignorant savages, encased always in a glove. Surely a perfumed g—— Slap! A rude shove that jerked her head back sharply and sent her forward, stumbling, and jarred her like ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... talk to," the ex-cardinal reflected. "He fails to follow up, or, apparently, even to understand, any of the usual conversational gambits. Is he very ignorant, or merely perverse?" ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... laws which his family recognized, his life was a failure. To Ben Roberts he was a derelict—and yet to me a kind of elemental dignity lay in the attitude he had maintained when surrounded by coarse and ignorant workmen. He remained unmoved, uncontaminated. His mind inhabited a calm inner region beyond the reach of any coarse word or mocking phrase. Growing ever more mystical as he grew older he had gone his lonely way bent and gray and silent, a student of the forest and the stream. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Ireland well. The genius of amalgamation and organization cannot afford to pass by these shops, which spring up in haphazard fashion, not because the country needs them, but because farmers or traders have children to be provided for. To the ignorant this is the easiest form of trade, and so many are started in life in one of these little shops after an apprenticeship in another like it. These numerous competitors of each other do not keep down prices. They increase them rather by the unavoidable multiplication of expenses; and many of them, ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... pages, to the number of twenty or twenty-five. Alfieri was at first placed in the third apartment, and the fourth class, from which he was promoted to the third at the end of three months. The master of this class was a certain Don Degiovanni, a priest even more ignorant than his good friend Ivaldi. It may be supposed that under such auspices he did not make much progress in his studies. Let us hear his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... concluding volume, "Dr. Pascal," to the press. He had spent five-and-twenty years in working out his scheme, persevering with it doggedly and stubbornly, whatever rebuffs he might encounter, whatever jeers and whatever insults might be directed against him by the ignorant, the prejudiced, and the hypocritical. Truth was on the march and nothing could stay it; even as, at the present hour, its march, if slow, none the less continues athwart another and a different crisis of the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... home, and squeeze a day into an hour, what follows is that there he is self-revealing in the superlative degree, the feelings so long dammed up overflow, and thus a Scotch family are probably better acquainted with each other, and more ignorant of the life outside their circle, than any other family in the world. And as knowledge is sympathy, the affection existing between them is almost painful in its intensity; they have not more to give than their neighbours, but it is bestowed upon a few instead of being distributed ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... was blandly ignorant of the fact that propriety as strictly measured in Boston would have been aghast at his candid manner of following his inclinations, met with no obstacles save from Miss Maitland herself. She, it is true, now and again drew back when it seemed to her that their friendship ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Ignorant of social interplay as Johnny Gamble was, he somehow divined that William G. Slosher's doll was the ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... found in every branch of the Army, and he is recognised as one by his comrades, even although the world at large is ignorant. Perhaps we shall find a word for his British correlative, who must be numerically very strong too. The letter A alone might do it, signifying anonymous. "Voila, un as!" says the French soldier, indicating one of these brave modest fellows ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... said, "Oh, Jumbo won't mind," which might or might not have been the case; for it is my fixed conviction that that noble animal was totally unaware of what was taking place, so to speak, behind his back, and to this hour is ignorant of the indignity that ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... "Study in City Development" is highly suggestive, and shows how great a difference thoughtful and tasteful treatment might make in dealing with such problems. It is sad to think of the opportunities wasted, and of the more ignorant and often too hasty clearances for traffic which have often been apparently the sole motives in city improvement. The conservation of historic buildings, whenever possible, the planting of trees along our streets, the laying out ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... instructed in the principles of their religion than Catholics; the reason is obvious; the doctrine of the former requires discussion, of the latter a blind submission; the Catholic must content himself with the decisions of others, the Protestant must learn to decide for himself; they were not ignorant of this, but neither my age nor appearance promised much difficulty to men so accustomed to disputation. They knew, likewise, that I had not received my first communion, nor the instructions which accompany it; but, on the other hand, they had no idea of the information I received ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... ignorant of what powers of speech the man-ape possessed. It must, in its developed state as a land-dwelling, wandering, and hunting biped, have needed a wider range of utterance than during its arboreal residence. It was exposed to new dangers, ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... Italian with a lacerated thumb up from the City Hospital and sent him in to her as an injured elevator-boy looking for first-aid treatment. One glimpse of her work on that thumb showed her to be betrayingly ignorant of both figure-of-eight and spica bandaging, and Blake, finally satisfied as to the imposture, carried on his investigation, showed "Doctor Callahan" to be Connie Binhart, the con-man and bank thief, and sent the two adventurers ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... Scythians again, then deserts with wild animals to a mountain ridge rising out of the sea, which is called Tabin. The first people that are known beyond this are the Seri. PTOLEMY and his successors again supposed, though perhaps not ignorant of the old statement that Africa had been circumnavigated under Pharaoh Necho, that the Indian Ocean was an inland sea, everywhere surrounded by land, which united southern Africa with the eastern ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... turned swiftly, dropping the pitcher of milk which she had just brought from the cooling-room as she saw him, he might well have been excused from promulgating his mission of peace with any degree of coherence. Sublimely ignorant of her presence,—spiritualists and sentimentalists to the contrary in like instances,—he rode directly to the hacienda, asked for the patron, and was shown to the cool interior of the house by the mildly astonished Senora. Senor Loring would return presently. Would the gentleman ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... months we have commenced work among the churches within four or five miles of here. Many of our older students make excellent helpers and are so glad to go and teach in the Sunday-schools and help their ignorant brethren in any way they can. I have never heard one of our students express a desire to leave the South for anything more than to complete his education. The most of them are planning to work among their own people, teaching and carrying on trades in a way that will ...
— American Missionary, Vol. 45, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... there without any apparent aim, tracing the most inexplicable zigzags, sometimes sinking to the earth, sometimes rising to a height of four or five feet, at others remaining quite motionless, and the next second flying off like a ball. In spite of the place and the season of the year, the less ignorant among vagabonds believed the light to be some ignis fatuus, one of those luminous meteors that raise from the marshes and float about in the atmosphere at the bidding of the wind. In point of fact, however, this ignis fatuus ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... be that the artists who slavishly follow the published text fear being accused of altering the composer's music, or are ignorant of the fact that there exists a better version, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... "Being ignorant of any positive law or treaty which deprives Americans of this privilege, and authorizes officers of police arbitrarily to take mariners in the service of France from on board their vessels, I call upon your intervention, sir, and that of ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... then she was ignorant of the death of that too-faithful friend! In a hurrying accent he replied, "Never forgotten! Oh, Helen. I asked for him life; and Heaven gave him long life, even forever ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... the moment, came across as involuntary deserter; flying from a great peril in his own camp. The name of him is Chasot, Lieutenant of such and such a Regiment: "Take me to Prince Eugene!" he entreats, which is done. Peril was this: A high young gentleman, one of those fops in red heels, ignorant, and capable of insolence to a poorer comrade of studious turn, had fixed a duel upon Chasot. Chasot ran him through, in fair duel; dead, and is thought to have deserved it. "But Duc de Boufflers is his kinsman: run, or you are lost!" cried everybody. The Officers of his ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the life we lead, Olga Semyonovna. It's enough to make one cry. One works and does one's utmost, one wears oneself out, getting no sleep at night, and racks one's brain what to do for the best. And then what happens? To begin with, one's public is ignorant, boorish. I give them the very best operetta, a dainty masque, first rate music-hall artists. But do you suppose that's what they want! They don't understand anything of that sort. They want a clown; what they ask for is vulgarity. And then look at the weather! Almost ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the formation of any definite mood, and to set up what is most hostile to all mood, to all unity of being: comparison, analysis, classification. You may know quite exactly the difference between Giotto and Simon Martini, between a Ferrarese and a Venetian, between Praxiteles and Scopas; and yet be ignorant of the meaning which any of these might have in your life, and unconscious of the changes they might work in your being. And this, I fear, is often the case with connoisseurs and archaeologists, accounting for ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Sly expedient, they would add, is a forced expedient. Perhaps it is. But English art sees with the eyes of the imagination and in dramatic matters it likes to use colour and emphasis. Daniel Dowlas, as Lord Duberly, is all the droller for being a retired tallow-chandler, ignorant, greasy, conventional, blunt, a sturdy, honest, ridiculous person, who thinks he has observed how lords act and who intends to put his gained knowledge into practical use. We shall never again see him acted as he was ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... be the tradition my mother meant, when she said, 'There is a tradition.' Yes, her trunk is pointing to it." So he pulled up the birch tree and devoured it, as well as he could. The young Elephant continued to wander among the mountains but with no great purpose in life; for he was totally ignorant of the story that one of his race would one day mount to the sky and dwell among the stars, so that he was without that great object before him. Neither did he know how much suffering his father and mother had gone through, that he might ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... he answered. "How should I know, who am but an ignorant old black man, who was born not much more than eighty years ago? Yet, Lady, tell me, for I seek your wisdom, where were you born from? Out of the earth, or out of the heavens? What? You shake your head, you who do not remember? Well, ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... rest until it reaches the forces by which the observed succession is produced. It was thus with Torricelli; it was thus with Newton; it is thus pre-eminently with the scientific man of to-day. In common with the most ignorant, he shares the belief that spring will succeed winter, that summer will succeed spring, that autumn will succeed summer, and that winter will succeed autumn. But he knows still further—and this knowledge is ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... patience] Silence! You talk like an ignorant girl, blinded by passion. The pogrom is a holy crusade. Are we Russians the first people to crush down the Jew? No—from the dawn of history the nations have had to stamp upon him—the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... that it was 'to us and not to the world' that the showing was to take place. Our Lord, by the studiously impersonal form into which He casts the promise, proclaims its universality, and says this to His ignorant questioner, 'Do not suppose that you Apostles have the monopoly. You may not even have a share in My self-manifestation. Anybody may have it. And there is no "world," as you suppose, to which I do not show Myself. Anybody may have the vision if ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... courage. Nobody in the palace, then, except Monpavon and Louis the valet de chambre, knew of the visit of those three personages introduced mysteriously into the Minister of State's apartments. The duchess herself was ignorant of it. Separated from her husband by the barriers frequently placed by the political and fashionable life of the great world between married people, she believed him slightly indisposed, nervous more than anything ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... discipline they knew nothing. To win the battle with the rush of the first onset, and when the battle was won to make off to their homes with all the plunder they could lay hands on,—this was their notion of warfare, and it was a notion which the chiefs were too ignorant or too prudent to interfere with. What chance could there be of inducing such spirits as these to combine in one great confederacy, and to undertake a long and desperate struggle for the sake of a king of whom ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... was the sternest and most severe of masters; that he laid about him, right and left, every day of his life, charging in among the boys like a trooper, and slashing away, unmercifully. That he knew nothing himself, but the art of slashing, being more ignorant (J. Steerforth said) than the lowest boy in the school; that he had been, a good many years ago, a small hop-dealer in the Borough, and had taken to the schooling business after being bankrupt in hops, and making away with Mrs. Creakle's money. With a good deal more of that ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... as it should be; and all attempts to make it otherwise are due to the eloquence of the ignorant, the zeal of ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... "Can't you speak to me, old chap? Can't you tell me what to do? I want to help you, but I am so stupid and ignorant. ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... right in such matters as the wise and prudent—even more likely, if our Saviour's words are to be believed. Dear child, do you not see that our Lord came to save all men, and call all men into His Church; and that therefore He must have marked His Church in such a manner that the most ignorant may perceive it as easily as the most learned? Learning is very well, and it is the gift of God; but salvation and grace cannot depend upon it. It needs an architect to understand why Paul's Church is strong and beautiful, and what makes it so; but any child or foolish fellow can see ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... assumed a severer aspect, she now weighs the value of observations, and substitutes induction and reasoning for conjecture and assumption. The dogmas of former ages survive now only in the superstitions of the people and the prejudices of the ignorant, or are perpetuated in a few systems, which, conscious of their weakness, shroud themselves in a vail of mystery. We may also trace the same primitive intuitions in languages exuberant in figurative expressions; and ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Alexandria or in Syria or even in Rome—that you, my mother's daughter, should be caught over head and ears by a broad-shouldered lout, for all the world like a clumsy town-girl or a wench at a loom. This ignorant Adonis, who knows so well how to make use of his own strange and resolute personality, and of the power that stands in his background, thinks no more of the hearts he sets in flames than I of the earthen jar out of which water is drawn when I am thirsty. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "Who can tell if that will ever happen?" and, ignorant how else to help herself out of her trouble, she promised the Dwarf what he desired; and he immediately set about and finished the spinning. When morning came, and the King found all he had wished for done, he celebrated ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... food for reflection in the fact that Peter was allowed to conduct him to the Tavern alone. It was evident that not only was the garrulous native ignorant of the real conditions at Green Fancy, but that the opportunity was deliberately afforded him to proclaim his private grievances to the world. After all, mused Barnes, it wasn't a bad bit ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... stump of an arm, which was taken off, after being shattered by a fall from a tree, that bore no marks of skilful operation, though some allowance be made for their defective instruments. And I met with a man going about with a dislocated shoulder, some months after the accident, from their being ignorant of a method to reduce it; though this be considered as one of the simplest operations of our surgery. They know that fractures or luxations of the spine are mortal, but not fractures of the skull; and they likewise ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... authority was as nothing to his children; he felt most painfully his sternness had alienated their affections, and he now rather shrunk from their society; therefore, even at home he was a solitary man, and yet Grahame was formed for all the best emotions, the warmest affections of our nature. He was ignorant that his wife now very frequently suffered from ill-health, for he had never seen her conduct different even when in youth and perfectly well. Had he known this, and also the fact that, though trembling at his sternness, she yet ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... one valuable piece of information. She knew enough to understand how very trifling was the sum of all her knowledge; it may be remarked that very ignorant persons are almost always the most conceited. Such individuals have no more idea of knowledge than those born blind or deaf can have of sight or sound. But the gentle humble-minded Mary Mannering was a very opposite character. She was not ignorant; she had, as it were, peeped, ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... revelations that Jinny could make would do no good. Jinny could only report that he had maintained a disguise at a wedding reception, and talked a few moments, apparently undetected, to a bride. Hamdi Bey, and Hamdi's eunuchs, would be blandly ignorant of such a scandal. What his disappearance would indicate would be some further frolic on his part, some tempting of a later Providence before he had abandoned his disguise.... If he were discovered, for instance, in some of those native ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... conscious soul accuses him of nothing; In opposition to his own soft heart He subjugates himself to an iron duty. Me in a weaker moment passion warp'd; I stand beside him, and must feel myself The worse man of the two. What, though the world Is ignorant of my purposed treason, yet One man does know it, and can prove it too— High-minded Piccolomini! There lives the man who can dishonor me! This ignominy blood alone can cleanse! Duke Friedland, thou or I—Into my own hands Fortune delivers ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... would not. I swear it by all that is sacred," said Erik, hotly. "Whatever may be the injuries you have inflicted upon me or upon others, I guarantee that you shall not suffer for them in any way. Besides, there is one fact of which you seem to be ignorant, it is that there is a limit to such matters. When such events have taken place more than twenty years ago, human justice has no longer the right to demand an accounting ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... a child and a story, without thinking of the fairy tale. Is this, as some would have us believe, a bad habit of an ignorant old world? Or can the Fairy Tale justify her popularity with truly edifying and educational results? Is she a proper person to introduce here, and what ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... some sort of a slippery, impenetrable casing; he never tried to enter through their minds, where the door stood always open. The trouble was that he wanted to teach and be listened to; wherefore he was subtly more at home among the ignorant and in such streets as he was now traversing than with educated men. He had been born a few decades too late; here in Hayti he had stepped back a century or so into the age of credulity. Credulity, he believed, was a good thing, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... out of the woodland into a short street of handsomely built houses, which my companion named to me at once as Piccadilly: the lower part of these I should have called shops, if it had not been that, as far as I could see, the people were ignorant of the arts of buying and selling. Wares were displayed in their finely designed fronts, as if to tempt people in, and people stood and looked at them, or went in and came out with parcels under their arms, just like the real thing. ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... the world believe that they are so, to serve their own selfish purposes. The sons are tyrannized over through youth by their mothers, who endeavour to subdue their spirit to the yoke, which they wish to bind heavy upon their necks for life; and they remain through manhood timid, ignorant, and altogether unfitted for the conduct of public affairs, and for the government of men under a despotic rule, whose essential principle is a salutary fear of the prince in all his public officers. Every unlettered native of India is as sensible ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... He wanted to have a row with Castle. But it was not the teller he worried about back at his own desk: it was himself. He was ignorant! With all his high-school education and his big marks in languages he did not know that combinations should not be wound, or that three-dollar bills were not somewhere in circulation. There was knowledge for him in ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... bonds and stocks drop down to where they could buy them in on terms that would yield them more than two hundred and fifty per cent, on the actual capital invested. Less and dearer coal; lower wages and more ignorant laborers; enormous profits absorbed without mercy into a ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... years. By 1997 we will have cut defense by 30 percent since I took office. These cuts are deep, and you must know my resolve: this deep, and no deeper. To do less would be insensible to progress, but to do more would be ignorant of history. We must not go back to the days of "the hollow army". We cannot repeat the mistakes made twice in this century when armistice was followed by recklessness and defense was purged as if the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... would be, for themselves to restore the great and neglected duty of Catechising, on which the Salvation of so many of the poor and ignorant lay-people does depend; but principally, that the Clergy themselves would be sure to live unblameably; and that the dignified Clergy especially which preach temperance, would avoid surfeiting and ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... said that he would show them something that would "put their brains into a twist like unto a bell-rope." As a matter of fact, he was really playing off a practical joke on the company, for he was quite ignorant of any answer to the puzzle that he set them. He produced a piece of cloth in the shape of a perfect equilateral triangle, as shown in the illustration, and said, "Be there any among ye full wise in the true cutting of cloth? I trow not. Every man to his trade, and the scholar may learn from the ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... legislation, the ex-slave was made the political equal of his white master, and if numbers are to be counted the slave class became the superior force in the reconstructed Southland. That the new Negro citizen was honest and well-meaning, no one doubts. It must be confessed, however, that the masses were ignorant of the high responsibilities charged to them, and it is but natural that many mistakes were unwittingly made. Indeed, the wonder is not that many errors could be laid at the door of the amateur "statesman," lawmakers and suffragists, but that more grievous blunders were not ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... was especially to the Tzendals. Previous to his arrival they were ignorant, barbarous, and without fixed habitations. He collected them into villages, taught them how to cultivate the maize and cotton, and invented the hieroglyphic signs, which they learned to carve on the walls of their temples. It is even said that he ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... life and genius! Evelyn woke and smiled peacefully on me, but lay as if still exhausted with weariness. The physician came. He was already aware that my wife had been engaged in her profession, though ignorant of the objects which had induced her to it. I informed him of my apprehensions. Conducting him to Evelyn, I excused his presence by stating my fear that she might require his advice after her excitement ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to-day come up against the bedrock of her integrity; it is terrible. She has eternal youth, eternal fair hair, cold and ignorant judgments. On things relating to the world I can't further soften her; a man must ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... considerable time. In case, however, Captain Heald thought proper to evacuate the place, he urged upon him the propriety of doing so immediately, before the Pottawatomies (through whose country they must pass, and who were as yet ignorant of the object of his mission) could collect a force sufficient to oppose them. This advice though given in great earnestness, was not sufficiently regarded by Captain Heald; who observed, that he should evacuate the fort, but having received orders to distribute ...
— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous
... seeming indifference, though with great art. Sir Wycherly's principal weakness was an overweening and an ignorant admiration of his own country, and all it contained. He was also strongly addicted to that feeling of contempt for the dependencies of the empire, which seems to be inseparable from the political connection between the people of the metropolitan country and their colonies. There ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... was one thing Barnriff bowed the knee to it was the man who could, and would, make a speech. It had all the masses' love for oratory, and was as easily swayed by it as a crowd of ignorant political voters. Besides, Doc Crombie was a tried orator in Barnriff. He had addressed a meeting once before, and, speaking on behalf of a church mission, and asking for support of the cause, he had created a great impression by his stern denunciation of the ungodly ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... fault of the French system: it is too exclusively on physical science and natural history. Fancy a National School which teaches the children no more of the state and history of Ireland than of Belgium or Japan! We have spoken to pupils, nay, to masters of the National Schools, who were ignorant of the physical character of every part of Ireland except their native villages—who knew not how the people lived, or died, or sported, or fought—who had never heard of Tara, Clontarf, Limerick, or Dungannon—to ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Rogers," I said; "but I will leave you something to think about till we meet again. Find out why our Lord was so much displeased with the disciples, whom He knew to be ignorant men, for not knowing what He meant when He warned them against the leaven of the Pharisees. I want to know what you think about it. You'll find the story told both in the sixteenth chapter of St Matthew and ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... very cold, haughty, collected, and self-possessed, and his conversation that of a man who has cultivated his intellect rather in the world than the closet. I mean, that, perfectly ignorant of things, he was driven to converse solely upon persons, and, having imbibed no other philosophy than that which worldly deceits and disappointments bestow, his remarks, though shrewd, were bitterly ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... offended, because I have named but one article. The tortoise—as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, knows by much experience—besides the delicious calipash and calipee, contains many different kinds of food; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... advantage of the customer. In respect that it consisted of women, it would give eager attention to a scheme that permitted each customer to spend her money, and yet to have it. In respect that it consisted of ignorant and pretentious women, this public could be counted upon to deceive itself in the service of its own vanity, and maintain against all opposition that the garments obtained on this soothing system were supremely ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... Cliges felt himself wounded, he charged the youth, and struck him with such force that he drove his lance quite through his heart, and stretched him dead. Then all the Saxons in fear of him betook themselves to flight through the woods. And Cliges, ignorant of the ambuscade, courageously but imprudently leaving his companions behind, pursues them to the place where the duke's troops were in force preparing to attack the Greeks. Alone he goes in hot pursuit after the youths, who, in despair over their lord whom they had ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... after their settlement in England. These Saxons were a fierce, warlike, unlettered people from Germany; whom the ancient Britons had invited to their assistance against the Picts and Scots. Cruel and ignorant, like their Gothic kindred, who had but lately overrun the Roman empire, they came, not for the good of others, but to accommodate themselves. They accordingly seized the country; destroyed or enslaved the ancient inhabitants; ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... men curious in regard to the future, or dissatisfied with life, or out of sorts with their contemporaries, could hold themselves in reserve for a better age, and we should have no more suicides on account of misanthropy. Valetudinarians, whom the ignorant science of the nineteenth century declares incurable, needn't blow their brains out any more; they can have themselves dried up and wait peaceably in a box until Medicine shall have found a remedy for their disorders. Rejected lovers need ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... be added another scarcely less important, namely, that the early Italians were ignorant of the use of what we now call oil paints, and worked entirely in tempera—that is to say, there was no admixture of oil or varnish with their pigments. To Hubert van Eyck is attributed the invention of the modern practice, as Vasari relates with more colour than historic truth in his life ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... man; you will never succeed otherwise. The real nurse is the mother and the real teacher is the father. Let them agree in the ordering of their duties as well as in their method, let the child pass from one to the other. He will be better educated by a sensible though ignorant father than by the cleverest master in the world. For zeal will atone for lack of knowledge, rather than knowledge for lack of zeal. But the duties of public and private business! Duty indeed! Does ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Central Asia, or derived it from the Turanian and Semitic nations with which they came in contact. In spite of their knowledge of writing, however, they produced no literature of any account, and of science they were completely ignorant. They made few improvements even in military weapons, the chief of which, as among all the nations of antiquity, were the bow, the spear, and the sword. They were skilful horsemen, and made use of chariots ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... chart without consulting it. Bowditch's Epitome, and Blunt's Coast Pilot, seem to him the only books in the world worth consulting, though I should, perhaps, except Marryatt's novels and Tom Cringle's Log. But of matters connected with the shore Mr. Brewster is as ignorant as a child unborn. He holds all landsmen but ship-builders, owners, and riggers, in supreme contempt, and can hardly conceive of the existence of happiness, in places so far inland that the sea breeze does not blow. A severe and exacting officer is ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... round the group, was not lost upon him. It was all confirmatory of what he had heard. And then, as he walked back to his tent in Silawayo's kraal, it occurred to Laurence that he had probably made a false move. Nondwana, who, of course, was not ignorant of his daughter's partiality, would almost certainly decide that Lindela had betrayed the secret and sinister intent to its unconscious object; and in that event, how would it fare with her? He felt more than anxious. The king might take long in deciding ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... swell to a single chord. He cannot tell where his direction tends; He strives unguided towards indefinite ends; He is an ignorant ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... 428-m. Levy and Simeon had for device the two fishes of Pisces, 462-u. Liberality teaches that possibly a contrary opinion may be true, 160-m. Liberties of the people guaranteed by—, 211-m. Liberty a curse to the ignorant and brutal, 26-m. Liberty and Necessity apparently antagonistic, 848-m. Liberty and Necessity, the columns of the Universe, symbolized by the Temple, 848-m. Liberty and Necessity, the essence of Deity, counterbalanced, produce equilibrium, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... leading from the bridge up to the railway station. The Hagen was a free-and-easy place compared with the Rheinischer, and among its inmates there was no one who could sing a better song than manly George—type of the Briton at whom foreigners stare—who, ignorant of a word of their language, wholly unprovided with any authorisation save the passport signed "Salisbury," and having not quite so much business at the seat of war as he might have at the bottom of a coal-mine, gravitates into danger with inevitable certainty, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... ignorant distance still delude us! Thy fancied heaven, dear girl, like that above thee, In its mere self cold, drear, colourless void, Seen from below and in the large, becomes The bright blue ether, and the seat of gods! 50 Well! but this broil that scared you from the dance? And was ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Christians, they are both irreverent and blind to all analogy. The Messiah, with His Divine mission proved by miracles which all might see who chose to look, is degraded into a prototype of James Laurie, ingeniously astronomizing upon ignorant geometry and false logic, and comparing to blockheads those who expose his nonsense. Their comparison is as foolish as—supposing {6} them Christians—it is profane: but, like errors in general, its other end points to truth. There were Pseudochrists ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... most goddess-like. Help me, I pray, To lure—Endymion, dear brother, say What ails thee?" He could bear no more, and so Bent his soul fiercely like a spiritual bow, And twang'd it inwardly, and calmly said: "I would have thee my only friend, sweet maid! My only visitor! not ignorant though, That those deceptions which for pleasure go 860 'Mong men, are pleasures real as real may be: But there are higher ones I may not see, If impiously an earthly realm I take. Since I saw thee, I have been wide awake Night ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... they will understand and respect. He can ride a horse standing; he can run a hundred miles in a day behind a dog-team. He can wrestle and fight with his hands, for skilled men have taught him. I have made him a thunderbolt to hurl among the ignorant and the unenlightened; and this is the hand ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... idea of the man who now lay murdered having been in the house presumably alive, whilst Bolton and I had stood within forty yards of him; in the idea that it had lain in our power, except for those human limitations which rendered us ignorant of his presence, to have averted his fate, perhaps to have checked the remorseless movement of this elaborate murder machine which seemingly had been set up in the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer |
