"Insipidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it is not a sign. Why not? Will it ever be so? To put the case in its short, simple, concrete form, how can a 'flirt' exist when by all the laws of the universe beauty should surely be a sign not of instability, insipidity, unspirituality, worldliness, shallowness, hypocrisy, ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... bed, it sends us there—or would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action. Macaulay, who confesses its absurdity and insipidity, says that no reader, probably, ever thought it dull. "The story, whatever its value may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no digressions, or unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every sentence carries the action forward. The excitement is constantly ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... antiquity, hence they are inclined to look upon this study as barren, superseded, out-of-date. This herd has turned with much greater zest to the science of language: here in this wide expanse of virgin soil, where even the most mediocre gifts can be turned to account, and where a kind of insipidity and dullness is even looked upon as decided talent, with the novelty and uncertainty of methods and the constant danger of making fantastic mistakes—here, where dull regimental routine and discipline are desiderata—here the ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... was bad enough; minus sugar it was unthinkable. But the "Law" would not permit us to sweeten the "pap" any more—that is to say, the reduced allowance of sugar was all too little for neutralising the insipidity of black tea. We were also restricted to a fixed complement per unit of tea and coffee—as much as we required in any circumstances, but, ironically enough, a little more than we required of the stimulants in their undiluted nastiness. An elaborate system was set up garnished ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Byron was the author of some of the most popular stage pieces of his day. Yet his extravaganzas have no wit but that of violence; his rhyming couplets are without polish, and decorated only by forced and often pointless puns. His sentiment had T.W. Robertson's insipidity without its freshness, and restored an element of vulgarity which his predecessor had laboured to eradicate from theatrical tradition. He could draw a "Cockney" character with some fidelity, but his dramatis personae were usually mere puppets for the utterance of his jests. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Miss Stafford, one need not be a professed stole to draw the line at a little country girl, pious to insipidity and simple to the brink of silliness. Here Lawrence, not being one of those who deny facts when they are unwelcome, caught himself up: she was not insipid and her power over him was undeniable. Twice within forty-eight hours she had ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... life—Desmond resembled her rather than his father. In both faces there was the same smiling youthfulness, combined—as indeed also in Pamela—with something that entirely banished any suggestion of insipidity—something that seemed to say, 'There is a soul here—and a brain.' It had sometimes occurred, in a dreamy way to Pamela, to connect that smile on her mother's face with a line in a poem of Browning's, which she had learnt ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... instance, of Jean Paul. And if I had to give [247] instances of these defects, then I should say, that Pope, in common with the age of literature to which he belonged, had too little curiosity, so that there is always a certain insipidity in the effect of his work, exquisite as it is; and, coming down to our own time, that Balzac had an excess of curiosity—curiosity not duly tempered ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... quite true, but it made the waiter Peter uncomfortably careful. There were no women in the kitchen, but there was an amatory stewardess, fat and forty, upon whom the factitious technique of the saloon fell with singular insipidity. He fled from her. Peter, the waiter, was already a good democrat but he was not ready to spread his philosophy out ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... was another species of ridicule: her shape was neither good nor bad: her countenance bore the appearance of the greatest insipidity, and her complexion was the same all over; with two little hollow eyes, adorned with white eye-lashes, as long as one's finger. With these attractions she placed herself in ambuscade to surprise unwary hearts; but she might have done so in vain, had it not been for the arrival ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... enfeebled health; and yet he remains active and vigorous; he ascribes it to the powerful odors of certain trees which affect his brain. These trees he destroys around him, but his uneasiness continues; he ascribes it to his food, the insipidity of the fish which he has eaten without salt, since his quarter of pork is consumed, and his stores of pickled fish exhausted. In fact, the flesh of fish has for some time given him a nausea, occasioned frequent indigestions; he renounces ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... authority as a husband, to prevent my indulging in my favorite entertainments. This state of affairs continued, my dear, until you attained the age of sixteen, when you began to feel a distaste for the insipidity of a domestic life, and longed for a change.—Our positions were then precisely similar: we both were debarred from the delights of gay society, for which we so ardently longed. One obstacle, and one only, lay in ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... sufficiently shows how bad my performance of it must have been, and how absolutely in the dark I was with regard to the real style in which the part should be played. The fine lady of my day, with the unruffled insipidity of her low spirits (high spirits never came near her) and the imperturbable composure of her smooth insolence, was as unlike the rantipole, racketing high-bred woman of fashion of Sir John Vanbrugh's play as the flimsy elegance of my silver-embroidered, rose-colored tulle dress ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... a formidable difficulty besetting our path—the insipidity and monotony inseparable from the necessity which will devolve on us of having constantly to discover new beauties in spots identical in their main features; and should we, in order to vary the theme, mix up the humorous with the rural, the historical, or ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... little towards the lids, met his with frank kindliness, her mouth quivered a little as though with the desire to break away into a laugh. The slight duskiness of her cheeks—she had lived for three years in Italy and never worn a veil—pleased him better than the insipidity of pink and white, and the absence of jewelry—she wore neither bracelet nor rings gave her an added touch of distinction, which restless youth finds something so much harder to wear than sedate middle age. The admiration grew in his eyes. ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... preferred the convents where the greatest freedom prevailed. Odo, however, had hitherto found little to tempt him in these glimpses of forbidden fruit. The nuns, though often young and pretty, had the insipidity of women secluded from the passions and sorrows of life without being raised above them; and he preferred the frank coarseness of the Procuratessa's circle to the simpering graces ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the British West Indies, or prepared manioc root; and axi in some other parts of this voyage is mentioned as the spice of the West Indies; probably either pimento or capsicum, and used as a condiment to relish the insipidity of the casada.—E. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... political draught. No! be assured that we know as little about politics as pyrotechny—that we are as blissfully ignorant of all that relates to the science of government as that of gastronomy—and have ever since our boyhood preferred the solid consistency of gingerbread to the crisp insipidity of parliament. The candidates of whom we write were no would-be senators—no sprouting Ciceros or embryo Demosthenes'—they were no aspirants for the grand honour of representing the honest and independent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 6, 1841, • Various
... the ship. The Isle of Wight is celebrated for its butter, and yet we found it difficult to eat it! The English, and many other European nations, put no salt in their table butter; and we, who had been accustomed to the American usage, exclaimed with one voice against its insipidity. A near relation of A——'s who once served in the British army, used to relate an anecdote on the subject of tastes, that is quite in point. A brother officer, who had gone safely through the celebrated siege of Gibraltar, landed at Portsmouth, on his return home. Among the other privations ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... people, awkwardly contrasted with their personal absurdity and insipidity, at length provoked the serious notice of the two illustrious associates: the result was this German Dunciad; a production of which the plan was, that it should comprise an immense multitude of detached couplets, each conveying a complete thought within itself, and furnished by one ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... whom he had become acquainted had bored him by their insipidity or disgusted him by their precocity; but from this one there emanated a kind of charm which rested while it attracted him. It was pleasant to lean back and look at and listen to her; to watch the soft tendrils of dark hair stirred by the wind, to see the ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... owing to the fastidiousness of my caprice than the delicacy of my taste; but I am so often tired, disgusted and hurt with insipidity, affectation, and pride of mankind, that when I meet with a person "after my own heart," I positively feel what an orthodox Protestant would call a species of idolatry, which acts on my fancy like inspiration; and I can no more desist rhyming ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... to call it, 'the art of creating landscape,' pressed forward to perfection; engraving much elevated; and painting, if less perceptibly advanced, still (towards the close of the reign, at any rate) ransomed from insipidity by the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The king himself, it was conceded, had 'little propensity to refined pleasure;' but his consort, Queen Caroline, was credited with a lively anxiety to reward merit and to encourage the exertions ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... far, I find it impossible. How, then, make it real to others? To tell of aerial adventure one needs a new language, or, at least, a parcel of new adjectives, sparkling with bright and vivid meaning, as crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and delightful to it. For there is something new under the sun: aerial adventure; ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... familiar events can be expected from a private correspondence; no reflexions but such as they excite can be found there; yet whoever turns away disgusted by the insipidity with which this, and I suppose every correspondence must naturally and almost necessarily begin—will here be likely to lose some genuine pleasure, and some useful knowledge of what our heroic Milton was himself contented ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... consequences of such garrulous biography merely negative. For as insignificant stories can derive no real respectability from the eminence of the person who happens to be the subject of them, but rather an additional deformity of disproportion, they are apt to have their insipidity seasoned by the same bad passions that accompany the habit of gossiping in general: and the misapprehensions of weak men, meeting with the misinterpretations of malignant men, have not seldom formed the ground work of the most grievous calamities. In the second ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... upon us by her amorous weakness, and the invincible kindness of heart which impels her, even when acquainted with the real state of affairs, to protect the lovers against her husband's malpractices. Leucippe herself goes far to make amends for the general insipidity of the other characters. Though not a heroine of so lofty a stamp as Chariclea, in whom the spirit of her royal birth is all along apparent, she is endowed with a mingled gentleness and firmness, which is strongly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... of Dodsley and other collectors will be found numerous attempts at Allegorical Odes: they are almost all nauseous failures—without originality or distinctness of conception; bald in their language, lame in their numbers, and repulsive from their insipidity of ideas. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... invited the Spanish artist to exhibit at the Hispanic Museum. Not, however, his Lassitude, two half-nudes, nor his powerful but unpleasant Bleeding Christ. What a giant Zuloaga seems when matched against the insipidity and coarseness of modern German art. The recent art of Arthur Kampf, who is a painter of more force than distinction, a one-man show in Unter den Linden, Berlin, did not impress me; nor did the third jury-free art show in Rudolph Lepkes's new galleries in the Potsdamerstrasse, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 'we are all—Scott, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and I—upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, not worth a damn in itself;' but among these are some leaders of the great nineteenth-century renaissance in English verse; and Byron was foremost in the revolt against unnatural insipidity which has brought us through romance to realism, by his clear apprehension of natural form and colour, and even by the havoc which he made among conventional respectabilities. He dwelt too incessantly upon his own sorrows and sufferings; and in the gloomy soliloquies of his ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the fabric of their lives, and they were only cheap, tawdry and dispirited imitators. That is one of the penalties which Nature exacts when she vouchsafes a great man to earth—all others are condemned to insipidity. They are whipped, dispirited and undone, and spontaneity dies a-borning. No man should try to do another man's work. Note the anatomical inanities of Bernini in his attempts to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... composition; but the misfortune is, that there are passages in all poems, that can neither be pathetic nor sublime; and that, on these occasions, a neglect of the embellishments of language is very apt to produce absolute meanness and insipidity. The language of passion, indeed, can scarcely be deficient in elevation; and when an author is wanting in that particular, he may commonly be presumed to have failed in the truth, as well as in the dignity of his expression. The case, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... highest aim (and that only at last) is slavishly to entreat pardon from his brothers-in-law for the mere offence of marrying their sister; and he dies by an improbable accident, the same pious and respectable insipidity which he has lived,—'ne valant pas la peine qui se donne pour lui.' The prison-scenes between the Duchess and her tormentors are painful enough, if to give pain be a dramatic virtue; and she appears in them really noble; and might have appeared far more so, had Webster taken half as much pains ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... sneer. As to Shakspeare, so far from Lord Shaftesbury's censures arguing his deficient reputation, the very fact of his noticing him at all proves his enormous popularity; for upon system he noticed those only who ruled the public taste. The insipidity of his objections to Shakspeare may be judged from this, that he comments in a spirit of absolute puerility upon the name Desdemona, as though intentionally formed from the Greek word for superstition. In fact, he had evidently ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... flesh on his bones, and his hollow cheeks and shrunken jaws threw his massive forehead into striking prominence. His line of features was absolutely faultless in its statuesque regularity, but his face was saved from the insipidity of too great perfection by the imperious—rather ruthless—lines of his mouth and the penetrating lustre of his deep-set eyes. His dress—a black cassock edged and buttoned with crimson, with a ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... limited and unseasoned diet of the English the variety and savouriness of American food (I mean the food of the well-to-do in the large towns), which includes all the English and Scotch dishes, corrected of their insipidity, besides countless dishes French, German, and Dutch, and many native to the soil, all improved and diversified by the surprising genius for cookery which, in so few generations, the negro race has come to exhibit. I was a busy lad at that ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... and, what was far worse, I remained cold myself. I thought over this singular result, and wondered how it was that music which, as a part of the operas for which it was written, had seemed so full of soul, now faded into insipidity when transplanted to the soil of other dramatic situations. I found the answer in the question. It was because I had transplanted my music from its native soil, that its beauty had flown. Then it burst upon my mind that the libretto is the father of the opera, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach |
