"Vapid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... release of control must have been in Charles Lamb's mind when he wrote to Coleridge about the "pure happiness" of being insane. "Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... the hortus siccus of Dissent. A sermon from a noble duke, or a noble marquis, or a noble earl, or baron bold, would certainly increase and diversify the amusements of this town, which begins to grow satiated with the uniform round of its vapid dissipations. I should only stipulate that these new Mess-Johns in robes and coronets should keep some sort of bounds in the democratic and levelling principles which are expected from their titled pulpits. The new evangelists will, I dare say, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... dressed admirably, and, as his cheval de battaile, he talked with a keenness of observation and a dexterity of language, scarcely less rare than wit, and still more exciting among the exhausted minds, and in the vapid phraseology, of fashion. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... mother-of-pearl, and papier-mache, with broken hinges; faded fans and chipped paper-weights; gorgeous picture-books with loosened covers, and a magnificent portrait-album which had been deflowered and had nothing left in it but the old and ugly, the commonplace middle-aged, and the vapid young; with many other things besides, all more or ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Mr. Holmes's face in the carriage as she did so. He did not look at her; had his head turned towards the gray distance. Lois's vivid eye caught the full meaning of the woman beside him. The face hurt her: not fair, as Polston called it: vapid and cruel. She was dressed in yellow: the color seemed jeering and mocking to the girl's sensitive instinct, keenly alive to every trifle. She did not know that it is the color of shams, and that women like this are the most deadly of shams. As the phaeton went slowly down, Margaret ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... exercises, of his fellow students in English composition, whether prose or rhyme, were well characterized by the lack of native thought and feeling, the cold pedantry, the mimicry of classic models, common to all such productions. Mr. Fessenden had the good taste to disapprove of these vapid and spiritless performances, and resolved to strike out a new course for himself. On one occasion, when his classmates had gone through with their customary round of verbiage and threadbare sentiment, ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... glance over these times. The vividness of the collision was incomparable. The wit, the eccentricity, the anecdote, the eloquence of those assemblages, were of a character wholly their own. They had, too, a substantial nutriment, the want of which had made the conversation of the preceding age vapid, with all its elegance.—Public events of the most powerful order fed the flame. It was the creation of a vast national excitement; the rush of sparks from the great electrical machine, turned by the hands of thirty millions. The flashes were still but matters of sport ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... that old fraud asleep again. And to-morrow he'll print half a column of vapid reminiscence and call it criticism. It's a wonder his paper stands for him. Because he once heard ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... business. They were not given to much talk, due, no doubt, to long years in the wilderness. Neither were they carried away by any sudden impulse on the spur of the moment. They never had anything in common with Curly and his gang, although they had often listened to their vapid boastings. So now when they learned of the despicable affair up the narrow creek, they did not take matters into their own hands, and visit upon the miscreants swift and dire punishment. They decided, after a brief consultation with Frontier Samson, to ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... less like Bursley. They had no curiosity. Even Constance was a thousand times more interested in relating trifles of Bursley gossip than in listening to details of life in Paris. Occasionally she had expressed a mild, vapid surprise at things told to her by Sophia; but she was not really impressed, because her curiosity did not extend beyond Bursley. She, like the rest, had the formidable, thrice-callous egotism of the provinces. And if ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... vapid, swarthy creature in the widow's cap, who looked as though her clothes had been stuck on her back with a pitchfork!" The signora never allowed any woman ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... those about him into the belief that he had been an officer in the dragoons, that he had spent a large fortune, and now condescended to take a part in periodical literature with the culture of a gentleman and the grace of an amateur. How this vapid charlatan in a braided surtout and prismatic necktie could so long veil his real character from, and retain the regard of, such men as Procter and Talfourd and Coleridge is amazing. Lamb calls him the "kind and light-hearted ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... years had sacrificed his repose, lavished his fortune, and risked his life, for the public cause, now aimed at absolute dominion, or coveted a despotism which all his actions prove him to have abhorred? Defeated bigotry has put forward such vapid accusations. He has been also held responsible for the early cruelties which, it is notorious, he used every means to avert, and frequently punished. But while these revolting acts can only be viewed in the light of reprisals ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... men and women, of scorn of what is mean, base and selfish, of eager desire to work or fight or suffer as the case may be provided the end to be gained is great enough, and the contemptuous putting aside of mere ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere avoidance of toil and worry. I do not know whether I most pity or most despise the foolish and selfish man or woman who does not understand that the only things really worth having in life are those the acquirement of which normally means ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... the Season, with its dances, with its concerts and its fetes, With its weddings and divorces, with its dinners and debates; Gone are all its vapid pleasures, all its easy charities, Gone its causes celebres and scandals, gone ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 23, 1892 • Various
... defend her, for he felt the justice of his neighbour's description: Cousin Maria's good sense was incontestable, magnificent. She took an affectionate, indulgent view of most of the persons mentioned, and yet her tone was far from being vapid or vague. Madame de Brives usually remarked that they were coming very soon again to see her, she did them so much good. 'The freshness of your judgment—the freshness of your judgment!' she repeated, ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... seeking to exhibit his wit, and impress me with his wide acquaintance. I must have made fit response, for his voice never ceased, yet I felt no interest in the stories, and disliked the man more than ever for his vapid boasting. The truth is my thought was principally concerned with De Artigny, and whether he would really gain admission. Still of this I had small doubt, for his was a daring to make light of guards, or any threat of enemies, if ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... presence of appalling sights that we have rarely seen equaled even in the stronger sex, and which, when united with a tender sympathy, as in her case, makes the model nurse. The feeling of horror which shrinks from the sight of agony and vents itself in vapid exclamations, she rightly deemed had no place in the character of one who proposes to do anything. So putting this aside she learned to be happy in the hospital, and consequently made others happy. Never in our observation has ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... emphasis distinguishes a word, and often determines the import of a sentence. The right placing of accent, in the utterance of words, is therefore not more important, than the right placing of emphasis, in the utterance of sentences. If no emphasis be used, discourse becomes vapid and inane; if no accent, words can hardly ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... offered to him. But was he sure that he had found it to be better? He had certainly sighed for the gauds which he had left. While his young wife was living he had kept his sighs down, so that she should not hear them; but he had been forced to acknowledge that his new life had been vapid and flavourless. Now he had been tempted back again to the old haunts. Would the Countesses' cards be ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... him, in neglect. Foul and filthy as the room is, foul and filthy as the air is, it is not easy to perceive what fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the general sickliness and faintness, and the odour of stale tobacco, there comes into the lawyer's mouth the bitter, vapid taste ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... himself in the harness, so in the disoriented woman the mistress, virtuous and otherwise, is slowly supplanting the mother. Please she must, even though she can not admire, and can so easily despise men who can not lead her, although she become thereby lax and vapid. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... could be anything. Sunken and neglected in the sea of modern monotony and imitation, the types hold tightly to their original truths. Antigone, ugly, dirty and often drunken, will still bury her father. The elegant female, vapid and fading away to nothing, still feels faintly the fundamental difference between herself and her husband: that he must be Something in the City, that she may ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... delirious hour for Harry, that dinner. He knew that Alison was pleased to be in the gayest spirits, and his father, in his father's own flamboyant style, seconded her heartily. He joined in, too, and seemed to himself loud and vapid, yet had no power of restraint. It was as though his usual placid, critical mind were detached and watched himself in the happy exuberance of drunkenness—which was a state unknown to him, for excess of liquor could only move him with drowsy gloom. And in the midst of the ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... dreams—of those who dream as I, Aspiringly, are damned, and die: Yet should I swear I mean alone, By notes so very shrilly blown, To break upon Time's monotone, While yet my vapid joy and grief Are tintless of the yellow leaf— Why not an imp the greybeard hath, Will shake his shadow in my path— And e'en the greybeard will o'erlook ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... be called world-wide. And whatever be the verdict on his own plots, there can be no question as to the superiority of the average libretto since his day. No composer dare face the public of the present day with one of the pointless, vapid sets of rhymes, strung together with intervals of bald recitative, that pleased our forefathers, and equally inconceivable is the re-setting of libretti that have served before, in the manner of the eighteenth century composers, a prodigious ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... LOUISA,—This accompanies Harold the Dauntless. I thought once I should have made it something clever, but it turned vapid upon my imagination; and I finished it at last with hurry and impatience. Nobody knows, that has not tried the feverish trade of poetry, how much it depends upon mood and whim. I {p.139} don't wonder, that, in dismissing ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... nicotine-loaded juices and the acrid smoke tends to impair the delicate sensibility of the entire surface. The keen appreciation of fine flavors is destroyed. The once clear and enjoyable tastes of simple objects become dull and vapid; thus highly spiced and seasoned articles of food are in demand, and then follows continued ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... friends grow cold and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and common-place, these only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope, nor deserted sorrow. ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... heights there no other nation can approach. An Englishman writing about Germany lately says that you often hear very bad music there, but I think his experience must have been exceptional and unfortunate. I am sure that Germans do not tolerate the vapid dreary drawing-room songs we listen to complacently in this country; for in England people often have beautiful voices without any musical understanding, or technical facility without charm. I suppose such cases must occur amongst Germans too, and in the end one speaks of a foreign nation partly ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... serious political disquisitions, concerning perhaps the welfare of society, an imperceptible yet carefully elaborated and most effective tone of levity that speedily proved disastrous to their object. It was be who forced the vapid but imposing ceremonial of the bon ton into the records of church and state; who clothed his empty but pompous periods with the ermine of royalty, to ensure them the reverence of a deluded multitude; who stripped Virtue of ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... The conversation was vapid and conventional—remarks about the opera and its performers—even the heat of the weather was mentioned. Lothair had come, and he had nothing to say. Mrs. Campian seemed much interested in the performance; so, if he had had any thing to say, there was no opportunity of expressing it. She had ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... too, was absolutely different from the type she had imagined. Always she had seen her as one of those vapid, pretty little creatures who had become old long before her time; peevish, spoiled, inclined to be flirtatious, refusing to give up her youth, still living in the recollection of ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... Romeo Montecchio and Giulietta Cappelletti, of the Cardinal d'Aragona and the Duchess of Amalfi, of unknown grotesque Persian Sophis and Turkish Bassas—stories of murder, massacre, rape, incest, anything and everything, prattled off, with a few words of vapid compassion and stale moralizing, in the serene, cheerful, chatty manner in which they recount their Decameronian escapades or Rabelaisian repartees. As it is with tragic action, so is it with tragic character. The literature of the country which suggested to our Elizabethans their colossal villains, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... trying to invest myself with an air of further interest, when another man was introduced to her, quite evidently, from his appearance, a vapid jackass without one tenth of the brain calibre that ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... understand the situation. Suppose I roast a show like 'The Nymph in the Nightie' that played here last week. It's vapid and silly, and rotten with suggestiveness. I wouldn't let my kid sister go within gunshot of it. But I've got to tell everybody else's kid sister, through our columns, that it's a delightful and enlivening melange of high class fun and frolic. To be sure, I can praise ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... mortification no woman of my husband's circle called upon me. But a few of his male friends were constantly with us, including Mr. Eastcliff, who had speedily followed us from Ellan, and a Mr. Vivian, who, though the brother of a Cabinet Minister, seemed to me a very vain and vapid person, with the eyes of a mole, a vacant smile, a stupid expression, an abrupt way of speaking through his teeth, and a shrill voice which gave the impression of screeching ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... heart's dank lyre withal; neither mother nor brother, nor any other kind familiar face, to look upon his gentleness in love, or to sympathize with his affections, unapprehended, unappreciated: so—while Mrs. Tracy was the showy, gay, and vapid thing she ever had been, and Julian the same impetuous mother's son which his very nurse could say she knew him—Charles grew up a shy and silent youth, necessarily reserved, for lack of some one to understand him; necessarily chilled, for want of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... for some time afterward, the press was burdened with replies, ponderous and pithy, lurid and vapid, vitriolic and unctuous, but in the main bearing the inevitable characteristics of pleas for inherited opinions stimulated ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... all just anticipations of the future, by condensing life, with its motives and enjoyments, into the present moment. Captain Truck, therefore, was soon forgotten, and the literati, as that worthy seaman had termed the associates of Mrs. Legend, remained just as vapid, as conceited, as ignorant, as imitative, as dependent, and ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... uplifted, delicately lighted by the moon. Her eyes shone dark with those fluttering, sweet wraiths of thoughts which we may not prison in speech, which words only deaden and crush into vapid sentimentalism. Life, held in a great unutterable calm, seemed to lie out there in the radiant, vague distance, asleep and ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... ideal. Our gilded youth want such examples as this of Motley, not a solitary, but a conspicuous one, to teach them how much better is the restlessness of a noble ambition than the narcotized stupor of club-life or the vapid amusement of a dressed-up intercourse which too often requires a questionable flavor of forbidden license to render it endurable to persons of vivacious ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "Very true," says Vapid, "but this will regulate itself."—Will it, indeed? Be good enough to tell me how! All the potent individual agencies now affecting it are attached by self-interest to the wrong side. The Capitalists, the Employers, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... been asleep. Now she stretched luxuriously beneath the crisp white sheet that the vapid August heat decreed. From memory to memory her dream-fogged mind drifted, and to the yet-to-be. It was good to remember, and to imagine, and to see and feel ...
— Moment of Truth • Basil Eugene Wells
... Dare I say that I, a plain, prosaic lieutenant in the republican service have done the incredible things here set out for the love of a woman—for a chimera in female shape; for a pale, vapid ghost of woman-loveliness? At times I tell myself I dare not: that you will laugh, and cast me aside as a fabricator; and then again I pick up my pen and collect the scattered pages, for I MUST write ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... doubt that the youth's greatest fault was his lack of filial respect. Yet the father was certainly rather a difficult person to deal with, for, in the first place, he was extremely inquisitive, while, in the second place, his long-winded conversation and questions— questions of the most vapid and senseless order conceivable— always prevented the son from working. Likewise, the old man occasionally arrived there drunk. Gradually, however, the son was weaning his parent from his vicious ways and everlasting inquisitiveness, ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... his extreme thinness and the almost yellow tint of his visage, which was, however, lit up by "two eyes sparkling with keenness and will-power"—evidently a Corsican falcon, pining for action, and fretting its soaring spirit in that vapid town life. Action Buonaparte might have had, but only of a kind that he loathed. He might have commanded the troops destined to crush the brave royalist peasants of La Vendee. But, whether from scorn of such vulture-work, or from an instinct that a nobler quarry might be started at Paris, he ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... splendour of his trappings. Placed on the rugged declivities of Cithaeron, the Greeks were tolerably safe from the Persian cavalry, save only the Megarians, who, to the number of three thousand, were posted along the plain, and were on all sides charged by that agile and vapid cavalry. Thus pressed, the Megarians sent to Pausanias for assistance. The Spartan beheld the air darkened with shafts and arrows, and knew that his heavy-armed warriors were ill adapted to act against horse. He in vain endeavoured to arouse those about him by appeals ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Brooke was listening all the while she seemed to be enchanted with the patter of Mr. Revel and the less vapid observations of Velasco, Lanyard sought ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... politics!" when it is a question of the class struggle—and "Hurrah for politics! Hurrah for electoral agitation! Hurrah for State interference!" when it is a question of realising the vapid ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... have occurred to Sidwell to debate with her mother on subtle questions of character and motive, but the agitation of her nerves made it difficult for her to keep silence under these vapid outcries. She desired to be alone; commonplace discussion of the misery that had come upon her was impossible. A little more strain, and she would be on the point of tears, a weakness she ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... highest poetry of these people becomes, in the very process of utterance, the finest music; while the utterance of base sentiments, or of fustian, becomes, by the very nature of the language, discordant, or at best vapid and unmelodious. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... very good likeness of Wilhelm as Apollo in Olympian nudity, handsome, slender and vapid, in its resemblance to school copies of the antique. A charming little cat with Pilar's features was rubbing herself against his leg. The pussy blinked up at the young Greek god with an expression of adoration, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... peculiarly entitled, in right of his possessions, to the exclusive control of human affairs. The most that I should expect from them, were all the facts published to-morrow, would be the secret assent of the wise and good, the expressed censure of the vapid and ignorant (a pretty numerous clan, by the way), the surprise of the mercenary and the demagogue, and the secret satisfaction of the few who will come after me, and who may feel an interest in my conduct or my name. I have openly predicted bad consequences, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newberry's hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs. B.'s and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. Barbauld's books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt, that a horse is an animal, and ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... he began; "I'm an artist. So are you. I'm also a philosopher. You are not. Therefore, I'll deign to instruct you. Ben de Laney has a father and a mother. The father is pompous, conceited, and a bore. The mother is pompous, conceited, and a bore. The father uses language of whose absolutely vapid correctness Addison would have been proud. So does the mother, unless she forgets, in which case the old man calls her down hard. They, are rich and of a good social position. The latter worries them, because they have to keep ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... SIZE of the Americans sneered at by POCKET-HANDKERCHIEFS, as I remember to have read that the NOSES of the New Yorkers, in particular, were materially larger than common. When the supercilious and vapid point out faults, they ever run into contradictions and folly; it is only under the lash of the discerning and the experienced, that we betray by our writhings the power of the blow ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... pleasantry, perhaps not conceived in the best of taste, sounded in his own ears wretchedly flat and vapid. He regretted it spontaneously; the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... evaporation, water is completely separated from all fixed saline matters, and consequently from all hardening matters. Distilled water, however, has a vapid and unpleasant taste, due partly to deficient aeration and partly to the presence of traces of volatile organic matter; and though filtration through animal charcoal will remove this, and the aeration can begin chemically, the process is too expensive, except in certain cases, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... for there are nerves in these black carcasses, thicker, more quickly stung to madness than yours. Yet if any savage longing, smouldering for years, was heating to madness now in his brain, there was no sign of it in his face. Vapid, with sordid content, the huge jaws munching tobacco slowly, only now and then the beady eye shot a sharp glance after Dorr. The sentry had told him the Northern army had come to set the slaves free; he watched the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... that neither rank, nor birth, nor personal popularity could shield them from his resentment; and while Louis XIII hunted at Fontainebleau, feasted at the Louvre, and attended with as much patience as he could assume at the constant performances of the vapid and tedious dramas with which the Cardinal-Duke, who aspired to be esteemed a poet, incessantly taxed the forbearance of the monarch and his Court, the active and versatile pen of the minister was at the same time spreading desolation and death on ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... said, frankly, that he should be glad to see the red hat go to him. The lady's husband was appointed to a foreign Embassy, and they were both soon thrown into an Ultramontane atmosphere, where clerical intrigues had long furnished one of the chief amusements of a vapid and corrupt Court. The lady, who, of course, could not have realized the impropriety, made known the President's regard for Archbishop Ireland. She even had letters to herself beginning "Dear Maria," to prove the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... need were the lot of all, and such as were raised above the sordid wants of life were but in a yet sadder state of silly delusion, in which they neither recognized their own calling nor the destiny of mankind, but giving themselves up to vapid pleasures and pitiful comforts reeled along toward the grave. One single star shed its light through this dark gloom,—but it was as far beyond my reach as if it had stood in the heavens,—my relation Elizabeth, whom you saw: she ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... primary work. The partnership should be one of equal rights, one of love, of self-respect, and unselfishness, above all a partnership for the performance of the most vitally important of all duties. The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the pony. Baldy stopped and eyed the foreman with vapid inquisitiveness. "Now, son, I got three things to tell you," and the foreman gathered up the reins. "First—keep on keepin' your mouth shut and tendin' to business. It pays. Second—always drop your reins over a hoss's head when you get off, whether he's trained that way or not. ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... is to-day) was to watch the torrent of foolishness which, under cover of religion, philosophy, or miracle-working, pretended to the conquest of mind and will. Amid this mass of wildest doctrines and heresies, in this orgy of vapid intellectualism, they had indeed solid heads who were able to resist the general intoxication. And among all these people talking nonsense, Augustin appears admirable ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... courtesy, and an ease of manner that could change in a moment to insolence, a superficial observer might have taken them for a couple of bankers. Any such mistake would have been impossible, however, if the listener could have heard them converse, and seen them on their guard with men whom they feared, vapid and commonplace with their equals, slippery with the inferiors whom courtiers and statesmen know how to tame by a tactful word, or to humiliate ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... third. She heard the tune through once, and then her attention wandered, and she gazed at the audience, or the organ, or the architecture. Much did she censure the attenuated Cupids who encircle the ceiling of the Queen's Hall, inclining each to each with vapid gesture, and clad in sallow pantaloons, on which the October sunlight struck. "How awful to marry a man like those Cupids!" thought Helen. Here Beethoven started decorating his tune, so she heard him through ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, not of a reflected but of an intrinsic lustre, as does a candle or the sun; yet their ordinary condition was so totally vapid, filmy, and dull as to convey the idea of the eyes ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that the people would prefer to see him as their representative living in a style consistent with the changes in manners and customs introduced by national prosperity, affording thereby an example of correct and elevating stewardship of reasonable wealth, by way of contrast to vapid society doings, came to him as an illumination which dissipated ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... exhales a nose-provoking odour, and possesses [271] a hot biting taste, combined with a certain sweetness: but on exposure to the air it quickly turns colour, and loses its volatile strength; likewise, it becomes vapid, and inert by being boiled. The root is expectorant, antiscorbutic, and, if taken at all freely, emetic. It contains a somewhat large proportion of sulphur, as shown by the black colour assumed by metals with which it comes into touch. Hence it promises to be of signal ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... matters a few failings? Need we be angels, male or female, in order to be worshipped as such? Let us admire the diversity of the tastes of mankind; and the oldest, the ugliest, the stupidest and most pompous, the silliest and most vapid, the greatest criminal, tyrant booby, Bluebeard, Catherine Hayes, George Barnwell, amongst us, we need never despair. I have read of the passion of a transported pickpocket for a female convict (each of them advanced ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... critic, says: "An easy talent for composition, though of no depth; a feeling for pretty forms, though they were often monotonous and empty, and for graceful movement; a coloring blooming and often warm, though occasionally crude; a superficial but agreeable execution, and especially a vapid sentimentality in harmony with the fashion of the time—all these causes ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... semi-provincial fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired of an existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being utterly vapid! How many fashionable women at the end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate monotony ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... scurrility and sedition, they will venture to affirm, that no production of merit has been defrauded of its due share of applause. On the contrary, they have cherished with commendation, the very faintest bloom of genius, even when vapid and unformed, in hopes of its being warmed into flavour, and afterwards producing agreeable fruit by dint of proper care and culture; and never, without reluctance disapproved, even of a bad writer, who had the least title to indulgence. The judicious reader will perceive that their ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... of the decline of the power and prosperity which had been matured under the Bengal conquerors and of the rise of the Malabar marauders, whose ceaseless forays and incursions eventually reduced authority to feebleness and the island to desolation. The vapid biography of the royal imbeciles who filled the throne from the third to the thirteenth century scarcely embodies an incident of sufficient interest to diversify the monotonous repetition of temples founded and dagobas repaired, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... activity of the Count of Grammont's mind, he may be said to sleep neither night nor day; and if Petronius died, the Count seems determined never to die at all. (He was at this time about eighty-five years of age.) It may well be supposed that all this, though now perfectly vapid and uninteresting, was extremely flattering to Grammont; and the result was, that he very much wished to have his life, or part of it, at least, given to the public. Hamilton, who had been so long connected with ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... What's a holiday to anybody who has never done a stroke of work? You and I know the difference; we can appreciate the fun of loafing between spells of work; but these people have got no standards to measure their fun by, so it's all the same to them—flat, vapid, monotonous, unless they season it up with cocktails and carrying on; and even that gets to have all the same flavour of tastelessness after a while. That's why so many of these women are going in for the suffragette business; it isn't that they care a whoop ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... steps 'twixt me and fame— So like, egad, we're just the same; I never half squeeze out a thought, But jumps its fellow on the spot— My tenderest dreams, my fondest touch, Are victims to his ready clutch; The whirling waltz, the gay costume, The porcelain tooth, the gallic bloom; The vapid smiles, the lisping loves Of turtles (never meant for doves)— The dreary stuff that fills the ears, Where all the orators are peers— The hides reveal'd through ball-room dresses, Where all the parties are peer-esses; The dulness of the toujours gai, The yawning night, the sleepy day, The visages ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... could. She was not angry with him on that account. Anger could not have helped her. Indeed, she did not price herself highly enough to make her feel that she would be justified in being angry. It was natural enough that he shouldn't want her. She knew herself to be a poor, thin, vapid, tawdry creature, with nothing to recommend her to any man except a sort of second-rate, provincial-town fashion which,—infatuated as she was,—she attributed in a great degree to the thing she carried on her head. She knew nothing. She could do nothing. She possessed nothing. ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... loveless years, smouldered weakly where the record of a long life filled with human sympathy should have blazed in answer. The gold for which he had striven lay forgotten at his feet; the hate which he had nurtured passed, a vapid filmy shade, as the withered soul shrank shivering, chilled at the void the ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... party have dived into "The Welsh Rarebit Warren," there to spend the early hours of the morning, listening to sentimental songs chanted amid fumes of tobacco and spirits, to hear sorry wit, and make vapid remarks. The great feature of the evening being a melodramatic dirge, supposed to be sung by a condemned felon—a triumphant lamentation and delineation of brutal character,—so eloquent and thrilling, in its monosyllabic groans of anguish, that it is a wonder the kidneys, ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... zeal cooled, Edwards became involved in characteristic difficulties. The pastor, it may easily be supposed, was not popular with the rising generation. He had, as he confesses with his usual candour, 'a constitution in many respects peculiarly unhappy, attended with flaccid solids; vapid, sizy, and scarce fluids; and a low tide of spirits; often occasioning a kind of childish weakness and contemptibleness of speech, presence and demeanour; with a disagreeable dulness and stiffness, much unfitting me for conversation, but more especially for the government of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... he cannot doubt, SEEN by the Crown-Prince in passing; "who asked M. Jordan, who that was," and got answer:—is not that a comfortable fact? Nothing farther came of it;—respectable Ex-Parson Formey, though ever ready with his pen, being indeed of very vapid nature, not wanted at ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... universal law—that action is always in inverse proportion to power. For the second, you will find that there is a pleasure in overcoming difficulties, compared with which all easily attained or naturally possessed advantages appear tame and vapid:[83] and besides the difference in the pleasurable excitement of the contest, you are to consider the advantage to the character that is derived from a battle and ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... bear with the faults of their own time, nor think all that is good is gone by, the representation of the present comedy will give high entertainment; particularly in those scenes in which Vapid is concerned.—Reynolds could hardly mistake drawing a faithful portrait of this character, for it is said—he ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... only existed in pugilism. At peace, Veuillot was no more than a mediocre writer. His poetry and novels were pitiful. His language was vapid, when it was not engaged in a striking controversy. In repose, he changed, uttering banal ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... cynical about human life, but he goes farther; he is cynical about his own wealth. And that brings me to my quarrel with you, Mr. Moreton. How could you let your brother spend his beautiful vigorous youth as a parasite to Cord's vapid son? Was that ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... of one syllable, for literary babes who never tire of testifying their delight in the vapid compound by appropriate googoogling. The words are commonly Saxon—that is to say, words of a barbarous people destitute of ideas and incapable of any but the most elementary sentiments ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... and what she knew, though it had the originality of first observation, and a grace of expression so great that more met the ear than was meant, was still so wanting, either in insight or reflection, as to be poor and vapid as small-beer after the first sparkle is gone. The manner was all in Mrs. Lewis, but that was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... reader knows, he had felt himself under the necessity of killing for the fair widow's entertainment. We pass over the relation of the circumstances which, as the lady discovers, render her mission fruitless, and which are detailed in a strain of the most vapid silliness—and proceed to the interview which brings about the union of Mabel and Sir Hubert. The latter, some time after these occurrences, pays a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... shaven clean, Hard lips, and eyes alert with strength and spleen; Visages vain and vapid, All wreathed with the conventional bland smile That covers weary scorn or watchful guile, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... retain the fervour of his early enthusiasm, and the simplicity and purity of the faith that was once delivered to the saints, why not extend the benefit of his own experience to others, instead of taunting them with a vapid pastoral theory? Or, if our popular and eloquent divine finds a change in himself, that flattery prevents the growth of grace, that he is becoming the God of his own idolatry by being that of others, that the glittering ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Pater so great, so wise, so salutary a writer is his perpetual insistence on the criminal, mad foolishness of letting slip, in silly chatter and vapid preaching, the unreturning days of our youth! "Carry, O Youths and Maidens," he seems to say. "Carry with infinite devotion that vase of many odours which is your Life on Earth. Spill as little as may be of its unvalued wine; let no rain-drops or bryony-dew, or floating gossamer-seed, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... meat has always a vapid, disagreeable taste, very perceptible through all the seasoning, and which nothing indeed can disguise. Also, it will be of a bad, dingy colour. The juices of the meat having been exhausted by the first cooking, ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... a Lyricist.—Lyric poetry is the artistic expression of the poet's individual sentiments and emotions, hence it is subjective. The action is usually vapid, the verse musical, the time quick. Unlike the Epic and Drama, it has no preferred verse or meter, but leaves the poet free to choose or invent appropriate forms. In this species of verse Arnold was not wholly at ease. As has been said, one searches in vain through the whole course ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... the labor of troops." At twelve she had been placed at school in the far East, while her father enjoyed a two years' tour on recruiting service, and there, under the care of a noble woman who taught her girls to be women indeed—not vapid votaries of pleasure and fashion, Esther spent five useful years, coming back to her fond father's soldier roof a winsome picture of girlish health and grace and comeliness—a girl who could ride, walk and run if need be, who could bake and cook, mend and sew, ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... entirely subject to their own control, under a Constitution which contains provision for its own amendment by this very same "whole people," whenever they may think proper! Is it not a libel upon the statesmen of that generation to attribute to their grave and solemn declarations a meaning so vapid and absurd? ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... I regard this as your masterpiece! You are really perfect in the great art of reducing simple & dignified speech to clumsy & vapid commonplace. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... especially with the old civilisations; I read little but Greek and Latin. That brought me out of the track I had laboriously made for myself I often thought with disgust of the kind of work I had been doing; my novels seemed vapid stuff so wretchedly and shallowly modern. If I had had the means, I should have devoted myself to the life of a scholar. That, I quite believe, is my natural life; it's only the influence of recent circumstances that has made me a writer of novels. A man who can't journalise, ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... door. As his manner plainly betokened whither he was bound with this refreshment, I felt all my uneasiness vanish, and was able to take my seat at one of the small tables with which the supper-room was filled, and for a few minutes, at least, lend an ear to Mr. Fox's vapid compliments and trite opinions. Then ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... North, great was the jubilee. It was asserted that Grant could now crush Lee and capture his stronghold at a single blow; that the present position was only the result of his splendid strategy and matchless daring; and the vapid boast, "I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer"—actually uttered while he was blindly groping his way, by the left, to the Pamunkey!—was swallowed whole by the credulous masses of the North. They actually believed that Grant's position was one of choice, not of ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... click-clack of the car wheels passengers could hear her counting: "One, two, three," evidently absorbed in her own thoughts. Sometimes she repeated the words at short intervals. Two girls tittered, thoughtlessly exchanging vapid remarks about such extraordinary behavior. An elderly man scowled ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... right. His virgin novel proved a rank failure. The man could do nothing sustained. He was essentially a person of brilliant flashes. The book, called, as you may remember, "The Shadow and the Substance," was a tour de force in vapid writing, and it almost severed his literary jugular vein. All the reviewers, delighted with a chance to play upon his title, said it contained far more ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was all for tragedy. If there was to be a proof that strong passion and bold action were still possible, notwithstanding the degeneracy of the age, what better object could there be for the passion to wreak itself upon than the age itself? If life had become vapid, and the German character servile and pusillanimous, here was the very field for a mad Ajax who should make havoc among the cowards and the pigmies. In Schubart's tragi-comedy there are no heroic passions whatever. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man's city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... and rewrote a story, "What Happened at Mendocino." What happened to the story does not appear. He went to church generally, and some of the sermons were good and others "vapid and trite." Once in a while he goes to a dance, but not to his great satisfaction. He didn't dance particularly well. He tells of a Christmas dinner that he helped his sister to prepare. Something made him dissatisfied with himself ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... countenance, with all the lines that tell a life history. She had suspected that he was not happy; that the joyous existence amidst fairest surroundings which seemed so exquisite to her was dull and vapid for him. She could but think that he was like her father, and that action and danger were necessary to him, and that it was only this rustic tranquillity that ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... his verse. Nor do we greatly admire the story which he introduces with the poem, nor the discrimination of his characters, nor, what may be called strictly, the pathos of the piece. Indeed, considering the size of the poem, there is so much that is vapid and common, that the counter-balancing excellences must be great ere they could have floated it so long. To use an expression suitable to the theme, the vessel which has sailed so far, notwithstanding its numerous leaks, must be of a strong ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... placed in boxes till they gradually soften; but the flavor of fruit thus treated is very inferior to that of a peach or nectarine ripened by the sun. Seed-fruits, such as strawberries, come very vapid in four or five hours after they have been picked, if they were ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... this vapid composition to its most lame and impotent conclusion; it is sufficient to cite it as a specimen-brick of the hostility which many literary characters entertained against the author of "Roderick Random." Despite his own birthplace being north of the Tweed, many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... dinner party. Out of his little rechauffe of the week's news she probably extracted enough information to enable her to display that well-bred interest, that vague and superficial acquaintance with the subject which will pass muster in society, and which probably explains alike the very vapid talk and the wildly false accusations which form the ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... There is no such thing as society now. Assemblies of well-dressed mobs meet at each other's houses, tear each other's clothes, tread on each other's toes. If you are particularly lucky, you sit on the staircase, you get a tepid ice, and you hear vapid talk in slang phrases all round you. There is modern society. If we had a good opera, it would be something to stay in London for. Look at the programme for the season on that table—promising as much as possible on paper, and performing as little as possible on the stage. The same ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... mistress of the occasion. She had had her own way, and in stinting herself had found her own reward. But now—the tea had no flavour now that it was made in the kitchen and brought to her, cold and vapid, by a man in livery whom she half feared to keep waiting while she ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... "Words, vapid words! Empty, worthless as last year's nests. My lover," she laughed scornfully, "is quite safe even from your malevolence. If indeed 'one touch of nature makes the whole world kin,' one might expect some pity from the guild of love swains; and it augurs sadly ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... with Lola, the "Baby-Talk Lady," a vapid little flirt. To woo her in a manner worthy of himself (and of her) he steals his father's evening clothes. When his wooings become a nuisance to the neighborhood, his mother steals them back, and has them let out to fit the middle-aged form ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... Good Fortune inherited.—I know not that any man has reason to wish a sufficient patrimonial estate for his son. Much to have something so as to start with an advantage. But the natural consequence of having a full fortune is to become idle and vapid. For, on asking what a young man has that he can employ himself upon, the answer would be, 'Oh! why, those pursuits which presuppose solitude.' At once you feel this to be hollow nonsense. Not one man in ten thousand has powers to turn solitude into a blessing. They care not, e.g., for geometry; ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... tulle, and their untouched faces, had a deliciously fresh, flower-like look which is wholly lacking in their sisters of to-day. A young girl's charm is her freshness, and if she persists in coating her face with powder and rouge that freshness vanishes, and one sees merely rows of vapid little doll-like faces, all absolutely alike, and all equally artificial and devoid of expression. These present skimpy draperies cause one to reflect that Nature has not lavished broadcast the gift of good feet and neat ankles; possibly some girls might lengthen their ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... squeeze poppies into the household cup, and clothe in dull gray the familiar landscape around; and yet, happily, in numerous instances it is not so. The confidential intimacies, the incessant dependencies, duties, and favors of near relatives, instead of engendering a consciousness of vapid usage, sprinkle electric stimulants on ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... as city snow could make it—a dingy whirl at the window; a smoky gust through the fireplace; a shadow black as a bear's cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous room, loomed really warm or familiar except a glass of stale water, and a vapid, half-eaten grape-fruit. ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... profess that in London such things are thought mere rubbish and despised; or again, in the society of professors at the Universities, an ignorance of letters can easily be turned by an allusion to that vapid life of the rich, where letters grow insignificant; so at sea, if you slip on common terms, speak a little of your luxurious occupations on land and you will usually ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... gay metropolis, and the poor child found herself hustled home from one function, only to change her attire and hurry again, weary of spirit, into the waiting car, to be whisked off to another equally vapid. It seemed to the bewildered girl that she would never learn what was de rigueur; what conventions must be observed at one social event, but amended at another. Her tight gowns and limb-hampering skirts typified the soul-limitation of her tinsel, environment; her high-heeled shoes were ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... subjects that would have told her more than she feared already, taking refuge in themes she had once considered vapid and inane. To miss nothing, she hurried homeward on that May afternoon, so as to be beside her tea-table in the drawing-room before any one appeared. And yet, the minute came when she cast ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... surprising, for Doris looked adorably pretty and winsome, and many a wiser man might have shared his pleased anticipation. Moreover, Doris was not in the least stupid or vapid, however selfish and shallow her nature; and if she chose she could ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page |
