"Blinder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mortality by relinquishing mortality itself in preference to any other mode. Life is but a sad possession to those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Were I weaker and blinder it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might be endured hopefully. But, being what I find myself, methinks I am of all mortals the most ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spoke. He was nonplussed; and Mr. Gryce no less so. Never had either of them been confronted by a blinder or more bewildering case. An incomprehensible crime and a suspect it was impossible to associate with a deed of blood! There must be some other explanation of the mournful circumstance they were considering. There had been twenty or more ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... the Scollays' story and I think we all believed that in the main it was true. In fact, since then it has stood the test of all the evidence that could be got to check it. At the same time it seemed pretty clear that their greed had made them blinder than any one without a strong monetary interest could possibly have been. For fear of losing their little gold mine they had shut their eyes when people of average common sense would have opened them pretty wide. Our questions convicted them of ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... King, "Gawain, and blinder unto holy things Hope not to make thyself by idle vows, Being too blind to have desire to see. But if indeed there came a sign from heaven, Blessed are Bors, Lancelot and Percivale, For these have seen according to their sight. For every fiery prophet in old times, And all the sacred madness ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... himself aimed at the high and dignified office of an angekok, an aspiration which had at first been planted in him, and afterwards been carefully encouraged by his deceiver, because it made his dupe, if possible, a blinder and more willing tool. ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... out the slip that bore the blind diagram and the blinder description that accompanied it. Nothing could be made of it in the darkness, so I described it as well ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... a primitive human instinct; and even when many gods took the place of One in the blinder faith of men it was nature worship making deities of the elements and addressing them with supplication and praise. Ancient hymns have been found on the monumental tablets of the cities of Nimrod; fragments of the Orphic and Homeric hymns are preserved in ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... talk. At that time the wind was moaning sadly, and the sky as dark as a wood, and the straw in the yard swirling round and round, and the cows huddling into the great cowhouse, with their chins upon one another. But we, being blinder than they, I suppose, and not having had a great snow for years, made no preparation against the storm, except that the ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... knew the ground pretty well, and could drop twenty feet out of the barn window and strike on a pile of straw so as to land near the goal, touch it, and let the crowd in free without getting found out. I did this several times and got the blinder, James Bang, pretty mad. After a boy has counted 500 or 600, and worked hard to gather in the crowd, only to get jeered and laughed at by the boys, he loses his temper. It was so with James Cicero Bang. I knew that he ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... voice, and the noise of the snuffling of small noses became so great that the traveller hastened away. He passed many other purblind little creatures in the twilight of this forest, till at last he came to one that looked even blinder than the rest, but whose song was sweet and low and clear, breaking a perfect stillness; and the traveller sat down to listen. For a long time he listened to that song without noticing that not a nut was falling. But suddenly he heard a faint rustle and three ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... as if I'd been blind all the time I have known you, blind to the truth of you and blinder still to my own truth. Perhaps I am blind now. I don't know. But, Hermione, I can see something. I do know something of you and of myself. I do know that even now there is a link between us. You want to deny it. You wouldn't acknowledge it. But it is there. We are not ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... under his own eye, or even by his own hands, is sacred, and will address his prayers to it with a solemn conviction of its powers to respond. Than this idolatry cannot further go. His most revered gods are effigies of renowned warriors and successful generals. African fetich is no blinder than such baseless adoration performed by an intelligent people. Some of the indigenous animals, such as foxes, badgers, and snakes, are protected with superstitious reverence, if not absolutely worshiped. ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... town, village to village, ranch to ranch, camp to camp. I never stayed long in one place. I never had but one idea. I never rested. Four years went by, an' I knowed every trail in northern Utah. I kept on an' as time went by, an' I'd begun to grow old in my search, I had firmer, blinder faith in whatever was guidin' me. Once I read about a feller who sailed the seven seas an' traveled the world, an' he had a story to tell, an' whenever he seen the man to whom he must tell that story he knowed him on sight. I was like that, only I had a question to ask. An' always I knew the ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... Purdy. And as Mahony still continued to quiz him, he added in a downright surly tone: "Just the same old Dick as ever! Blinder than any bat to all that doesn't concern yourself! I'll eat my hat if it's ever entered your noddle that Polly's quite the prettiest ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... some are blinder than others who use the various means available for sharpening their eyesight. As an onlooker it seems to me safe to say that the lenses recommended by both the "radicals" and their vivid opponents rather tend to increase than diminish ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... the little animal leaped clear of the foreman's grip, its blinder came off and it launched into a series of wild bucks and grunts. The air seemed full of flying hoofs, and for the moment there was a lively scattering of ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin
... and we will drink to the health of the poem in it. It is 'Italy in England'—isn't it? But I understand and understood perfectly, through it all, that it is unfinished, and in a rough state round the edges. I could not help seeing that, even if I were still blinder than when ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... because he was in it, and Bob consoled him by explaining that he had no reason to feel slighted, since he, who, as the clown, was to be the life of the entertainment, could take no other part in these preparatory steps than to lead a blind horse around a still blinder ring. ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... necessitous; but that men should be allured by the glittering of wealth only to feed the insolent pride of those who will not in return feed their hunger—that the sordid niggard should find any sacrifices on the altar of his vanity—seems to arise from a blinder idolatry, and a more bigoted and senseless superstition, than any which the sharp eyes of priests have discovered ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... that is taking time by the forelock, sure enough. I must be even blinder than I thought, if there are enough signs for you to go that far already. She wears a ring now that has given rise to much gossip, but I cannot get at the truth of the matter. She will not tell me her secrets as she used to do; so take care, Traverse, ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... a game of hide and seek and like all such games is best played where there is plenty of space and many hiding places. The distinctive feature of this game is the peculiar limitation put on the opportunity to hide, which may even free the blinder from his task. The one who is It, or hunter, blinds his eyes and counts ten while the other players run for hiding places. As soon as the one who is blinding says "Ten!" the players must all stand ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... split only vacancy. Deerfoot easily eluded the strokes, which were blinder than usual, for Taggarak was beside himself with passion. In the midst of his aimless outburst the Shawanoe did another thing which was worthy of a skilled pugilist. Waiting for an opening, he shot his left hand forward, and, with the open palm, landed a stunning blow on the bridge ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... produced this coercion to act. It is not the act or the despotism of that power—it is the nature of things that compels. Shall we, dreading to become the blind instruments of power, yield ourselves the blinder dupes of mere sounds of imposture? Yet that word, that empty word, coercion, has given scope to an eloquence that, one would imagine, could not be tired and did not ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... impatience, but Mr. Mix had been able, so far, to hold her in check. He had realized very clearly, however, that Mirabelle wasn't to be put off indefinitely; and he had been glad that he had a readymade ruse which he could employ as a blinder whenever she began to fidget. This ruse was his amendment; and although he could no longer see any value in it for the purposes of his private feud, yet he was passing it for two reasons; Mirabelle was one, and the public was the other. Even ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... may be remarked, that those persons who have busied themselves most with inquiries into the causes, and motives, and impulses of their actions, have exhibited, in their conduct, the most lamentable contrast to their theory, and have seemed blinder in their knowledge than others ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 580 That on the marriage-day is paid, Or hour of death, the bet is laid; And all the rest of better or worse, Both are but losers out of purse. For when upon their ungot heirs 585 Th' entail themselves, and all that's theirs, What blinder bargain e'er was driv'n, Or wager laid at six and seven? To pass themselves away, and turn Their childrens' tenants e're they're born? 590 Beg one another idiot To guardians, e'er they are begot; Or ever shall, perhaps, by th' one, Who's bound to vouch 'em for his own, Though got b' implicit ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... a little band of savages is but one of their number, whom they follow as their bravest and most wary. But when large bodies come to act together, personal selection becomes more difficult, a blinder obedience becomes necessary and can be enforced, and from the very necessities of warfare when conducted on a ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... so old and wise already, Ralph?" she asked. "Brotherly superiority won't go very far with a girl who has earned her own living. As you say, I should not have told you this, but you must have been blinder than a mole—even your uncle saw it, and I am quite right." She looked me over critically before she continued, as though puzzled: "I really cannot see why she should be so, and I begin to fancy that a little plain speaking will be good for ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... very easy for you to joke, but how would you like to wear a blinder like that for weeks and weeks, sir?" and Rose quenched his rising spirits by slipping the shade over his eyes, as he still sat on the cushion at ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... was blind—blinder than any bat; and, in my ignorance, I asked him, in an irritated voice, if he thought that it was fair to try "to kid" a man who had just been told that he would never again have the use of his eyes. He uttered ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... themselves the inveterate enemies of their blood-kin in the new; they always strove to delay the time when their own race should rise to wellnigh universal supremacy. In mere blind selfishness, or in a spirit of jealousy still blinder, the Europeans refused to regard their kinsmen who had crossed the ocean to found new realms in new continents as entitled to what they had won by their own toil and hardihood. They persisted in treating the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... soft music of hidden instruments. God! how I tortured myself! You were never out of mind for an hour. My days were given to you, and I used to pray that my dreams might hold nothing but you. You have been my fetish from the first day I met you, and my worship has grown blinder every hour, Mildred. You were always out of my reach, but I have kept my eyes raised toward you just the same, and I have never looked aside, never faltered." He paused to feast his eyes upon her, and then in a half-whisper finished, "Oh, my Lady, ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... did not move! I looked at my friend, uncertain what I should say; I was startled to see her whole being aglow with mother-pride. "Isn't she a dear?" she whispered. "And, Mary, she's learning so fast, and growing—you couldn't believe it!" Oh, the marvel of mother-love, I thought—that is blinder than any child ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... about that. Blackie's right eye was blinder than any bat's; it was an opaque white ball—a circumstance which caused it no little annoyance, for the other eye had to do duty for both, and this involved constant screwing of the head about, and unwearied watchfulness. It was as if a solitary sentinel ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... citation. It proceeds from the same deficiency of sensation. His eyes saw nothing; his ears heard nothing. He believed that men travelled for distraction and to kill time. The most vulgar plutocrat could not be blinder to beauty nor bring home less from Athens than this cultivated saint. Everything in the world which must be felt with a glow in the breast, in order to be understood, was to him dead-letter. Art was a name to him; music was a name to him; love was a ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... blind men, who practise their castigation, whether it be fasting, watching or labor, only because they think these are good works, intending by them to gain much merit. Far blinder still are they who measure their fasting not only by the quantity or duration, as these do, but also by the nature of the food, thinking that it is of far greater worth if they do not eat meat, eggs or butter. Beyond these are those ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... Suffer it that I to Thee As an hired servant be; Let the lowliest task be mine, Grateful, so the work be Thine; Let me find the humblest place In the shadow of Thy grace: Blest to me were any spot Where temptation whispers not. If there be some weaker one, Give me strength to help him on; If a blinder soul there be, Grant that I his guide may be. Make my mortal dreams come true With the work I fain would do; Clothe with life the weak intent, Let me be the thing I meant; Let me find in Thy employ ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in spite of my poor old guest's infirmities; he had grown blinder and more tottering since last we met. He eat very little and sipped ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... easy. Tie him to a tree and put this blinder over his eyes." He kicked toward Rob a heavy piece of leather semicircular in form and with a thong tied at the corners. Rob picked it up, and after studying it for a moment dropped the blinder over the claybank's face. To his surprise the horse now ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... he hung down his head as he spake it, and was silent a little space; And when it was lifted again there was fear in the Dwarf-king's face. And he said: "Thou knowest my thought, and wise-hearted art thou grown: It were well if thine eyes were blinder, and we each were faring alone, And I with my eld and my wisdom, and thou with thy youth and thy might; Yet whiles I dream I have wrought thee, a beam of the morning bright, A fatherless motherless glory, to work out my desire; Then high my hope ariseth, and my heart is ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... ddwys: Clywch, o'r llys mewn dyrys don, Draw'n sisial deyrn y Saeson,— "Pa uffernol gamp ffyrnig? A pha ryw aidd dewraidd dig? Pa wrolwymp rialyd Sy'n greddfu trwy Gymru 'gyd? Bloeddiant, a llefant rhag llid, Gawrwaeddant am deg ryddid,— 'Doed chwerwder, blinder, i blaid Ystryw anwar estroniaid; Ein gwlad, a'n ffel wehelyth,— Hyd Nef,' yw eu bonllef byth; Ac adsain main y mynydd,— Och o'u swn!—yn gasach sydd; 'Ein gwlad lan amhrisiadwy,' Er neb, ...
— Gwaith Alun • Alun
... and when in the twelfth century the idea of a university rises in the best minds, how incomplete and vague it is! Amid the ruins of castles and cathedrals we grow humble, and think ourselves inferior to men who thus could build. But they were not as strong as we, and they led a more ignorant and a blinder life; and so when we read of great names of the past, the mists of illusion fill the skies, and our eyes are dimmed by the glory of clouds tinged with the splendors of ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... word Liberty. We clothe our divinity with new honors. The ancients worshiped in her temple, but to them all, even the devoutest, she was ever an "Unknown God." In all ages, men sing her praises, but know not her law. Our revolutionary fathers were blind as others—blinder than many others. They declared all men free and equal. They fought long and valiantly for their evangel, baptizing it in the blood of many battles, came home triumphant, and then constructed a despotism which their ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... know not how to rightly tell How fared my quest, and what befell Me, coming in the presence of That blind girl, and her blinder love. I know but little else than that Above the chair in which she sat I leant—reached for, and found her hand, And held it for a moment, and Took up the other—held them both— As might a friend, I will take oath: Spoke leisurely, as might a man Praying ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... their trouble, than pardon for their sin, cared not how they lost their guilt, so they got it out of their mind: now, having got it off the wrong way, it was not sanctified unto them; but they grew harder and blinder, and more wicked after their trouble. This made me afraid, and made me cry to God the more, that it might not ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... who is "it" says "ten," the players must stand motionless wherever they may happen to be while he turns at once to look for them. Any player whom he sees moving must come back to the goal and start over again. The "blinder" repeats this five times, and any player not entirely out of sight the fifth time the blinder turns must change places with him, while the original "it" ...
— Games and Play for School Morale - A Course of Graded Games for School and Community Recreation • Various
... best, a fury incarnate. But the ride, was a match, and more than a match, for it. He sat the saddle like a Centaur, with the perfect: unconscious grace of a born master, swaying in his seat as need was, and spurring the horse to a blinder fury. ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... "I repeat, you will wed another—and more, I tell you, you are blinder than Richmond has shown himself—for the most illustrious damsel in the kingdom has regarded you with eyes of affection, and yet you ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... quack would have foreseen this catastrophe; but there is one thing blinder than love, and that is egotism such as his. His colossal vanity had not even suspected that a woman who possessed him for her husband could for a single instant bestow a thought of interest on any ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... sears the soul, Fills the mind with clouds of sorrow, Darkens all the shining goal Of the sun-illumined morrow; Wherefore should our lives be spent Daily growing blind and blinder— Let us, as the Master meant, Make the world ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... put off this birthmark of mortality by relinquishing mortality itself in preference to any other mode. Life is but a sad possession to those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Were I weaker and blinder, it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might be endured hopefully. But, being what I find myself, methinks I am of all mortals the most fit ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... smile was beautiful both in its pride and its kindness. It is astonishing how Leonard had altered since he had left his uncle's. He was both younger and older; for the sense of genius, when it snaps its shackles, makes us both older and wiser as to the world it soars to, younger and blinder as to the world it ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... those amorous sweets that lie Scatter'd in each neighbouring part, Find a passage to your heart, Then you'll confess your mortal sight Too weak for such a glorious light: For if her graces you discover, You grow, like me, a dazzled lover; But if those beauties you not spy, Then are you blinder far ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... hospitals he stayed in, the tsetse fly that bit him by day, the mosquitoes that made his nights a perfect torment, they are the more true to life. For fights are few, and, in this thick bush country, frequently degenerate into blind firing into a blinder bush; but the "jigger" flea is with the ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain— Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... lady vill per-mit,' rejoined Mr. Weller, 'we'll leave it here, ready for next journey. This here lantern, mum,' said Mr. Weller, handing it to the housekeeper, 'vunce belonged to the celebrated Bill Blinder as is now at grass, as all on us vill be in our turns. Bill, mum, wos the hostler as had charge o' them two vell-known piebald leaders that run in the Bristol fast coach, and vould never go to no other tune but a sutherly vind and a cloudy sky, ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... naturalist, William J. Long, "To call a thing intelligence in one creature and reflex action in another, or to speak of the same thing as love or kindness in one and blind impulse in the other, is to be blinder ourselves than the impulse which is supposed to govern animals. Until, therefore, we have some new chemistry that will ignore atoms and the atomic law, and some new psychology that ignores animal intelligence altogether, or regards it as under a radically different law from our own, we must ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... fallen to a lower ebb, had more nearly disappeared altogether, during Shaw's earlier epoch than at any other time. Individualism of the worst type was on the top of the wave; I mean artistic individualism, which is so much crueller, so much blinder and so much more irrational even than commercial individualism. The decay of society was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms. The aesthete was all receptiveness, like the flea. His only affair in this ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... here, ye young rascal!" exclaimed the woodsman, with a chuckle. "You'll have that whole spatter of Tories arter us. Couldn't you hide your clothes better 'n that? Might have left 'em ashore. If the old gentleman hadn't been blinder'n a bat ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... blinder man than Jim Galloway not to have marked the cool dislike and distrust in Virginia's eyes. But, though he turned from them to the pink-and-white girl at her side, he gave no sign of sensing that he was in any ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... of the undergraduates, very thoughtlessly. "Why, my dear Colonel Prowley, you are blinder than ever he was! Don't you know that recent scholarship has demonstrated Homer to be nobody in particular? The 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are mere agglomerations of the poetical effusions of a variety of persons; and doubtless all of them could see as well as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... about. There will be enough of them, in all probability, to supply every sort of sensation that declining life can need. There will be enough for every hope and every fear; and though my attachment to none can equal that of a parent, it suits my ideas of comfort better than what is warmer and blinder. My nephews and nieces!—I shall often have ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... her, because he is so proud of his conquest. That was my case. If I had had my eyes, I might have seen that she who could cheat her old father for a mere stranger, would certainly deceive him in his turn. But if love makes a man blind, vanity, Mr Simple, makes him blinder. In short, I ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... as they turned over the pages of Holbach's book, as if they stood face to face with the devil of the mediaeval legend, come to claim their souls. Satire of Job and David, banter about Joshua's massacres and Solomon's concubines, invective against blind pastors of blinder flocks, zeal to place Newton on the throne of Descartes and Locke upon the pedestal of Malebranche, wishes that the last Jansenist might be strangled in the bowels of the last Jesuit—all this had given zest and savour to life. In the midst of their high feast, Holbach pointed to the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley |
