"Unsatisfying" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... peculiarly nasty and unsatisfying," he remarked after a sip, "but doubtless I shall get used to it. I shall have to get used to a devil of a lot of things, my son. As soon as the period of her widowhood has elapsed I hope ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... found a crucial test which he has not taken into his calculations. The soreness of the wrench from home is still fresh, and there is no settled or regular work to occupy the mind, while the hardships are exactly of the kind that have not been anticipated, and are most harassing, though unsatisfying to the imagination, and all this when the health is adapting itself to a new climate, and the spirits are least in time, so that the temper is in the most likely condition to feel and resent any apparent slight or unexpected employment. No one ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... admiration for all talent and all distinction. For art, if not the highest, Ardworth cared not a straw; it was nothing to him that Varney painted and composed, and ran showily through the jargon of literary babble, or toyed with the puzzles of unsatisfying metaphysics. He saw but a charlatan, and he had not yet learned from experience what strength and what danger lie hid in the boa parading its colours in the sun, and shifting, in the sensual sportiveness of its being, from ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... little by little in the woods, small as it was and unsatisfying to his youthful impatience, sufficed to sustain his hopes. The constant meeting after work-hours with slinking bohunks who always avoided him, convinced him that something within the law was afoot, and repeated ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... very shaking of the government sieve, where, if there were any solid result, it was accompanied with a very great flying about of chaff indeed. Society was nothing but whip syllabub, a mere conglomeration of bubbles, as hollow and as unsatisfying. And in lower departments of human life, as far as he knew, he saw evils yet more deplorable. The Church played at shuttlecock with men's credulousness; the law, with their purses; the medical profession, with ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... position pretty well, from having all traveled extensively themselves; had they not been present, I might have put some in my pocket to eat by night; for, after fever, the appetite is excessively keen, and manioc is one of the most unsatisfying kinds of food. Captain Antonio Rodrigues Neves then kindly invited me to take up my abode in his house. Next morning this generous man arrayed me in decent clothing, and continued during the whole period of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... only which they give us; knowledge not put for us into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty, and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for us, and therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain while, unsatisfying, wearying. ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... last; and on this dreary December day she was face to face with absolute want. The wolf, with his gaunt eyes, was crouched beside her cold hearth. A pittance owed to her for work had not been paid. The little food left in the house had furnished the children an unsatisfying breakfast; she had eaten nothing. On the table beside her lay a note from the agent of the estate of which her home was a part, bidding her call that morning. She knew why—the rent was two months in arrears. It seemed like death to leave the house in which her husband had placed her, and wherein ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... friend Haydon was in difficulties and tormenting him, poor as he was, to lend him money; the state of his throat gave serious cause for alarm; and, above all, he was consumed by an unsatisfying passion for the daughter of a neighbour, Mrs. Brawne. She had rented Brown's house whilst they were in Scotland, and had now moved to a street near by. Miss Fanny Brawne returned his love, but she seems never to have understood his ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... that, if we are knit to Him by simple and continual faith, love, and obedience, then what is else barrenness becomes full of nourishment, and the unsatisfying gifts of the world become rich and precious. They are nought when they are put first, they are much when ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... unpublished works are a cantata, two arias with orchestral accompaniment, and a rhapsody for the piano. One rhapsody has been published, that in E minor; in spite of its good details, it is curiously unsatisfying,—it seems all prelude, interlude, and postlude, with the actual rhapsody accidentally overlooked. A "Meditation" is bleak, with a ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... ecstasy; a noble longing and determination shaped itself, though vaguely, within her. For a little, she was touched in her deepest and truest nature; she was uplifted to the threshold of a great resolve. But generalities are so grand—details so commonplace and unsatisfying. What should she do? What "high and holy ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... place of reason; anger, intolerance, personal feuds and sectarian bitterness, interminable discussions and weary controversies; while infinite Truth, for which I have been seeking, lies still beyond, or seen, if at all, only by transient and unsatisfying glimpses, obscured and darkened by miserable ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... seemed less gay about it, and had thought up a lot of fresh objections; but Tom said there was only one thing to worry about, and that was whether the whole concern wouldn't show plain against the sky. We got off a ways to take a look, and very unsatisfying it was, too. A big, leafy tree seems a mighty solid affair, till you stand off and look right through it; and Old Dibs was for giving up the idea and trying the cellar, which was Tom's other notion. But the tree business appealed to Tom more, and he ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... added Ayrault, "that our earth is the vestibule to space, and for the opportunities it opens, I should rather never have lived, for life in itself is unsatisfying." ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... much right to expect failed them. The Spartans, indeed, resolved to assist Athens, but not until assistance would have come too late. They declared that their religion forbade them to commence a march till the moon was at her full, and this was only the ninth day of the month [275]. With this unsatisfying reply, the messenger returned to Athens. But, employed in this arduous enterprise—his imagination inflamed by the greatness of the danger—and its workings yet more kindled by the loneliness of his adventure and the mountain stillness of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... great high priest, found it an unsatisfying portion, and, doubtless influenced by its failure, has resigned and turned ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... much like most associated charities, a sort of convention. Forms can not express the deep emotions, the natural longings, or the human desires; they are echoes, hollow and unsatisfying. ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... in spring the chickens are a source of considerable income to the negroes. Their fare is occasionally varied by an opossum caught in the woods, or a hare trapped in the fields; but they much prefer corn bread and bacon as regular fare to anything else. They dislike wheat bread, as too light and unsatisfying, and they always grumble when flour is measured out to them instead of meal. Coffee is a luxury used only on Sunday. The table is set off by a few china plates and cups, but there are no dishes, the meat being served in the utensil in which it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... cups the real cosmopolitan feelings which inspired him—the feelings of most old soldiers of fortune. They start probably with some vague notions of seeking honour and glory, but, finding the objects at which they aim thoroughly unsatisfying, they in most cases become intensely selfish, and think only how they can make themselves most comfortable under any circumstances in which they are placed, or how they can secure the largest amount of plunder. This was ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar" ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief love-tale, hiding nothing—not even the hope that in the years to come Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration. He felt better after he had told his father. It was highly necessary that he should tell some one; and ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... establishment of Christianity there was not much bigotry in the west, for organized religion was unknown in Europe: practices might be forbidden as immoral or anti-social but such expressions as contrary to the Bible or Koran had no equivalent. Old worships were felt to be unsatisfying: new ones were freely adopted: mysteries were relished. There was no invasion, nothing that suggested foreign conquest or alarmed national jealousy, but the way was open to ideas, though they ran some risk of suffering transformation on ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... Longstreet should have broken off fragments of stone with so plain a marking of red dirt on them. Helen merely knew that her father had more than once climbed up here, though she had laughed at him for seeking gold upon the exalted heights. To know anything beyond this meagre and unsatisfying data, they must ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... obdurate. He believed in letting well enough alone. The joys of a street-car ride were present and tangible; "something nice" was vague, unsatisfying. ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... for on the title-page he read the name of his mother as the author. Her thoughts were continually upon her lost son, and in her mind's eye she often traced his downward career. She imagined him worn and weary, his days spent in unsatisfying folly, and his moments of reflection embittered by remorse; unconsciously, in writing this little book she had drawn from her own feelings and addressed one in this situation. She pointed to him the falseness of the world, and bade him judge of the fidelity of the picture by his ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... mood. Thus Mephistopheles finds his opportunity. The scholar, embittered with the sense that knowledge is denied to him, will take to mere action; and the action will not be great like that which the Erdgeist would have prompted, but poor and unsatisfying to any nobler ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... been accepted by many generations of men as a picture of the world, with its temptations, its sins, its moral bankruptcy, and its illusionary and unsatisfying pleasures. Preachers have always been fond of allusions to the husks and swine, and the desperate hunger which there is nothing to satisfy in the Far Country. The story is true, God wot; it gives many a man a wholesome fright, and keeps him at home, and its note of forgiveness for a wasted life ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... protecting rail there at that time. The injury proved so serious that he had to see a surgeon; and this surgeon happened to be Mr. John Dinham, Hawker's brother-in-law. Two days after the accident Tennyson drove over to Morwenstow with Dinham to see Hawker. His own note on the visit is brief and unsatisfying: "In a gig to Rev. S. Hawker, at Morwenstow, passing Comb Valley, fine view over sea, coldest manner of vicar till I told my name, then all heartiness. Walk on cliff with him; told of shipwreck." This is very meagre. Happily Hawker himself wrote down a more detailed ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... saw two faces. One of them hung over my shoulder. It was the trader's. It was the face of a man who has lived a very long while wielding power of life and death over unsatisfying satisfactions. A man awakened! The toppling of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a difficult question, and brought out a world of unsatisfying conjecture. Various men were mentioned as possibilities, but one by one they were discarded as not being eligible. No one but young Hillyer had been intimate with Flint Buckner; no one had really had a quarrel with him; he ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain
... from then, I never notice now. I have got used to them, as you said. It frightens me when I think of it." Poor child!—neither fright nor warning have stayed her course since then. A ceaseless thirst for excitement, an endless round of unsatisfying pleasure—so called,—a weary, old, disappointed look on the young face; broken engagements, forgotten promises, a wasted life,—this is what it has all come to. "Hard upon dancing"? yes, I certainly have reason. Do I not find it right in the way of some of my Bible Class who ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... at last to a "criticism of life." It would not have satisfied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and it did not satisfy Mr. Morris! The burden of these long narrative poems is vanitas vanitatum: the fleeting, perishable, unsatisfying nature of human existence, the dream "rounded by a sleep." The lesson drawn is to make life as full and as beautiful as may be, by love, and adventure, and art. The hideousness of modern industrialism was oppressing to Mr. Morris; ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... coming across districts of that name," said Jay severely. "I often direct my enquiring fares to the region of God Knows Where. It is most unsatisfying. Where are ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... the unsuccessful dramatist has his moments. I knew a young man who married somebody else's mother, and was allowed by her fourteen gardeners to amuse himself sometimes by rolling the tennis-court. It was an unsatisfying life; and when rash acquaintances asked him what he did he used to say that he was reading for the Bar. Now he says he is writing a play—and we look round the spacious lawns and terraces and marvel at the run his last ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... variety, to supply the insatiable appetite of the soul. And this might be enough to convince you, that your souls are quite out of course, and altogether wandered from the way of happiness because they are poured out on such a multiplicity of insufficient, unsatisfying things, every one of which is narrow, limited and empty, and the combination and concurrence of all being a thing either impossible or improbable to be attained. But we may conceive that men's affections put themselves into three great heads of created things, one ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... seeming happiness, not to shock them too much by the contrast between the delicate enjoyments of the life he now leads among the wealthy and refined, and that bald existence of theirs in his old home? A life, agitated, exigent, unsatisfying! That is what this letter really discloses, below so attractive a surface. As his gift expands so does that incurable restlessness one supposed but the humour natural to a promising youth who had still everything to do. And now the only realised ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... little mental stimulus, but opened the door ajar into a larger world. The church gave him an orthodox gospel in terms of divinity and its environment rather than humanity on earth, but stirred vaguely his aspirations for a fuller life. He has sounded the depths of rural existence and found it unsatisfying. He wants to learn more, to do more, ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... she would return to her position of honoured guest in the man's house, a barren, unsatisfying position for one in whom youth cried ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... amused me. If each generation die and leave ghosts, he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them. On that theory they would have grown innumerable some Eight Hundred Thousand Years hence, and it was no great wonder to see four at once. But the jest was unsatisfying, and I was thinking of these figures all the morning, until Weena's rescue drove them out of my head. I associated them in some indefinite way with the white animal I had startled in my first passionate ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... It was certainly unsatisfying, but her letters had all been of this somewhat formal nature. She persisted, too, in referring to that imaginary woman, and Blake regretted ever having mentioned her. If Margherita suspected the truth, she could not help feeling his lack of delicacy, his disloyalty to Martel, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... responsibilities. My ideal life would be to work, study and teach, but as no opportunities for doing so have been presented to me, and having had no home of my own, I have been obliged to work on in my one-sided way, unsatisfying as it ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... traces to the very close of his life. He took a lively interest in the discussions that were stirred by the famous University Commission, and contributed ideas to the subject of academic reform on more sides than one. But such matters he found desultory and unsatisfying; he was in a state of famine; his mind was suffering, not growing; he was becoming brooding, melancholy, taciturn, and finally pessimist (pp. 306, 307). Pattison was five-and-forty before he reached ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... is the fashion to speak in that way. We learn, in our school books, all about the folly of ambition, and the unsatisfying nature of political greatness. But even if the attainment must disappoint, there is interest and excitement in the pursuit. And, if you will allow me to say so, it is not so in your case, and to me the disappointment seems even ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... leaving the heart empty and hungry still. Again, then, let us use this dark background to throw forward another scene. See, even now, "above the sun" Him who is the Head and perfect Exponent of the creation called the new. Is there any law of constant unsatisfying circuit in Him? Nay, indeed, every sight we get of Him is new; each revelation of Himself perfectly satisfies, and yet ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... helplessly to the chariot wheels of an industrial Juggernaut which knows nothing of moral values. Let the progress of industry make life noisy and ugly and anxious and unhappy: let it engross the great mass of mankind in tedious and uncongenial tasks and the remainder in the foolish and unsatisfying activities of luxurious living; let it defile the green earth with pits and factories and slag-heaps and the mean streets of those who toil at them, and dim the daylight with exhalations of monstrous vapour. It is not for us to complain ...
— Progress and History • Various
... The Mill on the Floss, her finest work, which is full of humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an analysis of soul in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpassed. Yet the end is cruel and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own religious creed. Next read Adam Bede, one of the saddest books in all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and return to the bounds which seem to him to be grown so narrow, but which he was told were safe? Now that Stephen was settled, it was open to him to return to St. Elizabeth's College, but the young soul within him revolted against the repetition of what had become to him unsatisfying, unless illumined by the brightness he seemed ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... enough. You are ceasing to pretend that these childish games—this dancing and singing and mating—do not become tiresome and unsatisfying after a while. And you no longer care to pretend that you are younger than you are. These are the signs of adolescence. And then, see these fantastic rags with which you have draped yourself. [He takes up a piece of her draperies in his hand]. It is rather badly worn here. Why do you not get ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... lost their charm,—she went reluctantly to her desk, and as reluctantly took up her pen,—what she had written already, appeared to her utterly worthless,—and what she attempted to write now was to her mind poor and unsatisfying. She was not moved by the knowledge, constantly pressed upon her, that she was steadily rising, despite herself, to the zenith of her career in such an incredibly swift and brilliant way as to be the envy of all her contemporaries,—she was hardly as grateful for ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... She knew but one path to charity, and that was paved with gold. She did not know how to offer sympathy, or to enhance a gift by the manner of giving. Her father had sacrificed everything to multiply and keep his wealth; all earthly happiness had been given up for it; and unsatisfying as it had been to her own heart, it had satisfied his. Inclination prompted to give, habit to withhold; and certainly Sarah Bond felt far more enjoyment in obeying inclination than in following habit; though sometimes what she believed ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... without any attack, and without the sentinels on the top of the tower announcing any prospect of relief, inactivity and exhaustion combined to increase the universal distress. Their dinner had been unsatisfying: potatoes burnt to a cinder, and a little salt; no wonder that they should again begin to be thirsty, and that the women should return and complain to Anton that his expedient had only availed for a very short time. Among the men, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... music in the last act; the "Good Friday music" is divine; the last scene is gorgeously led up to; and the music of it, considered only as music, is unsurpassable. But heard at the end of a drama so gigantically planned as "Parsifal," it is unsatisfying and disappointing. It is to me as if the "Ring" had closed on the music of Neid-hoehle with the squabblings of Alberich and Mime. The powers that make for evil and destruction have won; one knows that Parsifal is eternally ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... men of noble birth, kings and queens and emperors, warriors and statesmen, retired to lay down their splendid cares, and end their days in peace. Those with whom the world had dealt hardly, or those whom it had surfeited with its unsatisfying pleasures, those who were disappointed with earth, and those who were filled with passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven of rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came to them, and wealth, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... not Mind; but infinite Mind is sufficient to supply all manifestations of intelligence. The notion of more than one Mind, or Life, is as unsatisfying as it is unscientific. All must be of God, and not our own, ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... of the mysteries of the war. News from that city was brief and unsatisfying in the main. Great things, however, were done there, and none greater than those accomplished by the British. Some of these accomplishments are told in the ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... is a remnant of something degenerating, something which once has been immense, or it is a particle of what will in the future develop into something immense; but in the present it is unsatisfying, it gives much less than ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... and memory to foreign nations, and "to (his) own country, after some time is past over." His own time could neither appreciate nor reward them. Here is an element of greatness worthy of all imitation: he who works for popular applause, may have his reward, but it is fleeting and unsatisfying; he who works for truth alone, has a grand inner consequence while he works, and his name will be honored, if for nothing else, for this loyalty to truth. After what has been said of his servility and dishonesty, it is ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... where I did hear it first. Everybody in town seems to know it," he asserted; and with this unsatisfying answer I was ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... silently from somewhere and follow us as the priest leads us round. There does not seem to be any one special shrine with a central figure for us to see; perhaps there is one, but it is not shown to foreigners. It is all vague and rather meaningless, and the carving and decoration are unsatisfying. After a while, as there does not seem to be anything more forthcoming, we drop a few coins into a bowl held out to us and prepare to go. Just as we reach the door another strange being in a peaked cap appears with tiny cups of clear amber-coloured tea on a tray, and holds them out to us. The little ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... exertions, after the swift succession of dramatic events, after the tremendous call that had been made upon his brain power, nervous force and will, he experienced a strange unrest of spirit. His triumph seemed yet incomplete, somehow unsatisfying. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... in her restlessness. It is curious to note what diverse causes produce the same effects. Cora Arthur was restless, very restless. The fruit of her labor was in her hands, but it was vapid, tasteless, unsatisfying. What her soul clamored for, was the opera, the contact of kindred spirits, the rush and whirl, the smoke and champagne, and giddiness of the city; the card-won gold, and painted folly that made the be-all and end-all of ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... think we differ much then,' said Fausta, 'in what we think of human life. I hold the highest lot to be unsatisfying. You admit all are so, but have shown me that there is a nearer approach to an equality of happiness than I had supposed, though evil weighs upon all. How the mind longs and struggles to penetrate the mysteries of its being! How imperfect and without aim does life seem! Every thing beside ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... North. He found him sitting on the soft grass, underneath a large tree. He seemed to have been trying to carve his name; for a large E and half of an N were there. But he was tired of that; and a book he had brought with him seemed to have proved equally unsatisfying; for it was lying closed at his feet. He seemed very much surprised at seeing Arthur; but all he said, when he came near was: "Well?" Arthur did not quite know what to say himself, but he asked ...
— Left at Home - or, The Heart's Resting Place • Mary L. Code
... who only want your money seem to me very unsatisfying folks," replied Amphillis. "Will they smooth your pillows when you are sick? or comfort you ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... Blackfeet do not especially say that this future life is an unhappy one, but, from the way in which they speak of it, it is clear that for them it promises nothing desirable. It is a monotonous, never ending, and altogether unsatisfying existence,—a life as barren and desolate as the country which the ghosts inhabit. These people are as much attached to life as we are. Notwithstanding the unhappy days which have befallen them of late years,—days ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... various civilizations and epochs which were being dissolved in the common melting-pot, and even the man in the street was conscious of its chilling influence. Life in the capital grew agitated, fitful, superficial, unsatisfying. Its gaiety was forced—something between a challenge to the destroyer and a sad farewell to the past and present. Men were instinctively aware that the morrow was fraught with bitter surprises, and they deliberately adopted ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... in that region have, moreover, been shrouded in mystery; foreigners desiring to visit Albania have met with polite but firm refusals; the published reports of the progress of the Albanian expedition—which, by the way, is a much larger force than is generally supposed—have been meagre and unsatisfying. The Italians figure, I fancy, on making their occupation as extensive and as solid as possible before the Albanian question comes ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... "It seems unsatisfying," said Shafto. "Yet, by all accounts, Buddhism is a wonderful religion. I heard a fellow on board ship discussing its code and the extraordinary way in which it has fastened on mankind, and spread. He declared that every fourth human being who came into ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... questions of the day are largely dependent upon the food supply. Show the working men and women how to obtain attractive, palatable, and nourishing food at less cost than that which is unsatisfying, and their ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... of solid gold. They were very costly, though not prized much yet by the unconscious infant for whom they were intended. She went and came, in the midst of this gay and joyous procession, little imagining into what a restless and unsatisfying life all this pageantry and splendor were ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... also constructed with brick—no doubt from the brickyard outside the North Gate owned by the founder of the family fortunes. The pillars and capitals of the arcades of both the nave and chancel are thin and unsatisfying to the eye, and the interior as a whole, although spacious, does not convey any pleasing sensations. The slenderness of the columns was necessary, it appears, owing to the soft and insecure ground, which necessitated a pile ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... and suggestion of love than a conservatory full of them in January. And this suggestion, leavened as it is with the inconstancy of nature, stimulated by the promises which are so often like the peach-blossom of the Judas-tree, unsatisfying by reason of its vague possibilities, differs so essentially from the more limited and attainable and home-like emotion born of quiet intercourse by the winter fireside, that I do not wonder the Young Lady feels as if some spell had been broken by the transition of her life from in-doors to out-doors. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... law, which aims to raise the sex-instinct from the incomplete and unsatisfying plane of physical contact, to that of spiritual union—a wide gulf seemingly; but who would not strive to bridge it, did he but realize what spiritual union with ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... said Hitt, turning to Haynerd. "And we knew it, of course. But we have let our confidence slip. This steam-calliope age reflects the human-mind struggle for something other than its own unsatisfying ideas. It turns to thrills; it expresses its restlessness and dissatisfaction with itself by futurist and cubist art, so-called; by the rattle and vibration of machinery; by flaring billboards that insult every sense of the artistic; and by the murk and muck of yellow journalism, with its hideous ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fact that they were stranded in a real desert town, with Indians and cowboys in the streets, and vistas such as she had dreamed of shimmering in the afternoon sun, awakened an erstwhile slumbering desire for a draught of the real Romance of the West, heretofore only enjoyed in unsatisfying sips as she read of the West and its ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... finishing his unsatisfying meal, Joe sat watching her small hand turning the spoon in her soup. He noted the thinness of her young cheeks, in which there was no marvel, seeing the fare upon which she was forced to live. She seemed to be unconscious of him and Isom. She ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... with unabated ardor, but his work soon grew unsatisfying. The inspiring nature of his surroundings seemed to stimulate him to higher effort and loftier work, which should call into play the imaginative faculties and in which the brain would be free to weave its own creations. ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... and then "Sacerdos" (A priest), and finally "Finis," or "Finit," for even those nearest could not catch the word distinctly, as the devil, afraid doubtless of perpetrating a barbarism, spoke through the nun's closely clenched teeth. This being all decidedly unsatisfying, the magistrates insisted that the examination should continue, but the devils had again exhausted themselves, and refused to utter another word. The priest even tried touching the superior's head with the pyx, while prayers ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... hastily, at the bookstall of an impatient vendor a book he cannot buy, so I scan the idylls, the epics, the dramas of the life of man written in words which thrill me as I read. Some are fiercely tender, some yearning and unsatisfying, some bitter in the mouth but afterward sweet in the belly. All are expressed in words so fit and chaste and noble, that each is an immortal poem which would give me deathless fame—could I, ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... "how disastrous is ambition! how unsatisfying its rewards! how terrible its disappointments! Behold yonder peasant tilling his field in peace and contentment! He rises with the lark, passes the day in wholesome toil, and lies down at night to pleasant dreams. In the mad struggle for place and power he has no part; the roar of the ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... Turkish Delight—very sweet, but unsatisfying," she said. "Stay another week and then if you feel that way ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... want and pursuing we-know-not-what must affect the ardor of the chase. Even if we take the future on trust, and follow Spenser to the end, we cannot look back on a book of the "Faerie Queene" as on part of a good story: for it is admittedly an unsatisfying and ill-constructed story. But my point is that an ordinary reader resents being asked to take the future on trust while the author luxuriates in casual beauties of speech upon every mortal subject but the one in hand. The first ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and take the nonsense out of those about him, will, at all events, preclude the possibility of his being passed over as a factor not to be considered. If to charm and bestow gives the sense of power, to thwart and humiliate may be found not wholly unsatisfying. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is accustomed to a stimulating dietary of flesh-foods, especially if well-seasoned, finds a simple diet unsatisfying. Should such persons dine off simple vegetarian food, there is a tendency to over-eating. The less stimulating food fails to rouse the digestive organs and to appease the appetite; although an ample supply of nourishment be consumed. This is the reason why so many imagine that it is necessary ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... owing to wealth, admitting of indolence, and yielding to the pursuit of transitory and unsatisfying amusements, or to that of exhausting pleasures only, that the present times exhibit to us so many instances of persons suffering under this state: it is a state totally unknown to the poor, who labour for their ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... pet joke of Gabriel's did not dissipate the constraint and disappointment left upon the company by Uncle Sylvester's unsatisfying performance and early withdrawal, and they separated soon after, Kitty and Marie being glad to escape upstairs together. On the landing they met two of the Irish housemaids in a state of agitated exhaustion. It ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... sorry," was the unsatisfying statement. "I can do nothing without his Excellency's instructions, and he has gone out ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... "Life" it is difficult with the data at hand to say anything very definite. While dogmatism however is dangerous indefiniteness is unsatisfying. True, we cannot trace the genealogy of the present version beyond middle of the sixteenth century, but its references to ancient monuments existing at date of its compilation show it to be many centuries older. Its language proves little or nothing, for, being a ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... intelligence the less the imagination. To ninety per cent. of these men the situation lost much of its edge; to the remaining ten the edge was sharpened. What is to be is to be, in war as elsewhere. Fatalism as regards one's own prospects is inevitable; essential. But fatalism is an unsatisfying creed; the word "Why?" is apt to creep into the back of a man's mind, and the word "Why?" when the intelligence is low, is a dangerous one. For the word "Why?" can only be satisfactorily answered by the realisation ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... Nor is Fame only unsatisfying in it self, but the Desire of it lays us open to many accidental Troubles which those are free from who have no such a tender Regard for it. How often is the ambitious Man cast down and disappointed, if he receives no Praise where he expected it? Nay how often is he mortified ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... was framing bold plans to find Dyan—now the answer to her letter had come. It was a strange unsatisfying answer; full of affection, but too full of windy phrases that she was shrewd enough to recognise as mere echoes from those others, who had ensnared him in a ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... in response to the sigh of some silly waiting-girl, or at the bidding of some brazen-faced, unscrupulous "free lover." And this, "O, ye gods!" is all that ever shall be of the noblest spirits that ever left human flesh! Others, to gain rest from this horrible and unsatisfying fate, fly to the theory of everlasting silence, as a result of the idea that mind is simply brain action, and ceases to exist when the brain ceases to act. Their appropriate motto is, "Let us eat ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... of heaven into one protracted canticle—these are all deeply unattractive, and have no power at all over the vigorous spirit. Even the vision of Socrates, the hope of unrestricted converse with great minds, is a very unsatisfying thought, because it yields so little material ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... stirs. A holy peace steals over the mountains and settles in the valleys. The snow mountains no longer look cold, hard, and austere. Their purity remains as true as ever. And they still possess their uplifting power. But they now speak of serenity and calm—not, indeed, of the unsatisfying ease of the slothful, but of the earned repose of high attainment. Great peace is about them—deep, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... success lie in pinning belief solely on verification by physical phenomena, when they alone are in question; and for mankind generally, though possibly not for an exceptional man like Huxley, an impotent suspension of judgment on such issues as a future life or the Being of God is both unsatisfying and demoralizing. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the land and sea Is felt the swooping of thy ebon wings, And on my ear thy demon-chuckle rings, Over the feast the panting summer brings, "For me—'tis all for me!" All seasons and all climes— In city crowded, and in solitude, Ye gather your unsatisfying food; Ev'n through the rosy gates of joy ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... can only in God get what it wants. Prison fare is what it receives in the other service. The unsatisfying character of all sin; it cloys, and yet leaves one hungry. It is 'that which satisfieth not.' 'Broken ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... transformed his sufferings into delight; but he never outgrew them; and, when he died, the eyes of a child were closed upon a scene touched, it is true, here and there with rapturous pleasure, rich in oddity, and trembling with pathos, but, in the main, as bleak and unsatisfying as the wards of a workhouse. The intense emotions of his childhood made the usual fervours of adolescence a faint thing in the comparison, and if you want to know how lovers think and feel you do not go to Dickens to tell you. You go to Shakespeare, ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... as he roamed the vast garden surrounding the Palace of a Thousand Sounds—thus named because of the tiny bells tinkling about its marble dome. He had eaten an unsatisfying meal in a small antechamber, waited upon by a stupid servant. And worse still, the food was ill cooked. On presenting his credentials, earlier in the evening, the grand vizier, a sneaky-appearing man, had welcomed him coldly, telling him that her Serene ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... sex, the assurance and comfort of mutual fidelity, the love that feeds on daily caresses, endearing words, and acts of tender service. And these lasting joys do not accrue to the man or woman who is not willing to wait, or who squanders his potentialities of love in reckless and fundamentally unsatisfying debauchery. This is the paradox of love; whoso would find its best gifts must be willing to deny himself its gaudiest. The old love of twos, the loyalty of man and wife that bring to each other pure ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... work. There are those who complain that Hobbema was a poor colourist. True, he used little besides grays and a peculiar green, which seemed especially to please him; but since that colouring belonged to the subjects he chose, one cannot complain on the ground that what he did was unsatisfying. For lack of knowledge about him we can think of him as a man of moods, sad, desolate ones at that; because his work is too extreme and uniform in its character for us to believe his method ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... you would be making; but, dear, we know each other pretty well by this, and I hope you can trust yourself to me. If you only knew how I have longed to tell you this through the last two years of our sweet, but to me unsatisfying, friendship you would not keep me in suspense any longer than you can help. You have been the one thought and object of my life ever since I came out, and I have lived in fear of some other fellow getting ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... powers are present and ready to manifest freely, and the mental atmosphere of the sitters is likewise desirable and sympathetic, but still the manifestations are but faint, irregular, and generally unsatisfying—the weak link of the chain being found in the mental state of the medium, and consequently in the mental atmosphere arising from the same. Such undesirable mental states and atmospheres may be said to arise principally from ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... for the future. At the Gold Exchange Bank the weary accountants were making ineffective efforts to complete Thursday's business. That toilful midnight, at the close of the last great passion-day of the bullion-worshippers, will be ever memorable for its anxieties and unsatisfying anguish. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... work postulating a new spiritual point of view, it was vague and unsatisfying. It was without form and void. It desired that most unsatisfying thing, a religion with no dogmas:—those stakes which preserve the ground on which grow the flowers of religious truth, from those who come ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... matters helped any by the fact that Bertram was hungry. Bertram's luncheon had been meager and unsatisfying. That the kitchen down-stairs still remained in silent, spotless order instead of being astir with the sounds and smells of a good dinner (as it should have been) did not improve his temper. Where Billy was he could not imagine. He thought, once or twice, of calling up some of her friends; but something ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... earth who have carried the doctrine of incarnation (Avatar) to such excess of imaginings as to create such abundantly grotesque and fanciful appearances of their many divinities. Normally, then, the Mohammedan faith, at its very core, must be unsatisfying and even repulsive to the tropical Hindu mind. It was brought here at the point of the sword; and, for centuries, it was the faith of a ruling power whose custom was to tax heavily all people who did not conform, outwardly at least, to ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... its effect, is that of impletion, where nothing can be added or taken away, it is evident that such a condition can never be realized by the mind in itself. And yet the desire to this end is as evidently implied in that incessant, yet unsatisfying activity, which, under all circumstances, is an imperative, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... dream over the disgraceful conduct of children or friends, will bring you unsatisfying hopes, and worries will harass you. To be in disgrace yourself, denotes that you will hold morality at a low rate, and you are in danger of lowering your reputation for uprightness. Enemies are ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... to listen till they have done. When they are exhausted, you apply to the tube again. No answer is obtainable. You get mad, and become sarcastic; only being sarcastic when you are not sure that anybody is at the other end to hear you is unsatisfying. ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... sensation that came upon me: I had not seen it since it unbosomed itself four years before, and now I felt like one to whom a friend has made some sorrowing confession of crime long past, and who has basely deserted him in consequence. The old memories of Jo. Dunfer, his fragmentary revelation, and the unsatisfying explanatory note by the headstone, came back with singular distinctness. I wondered what had become of Jo., and—I turned sharply round and asked my prisoner. He was intently watching his cattle, and without ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... goats that have been sacrificed during this Sohrai we have had plenty of meat to eat lately and yet I don't feel as if I had had any." "That is so," answered her daughter-in-law; "fowls' and pig's flesh is very unsatisfying." "Then what are we to do?" rejoined the old woman, "I don't know unless you do for the father of your grandchild." When he heard this Chandrai shivered with fright and hid himself further under the rice shelf, for he saw that the two ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... health was the only shadow on the perfect happiness of the lovers during those two weeks of courtship. Compared with the intoxicating reality of these golden days Paul looked back on his wooing of the supposed Ida Ludington as a vague and unsatisfying dream. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... When the deputation called at Government House to present this Address, they were treated with an off-hand abruptness and brusquerie which gave them much offence. The reply of his Excellency was wordy and unsatisfying in tone; but its most objectionable feature was the air of assumed superiority by which it was pervaded. It referred to the meeting represented by the deputation as having been composed principally of "the industrious classes," ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... scientific treatise. To its pages they went for daily instruction and comfort, with its strange Semitic names they baptized their children, upon its precepts, too often misunderstood and misapplied, they sought to build up a rule of life that might raise them above the crude and unsatisfying world into which they were born. [Sidenote: The ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... It was in those days that I first became critical of my life and burdened with a sense of error and maladjustment. I would lie awake in the night, asking myself the purpose of things, reviewing my unsatisfying, ungainly home-life, my days spent in rascal enterprise and rubbish-selling, contrasting all I was being and doing with my adolescent ambitions, my Wimblehurst dreams. My circumstances had an air of finality, and I asked myself in vain why I had ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the snow he was soon miles from camp. Growing weary he slackened his pace. He came down to a walk. As the lonely red of the winter sunset began to stream through the openings of the forest, flushing the snows of the tiny glades and swales, he grew hungry, and began to swallow unsatisfying mouthfuls of the long moss which roughened the tree-trunks. Ere the moon got up he had filled himself with this fodder, and then he lay down in a ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... pleasure, having forgotten their God and Saviour, and see them disappointed, and utterly destitute of any thing to make them happy forever, and all because they would not forego their chase after unsatisfying pleasure,—there is many a faithful Christian friend, whose example and advice they disregarded, who could then reply, "Did I not say ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams |
