"Unthinking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were sounded to the very depths, this intimate closely hidden wretchedness, following upon her unthinking, girlish first love, had roused in her an abhorrence of passion; possibly she had no conception of its rapture, nor of the forbidden but frenzied bliss for which some women will renounce all the laws of prudence ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... committal of the crime quite in a personal light, for the dead man owed him money, and his death had discharged the debt in a way of which Mr Mosk did not approve. He frequently referred to his loss during the day, when congratulated by unthinking customers on the excellent trade the assassination ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... hundred and ninety-five are five more—as we allow—who have so little of perception, who are so stolid, so dull of wit and apprehension that they go into battle unmoved, unshaken, unthinking. This leaves nine hundred and ninety who are afraid—sorely and terribly afraid. They are afraid of being killed, afraid of being crippled, afraid of venturing out where killings and cripplings are carried on as branches of ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... to pry at; whatever it was, it was so swift, so born of instinct, as to be holy. But when she saw the crumpled finery, she was suddenly too much of a child again to rate it worth envy. The things that Primrose, all unthinking, stood for, the things of warm hearth and hallowed bed that her house had never known, might have power to draw the woman out in her all too soon, but the things that merely charm the feminine still left ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... such a distance that they could not distinguish more than the hats and the arms of the British regiments with which they were engaged. With respect to the imputation of cowardice levelled at lord George by the unthinking multitude, and circulated with such industry and clamour, we ought to consider it as a mob accusation which the bravest of men, even the great duke of Marlborough, could not escape; we ought to receive it as a dangerous suspicion, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... place there was a dreadful line to be drawn. Who was to dispose themselves within the ha-ha, and who without? To this the unthinking will give an off-hand answer, as they will to every ponderous question. Oh, the bishop and such like within the ha-ha; and Farmer Greenacre and such without. True, my unthinking friend; but who shall define these such-likes? It is in such definitions that the whole difficulty ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... more than one observation; I cannot forbear to make one upon the term which Mr. Cochrane Johnstone employs to describe this transaction—"A HOAX," a mere joke, a matter of pleasantry. Gentlemen, a young, a giddy, an unthinking and careless man, who had no concern in the transaction, and who had never been suspected to have had any, might perhaps, in conversation, make use of that term; but Mr. Cochrane Johnstone is not young, he is not giddy, he is not ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... Supreme Council in Paris sufficient proof that saving democracy was just another shibboleth? Is not a ghastly war to be followed by a ghastly peace? The press-agents and orators popularized the war with the unthinking and the hesitant, which is proof enough to me that we lack national unity and a definite national policy. We're a lot of sublimated jackasses, sacrificing our country to ideals that are worn at elbow and down at heel. 'Other times, other customs.' ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... Venters's primitive, childlike mood, like a savage's, seeing, yet unthinking, gave way to the encroachment of civilized thought. The world had not been made for a single day's play or fancy or idle watching. The world was old. Nowhere could be gotten a better idea of its age than in this gigantic silent ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... help, I was—I know I was, for I have often, often, thought about it since—the most inclined to yield to what he showed me. Oh! if he had relented but a little more; if he had thrown himself in my way for but one other quarter of an hour; if he had extended his compassion for a vain, unthinking, miserable girl, in but the least degree; he might, and I believe he would, have saved her! Tell him that I don't blame him, but am grateful for the effort that he made; but ask him for the love ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... irritated into mechanical action. He began to unfasten her little apron. She would have shrunk from him, but could not. So her small body remained in his grasp, while he fumbled at the little buttons and tapes, unthinking, intent, unaware of anything but the irritation of her. Her body was held taut and resistant, he pushed off the little dress and the petticoats, revealing the white arms. She kept stiff, overpowered, violated, he went on with his task. And all ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... up he wings the spiral stair, A song of light, and pierces air With fountain ardour, fountain play, To reach the shining tops of day, And drink in everything discerned An ecstasy to music turned, Impelled by what his happy bill Disperses; drinking, showering still, Unthinking save that he may give His voice the outlet, there to live Renewed in endless notes of glee, So thirsty of his voice is he, For all to hear and all to know That he is joy, awake, aglow; The tumult of the heart to hear Through pureness filtered crystal-clear, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... out and drowned the sentence. It was followed by a torrent of vile words, shouted by a man who had seen, now for the second time, the form that clothed his wife's soul shrivelled in unthinking flames. All that was left of the white moth lay on the altar-cloth, among the fruit at the base ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... beholds it In eminent jeopardy among the coast-rocks, And hurries to preserve his wares. As light As the free bird from the hospitable twig Where it had nested, he flies off from me: No human tie is snapp'd betwixt us two. Yea, he deserves to find himself deceived Who seeks a heart in the unthinking man. Like shadows on a stream, the forms of life Impress their characters on the smooth forehead, Nought sinks into the bosom's silent depth; Quick sensibility of pain and pleasure Moves the light fluids lightly; but no soul Warmeth ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... my pipe is lit, My den is all a cosy glow; And snug before the fire I sit, And wait to FEEL the old year go. I dedicate to solemn thought Amid my too-unthinking days, This sober moment, sadly fraught With much of blame, ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... unthinking rage of the moment, and Marsh sat down as the other directed. But his mind was made up to one thing—Newman would not leave that room now except as a prisoner or ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... desirous of being admired by Crawford, and might shew that desire rather more unguardedly than was perfectly prudent. I can remember that they were evidently fond of his society; and with such encouragement, a man like Crawford, lively, and it may be, a little unthinking, might be led on to—there could be nothing very striking, because it is clear that he had no pretensions: his heart was reserved for you. And I must say, that its being for you has raised him inconceivably in my opinion. It does him the highest honour; ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... and bees! O face of Nature always true! 45 O never-unsympathizing trees! O never-rejecting roof of blue, Whose rash disherison never falls On us unthinking prodigals, Yet who convictest all our ill, 50 So grand and unappeasable! Methinks my heart from each of these Plucks part of childhood back again, Long there imprisoned, as the breeze Doth every hidden odor seize 55 ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... which he peculiarly preferred. He was lord amongst such characters. They, while submitting implicitly to his influence, never acknowledged, because they never reflected on, his superiority; they were quite tractable, therefore, without running the smallest danger of being servile; and their unthinking, easy, artless insensibility was as acceptable, because as convenient, to Mr. Yorke as that of the chair he sat on, or of the ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Tredway listened to this remark was not unmixed with regret that the tone in which it was uttered was sportive rather than serious. He was consoled, however, by the reflection that national differences could not be expected to oppress the heart of unthinking youth as it ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... earthliness. Love is what it ever should be, all noble and elevating,—worship as well as devotion,—annihilating only selfishness, sanctifying, not sacrificing, duty. There is no yielding to a depraved popular taste, no abdication of an inherited throne to stand on a level with the unthinking crowd and receive its worthless applauses. Rather the crowd is bidden higher, to enter upon its own rightful, royal possessions. This is the true missionary work. Manhood and womanhood in their best development are the theme of the book; and they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... His sagacity discerned clearly beforehand the events of coming years, the overthrow of the papal doctrine of indulgences and other groundless dogmas, by which, for many centuries, Rome had held unthinking mankind in bondage. Whatever of thorough knowledge we possess, we owe it to him and must remain his debtors as ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... relicts of idolatry out of Linlithgow in their way.—These summary proceedings alarmed the queen regent, insomuch that her zeal for the Romish idolatry, gave way to her fears about her civil authority. To make the conduct of these reformers the more odious to the unthinking part of the nation, she gave out that they were in open rebellion against her, and that they made a pretence of religion, but that the real design was to set lord James on the throne (there being now no male-heir to ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... For this Reason several unthinking Persons fall in my way, who would give no Attention to Lectures delivered with a Religious Seriousness or a Philosophick Gravity. They are insnared into Sentiments of Wisdom and Virtue when they do not think of it; and if by that means they arrive only at ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... were menaced with a league of Cambray? When this kind of situation was new to me, I did not like it-I have lived long enough, and have seen enough, to consider all political events as mere history, and shall go and see the camps with as unthinking curiosity as if I were a simpleton or a ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... in this beautiful land, are all cognizant of. They are facts that no one would deny—and we should have a poor opinion of the ass who, at—er—such a supreme moment, would attempt to suggest that his call was unthinking and without significance. But, gentlemen, I shall prove to you that such was the foolish, self-convicting custom of the defendant. With the greatest reluctance, and the—er—greatest pain, I succeeded in wresting from the ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... tell when, or by whom, or under what circumstances, the order of succession had been established. Probably, like many other antiquated customs, it had been originally the result of despotism on the part of men in power, and of stupid acquiescence on the part of an unthinking people. ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... small clenched fists—and then tumult died in her ringing ears, the brightness of the eyes was quenched, her hands relaxed, her head sank low, lower, never again to look on this man undismayed, heart free, unafraid—never again to look into this man's eyes with the unthinking, unbelieving tranquillity born of the most harmless skepticism ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... always to be mine. I was born to be of the minority. Please don't give another thought to me or my play. Go your own way. Get back to the plays that please people. Be happy. You have the right to be happy, and I am a selfish, unthinking criminal whom you would better forget. Don't waste another dollar or another moment on my play—it is madness. I am overwhelmed with my debt to you, but I shall repay it ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... have some influence in building up and ennobling human destiny in the future, and he should therefore 'speak them in words hard as rocks,' regardless of the contumely heaped upon him by little minds for having thus spoken them. What if the ridicule, the denunciations of the unthinking, the sensual, the profligate, the unreflecting fools of the world be poured upon him? What of that? To-day, may be one of darkness and storm. The cloud and the storm will pass away, and the brightness and glory of the sunlight will be all over the earth ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... the type of many quarrels and dissensions which had occurred in the house of Bradwardine; of which,' he continued, 'I might commemorate mine own unfortunate dissension with my third cousin by the mother's side, Sir Hew Halbert, who was so unthinking as to deride my family name, as if it had been QUASI BEARWARDEN; a most uncivil jest, since it not only insinuated that the founder of our house occupied such a mean situation as to be a custodier of wild beasts, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... persecute. Observe then, I henceforward will not see, Not hear you, nor be minded of a deed Over and over, which I did unthinking, And which, when thought about, I wonder at. I wish not to repent it; but, remember, Should the like accident occur again, 'Twill be your fault if I proceed more coolly, Ask a few questions, and let burn ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... caught in a trap, and I, despairing, spurring on to die at their headhave I your attention?—just at that moment there appeared between the ravine and the road ahead a man. He wore an eye-glass; he seemed an unconcerned spectator of our movements —so does the untrained, unthinking eye look out upon destiny! Not far away was a wagon, in it a man. Wagon bisecting our course from a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... I ever remember, as we wandered in the park-lands, she began to say—half unthinking—that it was truly an elves-night. And she stopped herself immediately; as though she thought I should have no understanding; but, indeed, I was upon mine own familiar ground of inward delight; and I replied in a quiet and usual ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... boys?" "Hush!" cried 'cute Reynard. "Do not make a noise! Bubbles—if bright—are cunning's best decoys. Bubbles are only wind plus soap and water; But well-stirred suds, and well-blown flatulence, In this fool world, have influence immense, And draw unthinking dupes from every quarter. Eloquence is but Wind, yet flowery trope Is Humbug's favourite lure; And what is Diplomatic Skill but soap? Trust me! Success is sure! Bubbles are bright, bewitch the mob, float far, And cost the blower little. The watery sphere looks like a world, a star, And when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... his way back he met the jocund party of skaters going home from the river, and with the easy shift and change of youth joined in their ringing laughter. The weird power of the wind's voice was gone, and he sank to the level of the unthinking boy again. However, the problem was only put off, ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... instantaneous effect amongst the younger and more unthinking loiterers. Those who at once would have disbelieved the imputed guilt of Antagoras upon motives merely political, inclined to a suggestion that ascribed it to the jealousy of a lover. And his character, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... not in a situation to wish to appear before her envious brothers and sisters-in-law. Her eyes were so swollen with crying that she could hardly see; and her tears had stained those Imperial robes which the unthinking and inconsiderate no doubt believed a certain preservative against sorrow and affliction. At nine o'clock, however, another aide-de-camp of her husband presented himself, and gave her the choice either to accompany him back to the study ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... understanding of art may increase the appreciation of particular works of art. For the analysis and constant attention to the subtler details demanded by theory may bring to notice aspects of a work of art which do not exist for an unthinking appreciation. As a rule, the appreciations of the average man are very inadequate to the total possibilities offered, extending only to the more obvious features. Often enough besides, through a mere lack of understanding of the purpose of art in general ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... cogitative being; for it is as impossible [inconceivable] that incogitative matter should produce a cogitative being, as that nothing, or the negation of all being, should produce a positive being or matter." Again,—"For unthinking particles of matter, however put together, can have [can be taught to have] nothing thereby added to them, but a new relation of position, which it is impossible [inconceivable] should give thought and ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... to me that I CANNOT face all those people to- night!" Rachael said, giving him a quick, unthinking kiss before she gently put him away from her, and got to her feet. "It seems so wrong—so coarse—to be utterly and totally indifferent to the man who was my husband a year ago. I don't love him, he is nothing to me, but ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... his bird-houses and helped his father. Twice he went to the field. Once he met Tim there, and Tim caught his delivery and called instructions in a breezy, high-handed way. Andy Ford was right, Don thought. A wild, untamed, careless, unthinking Indian! ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... and it creates no remark. On the contrary, one who at any extra cost has supplied himself with stock of the choicer kinds, let their superiority be ever so apparent, has often been the subject of ribaldry, by his unthinking associates. And such, we are sorry to say, is still the case in too many sections of our country. But, on the whole, both our public spirit, and our intelligence, is ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... counsel it was shown that at half past ten in the morning on the day of the murder, Baldwin became insane, and remained so for eleven hours and a half exactly. This just covered the case comfortably, and he was acquitted. Thus, if an unthinking and excited community had been listened to instead of the arguments of counsel, a poor crazy creature would have been held to a fearful responsibility for a mere freak of madness. Baldwin went clear, and although his relatives and friends were naturally incensed against the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... French is in this, I leave to those who do indeed understand it and have seen it at the Court. The play had no other Misfortune but that of coming out for a Womans: had it been owned by a Man, though the most Dull Unthinking Rascally Scribler in Town, it had been a most admirable Play. Nor does it's loss of Fame with the Ladies do it much hurt, though they ought to have had good Nature and justice enough to have attributed all its faults to the Authours unhappiness, who is ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... customs of this wicked world) put myself under the necessity of taking." How many have been in the same state of mind as this wise, foolish man! He knew his error, and abhorred it, but could not resist it, for fear of the opinion of the prejudiced and unthinking. No other could have blamed him for refusing to fight ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... It was an unthinking, wicked speech. But Hephzy did not resent it. Her reply was as patient and kind as if she ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... won't be necessary, Mr. Jordan. Eight hundred thousand, give or take a few paltry thousand, is close enough. Eight hundred thousand endless, lonely revolutions about an unthinking, uncaring, ungrateful world is quite enough. Quite enough, Mr. Jordan. Now sir; (squinting over his glasses) what do you think is the proper action to be taken in the matter of retrieving this historic satellite from its ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy
... the unthinking gayety of premature genius, he joined the sirens, has made ample amends by a life of the strictest virtuous propriety, equally exemplary as the husband, the father, and the man,—and as far as the muse is concerned, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... preaching from a Christian pulpit a heresy which, if accepted by Christians, would make Christianity a practical impossibility, this headstrong, unthinking visionary, reckless of all the best traditions of his Church and his cloth, was going to address an assembly of infidels and atheists, and, as a minister of the Gospel, make friends with those who blasphemed the name of God every ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... This downright fighting fool, this thick-skulled hero, This blunt, unthinking instrument of death, With plain dull virtue has outgone my wit. Pleasure forsook my earliest infancy; The luxury of others robbed my cradle, And ravished thence the promise of a man. Cast out from ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... anxiety of the heart, and to depend on the caprice of the excited nerves. It is something to feel one part of the drama of disgrace is over, and that I may wait unmolested in my den until, for one time only, I am again the butt of the unthinking and the monster of the crowd. My lord, I have now done! To you, whom the law deems the prisoner's counsel,—to you, gentlemen of the jury, to whom it has delegated his fate,—I leave the chances ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... between the two attributes. Utility and virtue are so intimately related, that there is perhaps no action generally felt by us as virtuous, but what is generally beneficial. But this is only discovered by reflecting men; it never enters the mind of the unthinking multitude. Nay, more, it is only the Divine Being that can fully master this relationship, or so prescribe our duties that they shall ultimately coincide with ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... him. His body has been built for him through the lives and struggles of the countless beings who are in the line of his long descent; his mind is equally an accumulated inheritance of the mental growth of the myriads of thinking men and unthinking animals that went before him. In the forms of his humbler forebears he has himself lived and died myriads of times to make ready the soil that nurses and sustains him to-day. He is a debtor to Cambrian and Silurian times, to the dragons and saurians ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... soft-headed, the forgetful, the unthinking, those that live a great Way off, and those that ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... have held stubbornly to his position, made notorious by his personality, and a less patriotic have chosen the satisfaction of being consistent to the bitter end and winning some measure of approval from the unthinking. ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... that kiss now and die!" But she had gone, unthinking, up the road where the pale woman lived, then a rosy-cheeked happy bride, not a widow like herself. They laughed and discussed the newcomers at the settlement. It was a holiday, for the men were away over the hills, cutting down trees to build their ...
— The Indian's Hand - 1892 • Lorimer Stoddard
... happening early is that they 're just so much the less likely to happen late. The grudge I bear the Past is based upon the circumstance that it has taken just so much from the Future. Meanwhile, suggest the unthinking, let's enjoy the present. But virtually, as I need n't remind you, there is no such thing as the present. The present is an infinitesimal between two infinites. 'T is a line (a thing without breadth or thickness) moving across the surface of Eternity. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... day Thou standest by the margin of the pool; And, taught by God, dost thy whole being school To Patience, which all evil can allay: God has appointed thee the fish thy prey; And giv'n thyself a lesson to the fool Unthrifty, to submit to moral rule, And his unthinking course by thee to weigh. There need not schools nor the professor's chair, Though these be good, true wisdom to impart; He, who has not enough for these to spare Of time, or gold, may yet amend his heart, And teach his soul by brooks and rivers fair, Nature is always ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... she was obliged to sit at her desk in the corner and listen to what people said about what was happening, and now and then to Lord Coombe speaking in low tones to the Duchess of his anxiety and uncertainty about Donal. Anxiety was increasing on every side and such of the unthinking multitude as had at last ceased to believe that one magnificent English blow would rid the earth of Germany, had begun to lean towards belief in a vision of German millions adding themselves each ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "natural" than he did in his own day, his judges being mediately or immediately educated by him. The works are admired, but the nobleness of soul in him that made them is not perceived, and his genius and power are degraded into a blind faculty by unthinking minds, and by vain ones that flatter themselves they have discovered the royal road to poetry. What they seem to require for poetry is the flash of thought or fancy that starts the sympathetic thrill,—the little jots,—the striking, often-quoted lines or "gems." The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... brain. In a material sense they become actual living protoplasm, replacing the worn-out substances destroyed during our previous thinking; and their properties are combined to make brain and thought, to play for a time their part in life, and to pass back into the world of dead, unthinking things. Every one of us knows that hunger reduces our ability to think clearly and fully, and every one knows also that mental vigor is renewed when fresh supplies of nourishment reach the brain. What ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... secure Pullman accommodations. Dr. Washington, however, was generally treated with marked consideration whenever he applied for Pullman car reservations. He was sometimes criticised, not only by members of his own race, but by the unthinking of the white race who accused him of thus seeking "social equality" with ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... long and frequent intercourse with the more cultivated regions of the East. The first and most obvious progress was in trade and manufactures, in the arts which are strongly prompted by the thirst of wealth, the calls of necessity, and the gratification of the sense or vanity. Among the crowd of unthinking fanatics, a captive or a pilgrim might sometimes observe the superior refinements of Cairo and Constantinople: the first importer of windmills [65] was the benefactor of nations; and if such blessings are enjoyed without any grateful ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... not out of print, An honest tongue may drop a harmless hint. Stop not, unthinking, every friend you meet, To spin your wordy fabric in the street; While you are emptying your colloquial pack, The fiend Lumbago jumps upon his back. Nor cloud his features with the unwelcome tale Of how he looks, if haply thin and pale; Health is a subject for his child, his wife, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... girls consumptive with study and fatigue. The three Miss Browns stood it out very well, because they relieved each other; but the children, having no relief at all, exhibited decided symptoms of weariness and care. The unthinking part of the parishioners laughed at all this, but the more reflective portion of the inhabitants abstained from expressing any opinion on the subject until that of the curate had been ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... superior sort of teacher and friend, to say nothing of a magnificent salary. This proposal had been made to him the first time in Berlin, at the moment when he was first left a widower. His first wife was a frivolous girl from our province, whom he married in his early and unthinking youth, and apparently he had had a great deal of trouble with this young person, charming as she was, owing to the lack of means for her support; and also from other, more delicate, reasons. She died in Paris after three ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... by the unthinking to the statement that all affairs are directed has been the bane of the world since the days of the Egyptian papyri and the origin of superstition. So long as men firmly believe that everything is fixed for them, so long is progress impossible. If you argue yourself ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... which I have a high respect, and desire to have a higher. I am afraid that by dint of constantly being reiterated, and reiterated without protest, this assumption— which I take leave altogether to deny—may be accepted by the more unthinking part of the public as unquestionably true; just as caricaturists and painters, professedly making a portrait of some public man, which was not in the least like him to begin with, have gone on repeating and repeating it until the public came to believe that it must be exactly like ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... A. E. F. meant After England Failed. But why, months and months afterwards, when everything was over, did that foolish doughboy in the hospital hug this lone thing to his memory? It was the act of an unthinking few. Didn't he notice what the rest of London was doing that day? Didn't he remember that she flew the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes together from every symbolic pinnacle of creed and government that rose above her continent of streets and dwellings to ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... it stand to Glasgow in all time coming for faith, fortitude, courage, industry, qualities apart from intellect or power or wealth, which may inspire all her citizens however humble, however weak; let it remind the most unthinking passer-by of the dauntless character which it represents, of his long life and honest purpose; let it leaven by an immortal tradition the population which lives and works and ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... there has been a "vox clamantis in deserto." Usually these voices have fallen on unheeding ears; but again and again some delver in books, some student of men, some inspired, self-effacing, or altruistic one has taken up the cry; and at last unthinking, unheeding, superficial, self-satisfied humanity has turned ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... higher the poles the greater distance the message could be sent. The success of Marconi's system depended largely on his receiving apparatus, and it is on account of his use of some of the devices invented by other men that unthinking people have criticised him. He adapted to the use of wireless telegraphy certain inventions that had heretofore been merely interesting scientific toys—curious little instruments of no apparent practical ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... Not in the cheek, eye, or voice, clearly; for it was "despite" all these that he would make the discovery,—they are obstacles, entirely outside of the success. It is necessarily, then, in the "presence," in which the unthinking desert would have smiled unsuspecting, but in which "the shrewd observer might espy" a good deal that was ominous of trouble. Now it is obvious that the writer intended to refer "therein" to the cheek, eye, and voice, a reference from which he barred himself by the word "despite." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... They continually taunt the Canadians that they are the only portion of the New World who have not thrown off the yoke—the only portion who are not yet free; and this taunt has not been without its effect upon the unthinking portion of the community. What is the cause of this unusual sympathy? ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... life is toward imitation and reducing life to a dead level. Eccentricity may be objectionable, but without individuality of persons and communities life would be stupid and monotonous. There is probably no greater need for strengthening rural life than a community loyalty which will prevent the unthinking imitation of urban life and will take justifiable pride in local ideals and achievements. The need of a larger appreciation of the value of a true provincialism has been well described by Professor Royce in his ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... learned. Reuben S. Vanderpoel was without doubt a man remarkable not only in the matter of being the owner of vast wealth. The rising flood of his millions had borne him upon its strange surface a thinking, not an unthinking being—in fact, a strong and fine intelligence. His thousands of miles of yearly journeying in his sumptuous private car had been the means of his accumulating not merely added gains, but ideas, points of view, emotions, a human outlook ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... loved her. She knew that. Pierre was hoarding every shining dollar that came to his hand. Was he lavish in his garnishment of the Blue Goose? It was only for the more effective luring of other gold from the pockets of the careless, unthinking men who worked in mines or mills, or roamed among the mountains or washed the sands of every stream, spending all they found, hoping for and talking of the wealth which, if it came, would only smite them with more rapid destruction. And all these little rivulets, ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... English legal methods: you even question the impartiality of English judges, and throw an unpleasant light on English juries and the English public—all of which is not only unpopular but will convince the unthinking that you are a presumptuous, or at least an outlandish, person with too good a conceit of himself and altogether too ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... page called Memory, no sooner see their royal mistress depart than, by various doors, they leave the palace and wander far away. Then, silently, with sparkling eyes, and parted lips, comes that fair being, Unthinking Love. She puts one foot upon the lower step of the throne; she looks about her; and, with a quick bound, she seats herself. Upon her tumbled curls she hastily puts the crown; with her small white hand she grasps the sceptre; and then, rising, waves it, and issues her commands. ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... sudden and profound mistrust of time-honoured theories and strongly rooted prejudices regarding his own position in nature, and his relations to the underworld of life; while that which remains a dim suspicion for the unthinking, becomes a vast argument, fraught with the deepest consequences, for all who are acquainted with the recent progress of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... perfect supremacy, as of one who was monarch of all he surveyed in the county of Surrey. But Elma could see, for all that, that he was absent-minded and self-contained; he answered all questions in a distant, unthinking way; some inner trouble was undoubtedly consuming him. His eyes were all for the two Warings. They glanced nervously right and left every minute in haste, but returned after each excursion straight to Guy and Cyril. The Colonel noted narrowly all they said and did; and Elma was sure he was very ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... human occupancy of greed and mischief left no mark on the field, but the Indians did, and the unthinking sheep. Round its corners children pick up chipped arrow points of obsidian, scattered through it are kitchen middens and pits of old sweat-houses. By the south corner, where the campoodie stood, is a single shrub of "hoopee" ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... enormous wastage of wood that had taken place. From this bird's-eye view he realized the monstrous confusion of their excited workings. It was a gigantic inadequacy. Each worked for himself, and the result was chaos. In this richest of diggings it cost out by their feverish, unthinking methods another dollar was left hopelessly in the earth. Given another year, and most of the claims would be worked out, and the sum of the gold taken out would no more than equal what ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... a good many years; in fact, they dated back to the time when the first flush of her unthinking girlhood was over, and she began to question herself as to the life she was living. It was a very pleasant life, ostensibly. Her father had been elected from the bench to Congress, and had kept his title and ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Many losses of course there were—losses of men, losses of days, losses of dollars. But when all is said and done, the losses were slight when compared with the accomplishments. Credit to whom credit is due! But because of these losses unthinking men immediately began to criticise the schools. They should have been trade schools, or industrial schools or military schools—any kind of schools that they were not. And how clearly it was being demonstrated, we were told, that the time formerly ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... Florence, Venice, and Rome. Actors visited Denmark and Germany. No man at home was far to seek for knowledge of Elsinore, the mysterious Venetian "tranect or common ferry," the gondolas, and the Rialto. There was no lack of soldiers fresh and voluble from the foreign wars. Only dullards, or the unthinking, can be surprised by the ease with which a quick-witted man, having some knowledge of Latin, can learn to read a novel in French, Italian, or Spanish. That Shakespeare was the very reverse of a dullard, of the clod of Baconian fancy, is proved by the fact that he was thought capable of his ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... extraordinary endowments, or else my own ignorance, has so far bribed me to his interests that I can, by no means, allow of any of those unjust reflections the wholesale merchants of credulity, as well as their unthinking retailers, make against him. It is true, in the seventh chapter he seems to prove that many parts of the Mosaic history of the creation appear inconsistent with reason, and in the eighth chapter the same appears ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... perhaps, be told by some who read this, that I am inconsistent to express such a horror at blood-stained tyrants, and yet take every opportunity of extolling Napoleon, who was as great a tyrant as any of those whom I condemn. To the unthinking, an explanation is certainly necessary from me; for I fully concur in the opinion that CONSISTENCY is absolutely necessary to form the character of a useful and honourable public man; that amongst the dangerous failings in ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... a while With faint illumination, that uplifts The shadow to the ceiling, there by fits Dancing uncouthly to the quivering flame. Not undelightful is an hour to me So spent in parlour twilight; such a gloom Suits well the thoughtful or unthinking mind, The mind contemplative, with some new theme Pregnant, or indisposed alike to all. Laugh ye, who boast your more mercurial powers That never feel a stupor, know no pause, Nor need one; I am conscious, and confess. Fearless, a ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... moments of languor and discouragement, when he feels as if he could willingly exchange faiths with the old beldame crossing herself at the cathedral-door,—nay, that, if he could drop all coherent thought, and lie in the flowery meadow with the brown-eyed solemnly unthinking cattle, looking up to the sky, and all their simple consciousness staining itself blue, then down to the grass, and life turning to a mere greenness, blended with confused scents of herbs,—no individual ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... science and the theory of our Government. But you have made it needful. You have put forth notions radically false and practically mischievous on fundamental questions; and you have done it in the way most calculated to impose on the minds of the ignorant and unthinking—by quietly assuming their truth. One wonders to see you apparently so unconscious of the utter contradiction between that which you take for granted and that which, in the general consent of respectable writers and thinkers, is held to be settled ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... there, Mr. Morton, reminds me of certain eminent statesmen whom your paper delights to honor, and I imagine that that ridiculous creature embodies their idea of the American eagle. Then the hens have such a simple, unthinking aspect. They act as if they expected to be crowed over as a matter of course; and thus typify the followers of these statesmen, who are so pre-eminent in their own estimation. Their exalted perches seem ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... books, would not only be tolerated, but even, in a modest manner, encouraged—having, of course, a keen eye as to the elasticity of the campaign fund. But, of course, just as vulgar bribery, per se, only catches the easy and unthinking voter in politics, so, in like manner, would these evidences of generosity only capture the less desirable voter in love. When you men are trying for a woman's vote you need give yourselves no uneasiness. If she is worth having, character wins ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... in the way you have done," exclaimed Terence, from the fulness of his heart. "Had it not been for you, shipmate, I should not have seen the finger of God in the various ways in which He has been pleased to preserve me, and I should have died the ungrateful, unthinking ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... persuasions and expostulations of the two elder, and the refusal of the younger sister. Nearly half an hour thus passed away when Charlotte and Laura decided that they would go, and send back the carriage for Isabel, who by that time would have come to her senses. The heartless, unthinking girls tripped gaily down to the carriage, and drove off. Newton, who had escorted them, retraced his steps, with a beating heart, to the room where he ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the unthinking precision which comes of long practice, the many little duties pertaining to her several offices, and when the wheels began once more to clank, and she had waved her hand to the fireman, the brakeman, and ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... for the insane. It is appalling, it fills you with horror, it haunts you for days and nights, it leaves a kind of stain on the memory. It is a possibility of character of which the healthy, the pure, the unthinking have never dreamed. Such a portrait is not art, that is true; but it is science, and that delivers the critic from the necessity of searching his vocabulary for the cheap superlatives of moral censure. Whether it be art or science, however, men cannot but ask themselves how ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Mr. Smith's holiday luggage, the less one could make anything of it. One peculiarity of it was that almost everything seemed to be there for the wrong reason; what is secondary with every one else was primary with him. He would wrap up a pot or pan in brown paper; and the unthinking assistant would discover that the pot was valueless or even unnecessary, and that it was the brown paper that was truly precious. He produced two or three boxes of cigars, and explained with plain and perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker, but that cigar-box ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... gradual one, accomplished step by step. Often, too, the use of medicines that, if persisted in, will prove beneficial and curative, will, for a considerable time, arouse in the system very disagreeable sensations, and many times this leads unthinking persons to become frightened or discouraged, and to quit the treatment best adapted to their cases if only faithfully carried out. In many forms of womb disease, their are organic lesions or changes, that can be repaired only by a gradual process, just as an external wound would heal,—not ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... martyr could not have felt more deeply dejected and penitent. Like a flash, an old emotion of childhood had filled her breast; an old emotion that seemed only to have gathered strength in the intervening years,—that blind, unthinking and dependent love of ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... and that she has more learning than can be got even from the great schools at Reykjavik. She is especially prized by them here in this new country where the Icelandmen are settled—this America, so new in letters, where the people speak foolishly and write unthinking books. So the men who know that it is given to the mothers of earth to be very wise, stop their six part singing, or their jangles about the free-thinkers, and give attentive ear when Urda Bjarnason lights her pipe and begins ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... Uncouth, Ungraceful, Unfashionable, Unladylike, Uninteresting, Unpresentable, and Ugly. She was Unpoetical, Unmusical, Unlearned, Uncultured, Unimproved, Uninformed, Unknowing, Unthinking, Unwitty and Unwise. She was Unlively, Undersized, Unwholesome and Unhealthy. She was Unlovely, Ungentle, Uncivil, Unsociable, Untameable, and altogether Unendurable. She was Unkind, Unfeeling, Unloving, Unthankful, Ungrateful, Unwilling, Unruly, Unreasonable, Unwomanly, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... tour, to deter him from relinquishing all effort! The times, mon ami, are "out of joint:" we must not by exigeance precipitate him to his ruin, but try patiently and prudently, every possible means, to rescue him from the effects of his own wilful blindness and unthinking, idle eccentricity. If we succeed, how will he bless us when his maturer judgment opens his eyes to the evils he will have escaped! but if we fail why should we lie down and die ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... prudence and expediency. You're the slaves of your reason. You're dominated by the head, not by the heart. You're little better than calculating-machines. Are you ever known, now, for instance, to risk earth and heaven, and all things between them, on a sudden unthinking impulse?" ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... composed of a very supple, dark kind of skin and hair, which was so thickly smeared over with fat and red ochre, that if any one attempted to hold them, it left a tell-tale mark of red fat all over their unthinking admirers. The following day they wanted to accompany us, but I would not permit this, and they departed; at least, we departed, and with us came two men, who would take no denial, or notice of my injunction, but kept creeping up after us every now and then. Our cowra led us by evening to ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... billet catches you in bed, you are a lazy, sleepy little slut, and I am a giddy, foolish, unthinking fellow, for keeping you so late up—but this Sabbath is a day of rest, at the same time that it is a day of sorrow; for I shall not see my dear creature to-day, unless you meet me at Taylor's half an hour after twelve; but in this do as you like. I have ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... columns of appendix. With a fine patronage the reviewer concludes that "upon the whole, the story is amusing, the characters kept up, and many reflections which [sic] are useful, if the reader will but take notice of them, which in this unthinking age it is to be feared very few will." Some imperfections he kindly excuses on the score of "the author's hurry of business in administering impartial justice to his majesty's good people"; but he cannot excuse what he declares to be the ridicule ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... into sudden bustle, and sparks flew from the smokestack. The crew chattered freely and much merriment was mixed in the chatter. But the thing that shocked Barry, and gave even the unthinking Little cause for reflection, was Leyden's tone. If ever utter and complete triumph and exaltation were expressed in man's voice, they were ringing then in every ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... the glorious uncertainty of golf that makes it the game it is. The fact that James and Peter, lying side by side in the same bunker, had played respectively one and six shots, might have induced an unthinking observer to fancy the chances of the former. And no doubt, had he not taken seven strokes to extricate himself from the pit, while his opponent, by some act of God, contrived to get out in two, James's chances might have been extremely rosy. As it was, the two men staggered out on to the fairway ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... immense aggregate of systems. Every one of these, if we may judge by our own, contains several, and every one of these again, if we may judge by our own, is made up of a multitude of different modes of being, animated and inanimated, thinking and unthinking ... but all concurring in one common system.... Just so it is with respect to the various systems and systems of systems that compose the universe. As distant as they are, and as different as we may imagine them ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... he did not need friends because the friends of a strong man weaken and rob him, but that he did need enemies because he could grow rich and powerful destroying and despoiling them. To him friends suggested the birds living in a tree. They might make the tree more romantic to the unthinking observer; but they in fact ate its budding leaves and its fruit and rotted its bough ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... eminence. It is matter of deep regret, both to the friend of virtue and the friend of his country, when any of these are found manifesting disregard to sacred things, or giving an air of fashion to what is calculated to corrupt the moral principles of the unthinking classes of society. If they are restrained by no higher motive, the feelings of patriotism, and even of personal safety, ought to produce a solemn caution; and it becomes them seriously to consider, whether they may not thus be sowing ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... present life, as Mr. Holyoake himself could wish them to be, who will eagerly grasp at this "new development," as a plausible pretext for continuing in their present course; for "with the exception of those who compose the real Church of Christ, whose faith is not a mere name and an unthinking assent to Christianity, but a real, living, constant power over their life, the whole world is practically secularist, and is living solely by the light of the present, and under the impulse of the motives which it supplies."[312] For "Secularism is only the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... were in their springtime and our souls were in the bud, While the watchful world was silent, heeding not such childish love, I poured forth for thee my heart-thoughts in a sweet, unthinking flood, Like a bird that carols ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... Nearly half the people of the North were ready to acknowledge the justness of their complaints. The election of Lincoln was indeed a flimsy pretext for separation, but it had the merit of universal publicity, and of rankling irritation among the unthinking masses of the South. Agriculture was depressed, commerce was in panic, manufacturing populations were in want, the national treasury was empty, the army was dispersed, the navy was scattered. The national prestige was humbled, the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... any half-dozen items in the whole catalogue of imposture. Curiosity is, and has been from the creation of the world, a master-passion. To awaken it, to gratify it by slight degrees, and yet leave something always in suspense, is to establish the surest hold that can be had, in wrong, on the unthinking portion of mankind. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... endeavor to save you from all these multiplied mischiefs and disgraces? Would the little, silly, canvass prattle of obeying instructions, and having no opinions but yours, and such idle, senseless tales, which amuse the vacant ears of unthinking men, have saved you from "the pelting of that pitiless storm," to which the loose improvidence, the cowardly rashness, of those who dare not look danger in the face so as to provide against it in time, and therefore throw themselves headlong into the midst of it, have exposed ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the unthinking Tomline, and reached the ears of George the Third, a man who at times was very ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... struggling against the swarming bacteria of animalism that made up the rest of the human body controlled by the brain. He pointed out that the difference between types of brains was two ounces of grayish pulp, almost wholly absent in the unthinking herd of men. But it enlarged in gradually lessening groups of men to the intellectual few that dominate ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... mouths of babes and sucklings the heedless and unthinking are condemned; would God I could bring the little creatures back, for your sake. And mine, yes, and mine; for I have been unjust. There, there, don't cry—nobody could be sorrier than your poor old friend—don't ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... dozed a bit, for I must have turned the coin, unthinking, and now I see the reverse: a horseman, in full panoply, galloping, with naked sword brandished in his left hand, from which depends a severed head tight-clutched ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... clever scoundrels, was covered with fear and shame. The outraged crowd might have killed him had not his escape been made under cover of darkness. Shivering and moaning in abject misery, the pride of Tinkletown fled unseeing, unthinking into the forest along the river. He was not to know until afterward that his "detectives" had stripped the rich sojourners of at least ten thousand dollars in money and jewels. It is not necessary to say that the performance of "As You Like It" came to an abrupt ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... amphitheatre in which they raised a species of pillory.[3] On this pillory they set their lawful king and queen, with an insulting figure over their heads. There they exposed these objects of pity and respect to all good minds to the derision of an unthinking and unprincipled multitude, degenerated even from the versatile tenderness which marks the irregular and capricious feelings of the populace. That their cruel insult might have nothing wanting to complete it, they chose the anniversary ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... drink at the creek and went back somewhat reluctantly, I confess, to the work. It was hot, and the first joy of effort had worn off. But the ditch was to be dug and I went at it again. One becomes a sort of machine—unthinking, mechanical: and yet intense physical work, though making no immediate impression on the mind, often lingers in the consciousness. I find that sometimes I can remember and enjoy for long afterward every separate ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... "contests" and with all manner of "schemes" without limit in number, kind, or degree; with every cunningly devised form of appeal to curiosity and cupidity—from then until now that combination has been struggling to hold and has held an audience of the undiscriminating and the unthinking. But, further, and worse, a short-sighted instinct of self-preservation has led other papers to follow somewhat at a distance in this demoralizing race. None of them has gone to such lengths, but the tendency to literary, mental and moral dissipation induced by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... convinced, instead of launching out into a voluble farrago of irrelevant rubbish, as ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have done in order to have "the last word." That argued sense, judgment, tact. Further, she had avoided that vulgar commonplace, instinctive to the crude and unthinking mind, of whatever sex, of importing a personal application into an abstract discussion. This, too, argued tact and mental refinement, both qualities of rarer distribution among her sex than is commonly supposed—qualities, however, which Laurence Stanninghame ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... of the clever youth type—all too ready to forego the moral for the sake of the fun any day of the week, and the unthinking selfishness and self-enjoyment of youth—whose tender mercies are often cruel, are transcendent in it. As Stevenson himself said, they were young men then and fancied bad-heartedness was strength. Perhaps it was a sense of this ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... which every one should perpetually cherish in his thoughts, will banish from us all that secret heaviness of heart which unthinking men are subject to when they lie under no real affliction, all that anguish which we may feel from any evil that actually oppresses us, to which I may likewise add those little cracklings of mirth and folly, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... of the sort of art that is likely to turn the unthinking person away, though a study of them will bring out new beauties with riper acquaintance. Because people fail to get far enough away from them to obtain the proper perspective, the statues seem too huge, too strong, too terrible, ever to ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... and glee sat down All joyous and unthinking, Till, quite transmogrify'd, they've ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... two exceptions have been much animadverted upon by unthinking persons. I have shown that according to the code of morality, that is in vogue among people whose Christianity and civilisation are unquestionable, a lie may sometimes be honourable. However casuists ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... programme which Balbo put forward—the liberation of Italy from foreign yoke before all things—to Gioberti's mystical outpourings, much as they pleased the general. Gioberti, once a follower of Mazzini, and afterwards a priest, imagined a United Italy, with the Pope at its head, which, to unthinking souls, seemed to be on the road to miraculous realisation when the amiable and popular Cardinal Mastai Feretti was invested with the tiara. Cavour never had any hope in the Papacy as a ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... isolation grew upon him—a sort of dumb hatred of all these unthinking stolid beasts of burden who were bending their backs daily to their stupid tasks, trampling each other to death, too, in their own mad sordid ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... effect of being kindly received is unquestionably a pleasing internal commotion, out of which arises a not less pleasing secondary sensation, which the unthinking vulgar call conceit, but which is in reality an increased consciousness of life, and a most important part of the mechanism by which a man is advertised of his ability to serve his fellows, and stirred up to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... he deemed a good cause, he appealed to the understandings of his adult country-folk, he besought them in every instance to test and examine ere they judged and decided. He did not contemplate a phase of the controversy in which unthinking children should come from their schools to contend with other children, in the spirit of those little ones of Bethel who 'came forth out of their city' to mock and to jeer; or that immature, unreasoning minds should be torn by the she-bears of uncharitable feeling, at an age when ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... unfortunately for the success of the play none of the royal family "vouchsafed to honour it with their Presence." Mrs. Haywood complains that hers "was the only new Performance this Season, which had not received a Sanction from some of that illustrious Line," and the "unthinking Part of the Town" followed the fashion set by royalty. Unlike "The Fair Captive," which suffered from a plethora of incidents, Mrs. Haywood's second tragedy contains almost nothing in its five acts but rant. An analysis of the plot is but a summary ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... place where horse destinies are shuffled by reckless and unthinking hands. Also its doors open on the four corners of the world's crossed highways. You might go from there to find your work waiting between the shafts of a baker's cart just around the corner, or you might be sent across ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... "Unthinking beings!" he exclaims, "I have descended from my rock to warn you. You all fix your thoughts upon this girl, Franconnette, who is accursed; for her father, while she was yet in her cradle, became a Huguenot, and sold her to the devil. Her mother died of grief; and the demon, who watches ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the memory of the trader's overbearing manner. He acquiesced without further demur. But then this spoilt boy was only spoiled and weak. His temper was hot, volcanic. His reckless disposition was the outcome of a generous, unthinking courage. In his heart the one thing that mattered was his father's peril, and the sadness in his mother's eyes. Then he had ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... of the man who begot its beauty has passed unrecorded. None the less is the world aided by the effort of every true and daring mind because the thinker himself has been crushed down in the rush of unthinking crowds." ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... neglect, unthinking and selfish. A time came when our civilisation made it possible to live without other creatures. When machinery came into vogue we put aside the animals as useless; those we had no further use for we denied the right to reproduce. The ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... simulation. Modern writers might, with benefit to themselves, barter something of their finish and dexterity for that pure innocence of nature, and child-like simplicity and fearlessness, full of its own emotion, and unthinking of others or of their opinions, which ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... the world would call uneventful. The discovery of a new planet, or of the orbit of a star, seems less romantic to the vulgar taste than the slaughter of ten thousand men on a field of battle. It will seem to the unthinking that the victorious general or the daring seaman, the leader of a forlorn hope, or the captain who goes down with his sinking ship, affords an example worthier of imitation than the patient, watchful, enthusiastic astronomer or his devoted sister. ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... thoughtful person will attempt to deny that this virtue, desirable as it is, may be fostered and emphasized to such a degree that its possessor will become a mere automaton. And this is bad; indeed, very bad. We extol obedience, to be sure, but not the sort of blind, unthinking obedience that will reduce its possessor to the status of the mechanical toy which needs only to be wound up and set going. The factory superintendent is glad to have men about him who are able to work efficiently from blueprints; but he is glad, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... steps of the altar. She was supported by a humble friend, who was endeavoring to comfort her. A few of the neighboring poor had joined the train, and some children of the village were running hand in hand, now shouting with unthinking mirth, and now pausing to gaze, with childish curiosity on the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... provisional place in the plan of the "Great Instauration." To his friend Toby Matthews, at Florence, he sent in manuscript the great attack on the old teachers of knowledge, which is perhaps the most brilliant, and also the most insolently unjust and unthinking piece of rhetoric ever composed ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... deep into my unthinking temper with hinting to me that there was something beyond all this; that the present time was the time of enjoyment, but that the time of account approached; that the work that remained was gentler than the labour past, viz., repentance, and ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... not quite the same unthinking young barbarian in September that he had been in June. Nobody could work as he had worked that summer without gaining something in character and self-respect. Moreover, being constantly as he was with his brother and uncle, he would have ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... she rushed in, unthinking, turning by instinct into the library, where Ralph sat alone, leaning his head upon ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... marrow of which is to teach that there is a difference between men and men. To be sure, it will have been seen that I was not myself, having for a quarter year been subjected to a series of nervous shocks, and having had my mind contaminated, moreover, by being brought into daily contact with this unthinking American equality in the person of Cousin Egbert, who, I make bold to assert, had never for one instant since his doubtless obscure birth considered himself the superior ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... penalty, say the memorialists, "creates blood-thirstiness in the unthinking masses and defeats its own ends. It is a cause of murder, not a check." These gentlemen are themselves of "the unthinking masses"—they do not know how to think. Let them try to trace and lucidly expound the chain of ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... The unthinking comment on this rise in the cost of shelter is usually condemnation of greedy landlords and soulless capitalists; but ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... passion. Let his love be never so deep and true, the spell of isolation, the spirit that drives men into the wilderness, was as strong in him as the need to share thought and feeling with the heart nearest her own was in his wife. At no time could he have been classed among the frankly unthinking men who slip into marriage as composedly as they slip into a new suit of clothes: and at five-and-thirty, the complete readjustment of life and habit demanded by this exquisite yet exacting bond could not be arrived at without some degree ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver |
