"Incurious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... curiosity.] Incuriosity. — N. incuriosity, incuriousness &c. adj.; insouciance &c. 866; indifference, lack of interest, disinterest. boredom, ennui (weariness) 841; satiety &c. 639; foreknowledge (foresight) 510;. V. be incurious &c. adj.; have no curiosity &c. 455; take no interest in &c. 823; mind one's own business. Adj. incurious, uninquisitive, indifferent; impassive &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... mad lips was the curl of provocation. And as the man in him had waited carelessly, in a sensuous luxury of unconcern, for his soul to go where it might—far up or far down—so now the woman waited before him in an incurious, unbiassed calm—the clear eyes with their grave, stern "No!"—the parted lips all but shuddering out ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... des Ambassadeurs. As she was French it had never occurred to Esther to connect her with the unknown Lady Clifford. For a moment she felt self-conscious, afraid lest the beautiful patient should recognise her. But no, there was no need for alarm, the Frenchwoman passed her with a brief, incurious glance. Probably on that former occasion she had never noticed Esther at all, or if she had, the nurse's uniform was sufficient to effect a complete alteration. Who was this exquisite creature, French, but with an English ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... him gallop past—rode like the devil, yet not coming upon Nan and Jerry until they were at the station platform. Nan saw him first. She was gloriously glad, waving her hand and laughing out. Jerry stood with mouth open, silent but incurious, and Raven dismounted and threw ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... made certain purchases at a chemist's shop, conferred privately for some time with a photographer, sent off a reply-paid telegram, and made an enquiry at the telephone exchange. He had said but little about the case to Mr Cupples, who seemed incurious on his side, and nothing at all about the results of his investigation or the steps he was about to take. After their return from Bishopsbridge, Trent had written a long dispatch for the Record and sent it to be telegraphed by the proud hands of the paper's local ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... and surely unworthy, like a prying thing. Of all her old indifference that side which confronted people had always been the most sturdy, the most solidly built. Without affectation she had been a profoundly incurious woman as to the lives and the concerns of others, even of those whom she knew best and was supposed to care for most. Her nature had been essentially languid in human intercourse. The excitements, troubles, even the passions of others had generally stirred her no more than a ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Drew's place could not have travelled before him to Wood's house; but the next day it would be sure to come, and Wood could say that he had seen Bard—alone—the previous night. It would be a sufficient shield for the name of Sally Fortune in that incurious region. ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... morality themselves have, for the first time, unfortunately for mankind, become the subject of doubt and discussion. I shall consider it as my duty to abstain from all mention of these awful events, and of these fatal controversies. But the mind of that man must indeed be incurious and indocile, who has either overlooked all these things; or reaped no instruction ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... with my strength. Now the New England people, especially Bostonians, are inordinately given to knowing everything about everybody, and to "tittle- tattle," while the Southerners are comparatively free from it and very incurious. Two-thirds of the students at Princeton were of the first families in the South, and there my indifference to what did not personally concern one was regarded as a virtue. But there is a spot in this sun—that he who never cares a straw to know about the affairs of other people, will, not only ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... a great climb along a stony, small stream up into a blackish, rocky range. The sun shone splendidly, also hotly. Apparently there was no danger to travelers even in these wild parts. The peons I met were astonishingly incurious, barely appearing to notice my existence. Some addressed me as "jefe" (chief), suggesting the existence of mines in the vicinity. If I drew them into conversation they answered merely in monosyllables: "Si, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... certainty. With the hard details and closely connected steps which make up the body of any science, mathematical, physical, or metaphysical, she has no patience. Her mind is not receptive of formulas or syllogisms. She comprehends results, but is incurious as to causes. She knows what love or benevolence means, under its triple form of charity, mercy, magnanimity, which, like a sea, surrounds the universe; she has no idea of law and justice, which are the eternal pillars thereof. If man feels or loves, it is because his reason ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... others, even more numerous, such as the best people were a thousand years since. The lower orders, the middle orders, are still, when tried by what is the standard of the educated "ten thousand," narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious. It is useless to pile up abstract words. Those who doubt should go out into their kitchens. Let an accomplished man try what seems to him most obvious, most certain, most palpable in intellectual matters, upon the housemaid and the footman, and he will ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... solemn reception for the admiral at Barcelona, where the people poured out in such numbers to see him that the streets could not contain them. A triumphal procession like his the world had not yet seen: it was a thing to make the most incurious alert, and even the sad and solitary student content to come out and mingle with the mob. The captives that accompanied a Roman general's car might be strange barbarians of a tribe from which Rome had not before had ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... good he would do even in the Reich's-Diet there; and out of doors, over a German public, still more; and is worth his frugal wages,—say 1,000 pounds a year, printing and all other expense included! This is a mere guess of mine, Dryasdust having been incurious: but, to English readers it is incredible for what sums Friedrich got his work done, no work ever better. Which is itself an appreciable advantage, computable in pounds sterling; and is the parent of innumerable others which ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... room, at the most impassive aspect of the place, as at a place she never expected to leave; the darkening windows, the fast-shut door, the child leaning on the desk, watching them with sharp, incurious eyes—this would be her niche for ever. She would be left for ever with the crusts and the dregs. And Kerr's figure in the twilight seemed each time it moved to be on the point of vanishing into the grayness. He moved continually ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... he, who thought not it would have gone so far, repented him to have been an instrument of so damnable a machination, and came and brought the silver which they gave him for hire, threw it in amongst them, and said, 'I have sinned in betraying the innocent blood.' But they, incurious of those hell-torments Judas felt within him, because their own fires burned not yet, dismissed him.' I pause for a moment to observe that, in the expression, 'repented him to have been an instrument,' the context shows the bishop intending to represent ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... seduced to remain behind the appointed hour, would assume her true shape, and, having appeared to her terrified lover as a fiend of hell, would vanish from him in a flash of sulphurous lightning. Raymond of Ravenswood acquiesced in the experiment, not incurious concerning the issue, though confident it would disappoint the expectations of ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... than the atmosphere. When the most elevated station in the country where this was observed was ascended, the webs were still to be seen descending from above, and twinkling like stars in the sun, so as to draw the attention of the most incurious. The flakes of the web on this occasion hung so thick upon the hedges and trees, that basketsful might have been collected. No one doubts (he observes) but that these webs are the ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... touched many a time in their vague voyaging. Nobody, perhaps, can care very much about Nicolete's adventures in Carthage, and her recognition by her Paynim kindred. If the old captive had been a prisoner among the Saracens, he was too indolent or incurious to make use of his knowledge. He hurries on ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... shed The engine coughs and shakes its head, The smoke, a plume of red and white, Waves madly in the face of night. And now the grave incurious stars Gleam on the groaning hurrying cars. Against the kind and awful reign Of darkness, this our angry train, A noisy little rebel, pouts Its brief defiance, flames and shouts — And passes on, and leaves no trace. For darkness holds its ancient ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... that most lives reflected hers in that their questioning was never answered. The fortunate, then, were the incurious and the hearts undisturbed by a maddening thrill. She said aloud, "The ones who never heard music." Pleydon was without a sign that she had spoken. Her emotions were very delicate, very fragile, and enormously difficult to perceive. They were like plants in stony ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... close of his residence at Feldhausen, Herschel was fortunate enough to witness one of those singular changes in the aspect of the firmament which occasionally challenge the attention even of the incurious, and excite the deepest wonder of the philosophical observer. Immersed apparently in the Argo nebula is a star denominated Eta Carinae. When Halley visited St. Helena in 1677, it seemed of the fourth magnitude; but Lacaille in the middle of ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... inhabitants of the hive, we will now turn our attention to the hive itself. The most profound philosopher, as well as the most incurious observer, is struck with astonishment on inspecting the interior of a bee-hive. He beholds a city in miniature. He sees this city divided into regular streets; and these streets composed of houses constructed on the most exact geometrical principles and the most symmetrical plan; ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... all the various strange things I am to see, and the amount of knowledge I shall involuntarily acquire, by this residence in America; but you know I am what Dr. Johnson would have considered disgracefully "incurious," and the lazy intellectual indifference which induced me to live in London by the very spring of the fountain of knowledge without so much as stooping my lips to it, prevails ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... innumerable impressions, each of which became a dull excitation to her jaded imagination. Somewhere within her, responsive notes were answering to the things without, forgotten and undreamed-of correspondences were being renewed; and she was aware of it in an incurious way, and her soul was troubled, but she was not equal to the mental exultation necessary to transmute and understand. So she plodded wearily on at the heels of her lord, content to wait for that which she ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... material of which, he creates his effects. It is her potentialities of color and design that he seeks, or at any rate, of all her infinitely numerous traits, it is her hues and arabesques that strike him most forcibly. He is incurious as to her secrets and calls upon her aid to interpret his own, but he is so independent of her, if he be a decorative painter of the first rank—a Diaz or a Dupre—that his rendering of her, his picture, would have an agreeable effect, owing ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... spared the agony of foresight; he could not see beyond her sparkling eyes; and Claire was happy, exultantly, supremely happy, with the reckless, incurious happiness of youth. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... age, they have grown leaner than they are allowed to be by the statutes, have lost their honour, together with the bulk of their carcass. Their streets were paved with polished marble; which seemed strange amongst a people so incurious, both because the workmanship was troublesome, and there might be danger in its being slippery. But the true reason of it was, that they might not be forced to lift their feet higher than ordinary by the inequality ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... sang some of Mendelssohn's choruses from 'St. Paul' splendidly, the Caffres rolling out soft rich bass voices, like melodious thunder. They are clever at handicrafts, and fond of geography and natural history, incapable of mathematics, quick at languages, utterly incurious about other nations, and would all rather work in the fields than learn anything but music; good boys, honest, but 'trotzig'. So much for Caffres, Fingoes, &c. The Bastaards are as clever as whites, ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... instinct dies out so completely (except so far as it is kept alive by purely utilitarian considerations) when education of the conventional type has done its deadly work. It has been said that children go to school ignorant but curious, and leave school ignorant and incurious. This gibe is the plain statement of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... seen, and seen from far: In a new world with caution slept, Watch'd all the company she kept, Well knowing, from the books she read, What dangerous paths young virgins tread: Would seldom at the Park appear, Nor saw the play-house twice a year; Yet, not incurious, was inclined To know the converse of mankind. First issued from perfumers' shops, A crowd of fashionable fops: They ask'd her how she liked the play; Then told the tattle of the day; A duel fought last night at two, About a lady—you know who; ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... his wife when he returned home from the studio. She had mysteriously behaved to him as though nocturnal excursions to disgraceful daughters in remote quarters of London were part of his daily routine. She had been very sweet and very incurious. Whereon Mr. Prohack had said to himself: "She has some diplomatic reason for being an angel." And even if she had not been an angel, even if she had been the very reverse of an angel, Mr. Prohack would not have minded, and his night would not have ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more—though I ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his lion—my shut eyes saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the frail angle-irons; ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... sat alone as the twilight was gathering. My pistol case was on the table at my side. I rang the bell, and directed the servant who answered it to desire Evelyn's presence, and bring lights. She soon appeared—cold, passive, incurious, yet beneath this I could see ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mean, madame?" she asked; but her tone was listless, apathetic, as of one who though uttering a question is incurious as to what ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... had spoken well of his captain; but yet, so little were they in the habit of attending to such matters, so unobservant and incurious were they as to the names of men or ships, that it had made scarcely any impression at the time; and that Mrs Musgrove should have been suddenly struck, this very day, with a recollection of the name of Wentworth, as connected with her son, seemed one of those extraordinary ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the picker-up of learning's crumbs, The not-incurious in God's handiwork (This man's-flesh he hath admirably made, Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste, To coop up and keep down on earth a space That puff of vapor from his mouth, man's soul) —To Abib, all-sagacious ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... the parapet his listless attention was awakened by sounds of an unaccustomed kind from the town quarter. They were a confusion of rhythmical noises, to which the streets added yet more confusion by encumbering them with echoes. His first incurious thought that the clangour arose from the town band, engaged in an attempt to round off a memorable day in a burst of evening harmony, was contradicted by certain peculiarities of reverberation. But inexplicability did not rouse him to more than a cursory ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... took interest in nothing, not even when the Narwhal crossed Queen Charlotte Sound and rolled and pitched and bucked like a thing possessed. When Buck and Curly grew excited, half wild with fear, he raised his head as though annoyed, favored them with an incurious glance, yawned, ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... July 21, '88), of which No. i., dealing with my first and second volumes, is written after the facile American fashion, making the book review itself; that is, supply to the writer all the knowledge and familiarity with the subject which he parades before an incurious and easily gullible public. This especial form of dishonesty has but lately succeeded to and ousted the classical English critique of Jeffrey, Macaulay, and the late Mr. Abraham Hayward, which was mostly a handy peg for the contents of the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... became on a sudden less communicable, and thence very sad, pale, and exceedingly affected with the spleen. In his clothes and habit, which he had minded before always with more neatness and industry and expense than is usual to so great a soul, he was not now only incurious, but too negligent; and in his reception of suitors, and the necessary or casual addresses to his place, so quick and sharp and severe, that there wanted not some men (strangers to his nature and disposition) who believed him proud and ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... of rage against her, they returned to Psyche, and said to her craftily, "Thou livest in an ignorant bliss, all incurious of thy real danger. It is a deadly serpent, as we certainly know, that comes to sleep at thy side. Remember the words of the oracle, which declared thee destined to a cruel beast. There are those ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... somewhat thin and dark, the learning of these two chapters having cost me much pains. My mother's list of the chapters with which, thus learned, she established my soul in life, has just fallen out of it. I will take what indulgence the incurious reader can give me, for printing ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... a birthday by prayer is not altogether incurious in these days of license; and the following specimen, quoted from the Diary of that truly good man, JOHN EVELYN, may be entertained as the genuine effusion of piety, unmixed with any alloy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... James had little or no sympathy; he was not so impatient of them as the Swedenborgians commonly are, and he probably acknowledged a measure of verity in the spiritistic phenomena; but he seemed rather incurious concerning them, and he must have regarded them as superfluities of naughtiness, mostly; as emanations from the hells. His powerful and penetrating intellect interested itself with all social and civil facts through his religion. He ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in the rich accoutrement, and robe of purple, empaled with gold, is Eupathes; who entertains his mind with an harmless, but not incurious variety; all the objects of his senses are sumptuous, himself a gallant, that, without excess, can make use of superfluity, go richly in embroideries, jewels, and what not, without vanity, and fare delicately without gluttony; and therefore (not without cause) is universally ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... eight or nine years old, who never lifted his head to look on the intruder: near the boy crouched a half-starved hound of the lurcher kind, a red-coloured, wire-haired brute, with a keen cold Indian look, and as apparently incurious as the best-taught warrior of the tribe: there was no wagging of the tail in friendly recognition, as might be expected from a kindly European dog; neither was there the warning growl and spiteful show of bristled crest and angry teeth, nor any suspicious circling round the stranger, ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... spectacular, though in conduct, rather than in appearance, and in these days some of his acts would be set down to a love of self-advertising. As they had their effect, those who profited by increased safety could afford to be incurious of reasons. He startled the populace on the very day he landed. Cuba had been overrun with bandits, some masquerading as insurgents, while others prowled through the towns cutting throats in the shadow of the church. Cries of ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... have been the exact image of the girl playing with the bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her betrothal evening. The fact seemed an additional appeal to his pity: such innocence was as moving as the trustful clasp of a child. Then he remembered the passionate generosity latent under that incurious calm. He recalled her glance of understanding when he had urged that their engagement should be announced at the Beaufort ball; he heard the voice in which she had said, in the Mission garden: "I couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong—a wrong to some one ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... purpose. With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual and not incurious ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... him; nobody questioned him; the train officials were civil and incurious, and went calmly about their business with all the traditional stolidity of ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... escape—that happiness was no more than a reprieve. The perversity of such ideas was emphasized by Peyton's approach. He had the gift of restoring things to their normal relations, of carrying one over the chasms of life through the closed tunnel of an incurious cheerfulness. All that was restless and questioning in the girl subsided in his presence, and she was content to take her love as a gift of grace, which began just where the office of reason ended. She was more than ever, to-day, in this mood of charmed surrender. More than ever he ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... declared Peyton, who felt impelled to take the side of his brother in a family discussion. He was an incurious and gay young man, of active sporting interests and immaculate appearance, with so few of the moral attributes of the Culpepers that his mother sometimes wondered how he could possibly be the son of his father. Indeed there were times when this wonder extended to Mary Byrd, for it seemed incredible ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... friendliest invitation. But I have a new reason why I should not come to England,—a blessed babe, named Ellen, almost three weeks old,—a little, fair, soft lump of contented humanity, incessantly sleeping, and with an air of incurious security that says she has come to stay, has come to be loved, which has nothing mean, and quite ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to the main chance than the rest, applied to 'Dick' for cash wherewith to meet some of the family necessities. The money was promptly sent, together with photographs of Dick's wife and children. These last were not taken much notice of. These Leyburns were a hard, limited, incurious set, and they no longer regarded Dick as one ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his head. He was totally ignorant of the arrangements of the house, had never, so he said, put foot in it in his life. This was perfectly true, for he was an incurious man who did not greatly bother himself about the affairs of other people. The local police arrived in half an hour, headed by the chief inspector, who happened to be in the station when the report was ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... away the reserve ammunition, they at last went down to the war council assembled under the tree in the village. Mindful of the instructions of Mr. Hume, the two boys were quite self-possessed and incurious, though it was a great effort to restrain expressions of surprise when they were face ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... mirth; juvenile frolics, and puerile amusements, which do not pass without serious, perhaps contemptuous, animadversion—setting these aside it appears to me that even our best models are but ill adapted for the imitation of a rude, incurious, and unambitious people. Their senses, not their reason, should be acted on, to rouse them from their lethargy; their imaginations must be warmed; a spirit of enthusiasm must pervade and animate them before they will exchange the pleasures of indolence for those of industry. The philosophical ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... himself slightly from his recumbent position at the sound of the opening of the door. He watched Fenn with dull, incurious eyes as the latter crossed the uncarpeted floor of the bare wooden shed, threw off his overcoat, and advanced towards the ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Times or the Guardian. The talk was never very strenuous; for whereas Mr. Colt could never learn to distinguish one rose from another, on Church affairs or on politics the Master was hopelessly tolerant, antiquated, incurious even. What could one do with a dear old gentleman who, when informed of the latest, most dangerous promotion to a bishopric, but responded with "Eh? 'So-and-so,' did you say? . . . Yes, yes. I knew his father . . . ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... [530]country: and the city of the Sun, styled Heliopolis, owed its origin to an [531]Athenian. They were so weak as to think that the city Canobus had its name from a pilot of Menelaus, and that even Memphis was built by Epaphos of [532]Argos. There surely was never any nation so incurious and indifferent about truth. Hence have arisen those contradictions and inconsistences with which their history ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... make researches relative to its history, arrived at the ancient chateau of Montaigne, in possession of a descendant of this great man. He inquired for the archives, if there had been any. He was shown an old worm-eaten coffer, which had long held papers untouched by the incurious generations of Montaigne. Stifled in clouds of dust, he drew out the original manuscript of the travels of Montaigne. Two-thirds of the work are in the handwriting of Montaigne, and the rest is written by a servant, who always speaks of his ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... upon familiarity with the manners and customs of the working man, because the ordinary well-to-do citizen, however much he may have read of manners and customs in other countries, is, as a rule, perfectly ignorant and perfectly incurious as to those of his fellow-countrymen; nor is it based upon the belief that the working man is imperfect in mind or body; but on an assurance that the working man will never lift himself to the level of the higher form of recreation, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... possibility look in at that window. Even the curtain could only be detected with an opera-glass from the steamer that passed twice a week. But the sweet instinct of privacy and home had had its way, and every night the little curtain that never shut out anything but the incurious moonlight or the innocent stars was drawn as regularly as the shades of a Fifth Avenue mansion. Later we learned that it was the Life-Saving Station of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... ordinary Apennine limestone, the population might have remained in closer contact with wild things of nature, and retained a perennial fountain of enjoyment and inspiration. A particular kind of rock, therefore, has helped to make them sluggish and incurious. The insularity of their citadel has worked in the same direction, by focussing their interests upon the purely human. That inland sea, again: were it not an ideal breeding-place for shell-fish, the Tarentines would long ago have learnt to vary ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... and then their religion, has made them hard and incurious; it is a land of uncompromising masculinity. The softer element—thanks to the Koran—has become non-existent, and you will look in vain for the creative-feminine, for those intermediate types of ambiguous, submerged sexuality, the constructive poets and dreamers, the ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... for a healthy young man, was strangely incurious. He searched the menu from top to bottom, and then from bottom to top; nothing excited his palate. Whenever persons entered, he would glance up eagerly, only to feel his heart sink lower and lower. I don't know how many times he was disappointed. ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... Tancred to Bethany, of which he had said nothing to Baroni, the only person at his command who could afford or obtain any information as to the name and quality of her with whom he had there so singularly become acquainted. He was far from incurious on the subject; all that he had seen and all that he had heard at Bethany greatly interested him. But the reserve which ever controlled him, unless under the influence of great excitement, a reserve which ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... that careless throng of pleasure-seekers no one rubbed shoulders with Harrigan. The flame of his hair was like a red lamp which warned them away. Or perhaps it was his eye, which seemed to linger for a cold, incurious instant on every face that approached. He picked out the prettiest of the girls who sat at the windows chatting with all who passed. He did not have to shoulder to win a way through the ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... is it your excess of modesty; Or are you so incurious, that you do not 95 Ask me too ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the telephone. We drove on down the lane, eyed somnolently by spotted cows and incurious sheep, and all the way Miss Emily talked. She was almost garrulous. She asked the hackman about his family and stopped the vehicle to pick up a peddler, overburdened with his pack. I watched her with amazement. Evidently this was Mr. Staley's Miss Emily. ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... incurious glance at the coarse gold, poured himself a cup of coffee at the fire, and sat down. Joy sensed something wrong and looked at him with eagerly solicitous eyes. Shorty, however, was disgruntled by his partner's lack of delight in ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... him from the moment of his spectacular entrance, though no slightest sign of interest manifested itself in her indolent, incurious eyes. Indeed, his abundant and picturesque area was so vivid that it would have been difficult not to feel his presence anywhere, let alone on a journey so monotonous as this was proving ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... government has for the last three centuries been endeavouring to counteract. El cielo y suelo es bueno, el entresuelo malo, and man, the occupier of the Peninsula entresol, uses, or rather abuses, with incurious apathy the goods with which the gods have provided him. Spain is a terra incognita to naturalists, geologists, and every branch of ists and ologists. The material is as superabundant as native labourers and operatives are ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... have told how she knew that the girl had come to college to please a mother whose great regret was to have missed such training, nor did she remember when her incurious friend had learned her tense determination of flight; she could have sworn that she had never spoken of it. Sometimes, so perfectly did they appear to understand each other beneath an indifferent conversation, ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... Drogheda bewailed, "it is all so big—the incurious west, and the sea, and these rocks that were old in Noah's ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the jog-trot of my prosaic life. And being of a stolid and incurious nature, I left Seaton and his marriage, and even his aunt, to themselves in my memory, and scarcely gave a thought to them until one day I was walking up the Strand again, and passed the flashing gloaming of the covered-in jeweller's shop where I had accidentally encountered ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... religion of Buddha. He was evidently a man of an inquiring mind, with a pronounced taste for philosophical speculation; and the social and political conditions of his day were such that a person even of a very incurious disposition would be likely to be brought face to face with the sensational doctrine which was responsible for such amazing innovations as hospitals for men and for animals. Alexandria, the museum and ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... inquire now why I never went close to the house or never went inside it. The family were not there, I had heard on my arrival, and were not expected. I was far from being incurious or uninterested about the building; on the contrary, I often sat in this place wondering how the rooms ranged and whether any echo like a footstep really did resound at times, as the story said, upon the lonely Ghost's Walk. The indefinable feeling with which Lady Dedlock had impressed me may ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... expressions of an acute and well-informed writer, "restricted in the thrall of a less liberal religion, is bounded in the narrow circle of his actual locality. Concentrated in his home, he does not look beyond the limits of his native land, which he regards exclusively. Incurious, and stationary in a happy existence, he has no interest in what ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... pipes. Howat Penny was detached, critical. Mariana, in a dull, black satin wrap of innumerable soft folds and wide paisley collar slipping from a sheath-like bodice of gleaming, cut steel beading, was silent, incurious. He turned to her, to point out an extravagant figure, but he said nothing. She was, evidently, in no mood for the enjoyment of the ridiculous. This disturbed him; he had not thought that she would be so—so concerned. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the affair of ten seconds; and at first he was not aware of any deeper or more detailed impression. He had glanced at them vaguely; he was naturally incurious; and he had ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... much at Hilda, even on the arm of her liveried priest. She was a strange vessel, sailing in from beyond their ken, and her pilot was almost as novel, yet they were incurious. Their interests were not in any way diffused, they had one straight line and it led upward, pausing at the personalities clerked above them, with an ultimate point in the head of a department. The Head of the Department was the only person unaware, when addressed, of a travelling ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... they set going many strange secret schemes which were to make a new king, a new England, and new magnificence for themselves, singly or together. All which the mass of England watched with shrewd, incurious eyes. It could not long be a secret that plots were afoot. To shoulder out of power all who were committed friends of the lawful order was a confession of designs against it. As if that were not enough, Bolingbroke and Harley so managed their business that everything they did ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... honest life in them. Once before the Kentuckian had seen eyes such as those. It had been in a cabin—a cabin back in Tennessee in the dead of winter. A young bushwhacker wearing Union blue, with a murderer's eyes in his boyish face, had watched Drew with the same incurious glance which held nothing of humankind. Shannon; the bushwhacker—two of the same killer breed. But to recognize that no longer ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... chanced to err, 90 Mistaking catalogue for character,) His wise forefinger raised in smiling blame. Nor would I scant him with judicial breath And turn mere critic in an epitaph; I choose the wheat, incurious of the chaff That swells fame living, chokes it after death, And would but memorize the shining half Of his large nature that was turned to me: Fain had I joined with those that honored him With eyes that darkened because his were dim, 100 And now been silent: but ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... of whom one owns a delightful Son; his brother a fair lady, delightfuller yet. Gallant sure is Gallus, a pair so dainty uniting; Lovely the lady, the lad lovely, a company sweet. Foolish sure is Gallus, an o'er-incurious husband; 5 Uncle, a wife once taught luxury, ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... something maddeningly incurious about her. He couldn't understand why she didn't even pause to hear what Georgina had done and what he had to say about it. A person so wrapped up in her personal and private dignity makes a man want to throw stones. Perhaps she knew of ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... front bedroom on the first floor; Miss Spencer was immured in the attic; the last-named lady had been singularly quiet and incurious, taking her food from Nella and asking no questions, the old woman went at nights to her own abode in the purlieus of the harbour. Hour after hour Aribert sat silent by his nephew's bed-side, attending mechanically to his wants, ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... the cellar, out of reach, and he dared not break another window. Under this which served him lay the bin of Chianti. This was better than nothing; and the princess would never miss the few bottles he purloined. Sometimes he shared a bottle with Smith, who was equally incurious. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... While from Marseilles in the steamer we voyage to Civita Vecchia, Vexed in the squally seas as we lay by Capraja and Elba, Standing, uplifted, alone on the heaving poop of the vessel, Looking around on the waste of the rushing incurious billows, 'This is Nature,' I said: 'we are born as it were from her waters; Over her billows that buffet and beat us, her offspring uncared-for, Casting one single regard of a painful victorious knowledge, Into her billows that buffet and beat us we sink and are swallowed.' This ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... had not even hidden it. He had only put a book into its own place, carrying out as he did so his innocent intention when he had first lifted the book. When these searchers had come, doing their work so idly, with such incurious futility, he had not concealed the book. He had left it there on its shelf beneath their hands. Who could say that he had been guilty? If the will were found now, who could reasonably suggest that there had been guilt on his part? If all were known,—except that chance glance of his eye which ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... as I. You stumbled on these verses, and brought them up here to throw them at me. They don't harm me in the least, I can assure you. There is no use," continued the doctor, mollifying at the sight of his friend's countenance, and seeing how the land lay,—"there is no use speaking to our incurious, solitary friend here, who could bask comfortably in sunshine for a century, without once inquiring whence came the light and heat. But let me tell you," lifting his pipe and shaking it across me at the clergyman, "that science has done ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... that my couch was a part of the wilderness. At times, some of the larger birds have crept close to my glade, to sleep in the shadows of the low jungle-growth. But these were, one and all, timid folk, politely incurious, with evident respect for the rights of the individual. But once, some others of a ruder and more barbaric temperament advanced upon me unawares, and found me unprepared for their coming. I was dozing quietly, glad to escape for an ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him made that unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... continued so to do, until the subject of present controversy were finally disposed of, is the part I should altogether have chosen, had circumstances permitted to me such a course. But, if I have been a silent, I have not been an incurious, nor, I trust, an uninstructed, spectator of events. It is rendered apparent that those great matters, which occupy the public mind abroad, do now occupy also this House. If other gentlemen, differing with me in part or in whole, had voted without ...
— Speech of Mr. Cushing, of Massachusetts, on the Right of Petition, • Caleb Cushing
... Septimus knelt down before the grate and lit the paper. In a second or two the flame caught the wood, and, the blower being down, it blazed fiercely. He spread his ice-cold hands out before it, incurious of the futile little room whose draperies and fripperies and inconsiderable flimsiness of furniture proclaimed its owner, intent only on the elemental need of warmth. He was disturbed by the ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... roadster, not hurrying himself to follow up Cummings' suggestion—the big boy, non-communicative, incurious, the question of fortune lost or won seeming not to trouble him at all. I skirted the machine and ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... that she stole to her bed again, she looked at her sleeping husband whom she had resolved to leave, with no anger, no reproach, but rather with a long, incurious look which toad ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... I were by no means reluctant to humor the lad, for we were not incurious respecting the picture, and we accompanied him forthwith. His room was quite large, well lighted and airy, with a sleeping-closet attached. Over the blank wall opposite the windows hung a black muslin curtain of most funereal aspect, which rolled up to the ceiling by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... H. E., a woman who lived years ago in Great Britain and the United States, who believed that noble man was incompetent, incomplete, incompatible, incongruent, inconsistent, and an incubus in his incurious incumbency. She was the daughter of Too Much Time and Too Much Money. Early days spent at home. She married and began her career. S.'s first weakness was a club. Then she fell to the level of a speech maker and a flag carrier. The fanatical ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... had only a handful of men, Cazaio meditated to-night. And the woman was there,—the woman whose eyes were blue and incurious, whose ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... poetry that each new revelation is an education of the eye and the feelings. We learn to see and feel Nature in a far clearer and profounder way, now that we have been taught to look by poets. The incurious unimpassioned gaze of the Alpine peasant on the scenes which mysteriously and profoundly affect the cultivated tourist, is the gaze of one who has never been taught to look. The greater sensibility of educated Europeans to influences ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... with blank, incurious eyes. Then he rose slowly to his feet and walked out of the hotel—moving with a peculiar precision like one who walks in a trance. After that he lost count of time. He went down into the depths and the dark waters of ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... praised him, belauded the beauty of his end, telling one another sanctimoniously that he had died in harness. As it was we merely stripped him of his harness and deposited it in the brake! We unhitched the leader and put him between the shafts, side by side with the other horse, both incurious and indifferent, wasting nor glance nor nasal rub upon their defunct comrade. We men feign better. And then we drew him to the edge of the track, a rigid, lumbering mass; and the garrulous inhabitant discussed the value of the carcase, and the driver cracked his whip, and the living ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... flickering of intelligence, a good-natured brute with the strength and mental caliber of a gorilla. His hand pressed heavily upon me, and I knew the weight of the muscles behind. I looked at the other brutes, two of them unperturbed and incurious, and one of them that gloated over the spectacle; and my reason came back to me, my muscles relaxed, and I ...
— The Road • Jack London
... thickened the posts (the columns of Paestum are 7 ft. in diameter) and increased the strength of the beam (the architrave). Hence the vast solidity of the Doric order of the temples of Sicily and Magna Graecia. The Greek was incurious about construction qua construction. He found, in the column and the lintel, means perfectly adequate to realize his ideal of high unalterable beauty, and he was content. The Romans, who for a time were satisfied with these ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... impudent allusion to herself, convinced Kate that a man must be her agent, if any one were to be. But what man did she know? If she sent any of the servants, her father would recognize them, and the attempt fail. She had trusted Elkins. He seemed an honest, incurious lad, just the one to be trusted in the business. She could invent a fable which would satisfy his ready credulity without compromising her father. It was plain that he was the only resource. She dressed at once and returned to the Alburn. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... discloses a state of things not merely unsuspected but the reverse of what had been hoped and ingeniously conjectured. It is true that poor Hans had always cared chiefly to confide in Deronda, and had been quite incurious as to any confidence that might have been given in return; but what outpourer of his own affairs is not tempted to think any hint of his friend's affairs is an egotistic irrelevance? That was no reason why it was not rather a sore reflection to Hans that while he had been all along naively opening ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... better—much better. You will, no doubt, study the Classics. There are those (I am well aware) who are disposed to object to modern American Scholarship as an excessive attention to minutiae: but personally, I confess, I am no enemy even to a meticulous exactness, which alone can save us from an incurious and slipshod rhetoric! . . . And what, then, are the points of scholarship which it has been your endeavour to elucidate? Have you followed in the steps of the lamented Professor Drybones of Chicago, who died before he could ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... incurious, destitute of knowledge and of all thirst of knowledge, insolent, and profligate. They say that in the treatment of my father I have been ungrateful and inhuman. I have stolen his property, and deserted him in his calamity. Therefore ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... is not she the Queen of Drabs, Whose Head is perriwigg'd with scabs? Whose Hair hangs down incurious flakes, All curl'd and crisp'd, like crawling Snakes; The Breath of whose perfumed Locks Might choke the Devil with a Pox; Whose dainty twinings did entice The whole monopoly of Lice; Her Forehead next is to be found, Resembling much ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... a pointed beard, and Trask had to look twice at him before he recognized the face of Andray Dunnan. It looked more like the face of Duke Angus of Wardshaven as he last remembered it. Dunnan looked at him in incurious contempt. ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... hold back the stamped leather curtain, was large a great white creature like a moving statue, with a still, blank face framed in banks of shining jet hair. The strong, lights of the chamber shone on her; she stood, still as an image, with large, incurious eyes, looking at him. All the Orient was immanent in her; she had the quiet, the resignation, the un-hope of ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... hobble through a tranquil old age, with the active and laborious honours of a public life past, but not forgotten. Little shall be said of that smooth and narrow pool, scarce visible among the rising shrubs which belt in and shroud the grounds from the incurious wayfarer; or of such carp and tench as, having escaped the treacherous toils of the nightly plunderer, gasp and tumble on its surface, delighting to display their golden pride in the mid-day sun, before the gaze of lawful possession. Nor shall the casual reader be led carelessly and wearily to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... grey, the other was young; but each had the same pale, incurious air of detachment. They reminded Mary of two astronomy professors of her college days, two men who had just such an air of detachment, who always seemed to be out of their element in the daylight, always waiting for the night to come to resume the study ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... all his incurious young life had never thought of the roof of the Palace, save as a necessary shelter from the weather, a thing of tiles and gutters, vastly ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... pyramid and began to climb slowly and with great care, always keeping hidden in the vegetation. He was certain that no Mexican would follow where he was going. They were on other business, and their incurious minds bothered little about a city that was ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of transmitting to posterity the actions and manners of famous men, has not been neglected even by the present age, incurious though it be about those belonging to it, whenever any exalted and noble degree of virtue has triumphed over that false estimation of merit, and that ill-will to it, by which small and great states ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... While from Marseilles in the steamer we voyaged to Civita Vecchia, Vexed in the squally seas as we lay by Capraja and Elba, Standing, uplifted, alone on the heaving poop of the vessel, Looking around on the waste of the rushing incurious billows, "This is Nature," I said: "we are born as it were from her waters, Over her billows that buffet and beat us, her offspring uncared-for, Casting one single regard of a painful victorious knowledge, Into her billows that buffet and beat us we sink and are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... trick, as for performers in a circus; he certainly did not envy them, for he knew that he could buy them, as a carpenter buys tools. His attitude was that of the genuine bourgeois towards the artist: possessive, incurious, and contemptuous. Dayson, however, ignored George Cannon's attitude, perhaps did not even perceive what it was. He gloried in his performance. Accustomed to dictate extempore speeches on any subject whatever to his shorthand pupils, he was quite at his ease, quite master of his faculties, and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Village about four miles distant from the Castle of Lindenberg. Upon arriving there a story was related to the Host at whose Inn I descended, which prevented his wondering at my making so long a stay in his House. The old Man fortunately was credulous and incurious: He believed all I said, and sought to know no more than what I thought proper to tell him. Nobody was with me but Theodore; Both were disguised, and as we kept ourselves close, we were not suspected to be other than what we seemed. In this manner the fortnight passed away. ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... are not exceeded, and perhaps not equalled, by any thing of this nature that hath, as yet, been communicated to the world: For they were not copied from the works of others, or composed at home from imperfect accounts given by incurious and unskilful observers, a practice too frequent in these matters; but the greatest part of them were delineated on the spot, with the utmost exactness, by the direction and under the eye of Mr Anson himself; and where, as ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... degree of relevancy a Covenant for the members of the League could be supposed to possess to a treaty concluded with a nation which for the time being was denied admission to that sodality. And as we saw, he was incurious enough not to read the narrative of what had been done by his own American colleagues even after the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... as though in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement lifted his wife's lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... a loaf of bread under his arm had slouched from the business tent, and stood watching the scene with incurious eyes. ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... instinctively drew rein;—and there, in the midst of the shifting, drifting crowd, he sat motionless, letting the vision sink deep into his mind, while Terry investigated a promising smell, and Bishun Singh, wholly incurious, gossiped with a potter, from whose wheel emerged an endless succession of chiraghs—primitive clay lamps, with a lip for the cotton wick. His neighbour, with equal zest, was creating very ill-shapen clay animals, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... this. If Mary Higgins was required as a help to Dixon in the kitchen she was to hear and see as little of Frederick as possible; and he was, if necessary to be spoken of to her under the name of Mr. Dickinson. But her sluggish and incurious nature was the greatest ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... had reached the side-entrance, he paused and opened it, and then shoved his companion into an open field, where a number of cows, fresh from the evening milking, regarded them with incurious eyes. It was very quiet here, save for the occasional jangle of the cow-bells and the far-off fifing of frogs in the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... which they had in the destinies[29] of Rome, inclined them to carelessness about all but their nearest neighbours, and sustained for ages their illiterate propensities. Illiterate they were, because incurious; and incurious because too haughtily self-confident. The Greeks, on the other hand, amongst the other infirmities attached to their national levity, had curiosity in abundance. But it flowed in other channels. There was nothing to direct their curiosity ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... I would not do again what I have done once." He resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous studies, making every day some new acquaintance with Nature, though as yet never speaking of zooelogy or botany, since, though very studious of natural facts, he was incurious of technical ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... but festooned the porch of things; Apt at life's lore, incurious what life meant. Dextrous of hand, she struck her lute's few strings; ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson |
