"Inexpert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mother? These thoughts, and her melancholy life so full of secret sorrows were like a mortal illness kept at bay for a time by remedies. Her heart needed the wisest management, and those about her were cruelly inexpert in gentleness. What mother's heart would not have been torn at the sight of her eldest son, a man of mind and soul in whom a noble genius made itself felt, deprived of his rights, while the younger, hard and brutal, without talent, ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... him to the engine-room; and when the others were patting the well-remembered decks, they heard him giving God thanks that things were as he had left them. The wrecked engines stood over his head untouched; no inexpert hand had meddled with his shores; the steel wedges of the store-room were rusted home; and, best of all, the hundred and sixty tons of good Australian coal in the bunkers ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... they had been through some thrilling experiences since they had first stood on the railroad station platform at Maguez. Had they known it, they could have controlled the boat more or less with the rough oar—the one with which Ralph had sounded the depth of the river—but, of course, they were inexpert in the management of such a craft. They could do nothing but keep still and trust to luck to bring them safely out ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... unnecessary bills, eating what we may politely call "unnecessary food," and putting up with the discontented woman. Thousands of children are growing up as best they can under inexpert mothers and inexpert housekeepers. Thousands of unnecessary deaths, invalids, and miserable lives; millions and millions of dollars wasted; and all this for the simple lack of society's ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... asterisk, which has been written by mistake, the inexpert operator having pressed down the figure lever instead of the one for capitals. The literary typewheel is the only one that has an asterisk, as I noticed when I was thinking of purchasing a machine. Here, then, we have ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... had to go away so soon." She strove for sympathetic tone, but felt inexpert and self-conscious. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... flung, again and again into the 'derisive silence of eternity,' mocks the soul with echo's answer. Where lies the blame? Where, indeed? For all his vaunted supremacy man is not always master of his fate. Circumstance, heredity, the despicable trifle, the inexpert finger, which a certain type of human is so zealous to thrust into an alien life, compass him about with a cloud of witnesses to his ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... if you can answer this question, Mr. Yollop. You have described in direct examination that this defendant was a big, burly, rough looking man. You say you were surprised when he went down under your inexpert blow. ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... statement, whereupon the newcomers ceased to gibe and consented to silence. Ramsey leaned forth over the edge of the overhanging bank, a dirt precipice five feet above the water, and peered into the indeterminable depths below. The pool had been stirred, partly by the inexpert pokings of the fishermen and partly by small clods and bits of dirt dislodged from above by the feet of the audience. The water, consequently, was but brownly translucent and revealed its secrets reluctantly; nevertheless certain dim little shapes had been observed to move within it, ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... always a subject for dispute as to whether the major portion of the blame is to be laid at the door of the traditional American disinclination to be prepared for warfare, or upon Secretary Alger and his immediate advisors. That the conduct of the military affairs was inexpert, however, is admitted on all sides. The facilities for taking care of the troops at Tampa were inadequate. When transports reached Tampa to take the troops to Santiago, officers wildly scrambled to get their men on board. The Rough ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... chisel with a handle, of the form here represented, will often save the hand of an inexpert collector, and better enable him to ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... eyes, to shut out every sight and sound and suggestion of a world in which such things could be; and at the same time she was tormented by the desire to know more, to understand better, to feel herself less ignorant and inexpert in matters which made so much of the stuff of human experience. What did he mean by "a moment's folly, a flash of madness"? How did people enter on such adventures, how pass out of them without more visible traces of their havoc? Her imagination recoiled from the vision of a sudden debasing ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... he could possibly get in any other way. It is necessary, however, for the untrained person to recognize his own lack of experience, and in no case would it be justifiable to base important action or scientific conclusions upon the results of the inexpert examiner. As Binet himself repeatedly insisted, the method is not absolutely mechanical, and cannot be made so by elaboration ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... be no harm in such a division of labour, the inventors doing the work and the professors the talking. The experts may themselves be inexpert in verbal expression, or content with stock phrases, or profoundly sceptical, or too busy to think. Nevertheless, skill and understanding are at their best when they go together and adorn the same mind. Modern science until lately had realised this ideal: it was an ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... assiduously as was young Mill has little time for play or association with other boys. This lack of contact with companions is a grave defect in the education of Mill. "I constantly remained long," writes Mill, "and in a less degree have always remained, inexpert in anything requiring manual dexterity; my mind, as well as my hands, did its work very lamely when it was applied, or ought to have been applied, to the practical details which, as they are the chief interest of life to the majority of men, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... it may have been, and each was busied with it, but of the two Tracey seemed the more restless. His ample, if low, forehead was decidedly corrugated; his always rosy face owned an added trace of scarlet—a flush of perturbation; his chubby hands were inexpert, clumsy. He stumbled, fumbled, forgot and (in our homely phrase) flummoxed generally; his mind was elsewhere, and his hands and feet went anywhere but where they should have gone: a condition which ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... hollow ships the deafening roar return'd Of acclamation, every voice the speech Extolling of Ulysses, glorious Chief. 405 Then Nestor the Gerenian,[13] warrior old, Arising, spake; and, by the Gods, he said, Ye more resemble children inexpert In war, than disciplined and prudent men. Where now are all your promises and vows, 410 Councils, libations, right-hand covenants?[14] Burn them, since all our occupation here Is to debate and wrangle, whereof end Or fruit though long we wait, shall ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... whirlwind, to explain to a flash of lightning, to soothe and propitiate the fury of a conflagration—the task before the primitive and inexpert Cove-dwellers seemed to ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Lutra soon baffled our inexpert hounds, and gained refuge in a "strong place" well behind a fringe of alder-roots, whence Bob, notwithstanding his most strenuous efforts, failed to "bolt" her. I then drew off the hounds, led them towards the throat of the pool, and for a half hour assisted them to work ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... Consequently the local Press was dosed with rumours, which, retailed by the home papers, made the latter rife in contradictory reports. To quote one case only. The turquoise-gangue from Ziba (Chap. XII.) was pronounced, by the inexpert mineralogists at the Citadel, Cairo, who attempted criticism, to be carbonate of copper, because rich silicates of that metal were shown at the Exposition. No one seemed to know that the fine turquoises of Midian have been sold for years at Suez, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... in the House of Commons, where the expert in foreign affairs was not so rare as he became in a subsequent period; but the inquiries of inexpert persons were the most ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... object of a law-suit at Athens. The old soldiers, inexpert at speaking, often lost ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... all matters involving an expenditure of naval funds.'' It was believed that economical administration would result; but much opposition was raised to the principle that was involved of submitting the proposals of responsible departments to the inexpert criticism of a financial authority. Mr Main, assistant accountant-general, stated before the Royal Commission on Civil Establishments, 1887, that the effect had been to develop a tendency to withhold information or to afford only partial information, as well as to cause ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... too, did he dislike to meet the polite world merely on the basis of the books that he had written, which his entertainers were bound to praise whether or not they had read or comprehended them, and to whose well-meant but inexpert eulogies he must constantly respond with the threadbare and pathetic phrase, "I'm glad you liked it." Bright, of course, insisted that fame and position carried obligations which must be met, and he was constantly laying plots to inveigle or surprise his friend into compliance. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... sole artistic contribution to Punch; "Broom v. Brush" in May, 1859; and "The Turkish Bath" in 1880. And, above all, "process" had not yet held out its alluring promise of nearly equal results, to the inexpert eye, at a quarter of the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... such words as everyone knows and nobody prints, butted his utmost into the concavity of Mr. Rusper, entwined a leg about him and after terrific moments of swaying instability, fell headlong beneath him amidst the bicycles and pails. There on the pavement these inexpert children of a pacific age, untrained in arms and uninured to violence, abandoned themselves to amateurish and absurd efforts to hurt and injure one another—of which the most palpable consequences ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... through a long future, in forms as yet undreamt of, must needs mould the destiny of our race. Far more than Mary I was accepting the conventions of our time. It seemed to me not merely reasonable but necessary that because she loved me she should place her life in my youthful and inexpert keeping, share my struggles and the real hardships they would have meant for her, devote herself to my happiness, bear me children, be my inspiration in imaginative moments, my squaw, helper and possession through the whole twenty-four hours of every day, and incidentally ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... The proceeding was vaguely reminiscent of a barrack room kit inspection. So far as he could judge she was separating wardrobe from larder, the two having become painfully confused during the preceding day's march. To one inexpert in such matters it would have been hard to decide which was eatable and which wearable, and Richard observed the operation with a mixture of amusement and disgust. Having discovered her breakfast and selected a piece of rag to act ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... who, though not a general of the highest order, understood war very much better than the preachers and lawyers who were always obtruding their advice on him, made allowances which people altogether inexpert in military affairs never thought of making. In justice to a man who has had few defenders, it must be observed that the task, which, throughout this campaign, was assigned to Grey, was one which, if he had been the boldest and most skilful of soldiers, he would scarcely ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was exhausted and full of discontent. Meantime Wellington defeated Soult in the Pyrenees, and invaded France from that side. Napoleon was bent on resistance, and by his superior skill succeeded in ousting the brave Prussian soldier, but inexpert strategist, Bluecher, as well as the Austrian general Schwartzenberg (Jan. and Feb. 1814). But the preponderance of numbers on the side of the allies was too great. Their bold decision to march on Paris ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... have already surfeited most readers; and their details—usually so incorrectly stated by the inexpert—have little to do with a relation of things within the Confederacy, as they then appeared to the masses of her people. Such, therefore, are simply touched upon in outline, where necessary to show their reaction upon the popular pulse, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... resplendent with gold and silver. The Gunmakers perform the useful work of protecting our countrymen from the dangers of defective guns, and their company was incorporated by Charles I., on the ground that divers blacksmiths and others inexpert in the art of gunmaking had taken upon them to make, try, and prove guns after their unskilful way, whereby the trade was not only damnified, but much harm and danger through such unskilfulness had happened to his Majesty's subjects. They had the power of destroying all false hand-guns, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... blacks pottered clumsily at scraping the teak rail. They were as inexpert at their work as so many monkeys. In fact they looked very much like monkeys of some enlarged and prehistoric type. Their eyes had in them the querulous plaintiveness of the monkey, their faces were even less symmetrical than ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... handle a stone so heavy, even swinging in the scissors, may appear strange to the inexpert. These must bear in mind the great density of the water of the sea, and the surprising results of transplantation to that medium. To understand a little what these are, and how a man's weight, so far from being an encumbrance, is the very ground of his agility, was ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... when the ship is fitting out, still more when she is out at sea, and most of all when she is fighting, then she should be handled only by her expert captain with his expert crew. Civilian interference begins the moment any inexpert outsider takes the captain's place; and this interference is no less disastrous when the outsider remains at home than when he is on the ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... the citizens of London and many boroughs, to relieve his oppressed subjects, made the citizens this sagacious reply: 'We, with all our cabinet, think it strange that ye who be but brutes and inexpert folk, should tell us who be and who be not fit for ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... form of the marriage one used there. Afterwards we started for a motor ride to a place outside Paris for dejeuner, and I suppose the man's nerve failed him. I questioned him too closely about his possessions, and remarked upon the fact that he was a most inexpert driver, although Meysey Hill had a great reputation as a motorist. Anyhow he confessed that he was a fraud. I struck him across the face, jumped out and went back by train to Paris. He lost control of the machine, ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... house, or the education of her motherless young sister. But Miss Wodehouse had contented herself with loving Lucy—had suffered her to grow up very much as she would, without interference—had never taken a decided part in her life. When anything had to be done, to tell the truth, she was very inexpert—unready—deeply embarrassed with the unusual necessity. Nettie's case, so wonderfully different from anything she could have conceived, lay on her mind and oppressed her as she went home ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... shadow; catch at straws, lean on a broken reed, reckon without one's host, pursue a wild goose chase; go on a fool's goose chase, sleeveless errand; go further and fare worse; lose one's way, miss one's way; fail &c. 732. Adj. unskillful &c. 698; inexpert; bungling &c.v.; awkward, clumsy, unhandy, lubberly, gauche, maladroit; left-handed, heavy-handed; slovenly, slatternly; gawky. adrift, at fault. inapt, unapt; inhabile[Fr]; untractable[obs3], unteachable; giddy &c. (inattentive) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... not till now that he felt the embarrassment of such an arrival. For some time past he had known that he ought to go back to Lynbrook, but he had not known how to tell Bessy that he was coming. Lack of habit made him inexpert in the art of easy transitions, and his inability to bridge over awkward gaps had often put him at a disadvantage with his wife and her friends. He had not yet learned the importance of observing the forms which made up the daily ceremonial of their lives, and at present ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... was I found inexpert, wherein there was mischief implied. I shot swans, hunted cats, frightened serving-women, chased the deer, and robbed the orchard. I say nothing of tormenting the chaplain in various ways, for that was my duty ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... Sergeant Broughton. In the same neighbourhood he will find the admirable vignette of the old man who could read the inscription on Chinese crockery pots, but could not tell what's o'clock, and the life narratives of the jockey and of the inexpert thimble-rigger, Murtagh, who was imprisoned three years for interrupting the Pope's game at picquet, but finally won his way by card-sharping to the very threshold of the Cardinalate. In the second half of the Romany Rye, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... notable inconveniences as be to the great and notorious detriment of the commonweal, the subversion of politic order in knowledge and distinction of people according to their preeminence and degrees, to the utter impoverishment and undoing of many light and inexpert persons inclined to pride, the mother of all vices: Be it enacted,"[415]—but I need not enter into the particulars of the uniforms worn by the nobles and gentlemen of the court of Henry VIII.; the temper, not the detail, is ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... manner before described. In some instances, the good effects of these experiments were evident and promising, while they excited the greatest hopes of the future improvement and progress of this new art. But the unceasing abuses practised by bold and inexpert adventurers, together with the great number of cases, which proved unsuccessful, induced the different governments of Europe to put an entire stop to the practice, by the strictest prohibitions. And, indeed, while the constitutions and mode ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... as Smike in Nicholas Nickleby—that is his affair. In art, more than anywhere else, the end justifies the means, and the end of Dauber is vision—intense, terrible, pitiful, heroic vision. Here we have in literature what poor Dauber himself aimed at putting down on his inexpert canvases:— ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... craft, and it was therefore scarcely likely that they had met with a mishap of any description—indeed, all that was needed to ensure their perfect safety was to keep the canoe dead before the sea, and she would go along without shipping a drop of water; even I, comparatively inexpert as I was, would not have hesitated to undertake such a voyage, under the influence of so powerful an inducement as that which we suspected to animate the two natives. There was one other possible explanation, of which I thought as I stood up there on the swaying ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... However, Hyndford, with his Neipperg in sight of the peril, manages better than Robinson with his Aulic Council at a distance: besides he is a long-headed dogged kind of man, with a surly edacious strength, not inexpert in negotiation, nor easily turned aside from any purpose he ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... saw a figure whose surfaces were, indeed, not extraordinarily impressive. Craig's frame was good; that was apparent despite his clothes. He had powerful shoulders, not narrow, yet neither were they of the broad kind that suggest power to the inexpert and weakness and a tendency to lung trouble to the expert. His body was a trifle long for his arms and legs, which were thick and strong, like a lion's or a tiger's. He had a fine head, haughtily set; ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... in the pocket indicated, and with the air of an inexpert conjurer whose trick has succeeded contrary to his expectations produced a silver-plated fork. He regarded it with surprise; then he looked wonderingly ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... more to the North African coast than was the case later on. The pioneers of the piratical movement, after the fatal date 1492, which saw the wholesale expulsion of the Moors from Spain, were comparatively speaking inexpert practitioners in the art and mystery of piracy; they had not the habit of the sea, and in consequence confined their depredations to the neighbourhood of their own selected ports in Africa, which dominated that sea lane running east ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... potent things of faith, blessed objects and mysterious medals and prayers. In his wallet he had a bar of native silver for which he would not account; he insisted there was none in the valley with something of the insistence of an inexpert liar. They had all clubbed their money and ornaments together, having little need for such treasure up there, he said, to buy them holy help against their ill. I figure this dim-eyed young mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt, and anxious, hat brim clutched feverishly, ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Comes even now, and as he comes, designs A bloody death for these, whose bitter woes No few shall share, inhabitants with us Of pleasant Ithaca; but let us frame Effectual means maturely to suppress Their violent deeds, or rather let themselves Repentant cease; and soonest shall be best. Not inexpert, but well-inform'd I speak 230 The future, and the accomplishment announce Of all which when Ulysses with the Greeks Embark'd for Troy, I to himself foretold. I said that, after many woes, and loss Of all ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... waiting. He was entirely prepared for certain contingencies. If anybody knew anything about English social conditions it was Tasker Jevons. He had calculated all the chances and provided for the ostracism that attends the inexpert invader of the country-side. He was aware that there were powers in and around Amershott that were not to be conciliated. The very fact that their territory lay so near the frontier (Amershott is only sixty-seven ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... settlement for Fort Towson—about one hundred and fifty miles east. Our object was to play cards with the officers at the fort, and lighten them of some of their change. We also expected to fall in with some of the half-bred Choctaws, who are not inexpert in the shuffle. Edmonds and Scoggins were ordinary players, and depended on my skill. The former was a shrewd fellow, a Georgian by birth—aged about forty-five; the latter, a Canadian, was about the same age. ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green |
