"Mindless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... realized that he and his guides were becoming part of a general movement of people, a flow as mindless as that of blood corpuscles through the veins, yet at the same time dimly purposeful—at least there was the feeling that it was at the behest ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... peasant girl. After a month's unclouded existence she broke down beneath the load of misery. Her husband didn't love her. Why? Because they had been married a whole month and he hadn't beaten her yet! Does the child want me to beat her? I believe lots of women do. And you, mindless little donkey, what do you want me to make of her? Your head is full of the imbecilities of the studio. Because I keep her here like my daughter, and have not made her my mistress, you take it upon yourself to conclude that I have no affection ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... metaphysical teleology. This objection, it will be remembered, was, that it is as impossible to conceive of cosmic harmony as an effect of Mind [i.e. Mind being what we know it in experience to be], as it is to conceive of it as an effect of mindless evolution. The argument from inconceivability, therefore, admits of being turned with quite as terrible an effect on Theism, as it can possibly be made ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... leader of his flock: "Petitjean! stray not, my little one. I shall be back sooner than the daisies close." Then he turned to me again. I noticed a pallid, desperate look in his face, as though he were strung to great effort; but it was the face of a mindless ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... through his mind. He learned that radiation was fuel for the creatures' lives. And then they issued their terrible ultimatum: Explode a series of atom bombs to supply them with radiation or they would turn the world's population into mindless robots. ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... a jocund train, With joy the new-shorn Flock he hears Come bleating homeward o'er the russet plain; While slow, with languid neck, the weary Steers Th' inverted ploughshare drag along, Mindless of the Shepherd's song; Then, round his smiling Household-Gods, surveys A numerous, menial Group, the proof of ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... steal away his consciousness by drugging or bludgeoning, but it would be racial suicide to attempt it. In the split moment of realization he would kill every human being on Earth. There would be nobody left to operate on his brain, to make him a mindless, powerless idiot for the rest of time. For any period of time, he corrected himself. ...
— The Mightiest Man • Patrick Fahy
... Bessie Pollard, red-eyed and drooping in her father's door, he lingered an instant and held out his hand. There was defiant sympathy in his act—disdain of the judgment of Kingsborough—and of General Battle, who was passing—and pity for a bruised common thing that looked at him with beautiful, mindless eyes. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... the brain powers of Earth's millions will be forever shattered. So weakened will they be by then that recovery will be impossible even with the rays shut off, and the entire planet will be populated only by mindless imbeciles, readily available material for the myriads of monstrous hybrids that the invaders ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... unsatisfied and objectless love. All sensuous and verbal images may breed after their own kind in an empty brain; but these fantasies are often supported and directed by sexual longings and vaguely luxurious thoughts. An Oriental Paradise, with its delicate but mindless aestheticism, is above everything a garden for love. To brood on such an Elysium is a likely prelude and fertile preparation for romantic passion. When the passion takes form it calls fancy back from its loose reveries and fixes it upon a ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... tottering, muttering, mumbling with a mindless docility, they are, like Browning's men of the Paris morgue, only "apparent failures"; there was in them that spark of divine illumination which can never be wholly extinguished. Positive misdeeds, the presence of a wild crew of evil passions, do not suffice to make Browning's ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... circling at a height of a mile or rising to two miles in case of danger, we looked down on fierce fighting in the trenches and saw the Germans drive steadily forward, sweeping ahead in close formation, mindless of heavy losses and victorious by reason ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... life is simple, primitive and crude. Only, upon contact with the white man, some of this has been obliged to wear off a little. They have had to become adaptive, to assume a little polish, as it were. But at heart, after these many years of contact, they are still simple. They are mindless, gentle, squatting bare backed in the shade, chewing, spitting, betel nut. Chewing as the ox chews, thinking as the ox thinks. Gentle brown men and women, touching the edge of the most refined civilization of ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... the traveller ought to notice carefully that of Pietro Bernardo, a first-rate example of Renaissance work; nothing can be more detestable or mindless in general design, or more beautiful in execution. Examine especially the griffins, fixed in admiration of bouquets, at the bottom. The fruit and flowers which arrest the attention of the griffins may well ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... question, she shrank in sudden passion from the whole world of ideas concerned—from all those stifling notions of sin, penance, absolution, direction, as they were conventionalised in Catholic practice and chattered about by stupid and mindless people. In defiance of them, her whole nature stood like a charged weapon, ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... disillusion with Nature. It was as though a beautiful, tender, and fondly loved mother had turned murderously on her children, had wounded them nearly to death, had then tried to woo them to her breast again. The loveliness of her, the mindless, heartless, soulless loveliness, as of a maniac tamed, mocked at their agonies, mocked with her gentle indifference, mocked with her self-satisfied placidity, mocked with her serenity and her peace. For them she was dead—dead like those whom we ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... and their own exclusion from it. Such a Minister must possess a large share of fortitude, careless of its exhibition, and often exposing him to the charge of insensibility, as he moves steadily on amongst disaffected supporters and desperate opponents, mindless equally of taunts, threats, reproaches, and misrepresentations. He must resolve to bide his time, while his well-matured measures are slowly developing themselves, relying on the conscious purity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... as seen by us, this operation must needs appear to be what we call mechanical. The more unvarying the Will, the more unvarying must be this expression thereof; so that, if the former be absolutely self-consistent, the latter cannot fail to be as reasonably interpreted by the theory of mindless necessity, as by that of ubiquitous intention. Such being, as it appears to me, the pure logic of the matter, the proof of organic evolution amounts to nothing more than the proof of a natural process. What mode of being is ultimately concerned in this process—or in ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... she is practically mindless," remarked Shotwell, ironically. "You medically minded gentlemen are wonders!—all ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... the object, which he could never quite consider human,—at his white and blue petticoats, and his effeminate face, so sleepy and so mindless, as if he expected him to turn into a plate or sugar-bowl, or begin flying in the air across some porcelain river, and alighting on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... colours, from purple to yellow, The oracles kill him in print, But he turns not a hair, for the fellow Is hopeless at taking a hint; Apparently free from suspicion And mindless of what it all means, He careers on the road to perdition, Ebullient ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... air with which the marquise seemed to consider the Breton girl as the only creature fit to mate him, Calyste remained speechless and even mindless. ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... unsightly than the stalky, staring houses of our villages, with their plain gable-roofs, of a pitch neither high enough nor low enough for beauty, and disfigured, moreover, by mere excrescences of attic windows, and over the whole structure the awkward angularity, and the look of barren, mindless conformity and uniformity in the general outlines, and the meagre, frittered effect inherent in the material. But when we come to build, we find that the blockheads who invented this style, or no-style, have got at the cheapest way of supplying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... a nymph a bride, 30 Joyful I flew by young Favonia's side, Who, mindless of the feasting, went to sip The balmy pleasure of the shepherd's lip; I saw the wanton where I stoop'd to sup, And half resolved to drown me in the cup; Till, brush'd by careless hands, she soar'd above: Cease, beauty, cease ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... to bed that night without seeming to recognise her old home, to all appearance just a mindless child as she had been ever since she awoke from her trance at Kor. Next morning, however, Hans came to tell me that she was changed and that she wished to speak with me. I went, wondering, to find her in the sitting-room, dressed ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... military forces of the several States were ordered out for the protection of life and property; but in most cases the soldiers fraternized with the leagues, ran away, or were easily defeated. The cruel and mindless mobs had always the hypocritical sympathy and encouragement of the newspapers and the politicians, for both feared their power and courted their favor. The judges, dependent for their offices not only on ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... increases. Give him interest in his future; light a star for him to fix his eyes on. So that, when he steps out of hospital, you shall not have to begin to train one who for months, perhaps years, has been living, mindless and will-less, the life ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... brilliancy of an epigram. Whether or not it would hold water did not bother him. The story of Eris was Barry Annan at his easiest and most persuasive. There was the characteristic and ungodly skill in it, the subtle partnership with a mindless public that seduces to mental speculation; the reassuring caress as reward for intellectual penetration; that inborn cleverness that makes the reader see, applaud, or pity him or herself in the sympathetic role of a ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... not budge an inch or a step from their side. They sat round them, and did nothing but cry. Chia She and Chia Cheng too were a prey, at this juncture, to misgivings lest weeping should upset dowager lady Chia. Day and night oil was burnt and fires were, mindless of expense, kept alight. The bustle and confusion was such that no one, either master or ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... The sweet Kaala stood mindless of harm, as the playful breeze rustled the long blades of the la-i (dracaena) leaves, hanging like a bundle of green swords from her waist; and as they twirled and fluttered in the air, revealed the soft, rounded form, whose charm filled the eye and heart of one who stood among the ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... speedily divorced. She is very beautiful when she reaches New York. No emotional experience would leave a blur on her radiant youth, because love for her is a sensation, not a sentiment. By indirect and cumulative touches the novelist evokes for us her image. Truly a lovely apparition, almost mindless, with great sympathetic eyes and a sweet mouth. She exists, does Undine. She is not the barren fruit of a satirical pen. Foreigners, both men and women, puzzle over her freedom, chilliness, and commercial horse-sense. She doesn't long intrigue their curiosity, her brain is poorly ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Like startled giants by Nile's famous flood[279]; Or from the Pyramid's tall pinnacle Beheld the desert peopled, as from hell, With clashing hosts, who strewed the barren sand, To re-manure the uncultivated land! 150 Spain! which, a moment mindless of the Cid, Beheld his banner flouting thy Madrid[280]! Austria! which saw thy twice-ta'en capital[281] Twice spared to be the traitress of his fall! Ye race of Frederic!—Frederics but in name And falsehood—heirs to all except his fame: ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... the only thing the matter with him is his creed—"all those stifling notions of sin, penance, absolution, direction, as they were conventionalized in Catholic practice and chattered about by stupid and mindless people." ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... with the Eternal—the fact which lies at the root of every religion, and is the basis of each. Upon this Faith man builded, finding a rock beneath, refusing to think of Death as the gigantic coffin-lid of a dull and mindless universe ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... was, Mary felt it a relief when he ceased to be capable of watching the progress of it himself: his misery at least was over. Thereafter he slipped into perfect mindlessness, happy and harmless, but hopelessly mindless and vacant. Meantime, Lady Louisa Moor made a very brilliant marriage to a marquis, the eldest son of a duke, the account of which Mary Brunton read in the newspapers while watching her brother's face with its meaningless smile. How her heart swelled! and she burst into a passion of weeping. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... young trace their future path. And, seeing these, he has known, that the way leads, not by them, but among the brushwood and briars which fill the intervening space; that the statist's work is among the mindless many who will obstruct him at every step, not among the intellectual few by whom ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... youth's Arcadian day; And howsoe'er the pencil dipped in dreams Shades the brown woods or tints the sunset streams, The country doctor in the foreground seems, Whose ancient sulky down the village lanes Dragged, like a war-car, captive ills and pains. I could not paint the scenery of my song, Mindless of one who looked thereon so long; Who, night and day, on duty's lonely round, Made friends o' th' woods and rocks, and knew the sound Of each small brook, and what the hill-side trees Said to the winds that touched their leafy keys; Who saw so keenly and so well could paint The village-folk, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... her—the mindless animal, to forsake so good and great a man! I do hope she was punished, and that vile ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... day wears on and vesper draweth nigh. Christians and Pagans, sword in hand, engage; And valiant are their chiefs, nor mindless they Of battle cries:—"Precieuse!" the Emir shouts, And Carle:—"Montjoie!" the glorious sign. Each knows The other by the clear sonorous voice, And 'mid the field encountering, gives and takes Fierce blows. ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... grief, as it were, congeals the mind by arresting all its functions, and any chance impression made at such moments is retained by a frost-bound memory. Schmucke heard his companion with such a fixed, mindless stare, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... among birds or insects. Nevertheless we may venture to state with some confidence that both the sociologists and the reactionaries are wrong. It does not follow that human beings become less than human because their ideas appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we deduce that men are mindless solely from the fact that they are all of one mind. In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herd of bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings. Birds have ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... seemed to be looking on with the vacant stare of the mindless. He suffered himself to be led to the house, where he was fed like a child. It was in vain that Enid plied him with all kinds of questions. He had lost something—he would have no peace till he had found ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... were they chains, mighty to bind me fast; Now no blood in them burns, mindless of love, senseless of ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... swooped down upon the Berlin Valhalla. Nevertheless it has succeeded in seducing many minds, obscured by prejudices. It was hailed by "immanent" philosophers and anti-Semites out of political considerations and psychological predispositions, as well as by Christians mindless of their kin, by anti-church people of all kinds, and even by atheists of Jewish birth, who are ashamed of their kin and who are in the world like salt which has ...
— The Shield • Various
... half ironically she asked herself if Olive really suffered. No heart-pang was reflected in those blue mindless eyes; there was no heart to wound: only a little foolish vanity ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... recognised. I think the very cowboy in the farmyard—a broad-shouldered lad, with a good-natured mindless face, and prodigious wooden shoes like clumsy canoes—even the cowboy knows that I am to be Madame Lenoble of Cotenoir. Cotenoir is the Windsor Castle of this district; Beaubocage is only Frogmore. Yes, dear, the bond is signed and sealed. Even if ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... the Roses bushing round About her glowd, oft stooping to support Each Flour of slender stalk, whose head though gay Carnation, Purple, Azure, or spect with Gold, Hung drooping unsustaind, them she upstaies 430 Gently with Mirtle band, mindless the while, Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour, From her best prop so farr, and storm so nigh. Neerer he drew, and many a walk travers'd Of stateliest Covert, Cedar, Pine, or Palme, Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen Among thick-wov'n Arborets ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... We live as though we thought the spirit a doubtful matter. There are those who take pride in calling themselves materialists, but they are hardly as hopeless as those who are so indifferent that they have no opinion whatever. The man who thinks and cares is quite apt to come out right, but the mindless animal who only enjoys develops no recognizable soul. The seeking first is not in derogation of any true manhood. It is the full life, the whole life, that we are to compass—but life subordinated and controlled ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... instance, to show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but appeal "to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree." He repeats, in effect, Plato's argument about the life of the oyster, having pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it your good? Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is expected to answer instinctively, No! It is an argumentum ad hominem ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... its southern zone, The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone. No church-bell lent its Christian tone To the savage air, no social smoke Curled over woods of snow-hung oak. A solitude made more intense By dreary-voiced elements, The shrieking of the mindless wind, The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind, And on the glass the unmeaning beat Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet. Beyond the circle of our hearth No welcome sound of toil or mirth Unbound the spell, and testified Of human life and thought outside. We minded that ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... occur, a mindless desire to work grows irresistibly in me. I carry out my daily tasks as though as I were performing a mass. And I lose myself while doing so. Almost the way dreamers have lost themselves. But sometimes I notice that I have become ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... country, we applaud your creativity and your worldwide success and we support your freedom of expression but you do have a responsibility to assess the impact of your work and to understand the damage that comes from the incessant, repetitive, mindless violence and irresponsible conduct that permeates our ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and we stared each other in the eyes for several seconds before she—a Mussulman girl—remembered that she must not be seen, when, wrapping her veil around her head, she flew to the house. The vision was of such a transcendent beauty as I had, and have since, never seen in flesh and blood,—a mindless face, but of such exquisite proportion, color, and sweetness of modeling, with eyes of such lustrous brown, that I did not lose the vivid image of it, or the ecstatic impression it produced, for several days; it seemed to ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... scientific surgery to take no heed of men- 159:12 tal conditions and to treat the patient as if she were so much mindless matter, and as if matter were the only factor to be consulted? Had these 159:15 unscientific surgeons understood metaphysics, they would have considered the woman's state of mind, and not have risked such treatment. They would either 159:18 have allayed her fear or would have performed ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Staggering, unlanterned, from the cool Piraeus, With drunken shout. The remnants of the feast, The crumpled cushions and the broken wreathes, Lie scattered in yon shadowy court, whose stones Through the warm hours drink up the staining wine. The bridal oxen in their well-filled stalls Sleep, mindless of the happy weight they drew. The torch is charred; the garlands at the door, So gay at morning with their bright festoons, Hang limp and withered; and the joyous flutes Are empty of all sound. Only my brain Holds now in it's remote unsleeping ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... that the relations between Lincoln and Miss Todd were broken off for a time. He did go to Kentucky for a while, but this trip certainly was not due to insanity. Lincoln was never so mindless as some of his biographers would have us believe, and the breaking of the engagement was due to perfectly natural causes—the difference in temperament of the lovers, and Lincoln's inclination to procrastinate. After a time the strained relations ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the wild-beast tamer than of the kind firm teacher, as once it was. How long will they continue to suppose that you make a fine fighting-man, and a self-reliant, intelligent soldier, by treating him as a depraved child, as a rightless slave, as a mindless automaton, and by encouraging the public (whom he protects) to regard him as a low criminal ruffian to be classed with the broad-arrowed convict, and to be excluded from places where any loafing rotten lout may go.... When would a lawyer-ridden Army Council realize ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... heard precisely that tone from her before. One word from Douglas and she had become a zombie—a mindless muscle preparation that existed only to obey. Anger filled him—anger that one he loved could be ordered by someone who wasn't worth a third of her—anger that she obeyed—anger at his own impotence and ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... in check, where the power is based upon mental superiority; for the very superiority of the mind keeps alive the sense of humor and the sense of proportion. Not so the habit of money power. For money power is brutal, mindless. And as it is the only real power in any and all aristocracies, aristocracies ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... kindle in thee this unpitied love? Thy own warm blush within the water glows, With thee the coloured shadow comes and goes, Its empty being on thyself relies; 40 Step thou aside, and the frail charmer dies. Still o'er the fountain's watery gleam he stood, Mindless of sleep, and negligent of food; Still viewed his face, and languished as he viewed. At length he raised his head, and thus began To vent his griefs, and tell the woods his pain. 'You trees,' says he, 'and thou surrounding grove, Who oft have been ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... recovered, he thought of his pages and his people and his homestead and his family and he cried to Al-Hayfa, "Wallahi, I have sinned with a great sin when I left my suite in the desert; and Satan garred me forget them and the wine made me mindless of them and banished from my thought my folk and my home. And now 'tis my desire to fare and look upon my pages and to forgather with Yahya my cousin, the son of the King's sister and greet them and dismiss them to their homesteads, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... that in times of peace men have less need of one another than in seasons of war, and the crude argument closes with the cry: "The wars for my money." There is irony in this suggestion of the mercantile value of war on the lips of a spokesman of paupers. It is solely the impulsive mindless patriot who strains ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... it was almost possible to divine his slow, mindless nature—for there is expression in the very turn of a man's leg as he stands—and it was easy to see that he was guarding the little path down the cliff ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... though it looked now as if he would never live to reach the court. The papers had been whipping up a lot of anti-robe feeling, you could feel it behind the angry voices, see it in the narrowed eyes and clenched fists. The crowd was slowly changing into a mob, a mindless mob as yet, but capable of turning on him at ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... to think. They were all but mindless. Whatever they might be able to do in reference to worldly matters, they were unable to think, to compare doctrine with doctrine, or to reason in any respect whatever on religious matters. One young man, a candidate for the ministry, told me that he ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... church, or walking in the strange, dark, subject-procession to bless the fields, or cutting the young birch-trees for the feast of Frohenleichnam, it is always the same, the dark, powerful mystic, sensuous experience is the whole of him, he is mindless and bound within the absoluteness of the issue, the unchangeability of the great icy not-being which holds good for ever, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... my heart, up somewhere near my mouth, that I hear," said the boy with a short mindless laugh. "Maybe I am going to pieces. If I am I deserve ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... Achilles, mindless of thy friend, Neglecting, not the living, but the dead? Hasten, my fun'ral rites, that I may pass Through Hades' gloomy gates; ere those be done, The spirits and spectres of departed men Drive me far from ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... characterises the conduct of modern institutes of education reduces us all to one mindless level, reproducing ad nauseam what is known as 'average citizens.' This nation is already crawling with them; art, religion, letters, government, business, human ideals remain embryonic because the 'average citizen' ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... which all who look may now (viz. in consequence of the scientific victory of Darwin) behold advancing as a deluge black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulphing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless destruction."—A Candid Examination ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... leave Sauveterre early, fearing the weather, and were just starting, when, at the carriage-door, we beheld two figures, which we at once recognized as the returned pastor and his wife: a violent shower greeted them; but, mindless of it, there they stood, under their umbrellas, determined to make our acquaintance, and to thank my companion for a donation she had sent to the poor Protestants under his charge. His fine open, healthy countenance, and cheerful, good-humoured expression, gentlemanlike manners, and easy address, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... with histories so different from their own! They had not a notion how poor people feel, still less poor people poorer than before—or how they regard the rich who have what they have lost. They did not understand any huftian feeling—not even the silliness they called LOVE—a godless, mindless affair, fit only for the doll-histories invented by children: they had a feeling, or a feeling had them, till another feeling came and took its place. When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone, they felt as if it had never been; when it returned, they ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... interested him the most deeply, he had found May Webster a ready pupil; and when she differed from him she held her own with such merry defiance, that it gave her an added charm in his eyes. And now this mindless, fox-hunting squire was to carry her off, and life at Rudham would sink into one dead level of dulness. Thus it happened that he came ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... or I or both of us, were destined to imbibe these /Taduki/ fumes and see wonderful pictures of some past or future existence in which we were both concerned. This knowledge, she declared, had come to her while she was officiating in an apparently mindless condition as the priestess of the Kendah ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... to madden the beast, and, before I could wrench free, he had me clutched in an iron grip, my jacket torn into shreds. His jaws snapped at my face, but I had such purchase as to prevent their touching me, and mindless of the claws tearing at my flesh, I forced the animal's head back until the neck cracked, and the lips gave vent to a wild scream of agony. I dared not let go; dared not relax for an instant the exercise ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... some painter sit in future days, Some future poet meditate his lays! Not mindless of that distant age, renowned, When inspiration hovered o'er this ground, The haunt of him who sang, how spear and shield In civil conflict met on Bosworth field, And of that famous youth (full soon removed From earth!) by mighty Shakspeare's self approved. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... are yearly appreciating in value, mindless of the large acreage annually added to the supply. This is largely due to the fact that they are bought up and held for speculative purposes. However, there are still many farms in the hands of first purchasers from the government, and others still to be had directly from the government and others ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... if, as some believe, his remains may be traced as far back as the Eocene! But after this rude man of the Quaternary and Tertiary epochs had passed away there is a void, a period which to the imagination seems measureless, when sun and moon and stars looked on a waste and mindless world. When man once more reappears he seems to have been re-created on ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... and then broadening out into a long, rich, velvety laugh as smooth as a flowing stream. No one could hear that laugh unmoved. It rippled, it lilted, it died away, and rolled forth again until the most blase listener smiled in sympathy, and children in the streets haw-hawed in mindless glee. It was the laugh of Hannah—Mrs. 'Rastus Calhoun Breckenridge, as her husband was careful to explain; and he once so far forgot his dignity as to add, expansively, "We got de stifkit dat prove hit, Hannah an' me. We got mah'd, real ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... a very young thirteen—pretty and mindless as a Persian kitten—but developing rapidly a coquettish instinct for the value of a red ribbon in her dark curls, and the set of a bracelet on her plump arm. Beside her curves and curls and pretty frilled frocks, Dorothea, ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Canadian made during this lecture on hunting ethics. Furnishing such arguments to a professional harpooner was a waste of words. Ned Land stared at Captain Nemo and obviously missed his meaning. But the captain was right. Thanks to the mindless, barbaric bloodthirstiness of fishermen, the last baleen whale will someday disappear from ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... thou Adonis, did I not deserve "Most grateful thanks in smoking incense paid? "Mindless, nor thanks, nor incense yielded he; "And sudden anger in my bosom rag'd. "Irk'd at the slight, I instantly provide "That future times with less contempt behave: "And 'gainst them both my raging bosom burns. "Now pass'd they near a temple, long since ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... sponge of ways and channels, fought out of sight of sky or sun under the electric glare, fought out in a vast confusion by multitudes untrained in arms, led chiefly by acclamation, multitudes dulled by mindless labour and enervated by the tradition of two hundred years of servile security against multitudes demoralised by lives of venial privilege and sensual indulgence. They had no artillery, no differentiation into this force or that; the only weapon ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... saints below. Eternal reason then shall give her doom; And, sever'd wide, the tenants of the tomb Shall seek their portions with instinctive haste, Quick as the savage speeds along the waste. Then shall the golden hoard its trust betray, And they, that, mindless of that dreadful day, Boasted their wealth, its vanity shall know In the dread avenue of endless woe: While they whom moderation's wholesome rule Kept still unstain'd in Virtue's heavenly school, Who the calm sunshine of ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... and the vegetation burst into leaf and bud and bloom, quickly, for its growth instincts knew in their mindless way how short was the time to grow and reproduce before the brown death of summer came. The prowlers were suddenly gone one day, to follow the spring north, and for a week men could walk and work outside the stockade without the protection ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... futile and inhuman subject. It trains the mind—it teaches boys to think, they say. It doesn't. In reality it is a cut and dried subject easy to fit into a school curriculum. Its sacrosanctity saves educationalists an enormous amount of trouble, and its chief use is to enable mindless young men from the universities to make a dishonest living by teaching it to others, who in their turn may teach ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... mist into the mirk The glimmering combers roll. Almost these mindless waters work As though they had a soul— Almost as though they leagued to whelm Our flag beneath their green Then welcome Fate's discourtesy Whereby ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... the worst thing he could have done. There was a chance that he could have reached his Dart, had he thought of it, and soared aloft out of reach. But he thought of nothing. All he wanted to do, in that abysmal fear that can still make a mindless animal out of a civilized man, was to run and hide—to get away from the fearful monster that had risen up to glare at him with those stony, pitiless eyes, and to reach for him with two-fingered ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... the race as that which all who look may now behold, advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation.'[32] ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... command thee to obey me! it is for vengeance that I seek thee! This youth whom I would sweep from my path has crossed me, despite my spells:—this thing of purple and broidery, of smiles and glances, soulless and mindless, with no charm but that of beauty—accursed be it!—this insect—this Glaucus—I tell thee, by Orcus and by Nemesis, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... were watching the struggle with interest, but there was no warning from them. Whatever called Kaydessa into such mindless and will-less answer did not touch the animals. And neither Apache felt it. So perhaps only Kaydessa's people were subject to it, as she had thought. How far away was that machine? Not too near, for otherwise the coyotes would have traced the ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... Banish this unutterable folly of freedom, and control the breeding of human flesh as we control the output of beef and of mutton. Then the face of the world will alter. Millions of money is annually spent in order that mindless humanity, congenital lunatics and madmen, may be fed and housed and kept alive. Their existences are to themselves less pleasurable than that of the beasts, they are a source of agony to those who have borne them; but they live to old age and devour ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... attention was riveted on an object up the street. Around a bend a few hundred yards away a huge wild devil of a thing swung unsteadily, recklessly, almost striking the curb and lamp-post; and then, righting itself, it came on with a rush—a mindless destroyer. Now on one side of the street, now in the middle, now on the other side; gliding along through the twilight, barely to be seen, creeping nearer and nearer through the shadows, now again on the wrong ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... And mindless of the scorn it brings, For 't is in desert land That angels come with sheltering wings To lead ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... beautiful to her, the straight, powerful nape of the neck, the delicate shape of the back of the head, the black hair. The way the neck sprang from the strong, loose shoulders was beautiful. There was something mindless but intent about the forward reach of his head. His face seemed ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... children of Greece and England and America have read with tingling blood the tales which stirred their souls, by what name would we call him? By that name let him stand forth impaled upon the scorn of an age that has not lost the grace of reverence, who, mindless of majestic age, the dignity of letters, an influence unrivalled and benign, associations tender and most holy, upon these venerable and sacred books spits his shallow scepticism, spumes his spleenful sarcasm, and smuts them with his ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... &c. (be inattentive) 458. put away thought; unbend the mind, relax the mind, divert the mind, veg out. Adj. vacant, unintellectual, unideal[obs3], unoccupied, unthinking, inconsiderate, thoughtless, mindless, no-brain, vacuous; absent &c. (inattentive) 458; diverted; irrational &c. 499; narrow-minded &c. 481. unthought of, undreamt 'of, unconsidered; off one's mind; incogitable[obs3], not to be thought of. Phr. absence d'esprit; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... girl dancing passed and repassed me, and my glance rested on her idly, even cynically. For she seemed so happy, and at that time happiness won my languid wonder, if ingenuously exhibited. To be happy seemed almost to be mindless. But by degrees I found myself watching this girl, and more closely. Another dance began. She joined it with another partner. But she seemed just as pleased with him as with her former one. She would not ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... cloud or roving wind from the California Gulf, and these only in winter. In summer the sky travails with thunderings and the flare of sheet lightnings to win a few blistering big drops, and once in a lifetime the chance of a torrent. But you have not known what force resides in the mindless things until you have known a desert wind. One expects it at the turn of the two seasons, wet and dry, with electrified tense nerves. Along the edge of the mesa where it drops off to the valley, dust devils begin ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... his fondness for apparently futile amusements, such as the sailing of paper boats. This was, in the truest sense of the word, child- like; not, as it is frequently called and considered, childish. That is to say, it was not a mindless triviality, but the genuine child's power of investing little things with imaginative interest; the same power, though differently devoted, which produced much of his poetry. Very possibly in the paper boat he saw the magic bark of Laon ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... flattery and indiscriminate assentation.' [Footnote: August 10, 1749. [In the New English Dictionary a quotation for the word is given as late as 1859. I. Taylor, in his Logic in Theology, p. 265, says: 'A safer anchorage may be found than the shoal of mindless assentation']] The word is well worthy to ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... contingencies of the future, we may say that the next stage in the unfolding processes of nature is not the destruction of our consciousness, but issues in a purer life, elevates us to a spiritual rank. It is just to argue that if mindless law or boundless fortuity made this world and brought us here, it may as well make, or have made, another world, and bear us there. Law or chance excluding God from the question may as easily make us immortal as mortal. Reasoning by ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... wedding. The Duchess of York, though both an heiress and a beauty, left no mark on her time. She was by profession at least a Lollard; and since Lollardism was not now walking in silver slippers, this says something for her. But in all other respects she appears to have been one of those beautiful, mindless women whom clever men frequently marry. Perhaps no woman with a decided character of her own would have ventured on such a husband as Edward Duke ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... tree-soul, and his gods are not human. His instinct still is to nail skulls and trophies to the sacred tree, deep in the forest. The tree of life and death, tree of good and evil, tree of abstraction and of immense, mindless life; tree of ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... consolations," I replied, "since the mindless do not suffer. But if such is the case, how do you account for what you and poor Savage saw that night in the Town of the Child? It was not altogether a phantasy, for the dress you described was the same we saw her wearing at the Feast of ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... committing acts of hostility upon the Graces. He throws anywhere, but down his throat, whatever he means to drink, and only mangles what he means to carve. Inattentive to all the regards of social life, he mistimes or misplaces everything. He disputes with heat, and indiscriminately, mindless of the rank, character, and situation of those with whom he disputes; absolutely ignorant of the several gradations of familiarity or respect, he is exactly the same to his superiors, his equals, and his inferiors; and therefore, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... your numbers do but raise Confusion and divided will; In storm, the mindless deep obeys Not multitudes but single skill; In calm, your numbers, closely pressed. Do ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... glory of the sunset in the Eternal Painter's chaotic last moments of his day's work overspread the western sky, and from the furnace in which he dipped his brush came a blade of rich, blazing gold through the pass and lay across the trail. It enveloped her as, half running, mindless of her footing, slipping as she went, she hurried toward the other ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer |
