"Slow-witted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cushions, and placed in the most becoming light, until the quick, unhappy day dawns when another "artistic temperament" comes to the fore, and the first retires perforce, if not a better, certainly a sadder, man, for all that has been happening unto him. Now comes the time when one sees the slow-witted creature sinking gradually into the mere haunter of the Gaiety bar: when the sacred lamp burns brightly, and causes him to recollect, sadly indeed, the days that are no more. Or we find the man who has learned his bitter lesson, and recognising that he still ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... after divine service, a car waits them at the nearest street corner, and they slip into it, don trilby hats and civilian overcoats, and sweep outside the restricted area at a haste that causes the slow-witted country policeman to puzzle over the speed of the car and forget its number while groping ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... the handle of her parasol with the lorgnette. It was distinctly a sign of approval. These Americans were never slow-witted. She swung the parasol to and fro, slowly, like ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... five years old and no baby at all; but his appearance on this planet was in the nature of a complete surprise to all parties concerned, and he is spoiled accordingly. He has a square head and jaw, square shoulders, square hands and feet. He is red and white and solid and stolid and slow-witted, as the young of his class commonly are, and will make a bulwark of the nation in course of time, I should think; for England has to produce a few thousand such square babies every year for use in the colonies and in the standing army. Albert ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... he. "We have got our case—one of the most remarkable in our collection. But, dear me, how slow-witted I have been, and how nearly I have committed the blunder of my lifetime! Now, I think that with a few missing links my chain ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... became more and more as he was before his marriage. He grew thin and pale, silent and slow-witted. Jofrid's despair increased each day, for it seemed as if everything was to be taken from her. Her love for Toenne came back, however, when she saw him unhappy. "What is any of it worth to me if Toenne is ruined?" she thought. "It is better to go into slavery with ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... bit slow-witted," Prescott suggested. "I'm afraid he has always been going through life wondering at the doings of others, and especially at the success of unprincipled men he has ...
— The High School Boys' Training Hike • H. Irving Hancock
... Slow-witted as Belding was, and absorbed in his own feelings, he yet saw plainly that his advent was disturbing to these men. They looked alarmed, exchanged glances, and then quickly turned to him. One of them, a tall, rugged ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... had these verses before him, in either Suetonius or some other work, but seems to have been too slow-witted to appreciate the double entendre in subegit, which may signify voluptuary as well as military prowess. Hence, though he might have turned the expression exactly by [Greek: hupaegageto] he contented himself with the ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... yet it was easily explained. Instead of standing on the pedestal, the Demeter was beside it, and even the slow-witted goldsmith inferred from this fact that the robbers had intended to steal it and placed it on the floor for that purpose, but were prevented from accomplishing their design by the interference of Hermon ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... difference of attitude is easily explained. Only once in Paris did I have cause to blush for my American citizenship. I had become quite friendly with a young man from Luxemburg whom I had met at the big cafe. He was a stolid, slow-witted fellow, but, as we say, with a heart of gold. He and I grew attached to each other and were together frequently. He was a great admirer of the United States and never grew tired of talking to me about the country and asking for information. It was his intention to ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... that the British—whom foreigners delight to call stodgy and slow-witted,—have produced more high-class poetry than any other nation in the history of the world. English literature is instinctively romantic, as French literature is instinctively classic. The glory of French literature is prose; the glory of English ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... of grass-land," we are told, "the Board of Agriculture proposes to allocate a number of horses to agricultural counties." The idea of allocating some of our incurable golfers to this purpose does not appear to have suggested itself to our slow-witted authorities. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... Please make haste to remember!" pleaded Nealie, feeling as if she would really have to take hold of this slow-witted man, and shake the information out of him if he did not hurry up ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... a rationalist, and followed Occam in denying all objective reality to universals, which he regarded as mere words. The aim of his logic is represented as having been the devising of rules for the discovery of syllogistic middle terms; this system for aiding slow-witted persons became known as the pons asinorum. The parts of logic which he treated with most minuteness are modal propositions and modal syllogisms. In commenting on Aristotle's Ethics he dealt in a very independent manner ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... slow-witted as well as ugly, had had his experiences; he had carried weights both in the army and in other institutions which are officially described as His Majesty's, and had seen other men carry them too. From the set of Beaumaroy's figure as he arrived home on at least two occasions ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... his thoughts will rise with surer and more human strength. There is not an existence about us but at first seems colourless, dreary, lethargic: what can our soul have in common with that of an elderly spinster, a slow-witted ploughman, a miser who worships his gold? Can any connection exist between such as these and a deep-rooted feeling, a boundless love for humanity, an interest time cannot stale? But let a Balzac ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... old man, who had jest dropped in and who wuz kinder deef and slow-witted, asked, "What it is about anyway? what do the wimmen ask for when they are pounded and ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... McTeague was over thirty now, sluggish and slow-witted at best. What new trade could he learn at ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... I cannot understand how it is that I have only now acquired a clear conception of what these gentry are, when I had almost daily before my eyes in this town such an excellent specimen of them—my brother Peter—slow-witted and hide-bound in prejudice—. (Laughter, uproar and hisses. MRS. STOCKMANN Sits coughing assiduously. ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... slow-witted person: "Duns Scotus," a subtle philosopher of the 13th century. His method of reasoning was very popular in the schools during the Middle Ages, and a very skillful hair-splitter was called a Dunse; but at last, through the influence of the antagonists ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... diversity of method in Madame Bovary, though the story is so simple. What does it amount to, that story? Charles Bovary, a simple and slow-witted young country doctor, makes a prudent marriage, and has the fortune to lose his tiresome and elderly wife after no long time. Then he falls in love with the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, a pretty and fanciful ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... lived on the edge of the great salt marsh alone with her grand-parents, for her mother was dead. The yellow old couple were slow-witted Minorcans, part pagan, part Catholic, and wholly ignorant: their minds rarely rose above the level of their orange trees and their fish-nets. Felipa's father was a Spanish sailor, and as he had died only the year before, the child's Spanish was fairly correct, and we could converse with her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... plight of one poor boy, older than the rest, called Smike, a drudge whom starvation and ill-treatment had rendered dull and slow-witted, aroused all Nicholas's pity. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... to excite the interest and ultimately to win the co-operation of the New Yorker. His object in enlisting this support was now perfectly clear to the victim of his duplicity. Barnes had admitted that he was bound by a promise to aid the prisoner in an effort to escape from the house; even a slow-witted person would have reached the conclusion that a partial understanding at least existed between captive and champion. Sprouse staked everything on that conviction. Through Barnes he counted on effecting an entrance to ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... particular act will seem ridiculous to any particular class, or how long the sense of incongruity will in any case persist. Acts, for instance, which aim at producing exalted emotional effect among ordinary slow-witted people—Burke's dagger, Louis Napoleon's tame eagle, the German Kaiser's telegrams about Huns and mailed fists—may do so, and therefore be in the end politically successful, although they produce spontaneous laughter ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... reply. Whether with reason or not, he had the reputation for being slow-witted, in spite of the fact that he was ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... Stanton that had been so thoroughly fulfilled. In spite of themselves her irresistible grace, wit, and humor created continuous and irrepressible merriment at their table, which Ida seconded with a tact and piquancy but little inferior to that of Miss Burton herself. Straightforward and rather slow-witted Stanton rubbed his eyes and vowed between the first hearty laughs he had known for many a long day that he was practised upon, and that he intended to have Miss Burton indicted as a witch, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... degree are proportionately lacking in the English character, which thereby incurs their contempt. Having been over-complimented on their own humour, they have determined that the Englishman is slow-witted, with no sense of fun—an opinion in itself so lacking in appreciation of its own absurdity as to be self-confounding. Too well assured of their own chivalrousness (a foible which they share with all peoples) they know the Englishman to be a domestic tyrant, ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... proverbs, the Ahir is held to be treacherous and false to his engagements. They are also regarded as stupid because they seldom get any education, retain their rustic and half-aboriginal dialect, and on account of their solitary life are dull and slow-witted in company. 'The barber's son learns to shave on the Ahir's head.' 'The cow is in league with the milkman and lets him milk water into the pail.' The Ahirs are also hot-tempered, and their propensity for drinking often results in affrays, when they break each ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... darkness. Now, as I stood with scanty breath—for few men could have won that climb—at the top of the long defile, and the bottom of the mountain gorge all of myself, and the pain of it, and the cark of my discontent fell away into wonder and rapture. For I cannot help seeing things now and then, slow-witted as I have a right to be; and perhaps because it comes so rarely, the sight dwells with me ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... nullified by the superior tactical and strategical acumen of his antagonists, the result being that the German airman, who has merely been trained along certain lines, who is in many cases nothing more than a cog-wheel in a machine, and who is proverbially slow-witted, has concluded that he is no match for the airmen of the Allies. He found from bitter experience that nothing afforded the Anglo-French military aviators such keen delight as to lie in wait for a "rover," and then to swoop into the air to ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... spat a mouthful of tobacco juice through the open window, flinching before the boy's steady glance. He was a mild-natured man at best, whose chief sin was his softness. It would not have entered his slow-witted head to protest against the accusations of his wife. When they stung him into revolt he ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow |
