"Unedifying" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... each other within the four walls of Mrs Gowler's nursing home much as anywhere else, although in each twenty-four hours there usually occurred what were to Mavis's sensitive eyes and ears unedifying sights, agonised cries of women in torment. All day and night, with scarcely any intermission, could be heard the wailing of one or more babies in different rooms in the house. Mrs Gowler's nursing home attracted numberless girls from all ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... unedifying episodes in the career of a rising politician, public attention was diverted by the excitement of a State election. Since the abortive attempts to commit the Democratic party to the convention system in 1835, party opinion had grown ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... reading, some writing, very bad orthography, embroidery, and heraldry; but they were very good-natured, and had a number of pensionnaires who seemed to have all run wild together in the corridors and gardens, and played all sorts of tricks on the nuns. Sometimes Cecile told me some of these, and very unedifying they were,—acting ghosts in the passages, fastening up the cell doors, ringing the bells at unearthly hours, putting brushes or shoes in the beds, and the ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Not an unedifying place for the trial of war-criminals! There is little at Leipzig to give English witnesses an idea of a flourishing or promising Germany. A true study of the after-the-war Germany would naturally take in Leipzig and the other ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... British "Arts" degrees. The ordinary Oxford, Cambridge, or London B.A. has a useless smattering of Greek, he cannot read Latin with any comfort, much less write or speak that tongue; he knows a few unedifying facts round and about the classical literature, he cannot speak or read French with any comfort; he has an imperfect knowledge of the English language, insufficient to write it clearly, and none of German, he has a queer, old-fashioned, and quite useless knowledge of certain ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Though very possibly that frequent murmuring of ours: Ah! It's too sad! is but another way of putting the words: Stand aside, please, you're too depressing! Or, again, is it that we avoid the sight of things as they are, avoid the unedifying, because of what may be called "the uncreative instinct," that safeguard and concomitant of a civilisation which demands of us complete efficiency, practical and thorough employment of every second ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... my friend—impenitent, hopeless. I have myself tried him, spoke with him, reasoned with him, but never was my humility, my patience, so strongly tried. His language I will not repeat—but canting knave, hypocrite, rascal attor—no, it is useless and unedifying to repeat it. Now go, my friend, and do not forget that precious tract which you have thrust ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... does such a scene as this exhibit, when compared with the dull, formal, unedifying, and often indecent manner, in which funeral parties assemble ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... possesses over history, Sidney goes on, is that while the historian must stick to his facts, which too frequently are unedifying, the poet can and does create a world better than nature, and presents to his reader ideal figures of human conduct such as Pylades, Cyrus, and Æneas.[387] This is Sidney's application of Aristotle's assertion that history is particular and poetic ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... mention an extraordinary circumstance that happened in the last week. I received in a parcel—No, I will recite it you as I told it to Mr. Windham, who, fortunately, saw and came up to me—fortunately, I say, as the business of the day was very unedifying, and as Mrs. Ord much wished to hear some of ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... pay visiphone. And again there were different levels of awareness in his mind—one consciously and defensively cynical, and one frightened at the revelation of his unimportance, and the third finding the others an unedifying spectacle. ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... efficient. What could Lionel frustrate, after all, and what intelligent or authoritative step was he capable of taking? Mixed with all that now haunted her was her consciousness of what his own absence at such an hour represented in the way of the unedifying. He might be at some sporting club or he might be anywhere else; at any rate he was not where he ought to be at three o'clock in the morning. Such the husband such the wife, she said to herself; and ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... all the fault of Antoinette. Why can't she cook in a middle-class, unedifying way? All this comes from having in the house a woman whose soul is in ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... has been said, one may clearly perceive the absurdity of the doctrine of this seditious, discontented, hot-headed, ungifted, unedifying preacher, asserting 'that the grand security of the matrimonial state, and the pillar upon which it stands, is founded upon the wife's belief of an absolute unconditional fidelity to the husband;' by which ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... at Athens pursued these unedifying tactics in the firm conviction that the cause of M. Venizelos was their cause; which was true enough in the sense that on him alone they could count to bring Greece into the War without conditions. As to the Entente publics, M. Venizelos was their man in a less sober ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... the miracle of miracles, a second mystery superimposed on the first. If, on the other hand, he falls within the system, he might surely manage to convey to his disciples some glimmering notion of his place in it. The birth-stories of Gods are always grotesque and unedifying, but that is because they belong to folk-lore. If this God does not belong to folk-lore, surely his relation to the Veiled Being might be indicated without impropriety. Mr. Wells, as we have seen, hints that his reticence may be due to the fact that ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... intellectual power, his tale-telling faculty, his bonhomie, and other good qualities, Diderot has not escaped it—has, in fact, rushed upon it and compelled it to come in. It is comparatively of little moment that the main ostensible theme—the very unedifying account of the loves, or at least the erotic exercises, of Jacques and his master—is deliberately, tediously, inartistically interrupted and "put off." The great feature of the book, which has redeemed it with some who would otherwise condemn it entirely, the Arcis ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... paraphrase, and is now superseded. It first appeared in the form of extracts, which were handed in MS. about the Court until they reached the Queen, who reprimanded the translator for corrupting the morals of her ladies by translating the most unedifying passages, and banished him to his country seat until he should have translated the whole poem. His most valuable work is one which was pub. in 1769 by a descendant, under the title of Nugae Antiquae (Old-time Trifles), ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Greek on the previous day which filled his mind, and he frowned as he recalled it. He opened the little wicket gate and went through the plantation to the house, doing his best to shake off the recollection of the remarkable and unedifying discussion he had had ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... listened with intense interest, how Emlyn Stower had introduced her to the devil, who was clad in red hose and looked like a black boy with a hump on his back and a tuft of red hair hanging from his nose, also many unedifying details of her interviews ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... makes a false offer to assassinate the King to test Onaelia, again in 3.3 when he pretends to agree to murder Sebastian and Onaelia in order to placate the Queen and finally in 5.1 when he tells the King that the murder has been carried out. Scene 3.3 shows a further unedifying side of Balthazar when he bursts in on the King and stabs a servant and refuses to express remorse as the servant is a mere groom. On a different note, the character is also used to comic effect, especially in 4.2 when he acts out bawdy dialogue with Cornego. ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... phonograph formed part of the musical programme. I do not approve of this demoralising instrument except to a very limited extent. The cylinders usually gyrate with records of fatuous music-hall songs, unedifying coster-airs and farcical speeches. The vox humana interpreting national melodies is infinitely better. What vigour and illustrative expression the islanders can throw into their songs! I have but to shut my eyes to see the policeman of Staffin ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... traders are German, the gentry Hungarian, and the poor Slavonic. The traders pick holes in the gentry and the poor folks hate them both. He saw the heady young squires of the Alfoeld[7] idle away their time at school in unedifying contrast to the diligent sober conduct of himself and his friends, and yet the masters treated them with the greatest distinction. Some of them scarcely attended the lectures at all, and yet they sat on the front benches. They were able to have private lessons, ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... exaggeration to declare, that he who proposes to abolish classical studies, proposes to render, in a great measure, inert and unedifying, the mass of English literature for three centuries; to rob us of the glory of the past, and much of the instruction of future ages; to blind us to excellencies which few may hope to equal, and none to surpass; to annihilate associations which are interwoven ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... passions, at least strengthens our yearnings after imaginary good, and lends wings to our desires, by which we, "at one bound, high overleap all bound" of actual suffering. But Mr. Crabbe does neither. He gives us discoloured paintings of life; helpless, repining, unprofitable, unedifying distress. He is not a philosopher, but a sophist, a misanthrope in verse; a namby-pamby Mandeville, a Malthus turned metrical romancer. He professes historical fidelity; but his vein is not dramatic; nor does ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... learning. It may be the Oxford authorities requested his lordship to retire; let bygones be bygones. His youthful son, the present Lord Walham, is now at Christchurch, reading with the greatest assiduity. Let us not be too particular in narrating his father's unedifying frolics of a quarter of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mean. A strong spirit of practical poetry and romance was upon me; and I thought that a commonplace approach in the open day would have rendered my return to the scenes of my early life a very stale and unedifying matter. I left the inn at seven o'clock, and as I had only five miles to walk, I would just arrive about nine, allowing myself to saunter on at the rate of two miles and half per hour. My sensations, indeed, as I went along, were singular; and ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... continually to have some great public show or solemnity, some banquet, or some procession or other in the town to please them, coaxing his countrymen like children, with such delights and pleasures as were not, however, unedifying. Besides that, every year he sent out threescore galleys, on board of which there went numbers of the citizens, who were in pay eight months, at the same time learning and practicing ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... O King, Princes and People! ... Whereas it has unhappily occurred, to the wonder and sorrow of many, that the holy Spouse of the divine Nagaya is delayed in her desired departure, by the unforeseen opposition and unedifying contumacy of Sah-luma, Poet Laureate of this realm; and lest it may be perchance imagined by the uninitiated, that the maiden is in any way unwilling to fulfil her glorious destiny, the High and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... later the strange and unedifying sight of Lady Claudia Territon and Mr. Lane, mounted on a very rickety old "sociable," presented itself to the gaping gaze of several laborers in the park. Claudia was in her most boisterous spirits; Eugene, by one of the quick transitions of his nature, was hardly less elate. Up-hill they toiled ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... precise period in the history of the Christian Church cures of demoniacal possession or similar displays of miraculous power may have occurred. We have avoided controversy on that head, because it comprehends questions not more doubtful than unedifying. Little benefit could arise from attaining the exact knowledge of the manner in which the apostate Jews practised unlawful charms or auguries. After their conquest and dispersion they were remarked among the Romans for such superstitious practices; and the like, for What we know, may continue to ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... sitting just outside the door, employed as she generally was in her leisure time at lace work, of the style which had been so fashionable during the reign of the late murdered King. How Marguerite had first learnt this "unedifying work," we know not but as she used to work for the family of one of the King's officers, and had seen the ladies do it, she soon with very little instruction learnt to do it well. Very pretty Marguerite looked bending ...
— Legend of Moulin Huet • Lizzie A. Freeth
... flight of thought and the deep inwardness of feeling which are found in some passages in the Wisdom and in the Psalms; but, on the other hand, we meet with a pedantic asceticism which is far from lovely, and with pious wishes the greediness of which is ill-concealed; and these unedifying features are the dominant ones of the system. Monotheism is worked out to its furthest consequences, and at the same time is enlisted in the service of the narrowest selfishness; Israel participates in the sovereignty of the One God. ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... made his policy subservient to their pleasure, contriving continually to have some great public show or solemnity, some banquet, or some procession or other in the town to please them, coaxing his countrymen like children, with such delights and pleasures as were not, however, unedifying. Besides that every year he sent out threescore galleys, on board of which there went numbers of the citizens, who were in pay eight months, learning at the same time and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... and offenses at which it is directed: the first being that we have numbers of young gentlemen with really wonderful powers of perception and expression, but to whom there is wholly wanting a "bedeutendes Individuum"—so that their productions are most unedifying and unsatisfactory. But ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... will not follow this unedifying conversation further. Suffice it that Mr. Coombes was very satisfactorily disposed of, and they had a snug little time round the fire. Then Mrs. Coombes went to get the tea, and Jennie sat coquettishly on the arm of Mr. Clarence's chair until the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... directly in the field of verbal criticism—it is argued that because a large number of words are found in this book, found elsewhere alone in the post-exilian writers, (as Daniel or Nehemiah,) therefore the author of the book must surely be post-exilian too. It would be unedifying, and is happily unnecessary, to review this in detail—with a literature so very limited as are the Hebrew writings cotemporary with Solomon: these few, dealing with other subjects, other ideas, necessitating therefore another character of words, it takes no scholar to see that any argument ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... occasionally conversaziones. Dancing appears to me rational, and indeed highly intellectual, in comparison with such talk; and that I am as fond of as ever, but that has not begun yet, and I find these soirees causantes drearily unedifying. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... given his simplicity, to attempt in the least to guide his hand. If he didn't outlive his nephew—and he was older, though, as would appear, so much more virtuous—his inherited property, she being dead, would accrue to that unedifying person. There was the pity; and as for the question of the disposition of Henry's savings without the initiative of Henry's intelligence, in that, alas, was the terror. Henry's savings—there had been no terror for her, naturally, in beautifully husbanding ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... maintain a calm and composed demeanour. The gladiatorial conflicts in which these two combatants took part were often a source of rare amusement even outside the pale of the Presbytery, and, inasmuch as they were both well fortified with weighty and telling arguments, the spectacle was not always unedifying. On the question of Union, as is well known, they took diametrically opposite views. Many a passage of arms passed between them on this questio vexata, while the younger and less athletic backers surrounded the arena, waiting the shock with eager ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... insisting, until she was forcibly ejected from the kitchen, on throwing lettuces into the Irish stew. Finally, one Sunday afternoon, a policeman wandering through some waste ground, a deserted brickfield behind Flowery End, came upon an unedifying spectacle. There were madam and an elderly Irish soldier sprawling blissfully comatose with an empty flask of gin and an empty bottle of whisky lying between them. They were taken to the hospital and put to bed. The next morning, the lady, ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... of animated nature is confined to what we learn by experience on the earth, yet it is a most entertaining, and by no means unedifying, occupation, to seek to apply to the exceedingly diversified conditions prevailing in the other planets, as astronomical observations reveal them to us, the principles, types, and limitations that govern ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... that it may easily happen for both to be compelled to live under one roof. At the same time it is not to be denied that they play into each other's hands to their mutual benefit; and it is this that produces the very unedifying spectacle which only too many men exhibit, and that makes the world to go as it goes. A man who is unintelligent is very likely to show his perfidy, villainy and malice; whereas a clever man understands how to conceal these qualities. And how often, on the other hand, does a perversity ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... saints to the highest bidder.[1] Vasari assures me that the chief solace of the old prodigal in his end of days was to dress his young wife's hair in fantastic coils and braids. A prodigal he was—true Peruginese in that— prodigal of the delicate meats his soul afforded. His end may have been unedifying; it must at least have been very pitiful. Nowadays his name stands upon the Corso Vannucci of the town he uttered, and in the court wall of a little recessed and colonnaded house in the Via Deliziosa. Meantime his frescos drop ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French critic, M. Sainte-Beuve, and a very inadequate estimate of it in my judgment it was. And its inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in our English way it left out of sight the double sense ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... a third case. Then a very unedifying thing occurred. Surely, surely, this was Sybilla's disobedient day. She saw a forbidden book glimmering in old, gilded leather—she saw its classic back turned mockingly toward her—the whole allure of the volume was ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... claimed her, on the ground that she was a lady and was an American on her mother's side. Yet she insisted on calling herself a professional, because singing was her profession, and society thought this so strange that it at once became suspicious and invented wild and unedifying stories about her; and the reporters haunted the lobby of her hotel, and gossiped with their friends the detectives, who also spent much time there in a professional way for the general good, and were generally what English workmen call ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... being as helpful as they could be made. The chief fault is extreme rapidity. I long ago gave up the attempt to say the Confession at that pace; and now I say it, and the Lord's Prayer, close together, and never hear a word of the Absolution. Also many of the Lessons are quite unedifying. ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood |
