"Unimaginative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her bold and unimaginative spirit somewhat daunted by the ghostly silence of the house. Sylvia tiptoed to the swinging-door and pushed it open. Yes, there was the pantry, like the kitchen, in chaotic disorder, tissue paper and excelsior thick on the floor, and entangled ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... ideas of her peculiar class. She preserved her conception of what was right in drawing-room chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in every relation of life with a simple and luminous honesty and conviction, with an immense unimaginative inflexibility—as a tailor-bird builds its nest or a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... on to some institution for the care of boys—an orphan school or a training ship. Only the most sensitive are shocked and distressed by the sight of hard conditions of life it all, and as a rule boys have an extraordinarily unimaginative way of taking things as they see them, and not thinking much or ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... establishment lies, drinks, steals, and supports twenty satiated relatives at your expense. That would mean the making of you; for, after all, Jack, you are no genius—you're a plain, non-partisan, uninspired, clean-built, wholesome citizen, thank God!—the sort whose unimaginative mission is to pitch in with eighty-odd millions of us and, like the busy coral creatures, multiply with all your might, and make this little old Republic the greatest, biggest, finest article that an overworked world has ever yet ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... it was no pleasure to sit down to eat by herself, and for her midday meal she was satisfied to have a mutton chop with a potato—that hideously monotonous mutton chop and potato which so many millions of unimaginative Anglo-Saxons are content to swallow on each recurring day. And Mrs. Fay, her landlady, had a soul; and her skill in cooking was her pride and glory. Cookery was to her what poetry and the worship of Humanity, and Esoteric ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... imitation of indifference should falter in their books, intimidated by the opinions of those who stayed at home? They rarely summon the courage to attack those heroic dummies which are not soldiers but idols set up in a glorious battlefield that never existed except as a romance among the unimaginative; the fine figures and the splendid war that were air-built of a rapture. These authors who were soldiers faced the real War, but they dare not deride the noble and popular figments which lived but ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... woman made me appear quite new to myself, inasmuch as, in conversations with my almost maternal friend, I began to think I was of a somewhat cold nature, a nature which in comparison with hers seemed rather dry, unproductive and unimaginative, a ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... individual of between fifty and sixty years of age, was gaunt with recent sickness, patient and unimaginative in aspect. He preached extemporarily, with the aid of notes; and it cannot be said that his discourse was remarkable for interest, at any rate in its beginning. Doubtless the sparse congregation, so prone to slumber, discouraged ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... It looked frightfully steep, and whenever she thought of him descending that trail, worn and perhaps ill, her heart ached with anxiety. But Redfield rambled on comfortably, explaining the situation to the doctor, who, being a most unimaginative person, appeared to take it all as ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... force—like Rodin himself. That is why these kindred spirits converse across the years, as do the Alpine peaks in that striking parable of Turgenieff's. No doubt in bronze the Balzac will arouse less wrath from the unimaginative; in plaster it produces the effect of some surging ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... adieu in a few curt words, and made his way homeward through the sweet spring evening feeling half-ruffled, half-amused, as any other strong, unimaginative man might who has been menaced by a vague and ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a happy one. The literature of the sea presents no more thrilling chapter than that which, describing the passage of the great frigate through the narrow channel, gives every detail with such vividness and power that the most unimaginative cannot merely see ship, shore, and foaming water, but almost hear the roaring of the wind, the creaking of the cordage, and the dashing of the waves against the breakers. As he read on the listener's interest ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... the crisis which will follow the rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords must be either strangely unimaginative or else they must be strangely ignorant of British history and of the British Constitution. The control of finance by the representative Assembly is the keystone of all that constitutional fabric upon which and within which all of us here have dwelt ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... facility and lightning rapidity. Today, more than ever, time is on the side of the expeditious. We can no longer take the risk of giving much support to the scoffers—to that breed of unimaginative souls who thought Robert Fulton was a fool for harnessing a paddlewheel to a boiler, who thought Henry Ford was a fool for putting an internal combustion engine on wheels, who thought Samuel Langley was a fool for designing a contraption ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... "This family paper was committed to my care by Sir Charles Baskerville, whose sudden and tragic death some three months ago created so much excitement in Devonshire. I may say that I was his personal friend as well as his medical attendant. He was a strong-minded man, sir, shrewd, practical, and as unimaginative as I am myself. Yet he took this document very seriously, and his mind was prepared for just such an end as ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... but really Aunt Ann was great." She could have made the well-loved Colonel miserable by translating for him into the tongue of man the language of the actress on the stairs. "I wonder," she reflected, "if all men are that blind, or only the heroic or unimaginative." ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... neither golf, hockey nor tennis, and had never ridden to hounds, her demeanour was that of a little rustic princess benignly doing her social duty. The only reason why she did not appear like this to the Lavingtons was that, immutably unimaginative as they were, they knew that she wasn't a princess, was, indeed, only the odd appendage of an odd celebrity with whom their friend had chosen, oddly, to fall in love. They weren't perplexed, because, since he had fallen in love with her, she was placed. But they, in the complete contrast ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... humour for working that day, and I had just dipped the nib of my pen into the ink-bottle when I heard some one ring. Should any one ever read these pages written by an unimaginative old man, he will be sure to laugh at the way that bell keeps ringing through my narrative, without ever announcing the arrival of a new personage or introducing any unexpected incident. On the stage things are managed on the reverse principle. Monsieur Scribe ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... realize that making "crimes," and manufacturing "criminals" from honest men, is not discipline, is not making soldiers, is not improving the Army—is not common ordinary sanity and sense? When would they break their dull, unimaginative, hide-bound—no, tape-bound—souls from the ideas that prevailed before (and murdered) the Crimean Army.... The Army is not now the sweepings of the jails, and more in need of the wild-beast tamer than of the kind firm teacher, as once ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... no way attractive, whose whole interest in life centred in her daughter. Michael's transcendent act of chivalry towards the Marchesa, dramatically acknowledged by her at last upon her deathbed, appealed even to the most unimaginative natures. He became the hero of the hour. Telegrams of congratulation poured in from every quarter. Letters snowed in on him. Even before Wentworth could reach him enthusiastic strangers had tried to force their way into his cell. Determined young reporters came ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... of the associations by means of which it acts on the reader. Its effect is produced, not so much by what it expresses, as by what it suggests; not so much by the ideas which it directly conveys, as by other ideas which are connected with them. He electrifies the mind through conductors. The most unimaginative man must understand the Iliad. Homer gives him no choice, and requires from him no exertion, but takes the whole upon himself, and sets the images in so clear a light, that it is impossible to be ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... all civilized countries are becoming keenly aware of the value of their embodied artistic possessions. This is shown, in the most decisive manner possible, by the enormous prices placed upon them. Their pecuniary value enables even the stupidest and most unimaginative to realize the crime that is committed when they are ruthlessly and wantonly destroyed. Nor is it only the products of ancient art which have to-day become so peculiarly valuable. The products of modern science are only less valuable. So highly complex and elaborate is the mechanism now ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... being unimaginative—that is, according to them, I may have oil in my lamp, but no flame. Now this is exactly the accusation which I bring against them. I would say to them: "You are dark, even as the flints are. You must come to violent conflicts ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... brother? If he could represent the matter in such a light to his brother as to induce Hugh to produce the funds for purchasing the spy's services, the whole thing would be complete with a completeness that has rarely been equalled. But he doubted. Hugh was a hard man—a hard, unimaginative man, and might possibly altogether refuse to believe in the Russian spy. Hugh believed in little but what he himself saw, and usually kept a very firm grasp ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... circumvent the fiery, haughty, and proud Nicephorus Briennius! If he does so, it will not be by his own policy, and still less by his valour. Nor shall Anna Comnena, the soul of wit and genius, be chained to such an unimaginative log as yonder half-barbarian. No—she shall have a husband of pure Grecian extraction, and well stored with that learning which was studied when Rome was great, and Greece illustrious. Nor will it be the least charm of the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... archness dropped under this point-blank rejoinder. She flushed, and looked at her father. That unimaginative person started toward her as though she had called to him for help, and then, ashamed of his inexplicable impulse, turned away confusedly and ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... imagination one felt afraid in this place, for one felt not alone. At any moment it seemed that one might be touched on the elbow by a hand reaching out from the surrounding tangle. Even Dick felt this, unimaginative and fearless as he was. It took him nearly three-quarters of an hour to get through, and then, at last, came the blessed air of real day, and a glimpse of the lagoon between ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... unimaginative man's complacency in ferreting out such a dramatic scheme, and began to think next upon the somewhat important detail of how to get proofs before he commenced to frustrate it. Chance seemed to make Tazzuchi play into ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... blood and filth for months on end, living only to kill. The fact that the poor men can't help it does not alter the case. The women can't help it either. Women have grown very fastidious. The sensual women and the quite unimaginative women will not be affected, but how about the others? And only men of the finest grain survive a long period of war with the artificial habits of ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... told himself. Never. Ryan and Nogol will never believe me, they will never believe in the flying whale. They're explorers, simple men of action, unimaginative. Of course, I'm an explorer too. But I'm ...
— The Planet with No Nightmare • Jim Harmon
... apparently following as a matter of course, we were among the candidates for confirmation. I wish I could say that the solemnity of our feelings was on a level with the solemnity of the occasion; but unimaginative boys find it difficult to recognize apostolical institutions in their developed form, and I fear our chief emotion concerning the ceremony was a sense of sheepishness, and our chief opinion, the speculative and heretical position, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... million men, answered, "It means Armageddon." Like several million people, they both thought he was saying something as original as it was impressive, something clear and final and descriptive. "Armageddon!" Stolid, unimaginative people went about saying it to each other. The sound of the word thrilled them, intoxicated them, gave them an awful feeling that was at the same time, in some odd way, agreeable; it stirred them with a solemn and sombre passion. They said "Armageddon. ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... some time in silence, I wondering at the strange type of this commonplace young man, and half wishing I could put something into my portrait that should be the equivalent of this curious unimaginative earnestness. Then Oke told me the story of those two pictures—told it me about as badly and hesitatingly as was possible ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... art, the history and politics of Italy and Greece. He widened the horizon of his contemporaries, bringing within their ken wonders and beauties hitherto unknown or unfamiliar, and in so doing he heightened and cultivated, he "touched with emotion," the unlettered and unimaginative many, that "reading public" which despised or eluded the refinements and subtleties ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the scene where the body of the magnificent Zenobia is discovered in the river. Every touch goes straight to the mark. The narrator of the story, accompanied by the man whose coolness has caused the suicide, and the shrewd, unimaginative Yankee farmer, who interprets into coarse, downright language the suspicions which they fear to confess to themselves, are sounding the depths of the river by night in a leaky punt with a long pole. Silas Foster represents the brutal, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Could he tell anyone—anyone but Nan—how she had seemed to him there, the old, old picture of motherhood, divine yet human? It was too much to risk. If he did lay his mind bare about that moment which was his alone, and Dick met it with his unimaginative astuteness, he could not trust himself to be patient with the boy. He said little more than that he had given her the freedom of the hut, and that he meant always to have it ready for her. Then he came ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... were subterranean passages which led from the house to unfrequented parts of the grounds. These passages were well built, arched with brick, and high enough for people to walk upright in them; and although persons of quiet and unimaginative minds thought that they were constructed for the purpose of allowing the occupants to go down to the lake or to the other portions of the grounds without getting wet if it should happen to be raining, there were many people who believed that for ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... impressive—even to me with all I feel about the Irish question. For the image it presented—set forth by the physical aspect of the orator—was such as I can imagine to be wonderfully impressive to that dull, unimaginative, and unsentimental personage—the man of the shifting ballast, whose almost impenetrable brain has to finally decide this question. And the image presented to that very creature of clay was this: "Here is a man who is my Foreign ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... and wrinkled children of the soil, who had passed all their days in the desolation of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... know I am even painfully unimaginative and matter-of-fact; and as for idle fancies, is it an idle fancy to think you like to please ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... aestheticism in religion. They recognise the fact that a beautiful vestment uplifts the soul far more than a dozen bad chants by Stainer, or Barnby, or any other unmusical Christian. The average Anglican chant is one of the most unimaginative, unpoetical things in the world. It always reminds me of the cart-horse parade on Whit Monday. A brown Gregorian is ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... she dismissed it with a laugh. Of all people in the world, she thought, these two, the heavy, unimaginative Swedish woman, and the leathern-skinned, taciturn wood-rover, would be the last to listen to the call ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... in which one actually gets to know one's fellows—waiting for later experience to confirm or modify earlier impressions—the hapless, tragic Flora; her father, de Barral, the pseudo-financier, fraudulent through unimaginative stupidity rather than criminal intent; the kindly-cruel pair of Fynes; that perfect, chivalrous knight of the sea, Captain Anthony, Flora's fiery-patient lover; his splendidly staunch second officer, Powell, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... concluded, after some hard thinking, that it was his best part. He had given her something of his soul, and he had no wish to take it back. He had given her the reviving aspirations of an originally noble nature; the sun of her had shone upon the barren soil, and the harvest was hers. He was an unimaginative man, but he was inclined to believe that if there was a future existence, Magdalena would belong to him then and for ever, that something even less definable than the soul of each belonged to the other. For ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... who most apprehends this boundlessness—and indeed because he does apprehend it—can do or say what will open it to you or me; and the degree of his genius is measured by the extent to which he can present or expose it. The unimaginative gives surface-work, and, suggesting nothing, is ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... attitude was symptomatic of the demoralization of the country, apparent even during our momentary success. There was no will to victory, and the generalstaff, if one could believe General Thario, was too unimaginative and inflexible to meet the peculiar conditions of a war circumscribed and shaped by the alien glacier dividing the country and diverting ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... I had discovered that one law of the spiritual world, in which all others were contained, was Righteousness? and that disharmony with that law, which we call unspirituality, was not being vulgar, or clumsy, or ill-taught, or unimaginative, or dull; but simply being unrighteous? that righteousness, and it alone, was the beautiful, righteousness the sublime, the heavenly, the ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... diet and medication. Such illness does not appear to have been a major factor in his actions prior to the Revolution, the first significant attack not occurring until 1788. Instead, the stolid and often plodding king tended to rely upon men like the unimaginative Lord Bute or his somewhat stodgy wife, Charlotte of Mecklenberg (for whom two Virginia counties and the town of Charlottesville are named.) The breakdown of the once-powerful Whig political coalition also ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... unless Bias had granted him admittance without informing his master. This was quite possible, for the slave's keen eyes certainly had not failed to notice how little he and Myrtilus valued the opinion of the honest, skilful, but extremely practical and unimaginative man, who could not create ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... face flushed warmly. So unexpected and sincere was his praise that it made her feel both proud and humble. She had never realized that this quiet, apparently unimaginative man had seen all the ideals she expressed in her music. A woman expects to appear lovely to her lover, and to the men who would be her lovers if they could, but here was a man who neither sought nor expected any favors, saying that he wanted some ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of every generosity. Government was an obstructive business of energetic fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of public activities, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... "transcendentalism" in this plain, straightforward Address. The facts are collected and related with the patience and sobriety which became the writer as one of the Dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful, very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative Massachusetts Historical Society. It looks unlike anything else Emerson ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix. One would almost as soon have expected to see Emerson equipped with a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse of his clogged ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Crook" (vol. iii. p. 116.).—However unimaginative the worthy Cit may be for whose explanation of this popular phrase J. D. S. has made himself answerable, the solution sounds so pretty, that to save its obtaining further credence, more than your well-timed note is needed. I with ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... first gate (which the judge had unlocked without much difficulty) before he realised that there still remained something of interest for him to see and to talk about later. The two dark openings on either side, raised questions which the most unimaginative mind would feel glad to hear explained. Ere the second gate swung open and he found himself again in the street, he had built up more than one theory in explanation of this freak of parallel fences with ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... the sawdust once or twice, as if to assure himself that he was really there, began dancing around it, and indulging in such a remarkable series of fistic manoeuvres with an imaginary adversary that the unimaginative detective precipitately backed into ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... law which is called the Prevention of Crimes Act, which empowers the unemployed members of the constabulary who find time hanging on their hands to arrest known criminals on suspicion if they are seen out in questionable circumstances. And as all circumstances are questionable to the unimaginative 'flattie,' and his no less obtuse friend the 'split,' I will retire to the bedroom and stuff my ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... Stolid and unimaginative as he might seem to casual acquaintance, the chief inspector usually worked with tremendous enthusiasm and doggedness. As Foyle had said, he was as tenacious as a bull-dog. He was determined to catch Grell, if human wit and perseverance could ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and—to some extent—practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... facing things with the pluck which is their chief characteristic and which seems never to desert them, withal they were cursing the country with lurid metaphors quite refreshing after a month of unimaginative, monotonous Cockney swearing. The Cockney has one oath, and one oath only, the most indecent in the language, which he uses on any and every occasion. Far different is the luminous and varied Western swearing, ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... performed their whimsical service—these two representatives of a grimly unimaginative race of stoics—they went again and stood together under the tree and into the girl's grief and the man's forebodings crept an indefinable anodyne of ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... upon a light counter. In the third he was smacking back merrily where he saw an opening. His people yelled their approval of him at the end of every round. Even the iron-workers cheered him with that fine unselfishness which true sport engenders. To most of them, unspiritual and unimaginative, the sight of this clean-limbed young Apollo, rising above disaster and holding on while consciousness was in him to his appointed task, was the greatest thing their ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... will try to describe it to you; and to convince you that I do not exaggerate its rare beauty, I must inform you that two friends of ours have each offered a hundred dollars for it, and a blacksmith in the place—a man utterly unimaginative, who would not throw away a red cent on a mere fancy—has tried to purchase it for fifty dollars. I wish most earnestly that you could see it. It is of unmixed gold, weighing about two dollars and a half. Your first idea on looking at it is of an exquisite little basket. There is the ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... it! It was a case of love at first sight. The unimaginative would have called it gray. The thoughtless would have pronounced it pink. It was neither, and both; a soft, rosily-gray mixture of the two, like the sky that one sometimes sees at winter twilight, the pink ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... soul. With her brain on fire she stood behind the door, and heard that she was to be married to Daniel. This remark had filled the then thirteen-year-old girl with all the savage instincts of a bound and fettered woman, with all the crabbedness of an unimaginative person ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... out the telephone exchange at Belmont at once and was referred to the superintendent. He found the latter a brisk, unimaginative man—a creature ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... dissipated in the heavens—and there is the Milky Way. Other drops reached the earth and, falling on the lily, which hitherto had been purple, purified it to whiteness. In similar guise might the legend of the Southern Cross be framed—but who has the audacity to reveal it! And have not the unimaginative blacks anticipated ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... always controlling himself and reining himself in. But one is struck by an outburst of the same feeling in a younger man, Xenophon, who was ordinarily in harmony with his age and was probably rather unimaginative and self-complacent by nature. The war had given Xenophon his opportunity as a soldier and a writer. He was not inclined to quarrel with the 'envious and disordering' powers that had ruined Greek civilization. But in the last paragraph of the History ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... yourself, next time any one in your house is ill, whether the actual fact in any way corresponds to the picturesque belief. The angel who is to alleviate our sufferings comes in such a questionable shape, that to the unimaginative she appears merely as an extremely self-confident young woman, wisely concerned first of all in securing her personal comfort, much given to complaints about her food and to helplessness where she should be helpful, possessing an extraordinary capacity for fancying herself ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... established Church, taking literally the figurative, allegorical, and mythical language of a collection of Oriental books of different ages, directly and inevitably led. The same result long after followed the folly of regarding the Hebrew books as if they had been written by the unimaginative, hard, practical intellect of the England of James the First and the bigoted ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... which had been magnified and distorted into a weird and supernatural happening by the superstitious credulity of the original narrator; but there were others of an equally weird and unaccountable character, which had been told by hard-headed, intelligent, unimaginative men as having come within the scope of their own personal experience, that seemed to indicate that the nyangas really possessed powers denied to the great majority of their fellow-men. Moreover, it must be remembered by the sceptical ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... if not a very finished or distinguished effort, was clearly a hardy and quick-growing production, since it did eventually develop into a long half-column in some newspapers, according to the unimaginative and literal stenographic record aforementioned. It was ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... social relations may prove even harder to harmonise than political relations. The new Constitution was inaugurated under Lord Chelmsford's Viceroyalty. If he perhaps failed, especially at certain gravely critical moments, to rise above a somewhat narrow and unimaginative conception of his functions as the supreme depositary of British authority in India, and was too apt to regard himself always as merely primus inter pares in a governing body, peculiarly liable from its constitution to ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... carefully trained his son to put his talents to their best use. He had no stubborn material for his hands, for even in his youth Mr. Ticknor showed many of those traits which most clearly marked him in after life; among others, an intelligent, unimaginative, but also unmalicious observation of his kind for his relaxation, and for his work in life warm devotion to the study of letters. How scanty were the opportunities in this way at that period may be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... —— Lower Seedley Road, no possibility of the place being haunted crossed our minds. Indeed ghosts were the very last things we reckoned on, as neither of us had the slightest belief in them. Like the generality of solicitors, I am stodgy and unimaginative, whilst my wife is the most practical and matter-of-fact little woman you would meet in a day's march. Nor was there anything about the house that in any way suggested the superphysical. It was airy and light—no dark corners nor sinister staircases—and ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... this, that I'd as soon set to work to explain the theory of exchequer bonds to an Eskimo, as to make an unimaginative man understand something purely speculative. What you, and scores of fellows like you, denominate vanity, is only another form of hopefulness. You and your brethren—for you are a large family—do you know what ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... shortsightedness in the design of COBOL programs, most will succumb to software rot when their 2-digit year counters {wrap around} at the beginning of the year 2000. Actually, related lossages often afflict centenarians who have to deal with computer software designed by unimaginative clods. One such incident became the focus of a minor public flap in 1990, when a gentleman born in 1889 applied for a driver's license renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina. The new system refused to issue the card, probably ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... survive!" What wonder that Jeffrey, who was a clear-headed, unimaginative man, cherished all his life a cold hostility to France? What wonder that the painter Haydon, who was highly imaginative and not in the least clear-headed, felt such hostility to be an essential part of patriotism? "In my day," he writes in his journal, "boys were born, nursed, and grew up, hating ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... came a morning when he drove through Bloomsbury and realized that he had not thought about her for a fortnight. The British Museum suggested her to him there—the British Museum, and the certainty that within its massive walls a number of unimaginative young women in collarless sage-green gowns were copying casts of antique sculptures at that moment. But he did not allow himself to suppose that she could ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... that girl Pepita? What a bright and cheerful fire there would have been for him before sundown! How thoroughly the skin would have been peeled off his muscles! What neat carving at his finger joints and toe joints! Coarse, unimaginative, hardened, and beastly as Texas Smith was, his flesh crawled a little at the thought of it. Presently it struck him that he had better do something to propitiate a man who could send him to encounter ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... But further, this misuse of reason, this inciting of the mind to memorise facts unrelated except by their mere accidental time or space relations, will if persisted in tend to render the individual dull, stupid, and unimaginative. ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... all points in the creed none has a higher place than the belief in the Resurrection. Therefore the 'Burial' and the 'Rising again' called for particular elaboration. One of the earliest methods of driving these truths home to the hearts of the unlearned and unimaginative was to bury the crucifix for the requisite three days (a rite still observed in many churches by the removal of the cross from the altar), and then restore it to its exalted position; the simple act being done with much solemn prostration and creeping on hands and knees of those ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... bade him, putting up her tortoiseshell-rimmed eyeglasses as though she were in a picture-gallery or at a theatre. "Wouldn't the ordinary unimaginative person suppose that Love would be the last flower to blossom in the soil of this battered little bit of debatable ground? But we know better. So does Miss Wiercke, the German oculist's daughter, and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... imagination spared her these comments, Lewis's unimaginative common sense supplied them. He knew what other men and husbands were saying about him; what servants and gossip and friends insinuated to one another, and set his jaw in silence. He made no excuse and no explanation. Why should he? The facts spoke. His wife did prefer the Shakers to her ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... people's idea of being better and happier is to make other people subscribe to make them richer. They want more things to eat and drink and wear; they want success and respectability, to be sidesmen and town councillors, and even Members of Parliament. Nothing is more hopelessly unimaginative than ordinary people's aims and ideas, and the aims and ideas, too, that are propounded from pulpits. I don't want people to be richer and more prosperous; I want them to be poorer and simpler. Which is the better man, the shepherd there ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... names is not to be regretted, for the Latin nomenclature was of the most unimaginative description, while the Old German names are more like those of Greece; e.g. Ger. Ludwig, which has passed into most of the European languages (Louis, Lewis, Ludovico, etc), is from Old High Ger. hlut-wig, renowned in fight, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... moral dyspepsia that seized the soul of the wonderful Tolstoy was the outcome of a riotous youth, a youth overflowing with the "joy of life." Ibsen, like Carlyle, battled in his early days with poverty; but his message—if you will have a definite message (Oh, these literal, unimaginative folk of the Gradgrind sort, who would wring from the dumb mysterious beauty of nature definite meanings—as if sheer existence itself is not its own glorious vindication!)—may be a hopeful one. The individual is all in all; ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... other, but a world of righteous or unrighteous persons? What if I had discovered that one law of the spiritual world, in which all others were contained, was righteousness; and that disharmony with that law, which we called unspirituality, was not being vulgar, or clumsy, or ill-taught, or unimaginative, or dull, but simply being unrighteous? What if I had discovered that righteousness, and it alone, was the beautiful righteousness, the sublime, the heavenly, the Godlike—ay, God Himself? And what if it had dawned on me, as by a great sunrise, what that righteousness was like? What if ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... this world imagining ourselves to be not as we are, but as we should like ourselves to be. No man who is not wholly unimaginative can escape this form of self-consciousness. Certainly no man who has in him anything of the artist can escape it: less still a man who is so much of an artist as Mr. Belloc. It has been remarked of Mr. Belloc time and again that he would make an extraordinarily fine ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... proof that our senses are dulled by luxury and books, and that we require to excite our palled organ of marvellousness by signs and wonders, aesthetic brandy and cayenne. No. I have remarked often that the most unimaginative people, who can see no beauty in a cultivated English field or in the features of a new-born babe, are the loudest ravers about glorious sunsets and Alpine panoramas; just as the man with no music in his soul, to whom a fugue of Sebastian Bach, or one of Mendelssohn's Songs without ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... about this time up in God's country all the people are at the theatre, or they've just finished dinner and are sitting around sipping cool green mint, trickling through little lumps of ice. What I'd like—" he stopped and shut one eye and gazed, with his head on one side, at the unimaginative MacWilliams—"what I'd like to do now," he continued, thoughtfully, "would be to sit in the front row at a comic opera, ON THE AISLE. The prima donna must be very, very beautiful, and sing most of her songs at me, and there must be three comedians, all good, and a chorus entirely composed of girls. ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... to bear an ominous significance. Agnes herself, having uttered them, received one of those sudden inward illuminations which, in some natures, amount to second-sight. But she was unimaginative and not especially observant, sensitive, or skilled in discerning the signs of any psychological disturbance. She felt only, on this occasion, that a crisis had been reached, that Reckage was vexed with himself, with her, with life generally. She had a letter in her pocket from David Rennes—a ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... paradox of human life, often observed even by the most concrete and unimaginative of philosophers, that man seems to be poised between two contradictory orders of Reality. Two planes of existence—or, perhaps, two ways of apprehending existence—lie within the possible span of his consciousness. ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... this way when you write one. No opening could possibly be worse. It is unimaginative, flat, dry and likely to consist of mere wind. But in this instance it is allowable. For the following paragraph, which should have inaugurated the narrative, is too wildly extravagant and preposterous to be flaunted in the face ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... Against unimaginative men, who retain some coolness and consequently the faculty of reasoning in danger, moral effect will be as material effect. The mere act of attack does not completely succeed against such troops. (Witness battles in Spain and Waterloo). It is necessary to ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... the house of a niece, to whom by way of legacy he left his map. For the satisfaction of his anxious mind, still poring on the treasure, she wrote down what she could grasp of his instructions, and then, being an unimaginative woman, gave the matter little further heed. For years the map lay among other papers in a drawer, and here it was at length discovered by her son, himself a sailor. He learned from her its history, and having been in the Pacific, and heard the tales ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... gradually changed from the chronicler with strong sympathies to the interpreter with a reasoned philosophy. She discovered that a great deal of the suffering in this world is due not so much to original sin, but to a kind of original stupidity, an unimaginative, stubborn stupidity. People were dishonest because they believed, wrongly, that dishonesty was somehow successful. They were cruel because they supposed that repulsive exhibitions of power inspired a prolonged fear. They were treacherous because they had never been taught the greater strength ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... fact that chiefly determined the strong effect she produced on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than Bertha's. She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined to dissect all my favourite poems, and especially contemptous towards the German lyrics which were my pet literature at that ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... nothing more to the Atlantic, you were ill (I thank Heaven you are no longer so) the second-and third-rate essayists have been bought by mere Wall Street publishers. Beyond these are the company of story tellers and beyond them only a dreary waste of dead-level unimaginative men and women. I can (soon) get all that I could ever have got in the Atlantic and new ones (I know they'll come) whom I could ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... knotty fingers, the thin straight lips, the long silences, the "front-piece" that didn't match her hair, the very obvious "parting" that seemed sewed in with linen thread on black net,—there was not a single item that appealed to Rebecca. There are certain narrow, unimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous, and sometimes the worst traits in children. Miss Miranda, had she lived in a populous neighborhood, would have had her doorbell pulled, her gate tied up, or "dirt ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was one that once had belonged to the Kid. Except for the pink shirt, in the appearance of the young man there was nothing unusual. He was of a familiar type. He looked like a young business man from our Middle West, matter-of-fact and unimaginative, but capable and self-reliant. If he had had a fountain pen in his upper waistcoat pocket, I would have guessed he was an insurance agent, or the publicity man for a new automobile. John picked up his hat, and said, "That's good advice. Give me your steamer ticket, Fred, and I'll ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... Washington; but externally I think ours is the more graceful, though the effect inside is tame and flat in comparison. This is owing partly to its lesser size and height, and partly to our hard, transparent atmosphere, which lends no charm or illusion, but mainly to the stupid, unimaginative plan of it. Our dome shuts down like an inverted iron pot; there is no vista, no outlook, no relation, and hence no proportion. You open a door and are in a circular pen, and can look in only one direction,—up. If the iron pot ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... write genuine poetry, and not be a poet; for whosoever writes out truly any human feeling, writes poetry. All persons, even the most unimaginative, in moments of strong emotion, speak poetry; and hence the drama is poetry, which else were always prose, except when a poet is one of the characters. What is poetry, but the thoughts and words in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself? As there are few who are not, at least ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... experience or philosophy of fixing relative values, the question must remain where it has always been, a conflict between the emotional and unemotional; the "sentimental" and the stolid; the imaginative and the unimaginative; the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. Personally, being inclined to a purely mechanistic view of life and to the belief that all conduct is the result of certain stimuli upon a human machine, I can only say that the ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... been said, knew nothing, and his canon only applies to it by the rule of contraries. Undoubtedly, and in spite of the marvels which one great genius has wrought with it, it is a form lower than the poetic—essentially a prosaic, and in many or most hands an unimaginative, form of art; but for this very reason, that it demands nothing of its average practitioner but a keen eye for facts, great and small, and a knack of graphically recording them, it has become a far more commonly and successfully cultivated form of art than any other. ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... questions which my mind had suggested while I was standing at his door repeated themselves with double force. Tell this man, this unimaginative, hard-headed, raw-boned, sandy-haired North countryman,—tell this man a story which the most credulous school-girl would have rejected as ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I never imagined the land ironclad idea would get loose into war. I thought that the military intelligence was essentially unimaginative and that such an aggressive military power as Germany, dominated by military people, would never produce anything of the sort. I thought that this war would be fought out without Tanks and that then war would come to an end. For of course it is mere stupidity that makes people doubt the ultimate ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... summit, the art therefore declines in one of two directions. It either becomes academic, forsakes the study of nature, and degenerates into empty convention, or else it becomes ignoble, forsakes beauty, and sinks into a tasteless and unimaginative technique. The latter was the course of sculpture in ancient times, the former, with moments of reawakening, has been its ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... looked on their families—Mrs. Rossiter on Clare and Mrs. Galleon on Millicent, Percival and Bobby—with curiosity, tolerance and a mild soft of wonder. They were both massively happy and completely unimaginative. They were, indeed, old friends, having been at school together, they were Emma and Jane to one another and Mrs. Rossiter could never forget that Mrs. Galleon came to school two years after herself and was therefore junior still; whilst Mrs. Galleon had ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... restaurants are practical and unimaginative, and withal close bargainers, at the end of a week Rantoul generally was forced to ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... agitation. Twice in the past they had stood shoulder to shoulder through a crisis of sufficient magnitude and she had showed then a cautious judgment, a reliability of purpose that had been purely masculine in its strength and sanity. She had been wholly matter-of-fact and unimaginative, unswayed by petty trivialities and broad in her decision. She had displayed a levelness of mind which had almost excluded feeling and which had enabled him to deal with her as with another man, confident of her understanding and the unlikelihood of her succumbing ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... chattered to me about the appointments of the bar. The beer-pulls amused her particularly. She made me order a glass of bitter (a beverage which I loathe) in order to see again how it was done, and broke into gleeful laughter. The smart but unimaginative barmaid stared at her in bewilderment. The two or three bar-loafers also stared. I was glad to escape to ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... a distance and this distance once chosen must be firmly held against a pushing world. Verse, ritual, music and dance in association with action require that gesture, costume, facial expression, stage arrangement must help in keeping the door. Our unimaginative arts are content to set a piece of the world as we know it in a place by itself, to put their photographs as it were in a plush or a plain frame, but the arts which interest me, while seeming to separate from the world and us a group of figures, ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... years of vain, idle and inglorious life, she was now of the most complete unimportance to her country, had (for the first time) a sudden longing to "do something." And so, being unfitted for needlework, nursing or the kitchen, she adopted eagerly the suggestion of some stupid and unimaginative old gentleman, and constituted herself (under God) Supreme Arbiter of Men's Consciences for the South-West Suburbs of London. Patriotically aglow, she handed out white feathers to all the un-uniformed young men she chanced ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... of primitive nature, the marvels of latter-day science, the extravagances of human passion—all these he dexterously uses for the purpose of involving his hero in perilous scrapes from which he no less dexterously extricates him by expedients which, however far-fetched they may appear to the unimaginative, are certainly not lacking in originality of device, or cleverness of construction.... This is a specimen incident—those which succeed it derive their special interest from the action of Rontgen rays, subterranean torrents, and devastating inundations. ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... called auburn, while his enemies—if he had possessed any—would have tersely described it as "carrots". In temperament, too, Chichester was the very antithesis of Stukely, for he was absolutely unimaginative and matter-of-fact. Perhaps his occupation may have had something to do with this; for he was apprenticed to a shipwright, and delighted in his work. He was also an orphan; his nearest relative being his ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... vegetation had a delightfully home-like look to eyes accustomed for two years to South American surroundings. Seen through a glass from the ship's deck, the Public Buildings in Trafalgar Square, solid and substantial, had all the unimaginative neatness of any prosaic provincial townhall at home. We were clearly no longer in a Latin-American country. It was really a piece of England translated to the Caribbean Sea, and we few passengers, some ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... because she never suspected her husband of being such an "old softy," and then enraged her when she reflected that never since their honeymoon had Dan shown her anything more than the prosaic consideration of the unimaginative married man for ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... as truth, for if it was a mere conventional flame we should take no note of it—that the editor of the Athenaeum, a most grave, considerate gentleman, should be cited to Gray's-inn Coffee-house, and by an ignorant and unimaginative mob of jurymen voted incapable of writing reviews upon his own books, or the books ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... style and rhetoric. But it is the manner of the age. Many persons I suppose get over it, perhaps like it; but I long for the same thoughts, the same tenderness and truthfulness, and faithful searching words with a clear, simple, not unimaginative diction. Yet his book ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Perhaps it was emptied again by the Black Death, which took a long toll of victims hereabouts. Shepherds, ploughmen, hedgers, ditchers, farmers, an ale-house-keeper, a shopkeeper or two, and a priest— that has been the village for a thousand years. Patient, stupid, toilsome, unimaginative, kindly little lives, I daresay. Not much interested in one another, ill educated, gossipy, brutish, superstitious, but surprised perhaps into sudden passions of love, and still more surprised perhaps by the joys of fatherhood and motherhood; with children of all ages growing up, pretty and engaging ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... The difficulties were many, but he dismissed them with an impatient gesture of his unoccupied hand. Gilbert Penny would be heavily censorious; he had, Howat recognized, the moral prejudices of a solid, unimaginative blood. But, lately, his father had sunk to a place comparatively insignificant in his thoughts. This was partly due to the complete manner in which Isabel Penny had silenced the elder at breakfast. His mother, Howat gladly felt, would give him the sympathy of a wise, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 10. Thus—though unimaginative— An apprehension clear, intense, Of his mind's work, had made alive 310 The things it wrought on; I believe Wakening a sort of thought ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... people who had seen nothing of life's mystery, saw it clearly, and others who had been deaf to every voice but that of pleasure heard for the first time the voice of love and found it as 'musical as Apollo's lute'; or that evil passions fled at his approach, and men whose dull unimaginative lives had been but a mode of death rose as it were from the grave when he called them; or that when he taught on the hillside the multitude forgot their hunger and thirst and the cares of this world, and that to his friends who listened to him as he sat at meat the coarse food seemed ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... fervid periods, with such phrases as, "For your Alma Mater," "Because of your college spirit," "For dear old Bannister," and "For the Gold and Green!" predominating; all of which terms, to the stolid, unimaginative Thorwald being fully as intelligible as Hindustani. They appealed to him not to betray his Alma Mater; they implored him, for his love of old Bannister; they besought him, because of his college spirit; and all the time, for ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... Courtney Thane alone was aware of this amazing transformation. It was he who felt the thrill that charged the air, who breathed in the sense-quickening spice, who heard the pipes of Pan. All these signs of enchantment were denied the matter-of-fact, unimaginative inhabitants of Windomville. And you would ask the cause ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... readily associate the party of top-booted sewermen who descend nightly to the subterranean passages of London with the stout viceconsul at Durazzo. Yet it was one unimaginative man who lived in Lambeth and had no knowledge that there was such a place as Durazzo who was responsible for bringing this comfortable official out of his bed in the early hours of the morning causing him—albeit reluctantly and with violent and insubordinate language—to conduct certain ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... construed could often be seen in the tendency among powerful martinets to "drive a coach and four" through the law and procedure which regulate trials by Court Martial. The need for the "standardisation" of all infantry units in France was quite genuine; but unimaginative men in authority could make "standardisation" a burden to the spirit, and the picture of some men of this class, which is painted in A. P. Herbert's novel. The Secret Battle, is founded on the truth. We have all seen such cases. The grinding ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... place to sit down among the litter of small luggage with which the first occupant of the carriage had strewn every seat. I knew that Bob was as much in love with Di as a man of his rather unintellectual, unimaginative type could be, and he hadn't shown himself as friendly lately to me as he once had: still, I didn't think he was the sort of fellow to trip up a rival in the race by a trick, even if he could possibly have found out that I was going to Paris ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... friend, the late Rev. Dr. John Hunter, told me an anecdote very characteristic of the unimaginative matter-of-fact Scottish view of matters. One of the ministers of Edinburgh, a man of dry humour, had a daughter who had for some time passed the period of youth and of beauty. She had become an Episcopalian, an ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... "I don't think so, and I will tell you why. I believe the brave man is not he who is insensible to fear, but he who is able to rise above it in doing his duty. People are sometimes called courageous who are really so unimaginative and dull that they cannot understand danger—so of course they are not afraid. They go through their lives very quietly and comfortably, as a rule, but they do not often leave great names behind them, although they may ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... too with all her heart. Harry Feversham had made his story very real that night to Captain Willoughby; so that even after the lapse of fifteen months this unimaginative creature was sensible of a contrast and a deficiency in his manner ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... or give it wide conceptions of life, and religion, and duty, a certain satisfaction at having done with secular life and its cares, and at having their future here and hereafter comfortably provided for, was perhaps the general tone amongst this prosaic, unimaginative community. We are, indeed, far from affirming that in that little society there was no higher tone of religious enthusiasm, that there were not some who not only found their highest religious ideal ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... of arithmetical comparison is also a great thing to unimaginative people. They know always they are so much better than they were, in money; so much better than others, in money; but wit cannot be so compared, nor character. My neighbour cannot be convinced that I am wiser than he is, but he can, that I am worth ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... spoken. In those words "reasonable and practical" is the Chinese Wall of America, that narrow boundary which contracts our vision to the moment, cuts us off from the culture of the world, and makes us such provincial, unimaginative blunderers over our own problems. Fixation upon the immediate has made a rich country poor in leisure, has in a land meant for liberal living incited an insane struggle for existence. One suspects at times that our national cult of optimism is no real ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... specific and positive limitations—spiritual, mental, and physical. No actor has proved equal to every kind of character. Salvini, when he acted Hamlet, was unspiritual—giving no effect to the haunted tone of that part or to its weird surroundings; and when he acted Macbeth he was unimaginative, obscure, common, and therefore inadequate. The only Shakespearean character that he excelled in is Othello, and even in that his ideal displayed neither the magnanimity nor the tenderness that are ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... shown his true and bravest self to her. She was impatient, she had hoped that the others would see him as she had seen him. She watched them as they expressed their surprise that he was not the practical, fearless and unimaginative Englishman who was their typical figure. Whilst he found them far from the Karamazovs, the Raskolnikoffs, of his imagination, they in their turn could not create the "sportsman" and "man of ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... To the unimaginative visitor, the plan that has been adopted will appeal. To him the ancient broken tower, standing alone, would have little charm in comparison with this faithful restoration of the old church, that enables him to see what he never ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... I do not, I dare not, exaggerate. Indeed, a lady of a certain age could hardly feel more abashed at the sudden production of her baptismal certificate than I—a man, a matter-of-fact man, a plain, hard-headed, unimaginative man of business—do, at this confession. Suffice it to say, that in the last four years I have lived the life of a soul in purgatory or an inhabitant of the 'Inferno,' and though I have worked like a horse, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... inspiration to grasp and revel in lofty moral or imaginative conceptions, or where it needs aid and sharpening to appreciate and follow the niceties of repartee, or the delicacies of comic fancy. Secondly, it follows that if this is so with the intellectual few, it must be infinitely more so with the unimaginative many of all ranks. They are not inaccessible to passion and poetry and refinement, but their minds do not go forth, as it were, to seek these joys; and even if they read works of poetic and dramatic fancy, which they ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... her audience she relied mainly on her own imagination and her voice; striking no attitudes, and allowing herself nothing of that facial distortion which is the resort of the unimaginative, and destroys not creates illusion. Of course, her face changed, but the change was one of which she was probably unconscious, and which she couldn't have reproduced to her mirror; it was not a play of features, but a play of lights and shadows and nerves, a flow ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... still. What of his proud old honest Spartan of an unimaginative uncle? He thought of him, and "Oh, the poor old boy," he cried. "Not for ten times the money would I have had the dear old woman write to him like that. How hard it must ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... say stupid, rather the unimaginative, the practical and the plodding. The stubbornest person in the world ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... unimaginative and of restricted mental horizon does not think in terms of masses of mankind. Masses vaguely appall him. They exist in the big cities on which he turned his back in his unaudacious youth. His contacts are with individuals. His democracy consists in smiling upon the village painter and ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... Cuttle in inexperience of everything but wind and weather; in simplicity, credulity, and generous trustfulness. Faith, hope, and charity, shared his whole nature among them. An odd sort of romance, perfectly unimaginative, yet perfectly unreal, and subject to no considerations of worldly prudence or practicability, was the only partner they had in his character. As the Captain sat, and smoked, and looked at Florence, God knows what impossible pictures, in which she was the principal figure, presented themselves to ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... primitive fool, who only sees what is visible, instead of evolving the phantoms of an airy unreality from the bottomless abyss of his own so-called consciousness. Fortunately for humanity, the low-class unimaginative mind predominates in the world, as far as numbers are concerned; and there are enough true intellects among men to leaven the whole. The middle class of mind is a small class, congregated together chiefly within the boundaries of a very amusing ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... interesting to trace the gradual degeneration of a poetic faith into the ritual of unimaginative Tupperism, so it is amusing to see pedantry clinging faithfully to the traditions of its prosaic nature, and holding sacred the dead shells that once housed a moral symbol. What a divine thing the outside always has been and continues to be! And how the cast clothes of the mind ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... dare say it must be a very stupid life. So little opportunity, as he says. What a pity he is a tailor, papa! Such an unimaginative employment! How delightful it would be to send him to college ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... delicacy. That is my father's likeness. He was of English birth, the younger son of a rich Liverpool merchant. An impulsive, romantic, adventurous boy, seized early with a passion for seeing the world, his unimaginative, worldly-wise father, practical and severe, kept him within narrow, fretting bounds, and imposed harsh restraints upon him. When he was but sixteen years old, he ran away from home, shipped before the mast, and, after several long voyages, was discharged, at his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... romanticks for it. They must have devilry, it seems, or cayenne pepper. But I say, Scorn not the sentimental, though it be barley-sugar to ambrosia, a canary's flight to a skylark's. Scorn it not; it's the romantic of the unimaginative; and if it won't serve for a magic carpet, it makes ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... fervently that she would be among the first ten at least, so that she might see Matthew's kindly brown eyes gleam with pride in her achievement. That, she felt, would be a sweet reward indeed for all her hard work and patient grubbing among unimaginative equations and conjugations. ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the park, and also dissolved, so far as I was concerned, the phantoms which my imagination had conjured up at midnight. It was about half-past ten when the chief constable arrived. I flatter myself I put some life into that unimaginative man before ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... the Judge," people used to say, laughing as they said it, for he was portly and the door was wide. But they meant more than just that, for there were few, even among the unimaginative, who did not feel drawn to that door. Hospitality shone from every panel, the big fanlight was like a genial sun, and the resemblance to his cheery face and cordial ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... a very unimaginative, substantial, and undreamlike person? I do. And now, since you will not put me quite at my ease by assuming, in words, that I have been properly 'chaperoned' here, I must inform you that my father waits hard by—is, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... said, the maid is an altogether unimaginative creature, and it never occurred to her that anything short of blows or outcries could have anything to do with the crime. It was plain to me, as I talked to her, that she had even then no notion of the importance of what she ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... area,[1411] and long lived under the monotonous influence of the desert; thus, it is said, their conception of the world became objective and limited—they were clannish, practical, unanalytic, and unimaginative. But the origin of races is obscure, and the genius of every ancient people was formed and developed in remote ages under conditions not known to us. We can do little more than note the characteristics visible in ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... for this. Most of the internal reforms which Roosevelt struggled for lacked the dramatic quality or the picturesqueness which appeals to average, dull, unimaginative men and women. The heroism of the medical experimenter who voluntarily contracts yellow fever and dies—and thereby saves myriads of lives—makes little impression on the ordinary person, who can be roused only by stories of battle heroism, of soldiers and torpedoes. And yet the attacks ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... edge of the banks of Newfoundland, in latitude 45 deg.; but it is not until the voyager has fairly reached the heart of the torrid zone that he sees the flying-fish in perfection. I have hardly ever observed a person so dull or unimaginative that his eye did not glisten as he watched a shoal of flying-fish rise from the sea, and skim along for several hundred yards. There is something in it so totally dissimilar to everything else in other parts ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... "Unimaginative, too! You could have led yourself to believe you had done a lot," she pointed out. "And maybe you ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... unimaginative old woman became possessed by a legion of morbid fancies, which played like wild fire over the terrible main fact of the case—the fact that underlay everything—that she had sinned, that she had gone over from good ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... significance, he had reason to welcome it. He had been unfortunate at the font. His parents, at the time of his birth, lived in Ladbroke Crescent, XV. They must have been an extraordinarily unimaginative couple, for they could think of no better name for their child than Ladbroke. This was all very well for him till he went to school. But you can fancy the indignation and delight of us boys at finding among us a newcomer who, on his own confession, had been named after a Crescent. I don't ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... valet de chambre, had given us most excellent coffee. Now we smoked by the great fire, looked up at the marvellously bright stars, and told, as is the way of travellers, tales of our wanderings. My companion, whom I took at first to be a rather ironic, sceptical, and by nature "unimaginative globe-trotter—he was a hard-looking, iron-grey man of middle-age—related the usual tiger story, the time-honoured elephant anecdote, and a couple of snake yarns of no special value, and I was beginning to fear that I should get little entertainment from ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... I heard the accounts of that extraordinary case of house-possession of which (like Wesley) this innocent and unimaginative country minister, who had no more faith in "spooks" than he had in Universalists, was made the ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell |
