"Unreflecting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tribe has had the benefit of a resident mission for the last generation. I can hardly believe this abnormal cruelty to be the mere result of uncivilization; it appears to me the effect of an arrested development, which leaves to the man all the ferocity of the carnivor, the unreflecting cruelty of the child. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... with his own preoccupations, and these did not include the boy. He could not unbend. He could not subordinate his own momentary desire or disinclination to an interest essentially foreign to his own self. In other words, he was just as self-centred as Keith, and just as unreflecting on the whole. Both lived completely in the present, and both wished to escape from it. The only difference between them was that while Keith sought his escape in space, so to speak, by means of his books, the father's only road of escape led him into ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... obligations of the Constitution as the soul of the Union that suggested lurking danger, and rendered the supposed emissary for its destruction so odious that he was driven from a Massachusetts hall where he attempted to lecture. But bodies in motion will overcome bodies at rest, and the unreflecting too often are led by captivating names far ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... wonder; for what is there in nature that may not fall within its limits? and yet how small a portion of this stupendous fabric will be found to have any direct, much less exclusive, relation to the actual wants of the body! It might seem, indeed, to an unreflecting observer, that our physical necessities, which, truly estimated, are few and simple, have rather been increased than diminished by the civilized man. But this is not true; for, if a wider duty is imposed on the senses, it is only to minister to the increased demands of the ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... "Music to-day, in the vigour of her youth, is emancipated and free and can do what she pleases. Many old rules have no longer any vogue; they were made by unreflecting minds, or by lovers of routine for other lovers of routine. New needs of the mind, of the heart, and of the sense of hearing, make necessary new endeavours and, in some cases, the breaking of ancient laws. Many forms have become too hackneyed ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... hesitation, will cease to be a public spectacle; when, if it is deemed requisite to cut off from the earth the shedder of blood, the dreadful doom will cease to amuse the brutal, or to offer a momentary excitement to the unreflecting. Women will be no longer seen raising their children above the crowd, to enjoy the most humiliating sight that can meet the eyes of mortals. Let no one imagine, that men are effectually intimidated by attending public executions: as the fatal moment draws ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... represents the district, and is an advertisement of the kind of spiritual instruction which it needs and gets. Not many large heads sit in the pews; narrowness, unreflecting earnestness, and healthy desires are imprinted upon the faces upturned towards his clear and level delivery. He is never exactly vapid, and he never soars. His theology is full of British beer; but the common-sense of his points and illustrations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... confidence. To the timid, the world is full of mystery manipulated and controlled by forces and powers beyond their ken to comprehend. But knowledge convinces us that there is no mystery in civilization. The railroad, the steamship, and the practical projects that loom so large to the unreflecting, are but the result of the application of thought to things. The mechanical powers and forces of Nature are open secrets for all who will undertake to unravel the mystery. And so it is with essential ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... imagine that the employment of foreign officers is an obstacle to their own advancement. If the present foreign officers are compelled to abandon their situations an explanation must be given of the cause, and public indignation must inevitably fall on the unreflecting heads of the prejudiced or selfish ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... and by introducing into them that play and movement and changing relation which prevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever. The egoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better than the egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of natural objects, and took off something from the violent excess of sensuous force. His thought became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the other ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of such a promise, and yet could always absolve himself from the penalties of responsibility which it imposed, by appealing to the evidence of those who happened to stand in the first ranks of his audience. The blunder was gross and palpable; and yet, with the unreflecting and dull-witted soldier, it did him service greater than all the subtilties of all the schools could have accomplished, and a service which subsisted to the ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... will be heard. A week ago few signs of the approach of the scene-shifter were discernible. He has come, and plants and birds respond to his genial and becoming presence—plants with richer growth and more abundant flowers, birds with the unreflecting gaiety of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... takes its origin from the "indiscreet" or unreflecting form, and the mind from the breath. The organs of sense and action are under the control of the mind. The Yogis restrain their mind by the suspension of breath. Breath is the origin of all speech. The word soham is pronounced by a deep inspiration followed by expiration carried on by the nostrils.... ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... isle she lay, The pale ship anchored in the bay, While in the young moon's port of gold A star-ship—as the mirrors told— Put forth its great and lonely light To the unreflecting Ocean, Night. ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... great but not immense, Born destitute of feeling and of sense. No power he but o'er his brain desired— How not to suffer it to be inspired. Ideas unto him were all unknown, Proud of the words which, only, were his own. So unreflecting, so confused his mind, Torpid in error, indolently blind, A fever Heaven, to quicken him, applied, But, rather ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... dependencies of things, and not by their Appetite, which only can tell what will at the present please, or offend them; not what will, upon the whole, procure to them the most pleasure, or uneasiness; yet such appears to be the unreflecting Nature of the generality of Mankind, and such their fondness of present pleasure, as either not to consider this Truth, or when they do so, to be induc'd (in consequence thereof) to obey the most manifest dictates of Reason, or Natural Light, which will lay any restraint upon their pleasing, ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... magnificent voice, and was prolonged until the thrill produced in the listener became almost painful in its intensity. Again I ask, why did this world-famous singer perform this passage always in the same way? Unreflecting people may reply vaguely that it was because the artist "sang with expression." But what constitutes "expression" in singing? No great artist—no matter what the vehicle or medium through which his art finds manifestation—does anything at random. "The wind bloweth where ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... and the fact that she never knew this until he had given his life in his country's service. It was then too late to reap comfort in her supreme sorrow from the knowledge of his uprightness both to herself and to the wretched woman who had caused her unreflecting flight on that ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... murmured humbly, leaning forwards towards the girl with eyes which deprecated her displeasure. 'I am very far indeed from attributing weakness to you. It was only the natural, unreflecting impulse; one finds it so difficult to associate you, even as merely a reader, with ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... suggests to us this: the need of having a clear consciousness of what is our object in life. The most of men have never answered that question. They live from hand to mouth, driven by circumstances, guided by accidents, impelled by unreflecting passions and desires, knowing what they want for the moment, but never having tried to shape the course of their lives into a consistent whole, so as to stand up before God in Christ when He puts the question to them, 'What seek ye?' and to answer ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... went upstairs to see his wife. Outside the bedroom door he stood hesitant. A desolating sadness of disappointment suddenly surged over him. He had destroyed his ambitions, he had transformed all his life, by a single unreflecting and irretrievable impulse. What he had done was terrific, and yet he had done it as though it were naught ... The mood passed as suddenly as it had come, and left him matter-of-fact, grim, as it were swimming strongly on and with the mighty current which had caught him. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... work of the personifying instinct. When nature is thus personified, where there is no sense of its unity and no capacity to rise in faith to a living God above nature, the result is a multitude of divinities of higher and lower rank. Myths respecting them are the spontaneous invention of unreflecting and uncritical, but imaginative, peoples. Thus they serve to indicate the range of ideas, and the moral spirit of those who originate and give credence ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... that character which the most readily lay hold strongly of an unreflecting mind, because they all presented themselves in ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... that the discovery of the telescope which had played so great a part in the preparation of his crime might serve as a clue to an enquiry; and he threw it into the clock-case, where, as luck would have it, it interrupted the swing of the pendulum. This unreflecting action, one of those which every criminal inevitably commits, was to betray him twenty years later. Just now, the blows which I struck to force the door of the drawing-room released the pendulum. The clock was set going, struck eight o'clock ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... into authority. To whatever is the prevailing, the habitual, usage of a majority of the best writers and speakers the grammarian should bow without question; but not to the accidental slips of even the greatest writers, or to the common usage of the unreflecting and ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... temple tomb have all been mapped by archaeologists, and its Arch of Triumph, of Roman bricks faced with white marble, its long colonnades of Corinthian columns, and its melancholy waving palms have been photographed by troops of unreflecting tourists. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... with a laugh; Chloe wakes; All the enchantment scatters off like chaff; The cord is loosened and the spell breaks. Rosalind Resolves that to-night she will be kind to her lover, Unreflecting, warm and kind. Celia tells the lessons over, Counting on her fingers—one and two ... Ribbon and shoe, Skirts, flowers, song, dancing, laughter, eyes ... Through the whole catalogue of formal gallantry And studious coquetries, Counting ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... like the most of mankind, may be an unreflecting person. Then, in this case, thoughts, feelings, and purposes are continually rising up within his soul like the clouds and exhalations of an evaporating deluge, and at the time of their rise he subjects them to no scrutiny ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... it would have exhibited if left alone. Never were conditions more favourable for developing a girl's first passing fancy for a handsome boyish face—a fancy rooted in inexperience and nourished by seclusion—into a wild unreflecting passion fervid enough for anything. All the elements of such a development were there, the chief one being hopelessness—a necessary ingredient always to perfect the mixture of feelings united under the name of loving ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... fact that is what it is; it is so used to its work that it can do it without your help or even your privity; out of all the facts and statistics that may be placed before it, it will always get the one result, since it has never been taught to seek any other. It is thus the unreflecting cause of much injustice. As we have seen, it betrayed Susy into an injustice toward me. It had to be automatic, for she would have been far from doing me an injustice when in her right mind. It was a dear little biographer, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... 447), denies that there can be such a thing as unconscious memory; but without this it is impossible for us to see instinct as the "kind of organised memory" which he has just been calling it, inasmuch as instinct is notably undeliberate and unreflecting. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... nature objective rather than introspective, his experiences since his first meeting with Felicity were teaching him by hard blows the rudiments of his own psychology. Had he been unmoral, he would have remained unscrupulous and unreflecting, but the claims of right would not down. He saw the better way and approved it, but followed the worse, and his knowledge of this inconsistency was gall and bitterness to his soul. He was as genuinely repentant as it is possible for a healthy man to be while ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... father's knowledge, he had made the laws interpose, and sequestrated the remainder. Sophia did not dare to speak or complain. She felt in her heart that her father was probably in the right, that her own conduct was at least unreflecting, and that Edoardo's expenses were too great; but still she found a thousand arguments to excuse both herself and him. She spent all the day making flowers, and stole a great part of the night from repose to devote it to this labour; but she, formerly so ready to make presents ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... first time broad democratic ground. Attacking the famous speech of Mr. Lowe, [Footnote: Mr. Lowe had asked in the debate on the "Representation of the People Bill," as reported in Hansard, on March 13th, 1866: "If you want venality, ignorance, drunkenness; if you want impulsive, unreflecting, violent people, where do you look for them? Do you go to the top, or to the bottom?"] I declared that so far was I from agreement with these calumnies, that I was of opinion that those homely and truly English qualities which had to ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... next few years the American Navy began to arise again from its ashes. The obligation incurred in exchange for this concession, however, although it resembled that in the Japanese treaty, was probably an unreflecting act of good nature for, if it meant anything, it was an entangling engagement such as the vast majority of Americans were still determined ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... practical and almost rudely healthy young man, with an unreflecting belief in the existence of things he had seen, and considerable doubt concerning those which he had not seen. In his heart he regarded sentiment as the expression of a flabby nature in a feeble body. Once or twice he had casually redressing-case, with its ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... master of methods and slave of things, and therefore the conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, the undoubting, the child with the muscles of a man, the European stripped bare, and shown for what he is, a predatory, unreflecting, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... unevenness of inflection would have rendered it futile, but the voice was sharp and ringing, and the fashion in which the horseman flung up his arm commanding. It was, also, tactful, for some of those who heard it had been drilled into unreflecting obedience, and there is in the native American the respect for a duly accredited leader, which discipline has further impressed upon the Teuton. Still, those who watched from the window felt that this was the crisis, and tightened their numbed ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... offence, that our behaviour, thus guarded and circumspect, has an air of restraint about it, which may produce distrust and apprehension on their part; whilst, on the other hand, Jack, who is not only unreflecting and inoffensive himself, but never suspects that others can possibly misconstrue his perfect good-will and unaffected frankness, has an easy, disengaged manner, which at ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... perhaps rather humble pacific landsmen in their presence; and neither respect, nor a sense of humiliation, are feelings easily combined with a familiar fondness towards those who inspire. them. But the boyish frolics, the exulting high spirits, the unreflecting mirth of a sailor, when enjoying himself on shore, temper the more formidable points of his character. There was nothing like these in this man's face; on the contrary, a surly and even savage scowl appeared to darken ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... But that cheerful, unreflecting youth of mankind, that naive Homeric time, was short in spite of Schiller, who, in the very essay referred to, included Euripides, Virgil, and Horace among the sentimental, and Shakespeare among the naive, poets—a fact ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... nothing survive here of so much honor, so much courtesy, so much courage, to elevate us by its example and to inspire us with new hope, ere we turn again to tread the toilsome mazes of the world? Let the acknowledgments of all those who with no unworthy or unreflecting spirit have traced these paths, reply; or rather let the answer embody itself in the words of a poet, who, while expressing his own sense of the merits of Sydney, has but given a suitable expression to sentiments which find ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... idea once admitted that there may be many churches; that what is called the State can be separated from what is called the Church; the plea of infallibility and of authority soon becomes ridiculous—a mere fiction of political or fashionable quackery to impose upon the uneducated or the unreflecting. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... reader prefers to draw his own conclusions. But for once I ask those to whom this book is dedicated to note the conduct of Catholic young men in a mortal contest. The hereditary leader of the people, sure to be backed by the whole force of the unreflecting masses, and supported on this occasion by the bulk of the national clergy—a man of genius, an historic man wielding an authority made august by a life's services, a solemn moral authority with which it is ridiculous to compare the purely political influence of anyone who ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... contests, there was real affection and respect for Washington on the part of those who were politically opposed to him; but this act, so much like defiance of the popular will as expressed by the house of representatives, in the eyes of the unreflecting, seemed, for the moment, to extinguish every lingering spark of affection in the bosom of his old ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... length on the snow to rise no more. The best means they knew, says Q. Curtius, to escape that mortal numbness, was not to stop, but to force themselves to keep marching, or else to light great fires at intervals. Charles XII, a great warrior alike rash and unreflecting, in 1707 penetrated into Russia and persisted in his determination of marching to Moscow despite the wise advice given him to retire into Poland. The winter was so severe and the cold so intense that the Swedes and Russians could scarcely hold their ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... productive enterprises. They might as well have burned a building or sunk a vessel of that value. It is urged that "labor was employed and paid." Quite true; but tell me, thou resounding ministerial vacuum, thou unreflecting editorial parrot, where is its product? What has society to show for the expenditure of this energy? A hole in its working capital—a hiatus in its larder caused by employing and sustaining labor, not to produce but to destroy. Prodigality on the part of the rich personally ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the ocean clashing against each other, and then plunging into the deep with a violence which no language can describe, and with a noise like the discharge of a thousand cannon, was a sight which must have filled the most unreflecting ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... of my younger Readers may ask HOW a woman in Flatland can make herself invisible. This ought, I think, to be apparent without any explanation. However, a few words will make it clear to the most unreflecting. ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... for our excursion; and yet I never think of that part of our passage in which we threaded the islands lying north of Staffa without a gentle shade of sadness mingling with my recollections. But that the sage Johnson, the romantic Campbell, and the unreflecting parrot all indorse these emotions as instinctive, I should feel bound in honor (honor to the landscape) to ascribe them to that occasional thrill of homesickness which I have known take possession of me in the crowded streets of London or Edinburgh as well as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... greenish feathers and watched him curiously. The faint cries of the gulls overhead seemed borne downward with a note of mocking derision. Charles Turold stepped back from the door with an uneasy look at the cormorant, as though fearing to detect in its unreflecting beadiness of glance some humanly cynical enjoyment at his loss of self-control. The wave of feeling had spent itself. Not thus was victory to be won. He paused to consider, then tried the knocker again. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... sacred cause of freedom. I have directed my solicitor to apply to Chancery for an injunction to restrain the sale; but, after the precedent of Mr. Southey's "Wat Tyler" (a poem written, I believe, at the same age, and with the same unreflecting enthusiasm), with ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... others, he was to be dispensed with altogether. Under any circumstances, the Swiss confederation was to be imitated or reproduced in France. That which gave the pretended scheme most of its air of probability, in the eyes of the unreflecting, and compensated for the entire absence of proof of its substantial reality, was the familiarity of many of the Huguenots—both religious and political—with Geneva, Basle, Berne, and other small republican states. These were fountains of Protestant doctrine; these had afforded ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... declared that, while men of all sects were eligible to membership, "he who rejects the establishment of what we believe to be a divine revelation, he who would disturb the peace of the quiet, and by doubtful disputations unhinge the minds of the simple and unreflecting, and endeavour to turn the unwary out of the way of peace and rational subordination, can have no seat among the members of this institution." The first sentence in this declaration gives food for reflection, for it is the same confusion ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... workers engaged in the task, one requiring an extraordinary amount of time, patience, and care, of restoring the dismembered collections, and replacing the fragments which were then isolated in so brutal a manner by these zealous but unreflecting manipulators of historical documents. It must be recognised, moreover, that the mutilations due to revolutionary activity and the pre-revolutionary collectors are insignificant in comparison with those which are the result of accident ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... pleasantly preoccupied, she may be supposed ignorant of her cousin's broad gaze of unreflecting admiration, and totally unprepared for ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... "you are too reckless of money, too extravagant and unreflecting. Six months ago, you told me, you had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... very verge of a precipice, when the simple act of depositing a vote by the hand of woman, would overthrow and destroy it forever. I don't doubt the honorable gentleman meant what he said, particularly the last part of it, for such are the views of the unthinking, unreflecting mass of the public, here as well as there. But like a true politician, he commenced very patriotically, for the happiness of society, and finished by describing his own individual interests. His reply is a curious mixture of truth, political sophistry, false assumption, and blind selfishness. But ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... elements, an hereditary trait, of the nature of an inborn impulsive propensity, rather than a product of habituation. It is, in substance, not something that can be learned and unlearned. From one generation to another, the allegiance may shift from one nationality to another, but the fact of unreflecting allegiance at large remains. And it all argues also that no sensible change has taken effect in the hereditary endowment of the race, at least in this respect, during the period known by record or by ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... been matter of insult and policy: in Buonaparte they were sincere; for this adventurer, intoxicated with success, already began to imagine that all things were to be submitted to his fortune. We had not at that time proved the superiority of our soldiers over the French; and the unreflecting multitude were not to be persuaded that an invasion could only be effected by numerous and powerful fleets. A general alarm was excited; and, in condescension to this unworthy feeling, Nelson was appointed to a command, extending from Orfordness to Beachy Head, on both shores—a sort of service, ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... to see the pernicious influence which your doctrine about the sovereign rights of individuals must have upon the unreflecting masses who accept it as sound sense, and particularly upon those of them who vote ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... knickknacks, shone a reading-lamp, making more brilliant the rich coloring of his complexion and the gleam of his shining hair. There was daylight, too, but it was north light, and the winter days were dull. Also the walls of the room were a deep, unreflecting red, and his eyes were getting old. The outlines of that vast bed blending into the luxuriant background, the whole focusing to the striking central figure, remain in my mind to-day—a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the Forces has recently made public his belief, that never, till within the last twenty years, did he see so many young men with pale faces and emaciated figures, and he attributes the existence of the evil to the use of Cigars. The unreflecting servility with which men adopt new and foreign practices, is fully exemplified in the present case; for it is notorious that the practice of cigar-smoking, the modern foppery from Regent-street to Cheapside and Cornhill, was an importation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... to my kingdom I have undergone great indignities from this unreflecting people. One Canova, a sculptor at Rome, visited Paris in the name of the Pope, and in quality of his envoy, and insisted on the cession of those statues and pictures which were brought into France by the French ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... because, and in so far as, it had surrendered itself to a blind instinct of conflict. It seemed, therefore, as if the old moral precept that men should control their more violent impulses by reflection had been founded upon a mistake. Unreflecting instinct was, after all, the best guide, and nations who acted instinctively towards their neighbours might justify themselves like the Parisian ruffians of ten years ago, by claiming ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... irrecoverable, though falsehood may be apparent; and still more because few men will be disposed to degrade themselves by assuming a secondary and ministerial office in hanging upon the errors of any man. Pope was a great favourite with Dr. Johnson, both as an unreflecting Tory, who travelled the whole road to Jacobitism—thus far resembling the Doctor himself; secondly, as one who complimented himself whilst yet a young man, and even whilst wearing a masque—complimented him under circumstances which make compliments doubly ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... manhood our life necessarily loses its childlike and unreflecting spontaneity in the ferment of thought, desire, and passion, and in the light of experience; and therefore it becomes a matter of no slight importance to estimate the value of that which we hold in our hands to-day, the nature of the web which our conduct is weaving, and the fateful character ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... affairs of one drunken tailor's family could not afford me complete occupation for my leisure hours, I began to find myself insensibly drawn by Campion's unreflecting enthusiasm into all kinds of small duties connected with Barbara's Building. Before I could realise that I had consented, I discovered myself in charge of an evening class of villainous-looking and uncleanly youths who assembled in one of the lecture-rooms to listen to my recollections ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... Spontaneous, unreflecting good acts proceed from what the mystics call the apex of the soul. "In such acts St. Antony places the ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... and on which there was no insurance. He came again to New York in 1839, and established a restaurant, where, by devoting the services of himself and several members of his family assiduously to the business, he soon reveled in his former prosperity, and snapped his fingers in glee at what unreflecting persons term "the freaks of Dame Fortune." He is still living in New York, hale and hearty at the age of seventy. Although called a "French" blacking-maker, Mr. Gosling is in reality a Dutchman, having been ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... expected in a community which has done away with the spur of economic competition. Will men in such a world become lazy and apathetic? Will they cease to think? Will those who do think find themselves confronted with an even more impenetrable wall of unreflecting conservatism than that which confronts them at present? These are important questions; for it is ultimately to science that mankind must look for their success in ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... without perpetrating mischief, nor intend mischief without unconsciously achieving discomfiture and disgrace. For of the L.1,550,000 colonial overcharge in military expenditure alone of this shallow, unreflecting, and superficial person, not less certainly than L1,200,000 must be charged to the account of foreign trade, the special trade he delights to honour. It will constitute, as he will find, a material item in the general balance-sheet which we purpose to draw hereafter between ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... of highbred And unreflecting graces, I scintillate o'er STREPHON's head At gala, rout or races; Mine is the black but comely blend, And mine the crowning touches That so demurely recommend The dandy to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing. I have pointed out again and again that the influence of the theatre in England is growing so great that whilst private conduct, religion, law, science, politics, and morals are becoming more and more theatrical, the theatre itself remains impervious ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the Aristotelian theory of nature? No doubt it is better to go back to that than to stop short before instinct as before an unfathomable mystery. But, though instinct is not within the domain of intelligence, it is not situated beyond the limits of mind. In the phenomena of feeling, in unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, we experience in ourselves—though under a much vaguer form, and one too much penetrated with intelligence—something of what must happen in the consciousness of an insect acting by instinct. Evolution does but ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... recommend you not to be carried away by those gusts of prejudice and passion that sweep periodically through the community. There is a contagion in these things that it is hard to resist, and so much that to-day passes for thought is not thought at all, but merely the automatic, unreflecting acceptance of wild theories that are enunciated with so much force that they seem to be almost axioms. Your study of history will show you that the world has always been subject to these waves of emotion, that are sometimes religious, sometimes ...
— Morals in Trade and Commerce • Frank B. Anderson
... doubt hopes to reach the indubitable, and to the excessive skepticism of Pyrrhonism, which cripples the impulse to inquiry. This moderate skepticism asks us only, after resisting the tendency to unreflecting conclusions, to make a duty of deliberation and caution in judging, and to restrain inquiry within those fields which are accessible to our knowledge, i.e., the fields of mathematics and empirical fact. In the Treatise Hume had favored a sharper skepticism and extended ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And feel that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think, Till Love and Fame to nothingness ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... had, unknown to himself, exerted a magnetic influence on Reine's dark, liquid orbs, and, without endeavoring to analyze the sympathy that drew her toward a nature refined and tender even to weakness, without asking herself where this unreflecting instinct might lead her, she was conscious of a growing sentiment toward him, which was not very ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the fever of political excitement, by giving better occupation to the mind. Much, too, may be hoped from the growing self-respect of the people, which will make them shrink indignantly from the disgrace of being used as blinded partisans and unreflecting tools. Much also is to be hoped from the discovery, which must sooner or later be made, that the importance of government is enormously overrated, that it does not deserve all this stir, that there are vastly more effectual ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... placing a bad novel on your record. People sin out of thoughtlessness, as well as depravity, and we would not say that every amateur novelist is, ex officio, infamous, nefarious, and felonious. He or she may be only rather vain, conceited, and unreflecting. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Dr. Channing to pronounce such a eulogy upon them. We say, then, that he knew better when he asserted that we have degraded them into brutes. He spoke, not from his better knowledge and his conscience, but from blind, unreflecting passion. For he knew—if he knew any thing—that the blacks have been elevated and improved by their contact with the whites of this enlightened portion ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... question of improved armaments has been approached by the governments of the earth in a spirit of nervous and unreflecting haste, whereas the right way was lying plainly before them, and had only to be pursued with calm determination. The learned vigils and labours of a certain class of inventors should have been rewarded with honourable ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... retirement conspired also to swell the general gloom; for, although thinking military men could realize from the first that the position into which the fleet was forced was so essentially false that it could not be maintained, the unreflecting multitude saw only the conversion into repulse and disaster of a substantial success, of a conquest as apparently real as it was actually phantasmal. In the West, Grant was so stripped of troops that he feared ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... The crowd state and the domination of crowds is equivalent to the barbarian state, or to a return to it. It is by the acquisition of a solidly constituted collective spirit that the race frees itself to a greater and greater extent from the unreflecting power of crowds, and emerges from the barbarian state. The only important classification to be made of heterogeneous crowds, apart from that based on racial considerations, is to separate them into anonymous crowds, such as street crowds, and crowds not anonymous—deliberative ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... age with very few votaries? Some, doubtless, will always be found, who, disgusted with the profligacy with which they are surrounded, are led only the more rapidly to a life of rectitude and duty by such vice; but how many are they amidst the crowd of sensual and unreflecting? Perhaps one in twenty. The great mass pass quietly by on the other side; they do not say there is no God, but they live altogether without God in the world. In vain are efforts made to reclaim the vicious, to bring up their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... desolation of his futile wanderings. For months—for years—his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration—like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... done the people of Kentucky, because of their conduct during the retreat. Baseless charges of their cowardice and treachery had been bandied about in the mouths of the unreflecting; the many had been made to suffer for the baseness of the few; and the shield of the state had been tarnished because of an inaction her ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... they are never allowed animal food, at least when in their own country; and the better living to which they are accustomed in foreign countries, and on active service, is a stronger recommendation of war to these volatile and unreflecting spirits, than it ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... all have known intimately a space. These pieces are not youth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are the expression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels, itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, its sharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. The spring comes up hot and cruel in them. There is all the loneliness of youth in this music, all the mysterious dreams of a world scarce understood, all the hesitancies and blind gropings of powers untried. Always, one senses the pavements stretching ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... impression, I find gradually dispelling the pleasing pensiveness which the melancholy event, the subject of my last, had diffused over my mind. Naturally cheerful, volatile, and unreflecting, the opposite disposition I have found to contain sources of enjoyment which I was before unconscious ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... theory of "Chance," which was once the stronghold of Atheism, is now all but abandoned by speculative thinkers, and exists only, if at all, in the vague beliefs of uneducated and unreflecting men. This result has been brought about, not so much by the Metaphysical or even the Theological considerations which were urged against the theory, as by the steady advance of Science, and the slow but progressive growth of a belief in "law" ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... show a correspondent aversion and contempt. The towns would not suffer their passage; the hamlets were unwilling to serve them even with fire and water. They were filled at once with shame and rage; one officer killed himself, unable to bear it; in the unreflecting minds of the soldiers, hate sprung up for the rest of Italy, and especially Rome, which will make them admirable tools of tyranny in case of ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... natural for men to prefer an animal life. By-and-by they will learn that such a life necessitates force, absolutism. It is natural for unreflecting men to complain when custom or institutions hold them up to some higher degree. But that higher degree has in it an element of emancipation from the necessary despotisms of physical life. If it were possible to bring the whole community up to a plane of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Karl Albert's never had much likelihood to do. Few mortals in any age have offered such an example of the tragedies which Ambition has in store for her votaries; and what a matter Hope FULFILLED may be to the unreflecting Son ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... must be an end to it," he said. "You will excuse me, Sir Wycherly, but the movements of a fleet always have interest in my eyes, and it is seldom that I get such a bird's-eye view of those of my own; no wonder it has made me a somewhat unreflecting intruder." ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the influence of example upon unreflecting minds dwelling on the frontiers of Upper Canada, that although in most instances the settlers are in possession of farms originally free gifts from the Crown, yet many of their sons were in arms against that Crown in 1837. Among these misguided youths was a son of Defield's, who surrendered, ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... loyalty may be returned—confirmed insanity. It is, however, our duty as good citizens and fellow-journalists to protest, in advance, against any such verdict; declaring that whatever may be adduced by the unreflecting persons in daily intercourse with the editor—that grave and learned scribe is in the enjoyment—of all the sense originally vouchsafed to him. We know the stories that are in the most unfeeling manner told to the disadvantage of the learned and inoffensive ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... future of forty sous in his pocket when his old comrade du Tillet chanced to meet him, the little gains that he was to get out of the affair seemed an Eldorado. His friendship, his devotion, to du Tillet, increased by unreflecting gratitude and stimulated by the wants of a libertine and vagabond life, led him to say amen to everything. Having sold his honor, he saw it risked with so much caution that he ended by attaching himself to his old comrade as a dog to ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... humiliation of her offering him the money. No, it was offered in such a way that it was possible to take it, especially for a man so easy-going as the prisoner, above all, as he expected to receive shortly from his father the three thousand roubles that he reckoned was owing to him. It was unreflecting of him, but it was just his irresponsible want of reflection that made him so confident that his father would give him the money, that he would get it, and so could always dispatch the money entrusted to ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... residence among us is yet more objectionable on other accounts. It is incompatible with the tranquility of society; their apparent exemption from want and care and servitude to business, excites impracticable hopes in the minds of those who are even more ignorant and unreflecting—and their locomotive habits fit them for a dangerous agency in schemes, wild and visionary, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... Valois. Reeking with blood, and apparently insensible to anything like a humane feeling, he was yet popular with the masses of his subjects, and no small share of that popularity has descended to our time, in which he is admired by the unreflecting because of the boldness and dash of his actions and on account of the consequences of those actions, so that he is commonly known as "bluff King Hal," a title that speaks more as to the general estimate of his character than would a whole ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... distinctness. The silly old mother, obstinate from age as well as bigotry; the modest and sensible Cleante; his brother-in-law, Orgon, prepared to be a dupe by prepossession and self-opinion; Damis, impetuous and unreflecting; Mariane, gentle and patient; with the hasty and petulant sallies of Dorine, who ridicules the family she serves with affection; are all faithfully drawn, and contribute their own share on the effect of the piece, while they assist in bringing on the catastrophe. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... prevalent evils. By attacking the present system of government and industry they hope to have the workingmen conclude that the Socialist Party alone can save mankind from complete ruin. This, then, is the way in which "scientific" Socialism leads unreflecting laborers to believe that the contemplated state would be the most perfect institution under heaven, replete with countless blessings and free ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... ceremonies of Marriage and rules and rites of sex-connection, fitted to curb the terrific and demonic violence of passions which else indeed might easily rend the community asunder. And so on. It is easy to see that granted an early stage of simple unreflecting nature-consciousness, and granting this broken into and, after a time, shattered by the arrival of SELF-consciousness there would necessarily follow in spontaneous yet logical order a whole series of religious institutions and beliefs, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter |
