"Blockhead" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... idiot, imbecile, natural; simpleton, dolt, dunce, defective, witling, dotterel, driveler, blockhead, beetlehead, ninny, ignoramus, numskull, booby, clodpate, nincompoop, ass, wiseacre, dunderhead, halfwit, oaf, dullard, coot, mooncalf; zany, harlequin, buffoon, jester, merry-andrew, droll, clown, scaramouch. Associated ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... ass I am! I remember now. I left the stick against the wall of the opera house. Blockhead! With a stick, ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... of course, is dismissed by the average male blockhead as no more than a feeble sentimentality. The truth is that it is precisely the opposite. It is surely not sentimentality to be moved by the stately and mysterious ceremony of the mass, or even, say, by those timid imitations ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... getting out of patience with this blockhead. Blind and can't see out of it! They put the blockheads in the army because there is no other place for them. I think that must be the reason why there are more synonyms for blockhead in the German language than in any other—we have the ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... "machinery" is to be taken as an existing fact; but that the poem is, so to speak, the projection of truths upon the cloudland of imagination. It reflects and gives sensuous images of truth; but it is only the Philistine or the blockhead who can seriously ask, is it true? Some such position seems to be really conceivable as an ultimate compromise. Put aside the prosaic insistence upon literal matter-of-fact truth, and we may all agree to use the same symbolism, and interpret it as we please. This seems to ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... with all its bustle of gaiety and endless occupation about nothing, might have exercised upon him something of the fascination which fine names and fine houses and the sweep and whirl of hurried life certainly possess; but he who expresses almost with bitterness his disgust to see a blockhead of rank received by one of his noble patrons with as much, nay more, consideration than is given to himself, would probably have had very little toleration for the butterflies of fashion: whereas Edinburgh society impressed him greatly, as of that ideal kind of which ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... a jolly good trick, I should say. Then Koga-san has no liking to go there? No wonder I thought it strange. We would have to go a long way to find any blockhead to do a job in such a mountain village and get acquainted with ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... care for anything now," cried Brown recklessly. "My prayers, tears, and alms-giving haven't been without avail. The terrors and agonies I've endured this last few days lest that old blockhead should take himself off without saying or doing anything, no man will ever know. And he would have gone off, too, had it not been for that lucky fluke of your mother's. Do ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... best in sandy soil, I'm sure of that—but plant before you boil; Then put in strawberries; that's what I do— Confound you for a blockhead! Why don't you Get modern works and read them? No, you'd rather Go creeping on just like your stupid father. That patch is good for melons. Why the deuce Don't you convert those ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... this grinder does not pretend his stone is safe. All he says is, safe or not, he'll run it out. So now the question is, will you pay four shillings from your box for this blockhead's loss of time in hanging ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... been coming over me ever since I came here; but it is greatest since yesterday. You know what sorrows I have passed through, Jemima; how unjustly I was always treated at school, the masters keeping me back and calling me a blockhead, though, as they themselves allowed, I had the best memory of any boy in the school, and could repeat whole books from beginning to end. You know how cruelly father always used me, calling me a noodle and a milksop, just because he couldn't understand my fine nature. You know how he has made ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... found, under the rose be it spoken, even for a bishop to be a blockhead: but, if that bishop had sense enough to discern my good qualities, I ought not to be the most unrelenting of his censurers. My defence of the articles would indeed do its own business: yet to come forth under episcopal auspices ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the court-fool was generally not a wit, but a naive blockhead, who believed all that was said, and was therefore a butt for jests. He only placed a letter in Cercas' hand, and disappeared. When Cercas had read the letter, she changed colour and seemed to become a different being. Overcome with rage, she could ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... happens that the imprudent is honoured and the wise despised. The alchemist died of poverty and distress, while the blockhead found a treasure ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... line. When Macaulay attacks an old non-juror or a modern Tory, we can only wonder how opinions which, on his showing, are so inconceivably absurd, could ever have been held by any human being. Men are Whigs or not-Whigs, and the not-Whig is less a heretic to be anathematised than a blockhead beneath the reach of argument. All political wisdom centres in Holland House, and the 'Edinburgh Review' is its prophet. There is something in the absolute confidence of Macaulay's political dogmatism ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... slight sound caused me to turn my head, and I saw in a doorway that led to another room the erect figure of Major Lessard listening intently, a black frown on his eagle face. When MacRae had finished his story and the incapable blockhead behind the desk sat there regarding the two of us as though he considered that we had been the victims of a rank hallucination, Lessard slammed the door shut behind him ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... for disturbing the old received spelling, is—that Jean Hordal, a descendant of La Pucelle's brother, spelled the name Darc, in 1612. But what of that? Beside the chances that M. Hordal might be a gigantic blockhead, it is notorious that what small matter of spelling Providence had thought fit to disburse amongst man in the seventeenth century, was all monopolized by printers: in France, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... careless or lazy to look out for yourself," retorted the baron. "But then you can have no possible objection to the present match. The fair Julia is just twenty—eyes, you dog—lips, you rascal—a shape, you blockhead, to bewitch an anchorite. And then she has the gelt—the money, ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... from his journeys it was not seldom that he called him a simpleton and a blockhead in the hearing of the servants, and would complain bitterly at being obliged to leave his farm in hands as incapable as his, when his duty—nobody knew what that duty was—called ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... education, and favourable chance, could not have surmounted all the obstacles of an unpromising nature; and there is no great man who, in the absence of passion, interest, education, and certain chances, would not have been a blockhead, in spite of his happier organisation. It is only in the moral region that we ought to seek the true cause of inequality of intellect. Genius is no singular gift of nature. Genius is common; it is only the circumstances proper to develop it that are rare. The man of genius is simply the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... once more rested on his son. He imagined the child grown into a young man; he would make a companion of him; but perhaps he would be a blockhead, a wretched creature, in any event. He was always oppressed by the illegality of the infant's birth; it would have been better if he had never been born! And Frederick would murmur, "Poor child!" his heart swelling ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... said, turning upon me angrily, "you blockhead! I mean that unless you marry Julia I shall have to give an account of her property; and I could not make all square, not if I sold every stick ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... nothing else; philology being the last resource of dulness and ennui, I have got a little in advance of the throng, by mastering the Armenian alphabet; but I foresee the time when every unmarriageable miss, and desperate blockhead, will likewise have acquired the letters of Mesroub, and will know the term for bread, in Armenian, and ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... while we were at two, and besides, we had had two by honours; as they made four by cards, they went out—and so did I—not without an obbligato accompaniment on muted strings; unwhispered whispers of "confounded blockhead!" "blundering idiot!" "well, of all the born ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... Her husband, however, really tired after his unusual bodily efforts of the previous day, only slumbered, as Mrs. Mulcahy had at first anticipated; and when she had shaken and aroused him, for the twentieth time that morning, and scolded him until the spirit-broken blockhead whimpered,—nay, wept, or pretended to weep,—the dame ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... heard what had happened, he said, 'You blockhead, you can't have done it properly; just let me have a try,' and with these words he seized his wife by the roots of her hair, cut her throat with a razor, and then took the pipe and blew into it with all his might but he ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... of Flatt'ry rise, Th' anointed Son of Dulness and of Lies: Whose softest Whisper fills a Patron's Ear, Who smiles unpleas'd, and mourns without a tear.[43] Persuasive, tho' a woful Blockhead he: Truth dies before his shadowy Sophistry. For well he knows[44] the Vices of the Town, The Schemes of State, and Int'rest of the Gown; Immoral Afternoons, indecent Nights, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... formidable enemies to his fame and detractors from his genius—Samuel Johnson and Christopher North. The first pronounced him "a prolific blockhead," "a huge and fertile crab-tree;" the second has wielded the knout against his back with peculiar gusto and emphasis, in a paper on satire and satirists, published in Blackwood for 1828. Had Churchill been alive, he could have easily "retorted scorn"—set a ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... masters me. I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even know her. I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature: I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor refinement in her mind or manners—and, I married her:—gross, grovelling, mole-eyed blockhead that I was! With less sin I might have—But let me remember to whom I ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... have been made fools of by the girls, but this can never with truth be said of me. I most emphatically in this instance, made a fool of myself. I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason: I can never be satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... project, and encouraged them, never thinking there was one among them so stupid as to carry a gun to fight a ghost with; for how can you shoot a ghost, when it has neither flesh nor blood? It was impossible to suspect any one of being such a monstrous blockhead; so I was rather disagreeably startled at hearing the crack of a gun, and feeling the tingling of a bullet whizzing past my ear. You nearly made me into a real ghost, friend Beppo; for I assure you, you are a capital ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... vile, sheep-hearted blockhead! If I hadn't the valour of St. George and the dragon ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... thinking to serve the artist by it, made it an argument that the Pope should be reconciled to him, because men of his profession were commonly ignorant, and of no consequence otherwise; his holiness, enraged at the bishop, struck him with his staff, and told him, it was he that was the blockhead, and affronted the man himself would not offend: the prelate was driven out of the chamber, and Michael Angelo had the Pope's benediction, accompanied with presents. This bishop had fallen into the vulgar ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... truth of this. Indeed, when he came to look carefully at the wooden head, he did not blame his daughters for not wishing to marry it. Should he force one of them to consent, it was not unlikely she would call her husband a blockhead—a term almost certain to cause ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... know," said he, a little nettled, "I draw tolerably—SHOULD do it at least—have had good masters, and flatter myself that I am not quite a blockhead." ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... Thomson's Castle of Indolence he vouchsafed only a line of cold commendation—of commendation much colder than what he has bestowed on The Creation of that portentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. Gray was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill was a blockhead. The contempt which he felt for Macpherson was, indeed, just; but it was, we suspect, just by by chance. He criticized Pope's epitaphs excellently. But his observations on Shakspeare's plays, and Milton's poems, seem to us as wretched as if they ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... an old blockhead. He has stumbled into the possession of some property which I am ready to pay him a fair price for. He took it for a cow-pasture. It isn't worth anything. It would only be a convenience to us to have it and prevent a row in the future, perhaps. That is the only reason I want it. Besides, his ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... went on: "And now see the precious old fool! He is deeply interested in the movements of the little ants, and as childish and ridiculous over them as if they were highly important.—There, you old blockhead, ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... idle as to waste This Life disputing upon Taste; And most—let that sad Truth be written— In this contentious Land of Britain, Where each one holds "it seems to me" Equivalent to Q. E. D., And if you dare to doubt his Word Proclaims you Blockhead and absurd. And then, too often, the Debate Is not 'twixt First and Second-rate, Some narrow Issue, where a Touch Of more or less can't matter much, But, and this makes the Case so sad, Betwixt undoubted Good and Bad. Nay,—there are some so strangely ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... in: "That miserable fellow there whom you met flatters himself he shall gain a large sum of money from me, if he can detect our thief by means of some senseless artifice. He won't come back again, the blockhead! for I have at length given vent for once to my feelings. There is nothing in the world so insufferable to me, as when people try, by means of certain phrases fabricated at random, or of certain traditional ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... numskull, witling, blockhead, coot, lackbrain, ninny, oaf, nincompoop, mooncalf, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Johnson held them very cheap: 'Bouts-rimes,' said he, 'is a mere conceit, and an old conceit; I wonder how people were persuaded to write in that manner for this lady.' I named a gentleman of his acquaintance who wrote for the vase. JOHNSON—'He was a blockhead for his pains!' BOSWELL—'The Duchess of Northumberland wrote.'—'Sir, the Duchess of Northumberland may do what she pleases; nobody will say anything to a lady of her high rank: but I should be apt to throw ... verses in his face." (Boswell, vol. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... guard how I treated him. But as sickness frets one's temper, I sometimes forgot myself, and called him "bestia, blockhead;" and once when he was at a loss which way to go, at a wild woody part of the country, I fell into a passion, and called to him "Mi maraviglio che un uomo si bravo puo esser si stupido. I am amazed that so brave a man can be so stupid." However by afterwards ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... confusion. Every man entered into dispute with his neighbour on the merits of this cause. The chairman interposed his authority in vain; the noise grew louder and louder; the disputants waxed warm; the epithets of blockhead, fool, and scoundrel, were bandied about. Peregrine enjoyed the uproar, and, leaping upon the table, sounded the charge to battle, which was immediately commenced in ten different duels. The lights were ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... time, then if you return to repeat a similar course, you will never be questioned about your absence any more than if you had been dead, and you will waste your whole life in submitting to court the humours of this blockhead. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... meant. Whoe'er excels in what we prize, Appears a hero in our eyes; Each girl, when pleased with what is taught, Will have the teacher in her thought. When miss delights in her spinet, A fiddler may a fortune get; A blockhead, with melodious voice, In boarding-schools may have his choice: And oft the dancing-master's art Climbs from the toe to touch the heart. In learning let a nymph delight, The pedant gets a mistress by't. Cadenus, to his grief and shame, Could scarce oppose Vanessa's flame; ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... order, and the same profusion. When they had taken their seats in the corner of the room, Yussuf said, "Now, my guests, as you hope for pardon, tell me, do you know nothing of what has happened to me this day—and what the blockhead of a caliph has been about?" Haroun and the vizier could with difficulty restrain their laughter, as they shook their heads. "Yes," continued Yussuf, "that vicegerent of a tattered beard, and more tattered understanding, has issued a decree for closing the baths for three days, by ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... for he wished to show his zeal before the officer. "Blockhead!" he added with emphasis, as Pasquale disappeared again and was ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... fiume, broke down a bridge, and flooded heaven knows how many campi; then rain came—and it is still thawing—so that my saddle-horses have a sinecure till the roads become more practicable. Why did Lega give away the goat? a blockhead—I must have him again. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... means clear, that this was a "counterfeit association," though Walpole abandons his usual scepticism on all disputable points with such facility. The "association" was a plot to bring back that miserable blockhead and bigot, James II., said to be signed by Marlborough, the Bishop of Rochester, Lords Salisbury, Cornberry, and Sir Basil Firebrace. On the information of one Young, the draft of the plot was found in a flower-pot in the Bishop's house ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... shaken and Troy undone, Ten thousand lives for a worthless one. Yet I blame you not; you might well do worse; Better fight and perish than live to curse The day you were born; and such has been The lot of many, and shall, I ween, Be the lot of more. If Thurston chooses He may go with you. The blockhead abuses Me and ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... thee for a blockhead!" he exclaimed. "Where hast thou ever heard of castles and royal palaces being built ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... keep before us the character of the child as distinct from the wrong acts which the child may commit. If a child lies, that does not make of him a liar, any more than does his failure to understand what he has just been told make of him a blockhead. Yet the natural consequence of lying, for instance, is to be mistrusted in the future—to be branded a liar. This, however, is one of the worst things that can happen to a child, and one of the surest ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... heavy, and the stupid; to these he gave the exactest and most expressive colours, and in some of them looked as if it were not in the power of human passions to alter a feature of him. A countenance of wood could not be more fixed than his, when the blockhead of a character required it; his face was full and long; from his crown to the end of his nose was the shorter half of it, so that the disproportion of his lower features, when soberly composed, threw him into the most lumpish, moping mortal, that ever made beholders merry; ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... capacities take a much more outward direction. They are expressed not only in the face and play of his features, but also in his walk, nay, in every movement, however slight it may be. One could perhaps discriminate from behind between a blockhead, a fool, and a man of genius. A clumsy awkwardness characterises every movement of the blockhead; folly imprints its mark on every gesture, and so do genius and a reflective nature. Hence the outcome of La Bruyere's remark: Il n'y a rien de si delie, de si simple, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... every night, and then retired without paying—this being, it seems, an immemorial privilege which the beaus of the town prescribe for themselves. This, however, did not suit Wild's temper, who called it a cheat, and objected against it as requiring no dexterity, but what every blockhead might put in execution. He said it was a custom very much savouring of the sneaking-budge, [Footnote: Shoplifting] but neither so honourable nor ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... he cried, 'All our physicians cannot tell what an ague is, and all our arithmetique is not able to number the days of a man'—which, God knows, is not the fault of arithmetique, but that our understandings reach not the thing." "The blockhead Albemarle hath strange luck to be loved, though he be, and every man must know it, the heaviest man in the world, but stout and honest to his country." "He advises me in what I write to him, to be as short ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... times, each cough being louder than the last, and then, treading softly, was about to return to the workshop when the girl stirred and muttered in her sleep. At first she was unintelligible, then he distinctly caught the words "idiot" and "blockhead." ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... that it should be in the power of one blockhead to do so much mischief!" The obstinacy of George III. cost England her dearest and fairest possession. It is almost impossible to picture what would be her power to-day if she had continued to ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... most frequent interrupter of his solitude. He would be met pounding along steadily, carrying, often twirling, a 'very big stick,' which now and then came down with a blow—upon the knuckles, I take it, of some imaginary blockhead on the other side—muttering to himself, 'immersed in thought and with a fierce expression of concentrated study.' He did not often come to mess, and when he did found some things of which he did not approve. Barristers, it appears, are still capable of indulging ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... gracious Lord given me to do, that the COLLEGE may be owned for the bringing forth such as are somewhat known in the world, and have read and wrote as much as many have done in other places? And yet the College for ever puts all possible marks of disesteem upon me. If I were the greatest blockhead that ever came from it, or the greatest blemish that ever came to it, they could not easily show me more contempt than ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... substantial character. Experience of every day life teaches us, if we would but learn, that civility is not only one of the essentials of high success, but that it is almost a fortune of itself, and that he who has this quality in perfection, though a blockhead, is almost sure to succeed where, without it, even men of ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... upon the Barnacles,' said Gowan, laughing afresh, 'they are darling fellows! Even poor little Clarence, the born idiot of the family, is the most agreeable and most endearing blockhead! And by Jupiter, with a kind of cleverness in him too that ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... mean? It means that you are a stupid, a fool, a blockhead! All the world knows that one of your daughters is the mistress of a nobleman, and you are not only content to live with her and share her shameful earnings, but you actually come here to me and make ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... Honor to all the great arts! The limit to their beauty and their usefulness has never yet been found and never will. Painting was the golden key this thinker held to the Bramah lock of an imbecile's understanding the ponderous wards were beginning to revolve—when a blockhead came and did his best to hamper ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... the haughty FONTANGE [Species of topknot; so named from Fontange, an unfortunate female of Louis Fourteenth's, who invented the ornament.] of my Spouse [as Ludwig Rudolf does, by all accounts], than to have a blockhead who would drive me mad by her ineptitudes? and whom I should be ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... "blockhead! coof!" And heav'd on high my waukit loof, To swear by a' yon starry roof, Or some rash aith, That I henceforth wad be rhyme-proof Till my ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... them, theame, thus, thunder, thine, thin, goal or goal, as afore, motion, crimson, action, Acteon, singed, hanged, changed, shepherd, Shaphat, dishonour, asham'd, bishop, mishap, character, charity, duckherd, blockhead, Dutchess, gather, success, suggest, or suggest, or suggest, or suggest, haov, rij, [w]heg and who, come, on, you know what I mean, as well as [h]orses. War rod: scepter, sceptic, syllables, bless, access, axes, oxen, Christ-cross, beaux, beauty, ancre, kernel, acres, ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... himself on the stocks (whether to recover his breath, or whether to show that his victory was consummated, and that he was in his rights of possession). "Hollo," said Mr. Stirn, "what is all this?—what's the matter, Lenny, you blockhead?" ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... "place of location" without a special permission. It signified nothing to him that on his wake belated police officers, not a little relieved to find themselves belated, shook warning handbills at his retreating back. He was going to see what the world had to show him, poor incredulous blockhead, and he did not mean that occasional spirited persons shouting "Hi!" at him should stay his course. He came on down by Rochester and Greenwich towards an ever-thickening aggregation of houses, walking rather slowly now, staring about him ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... terrible leader of Walter's Was not utterly void of foundation in fact. Was the Cabinet really not full of defaulters, And resolved for a time on that ruinous act?" "Cease, blockhead, to babble Your ganderlike gable: Could Repeal e'er be REASON CONTENTS ME with Graham, Could the NE NIMIUM Of good Gordon succumb, Or the Stanley's SANS CHANGER be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... laugh" is another precept of the hypercritical mother. Why? Goodness only knows!—for none but a pompous blockhead or a solemn prig will pretend that he never relaxes. But let ancient Plato, brimful as he was of philosophy, answer the ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... on his acute insight into human nature in general, and upon his specialized, intensified knowledge of those two women whom he had known so long and studied so minutely; but "I've been a conceited blockhead, and vanity's treacherous as well as damnable," he cried out to his sister some days later, amazed beyond expression at the way in which their loss affected ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... man's own language, "by standing in the way of the maharajah sahib's orders? Here's his highness sending a lady doctor to the princess for an excuse to confine her elsewhere and have all this trouble off our hands, and you, like a blockhead, stand in the way to prevent ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... Whig, or a Puritan, or any other unimaginative blockhead, to cry out against all this as nauseous flattery, and assert that after all she was rather an unpoetical personage than otherwise—a coarse-minded old maid, half prude, half coquette, whose better part was mannish, and all that belonged to her sex a ludicrous exaggeration of its weaknesses. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... against the grain of Mr. Bazzard,' said Mr. Grewgious. 'He is very short with me sometimes, and then I feel that he is meditating, "This blockhead is my master! A fellow who couldn't write a tragedy on pain of death, and who will never have one dedicated to him with the most complimentary congratulations on the high position he has taken in the eyes of posterity!" Very trying, very ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... count, motioning the two young men to sit down. "It was the fault of that blockhead Pastrini, that I did not sooner assist you in your distress. He did not mention a syllable of your embarrassment to me, when he knows that, alone and isolated as I am, I seek every opportunity of making the acquaintance of my neighbors. As soon as I learned I could in any way assist you, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... without you; and my way is this," he said, suddenly lifting her from the ground, holding her waist between his two big hands, and giving her an emphatic kiss. Phoebe was silenced altogether when this had happened. He was a blockhead, but he was a man, and could stand up for his love, and for his own rights as a man, independent of the world. She felt a genuine admiration for her lout at that moment; but this admiration was accompanied by a very chill sense of all that might be forfeited if Mr. ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... useless &c 645; inexpedient &c 647; frivolous &c (trivial) 643. Phr. Davus sum non [Lat.] [Oedipus]; a fool's bolt is soon shot [Henry V.] clitellae bovi sunt impositae [Lat.] [Cicero]; fools rush in where angels fear to tread [Pope]; il n' a ni bouche ni eperon [Fr.]; the bookful blockhead, ignorantly read [Pope]; to varnish nonsense with the charms ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the young man, firmly, "it isn't. On second thoughts, you are to stay just where you are till that blockhead brings the ladder. I've a good deal to say. I'm going to walk ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... a blockhead, Monsieur; I have good eyes, and I have seen what I have seen. But, really ill as you are, Monsieur le ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... madman!" quoth he. "If we be delayed here any longer thou shalt be hanged for a false thief! To keep the king's messengers waiting thus! Canst thou not see the king's seal? Canst thou not read the address of the royal letter? Ah, blockhead, thou shalt dearly abide this delay when my lord ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... To-morrows are only our To-days over again.... So Dinky-Dunk, who keeps saying in unexpected and intriguing ways that he can't live without me, is trying to make love to me as he did in the old days before he got salt-and-peppery above the ears. And I'm blockhead enough to believe him. I'm like an old shoe, I suppose, comfortable but not showy. Yet it's the children we really have to think of. Our crazy old patch-work of the Past may be our own, but the Future belongs to them. There's a heap of good, though, in ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... Dryden, with delight has seized, His soul engaged and of his trouble eased: When, with a heavy eye and ill-done sum, No part conceived, a stupid boy will come; Then Leonard first subdues the rising frown, And bids the blockhead lay his blunders down; O'er which disgusted he will turn his eye, To his sad duty his sound mind apply, And, vex'd in spirit, throw his pleasures by. Turn we to Schools which more than these afford - The ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... blockhead!" said Mrs. Blackwell, "haven't you better sense than to talk about its being chilly? These last few days Belinda has done nothing but complain about the cold. She comes from Barbados, where the thermometer never goes ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the plunge, and following your repeated advice, I have taken a post with the ambassador. We arrived here yesterday. If he were less peevish and morose all would be well. As it is, he occasions me continual annoyance; he is the most punctilious blockhead in the world. He does everything step by step, with the paltry fussiness of an old woman; and he is a man whom it is impossible to please, because he is never pleased ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... and Ovid too, That man's a blockhead have confessed, Powel and Stretch {1} the hint pursue; Life is the ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... worthless subject, and what is worse, but indifferently handled. He is meant for the feather-brained thing of tags and laces, which frequently inhabits courts; but he wants the grace and agility proper to the species; he is less a fool than a blockhead, less perverted than totally inane. Schiller's strength lay not in comedy, but in something far higher. The great merit of the present work consists in the characters of the hero and heroine; and in this respect it ranks at the very head of its class. As a tragedy of common ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... thing is best notion would bring the beautiful harmonious world into dull, dead uniformity. There's a friend of mine that studies his Bible without any reference to the old systems of theology, and finds these old systems have made some big mistakes in interpreting its sayings, when a newspaper blockhead comes along and says if he won't conform let him go out of the church. There's a one-eyed man for you, an ecclesiastical Polyphemus! Our politicians are just the same, without a broad, liberal idea to clothe their ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... matter of fact, I don't see," said I. "You will think me an awful blockhead, but I don't perceive anything singular in a cigar manufacturer ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... inconveniences and ills as if they were the peculiar property of his particular situation; and hence that eternal fickleness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily does ruin many a fine fellow, as well as many a blockhead; and is, almost without exception, a constant source of ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Sleeping, to be sure, is the most serious employment of your life—for as to eating, you hardly match a sparrow; but I entreat you to sleep without dreaming, or to keep your visions to yourself.—Why do you keep such fast hold of me?—What on earth can you be afraid of?—Surely you do not think the blockhead Binks, or any other of the good folks below yonder, dared to turn on me? Egad, I wish they would pluck up a little mettle, that I might have an excuse for drilling them. Gad, I would soon teach ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... squeamer, Blockhead, sluggard, dullard, dreamer, Shirker, shuffler, crawler, creeper, Sniffler, snuffler, wailer, weeper, Earthworm, maggot, tadpole, weevil! Set upon thy course of evil, Lest the King of Spectre-land Set on thee his ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... "Blockhead, that you cannot keep your thoughts on what you are doing! One might expect as good a game from the tumbler's dog. Is it the drink that you have got into your head, or the war matters that you cannot get out? ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... that neer learns his A B C, For ever will a blockhead be; But he that learns these letters fair, Shall have a Coach to take the Air. THE ROYAL ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... letters of his youth, and he began to scribble verses when he could scarcely write. At the age of eight he went to the Rev. Mr. Gilpin's superior school of Elphin, in Roscommon, where he was considered "a stupid, heavy blockhead, little better than a fool, whom everyone made fun of." Indeed, from his earliest youth he was made to feel an intense, uneasy consciousness of supposed defects. Later he went to school at Athlone and at ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... by the teachers in the public schools, that this teaching is necessary for the protection of virtue and the prevention of disease, and that, if anyone hesitates to encourage the spread of such literature and the teaching of such knowledge, he is an arrant and presumptuous blockhead. The arrogance of the extreme advocates of child hygiene blinds them to certain all-important truths. The first is that our teachers are not prepared, and, in too many cases, are not the most suitable ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... LOGGERHEAD. A blockhead, or stupid fellow. We three loggerheads be: a sentence frequently written under two heads, and the reader by repeating it makes himself the third. A loggerhead is also a double-headed, or bar shot of iron. To go to ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... The blockhead talks nonsense, and your Majesty in your own person furnishes the best proof of it. Observe, Sire, the advantage and pleasure the hunter derives ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... she, "we have parted with the colt, and have only got a gross of green spectacles, with copper rims and shagreen cases! A murrain take such trumpery! The blockhead has been imposed upon, and should have known ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... was more dead than alive, and the doctor was quickly summoned I at once went to see him, but was not admitted to his room, and for three days he had to lie up, suffering from shock—and, I trust, a feeling of humility for being such an obstinate blockhead. ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... over to his bed, kicked him a few times, and told him he would scald him if he didn't turn out. It was quite light by then. N'Yawk joined us in a few minutes. "What the deuce was you fellers kicking up such a rumpus fer last night?" he asked. "You blamed blockhead, don't you know?" the boss answered. "Why, the sheriff searched this camp last night. They had a battle down at the bridge afterwards and either they are all killed or else no one is hurt. They would have been here otherwise. Ward ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... as it was, for there went fat "King Cole" with the most ragged of the beggar-maids. "Mistress Mary," in her pretty blue dress, tripped along with "Simple Simon" staring about him like a blockhead. The fine lady left her horse to dance with "Bobby Shafto" till every bell on her slippers tinkled its tongue out. "Bo-Peep" and a jolly fiddler skipped gayly up and down. "Miss Muffet" took the big spider for her partner, and made his many legs ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... innocence," and "interested attentions," and other similar expressions—all of which, however, were lost upon Titmouse. Tapping with an auctioneer's hammer on a block of granite, would make about as much impression upon it as will hint, innuendo, or suggestion, upon a blockhead. So it was with Titmouse. He promised to dine at Satin Lodge on the Sunday after the ensuing one—with which poor Mr. Tag-rag was obliged to depart content; having been unable to get Titmouse up to Clapham on either of the intervening evenings, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... duty of the Clerk of the Acts shows the importance of the office, and the statement that if the clerk is not fitted to act as a commissioner he is a blockhead and unfit for his employment is particularly racy, and not quite the form of expression one would expect to ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys |
