"Dullard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more already," said Tom, "than any dullard like me could ever learn from a book. To think it's a beetle! But I might have known from looking at it. Are all the ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... past and in conjuring up some vague representation of the scenes that were once enacted in these places; the more imaginative feel the very air vibrating with the unseen spirits of men and women famous in the world's history. He must be indeed a Philistine or a dullard who cannot contrive to arouse a passing exaltation at the thought of treading in the footsteps of Cicero and the Caesars in Rome, of Pericles and Socrates in Athens, for the very soil of the Forum and the stones of the citadel of Pallas seem impregnated ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... imagine, for the plucking of the perfect fruit. And yet, in despite of opportunity and privilege, what would you think of one who came home with empty baskets and an unappeased relish for ripe peaches? Would you not think such a one a dullard, or, at least, stupidly blind to his opportunities? And if you chanced to hear him crying over his empty basket later on, would you not revile him for a lazy fellow? We all of us, from day to day, miss chances of far greater value than the ripest peach that ever mellowed ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... to make it the laughing stock of the irreligious, than thus to clip the wings of faith, to throw her into a dungeon, to keep her from the light of day, to make her read through. Hebrew spectacles, and to force her to be a laggard and dullard, instead of a bright and volatile spirit, forward and foremost in the ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... purely shadowed forth this most perfect conception of one of those who hold companionship with God! It was made up of all the rarest traits of beauty, yet its loveliness was not of the world: the veriest dullard looking on it would have paused in admiration; the most brutal have gazed into those pure eyes, untainted by one earthly feeling, one sinful thought, or impure desire. On my mind the effect was thrilling: I have pictured to myself angels as poets have described ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... a word of it," broke in Brandon, answering for me; "I should have been a dullard, indeed, not to have seen it myself after what you said about the loss of your ten crowns; so let us cry quits ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... woman appeared at his bridle rein, and solemnly warned him "that, if he crossed that water, he would never return alive." He was struck by the apparition, and bade one of his knights to inquire of her what she meant; but the knight must have been a dullard or a traitor, for he told the king that the woman was either mad or drunk, and no notice ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... are not only ungrateful, but stupidly arrogant. What comparison can be drawn between this dullard, Matlack, whose feelings as a citizen were hurt by an order of an aide-de-camp, and I, when I was obliged to serve a whole campaign under the command of a gentleman who was not known as a soldier until I had been some time a brigadier. My feelings had to be ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... some one else outshine This dullard head of mine, Should I be sad? I will be glad. To do my best ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... altogether a dullard, and my professors were able to teach me almost everything they wanted, namely, a little Greek and a great deal of Latin. My acquaintances were confined to the ancients. I learned to esteem Miltiades, and to admire ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... among the heather hills, always by my lone self, and nearly always with a story book in my pocket. He was clever, practical and ambitious, excelling in all his studies; whereas, except in those which appealed to my imagination, I was a dullard ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... anger excited Cibber's mirth, his satire contributed to his content. The comedian's unbounded self-satisfaction and good humour, his vivacity and spirits, were proof against Pope's malice. Graceless he may have been, but a dullard the mercurial 'King Colley' ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... never have occurred; for, being a wise man, he would not have failed to propitiate Kotsuke no Suke by sending him suitable presents; while the councillor who was in attendance on the prince at Yedo was a dullard, who neglected this precaution, and so caused the death of his master and the ruin ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... thou dullard," said Pelides, "That on the funereal pyre Earthly sins are purged from glory, And the ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... was Ro, and I remembered him well. We had passed through the sacred college together, and always he had been known as the dullard. He had capacity for learning little of the cult of the Gods, less of the arts of ruling, less still of the handling of arms; and he had been appointed to some lowly office in this obscure temple, and had risen to being ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... though no woman were at his side. Such is my booby! he sees not, he hears naught. Who himself is, or whether he be or be not, he also knows not. Now I wish to chuck him head first from thy bridge, so as to suddenly rouse (if possible) this droning dullard and to leave behind in the sticky slush his sluggish spirit, as a mule casts its iron shoe ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... corpulent; he works from morning to night, reads a lot, remembers well everything he has read—and in that way he is not a man, but pure gold; in all else he is a carthorse or, in other words, a learned dullard. The carthorse characteristics that show his lack of talent are these: his outlook is narrow and sharply limited by his specialty; outside his special branch he is simple as ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... he should be read with understanding; what author should not? I would no more think of putting my Boccaccio into the hands of a dullard than I would think of leaving a bright and beautiful woman at the mercy ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... The Darning-Needle Delaying is not Forgetting The Drop of Water The Dryad Jack the Dullard ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... patience all worked to burst the tough husk, and develop that shy and sensitive, yet uncouth and silent youth, bringing out the best that was in him. A wrong environment in those early years might easily have shaped Rembrandt into a morose and resentful dullard: the good in his nature, thrown back upon itself, would have been turned ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... mankind, because so narrow and so selfish is our outlook upon life that one single man or woman—a dullard neighbour or a silly girl—who may interfere with us, throws into turmoil our whole existence. Walls of impenetrable blackness shut out. all life save only this intruder and ourself; that other person becomes our ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... soothsayers, sent persons to consult the famous oracle of the Greeks at Delphi, and the persons he sent were his own sons Titus and Aruns, and his sister's son, L. Junius, a young man who, to avoid his uncle's jealousy, feigned to be without common sense, wherefore he was called Brutus or the Dullard. The answer given by the oracle was that the chief power of Rome should belong to him of the three who should first kiss his mother; and the two sons of King Tarquin agreed to draw lots which of them should do this as soon as they returned home. But Brutus perceived that the oracle ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... a woman for what is all man's weakness. Hues charming and fair may move the wise and not the dullard. Mighty love turns the son of men from wise ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... But we have some: and that, as a man of genius, he is superior to any single person named and known in earlier French literature, can hardly be contested by any one who is neither a silly paradoxer nor a mere dullard, nor affected by some extra-literary prejudice—religious, moral, or whatever it may be. But perhaps not every one who would admit the greatness of Master Francis as a man of letters, his possession not merely of consummate wit, but of that precious thing, so much rarer in French, actual ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... preponderances are at the basis of personality, creating genius and dullard, weakling and giant, Cavalier and Puritan. All human traits may be analyzed in terms of them because ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... another request to make of her. The reports he received of the boy Johnny, now a pupil at the Geelong Grammar School, grew worse from term to term. It had become clear to him that he was unfortunate enough to possess an out-and-out dullard for a son. Regretfully giving up, therefore, the design he had cherished of educating Johnny for the law, he had resolved to waste no more good money on the boy, but to take him, once he was turned fifteen, into his own business. Young John, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... England a self-seeker, Nobility has shone in you alone. Your error grew of over-generous dreams, And misbeliefs by dullard ministers. By treating personally we speed affairs More in an hour than they in blundering months. Between us two, henceforth, must stand no third. There's peril in it, while England's mean ambition Still works to get us skewered by the ears; And in ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... arrested at the gate of Tixall Park, whither Paulet had taken her under pretence of a hunting-party. At Tixall she was detained till her papers at Chartley had undergone thorough research. That she was at length taken in her own toils, even such a dullard as her admirers depict her could not have failed to understand; that she was no such dastard as to desire or deserve such defenders, the whole brief course of her remaining life bore consistent and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... for all pupils, whether for the inculcation of the love of study or for the correction of faults. The earnest and passionate nature was treated in the same way as the cold and phlegmatic; the boy of genius or talent, as the dullard; the one who loved, as he who disliked, or had a tendency to dislike, study; the weakly, as the strong. They were all driven together like a flock of sheep, with scarcely any regard to individual capabilities, bent of genius, or physical constitution, which indeed little ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... the reposal Of any trust, virtue, or worth in thee Make thy words faith'd? No: what I should deny As this I would; ay, though thou didst produce My very character, I'd turn it all To thy suggestion, plot, and damned practice: And thou must make a dullard of the world, If they not thought the profits of my death Were very pregnant and potential spurs To make thee ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... our philosophic pedants, all our sons of science know Not a whit more than that dullard knew a ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... gathered from his perusals was that the author was a pretentious dullard, an absolute criminal, a genius; that the actors and actresses were all splendid and worked hard, though conceivably one or two of them had been set impossible tasks—to wit, tasks unsuited to their personalities; that he himself was a Napoleon, a temerarious ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... does he still bear love? Ay, passionate love. The heart which truly loves Puts not its love aside for ends of State, Or marriage bonds, or what the dullard law Suffers or does not suffer, but grows stronger For that ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... enjoyed. The poet resolved to avenge himself, and he did it to the lasting injury of his poem. He dethroned Theobald, who, as a plodding antiquarian, was an excellent exponent of dulness, and installed Cibber in his place, who might be a representative of folly, but was as little of a dullard as Pope himself. The consequent alterations make the hero of the poem a thoroughly incongruous figure, and greatly injure the general design. The poem appeared in this form in 1743, with a ponderous prefatory discourse by Ricardus Aristarchus, contributed by the faithful Warburton, and illustrating ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... intellectual accidents, but for the very woman. Guided by the self-evident axiom that humanity is to be judged by literature, and not literature by humanity, he detected the analogy between Lycidas and Annie. Only the dullard would object to the nauseous cant of the one, or to the indiscretions of the other. A sober critic might say that the man who could generalize Herbert and Laud, Donne and Herrick, Sanderson and Juxon, Hammond and Lancelot Andrewes into "our corrupted Clergy" must be either an imbecile or a ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... it than I was convicted of being a dullard. 'God forgive me, dear!' I made haste to reply. 'I never saw before that there were two sides to this!' And I told her my tale as briefly as I could, and rose to seek Ronald. 'You see, my dear, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Be sage, littlest," I said in Italian, like one who orders, for (as I have said) Galloway even at twenty-three is no dullard in the ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... single, Haunts the rude masses of brick garlanded gaily with vine, E'en in the turret fantastic surviving that springs from the ruin, E'en in the people itself? is it illusion or not? Is it illusion or not that attracteth the pilgrim transalpine, Brings him a dullard and dunce hither to pry and to stare? Is it illusion or not that allures the barbarian stranger, Brings him with gold to the shrine, brings him in ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... of their Master; nor do I see any way of getting it to harmonise with the orthodox postulate; namely, that Matthew was the author of the first gospel and John of the fourth. If that is so, then, most assuredly, Matthew was no dullard; and as for the fourth gospel—a theosophic romance of the first order—it could have been written by none but a man of remarkable literary capacity, who had drunk deep of Alexandrian philosophy. Moreover, the doctrine of the writer of the fourth gospel is more remote from that of the "sect of the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Popish Apennines, Dirty Stones of Venice And his Gas-lamps Seven; We've the stones of Snowdon And the lamps of heaven. Where's the mighty credit In admiring Alps? Any goose sees "glory" In their "snowy scalps." Leave such signs and wonders For the dullard brain, As aesthetic brandy, Opium, and cayenne; Give me Bramshill common (St. John's harriers by), Or the vale of Windsor, England's golden eye. Show me life and progress, Beauty, health, and man; Houses fair, trim gardens, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... poor came to see that speaking record of a city's sorry plight, and at last we all understood. Not to understand after one look at the poverty and disease maps that hung on the wall was to declare oneself a dullard. The tenements were all down in them, with the size of them and the air space within, if there was any. Black dots upon the poverty maps showed that for each one five families in that house had applied for charity within a given time. There ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... plain. The first to open the door of war was the rider outrageous and the lion rageous, King Gharib, who crave his steed between the two hosts and wheeled and careered over the field, crying, "Who is for fray, who is for fight? Let no sluggard come out to me this day nor dullard!" Before he had made an end of speaking, out rushed Ra'ad Shah, riding on an elephant, as he were a vast tower, in a eat girthed with silken bands; and between the elephant's ears at the driver, bearing in hand a hook, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... though dullard thousands throng And jostle rudely at Life's holy feast? The dull ears hear no tender strains of Song, And they that know Love best know ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... oval face, easily and usually illuminated with a smile; Clinton had a big frame, square shoulders, a broad, full forehead, short, pompadour hair, dark penetrating eyes, and a large mouth with lips firmly set. It was a strong face. A dullard could read his character at a glance. To his intimate friends Clinton was undoubtedly a social, agreeable companion; but the dignified imperiousness of his manner and the severity of his countenance usually ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... No man but a dullard without a spark of imagination could have witnessed the scene presented at that moment without experiencing a thrill which he would have found it difficult to describe. The sunshine, sending a beam through the ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... a picture to attempt to draw. Everything was hopelessly haphazard, almost hopelessly uninteresting. Only in the schools of the Jesuits was anything approaching skill employed to stimulate the learner. If a child did not advance, the teacher held himself no way responsible. The lad was adjudged a dullard and left to remain in his stupidity with the rest of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... cried the mayor, "they are caught at last. By my life, a scholar, too. If he smart not for this, and something else, call me a dullard." ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... revealed to him, he has exceeded the limits upon which he has hitherto looked as a matter of course; the barrier between him and the universe has fallen, the whole world belongs to him; the egoist becomes less selfish, the cruel man gentle, the dullard clairvoyant; every man feels that he has become greater and more human. This is neither illusion nor projection, nor is it a subtle, psychical deception—it is sober reality. Weininger's suspicion of a delusion is nothing ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... is right, and the author wrong. It may be that the archbishop's sermon is not so fine as some of those discourses twenty years ago which used to delight the faithful in Granada. Or it may be (pleasing thought!) that the critic is a dullard, and does not understand what he is writing about. Everybody who has been to an exhibition has heard visitors discoursing about the pictures before their faces. One says, "This is very well;" another says, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... implies that of activity. The pattern saint and flower of chivalry is one who gladly fights and would as gladly die in noble causes. The words pronounced of old times on the dubbing of a knight, "Be gentle, valiant, and fortunate," are not words which could realise themselves in the dullard or the churl. To the good knight, the ardent love of beauty, in all its aspects is indispensable. The fair lady of his dreams is the spiritual bright-shining of goodness, which expresses itself to him fitly and sweetly in material and visible things. ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... and just by chance the third son came up. For the proprietor had really three sons, though nobody counted the third with his brothers, because he was not so learned as they, and indeed he was generally known as "Jack the Dullard." ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... There is a quality in certain people which is above all advice, exposure, or correction. Only let a man or woman have DULNESS sufficient, and they need bow to no extant authority. A dullard recognises no betters; a dullard can't see that he is in the wrong; a dullard has no scruples of conscience, no doubts of pleasing, or succeeding, or doing right; no qualms for other people's feelings, no respect but ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Tom Noddy, looby^, hoddy-doddy^, noddy, nonny, noodle, nizy^, owl; goose, goosecap^; imbecile; gaby^; radoteur^, nincompoop, badaud^, zany; trifler, babbler; pretty fellow; natural, niais^. child, baby, infant, innocent, milksop, sop. oaf, lout, loon, lown^, dullard, doodle, calf, colt, buzzard, block, put, stick, stock, numps^, tony. bull head, dunderhead, addlehead^, blockhead, dullhead^, loggerhead, jolthead^, jolterhead^, beetlehead^, beetlebrain, grosshead^, muttonhead, noodlehead, giddyhead^; numbskull, thickskull^; lackbrain^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget |
