"Gullible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... too often repeated that properly made books are not extremely costly. A modern book offered at a fancy price means either a very small edition, an extravagant binding, or what is more likely, a gullible public. But most books that appeal to the booklover are not excessive in price. Never before was so much money spent in making books attractive—for the publisher always has half an eye on the booklover—and while much of this money is wasted, not all is ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... help out certain unsubtle "complications." If I mistake not, these very novels are beginning to pall, as such stupid, meaningless vaporings should do. One cannot resist the belief that one-half of them are written with an eye upon the gullible playwright, for a play means larger remuneration than any novel could ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... No. i., dealing with my first and second volumes, is written after the facile American fashion, making the book review itself; that is, supply to the writer all the knowledge and familiarity with the subject which he parades before an incurious and easily gullible public. This especial form of dishonesty has but lately succeeded to and ousted the classical English critique of Jeffrey, Macaulay, and the late Mr. Abraham Hayward, which was mostly a handy peg for the contents of the critic's noddle or note book. The Saturnine ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... that she would thence-forward be on guard against me without having given me any real information. I was perfectly convinced there was a deep plot underlying the foolishness she had proposed. The fact that she considered me so venial and so gullible was no proof that the hidden purpose was not dangerous. The mystery was how to seem to be fooled by her and yet get in touch with my friends. Then suddenly I recalled that she and the hag had been trying to use the gipsy's black art. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... last, or rather we found his office. The good man himself was probably in bed. An orderly invited us to write our names in block capitals, insisting severely on the block capitals, in a large book. Then—he must have recognised that we were new boys and gullible—he said that we ought to report ourselves to some one else called ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... a door and motioned Barrent inside. Barrent paused, thinking about the stories he had heard of gullible citizens falling into mutant hands. Then he half-drew his needlebeam ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... Wallace Hood's verdict. But the picture between the lines which they unanimously presented, was of a spoiled beauty, restless for the publicity that private life deprived her of, offering in a winning manner to a gullible public, a ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... gospel; run away with a notion, run away with an idea; jump to a conclusion, rush to a conclusion; think the moon is made of green cheese; take for granted, grasp the shadow for the substance; catch at straws, grasp at straws. impose upon &c (deceive) 545. Adj. credulous, gullible; easily deceived &c 545; simple, green, soft, childish, silly, stupid; easily convinced; over-credulous, over confident, over trustful; infatuated, superstitious; confiding &c (believing) 484. Phr. the wish the father to the thought; credo quia impossibile [Lat.] [Tertullian]; all ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... meteor-wise across the world with his huge scheme to finance France out of difficulty with his Mississippi Bubble. Among other considerations mentioned in the charter for twenty-five years, which he obtained from the gullible French government, was the stipulation that before the expiration of the charter, he must transport to Louisiana six thousand white persons, and three thousand Negroes, not to be brought from another ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... the coppice sings clear;" [457] hideous genii, whether of the amiable or the vindictive sort, making their appearance in unexpected moments; pious beasts—nay, the very hills—praising Allah and glorifying his vice-gerent; gullible saints, gifted scoundrels; learned men with camel loads of dictionaries and classics, thieves with camel loads of plunder; warriors, zanies, necromancers, masculine women, feminine men, ghouls, lutists, negroes, court poets, wags—the central figure being the gorgeous, but ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the candidate in his first campaign speech. In these circumstances, and smarting as I was under the recollection of recent defeat, it is not strange that I thought I detected the old political ruse of dressing the wolf in sheep's clothing, of using handsome pledges as a mask to deceive the gullible, and that I assumed that this scholarly amateur in politics was being used for their own purposes by masters and veterans in the old ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... rank and name which he was not fluent enough clearly to express. After he had realised that he should not die of the public humiliation and disgrace, which seemed to point him out as having been the kind of gullible fool it is scarcely possible to avoid laughing at—or, so it seemed to him in his heart-seared frenzy—he thought it not improbable that he should go mad. He was harried so by memories of lovely little soft ways of Edith's (his wife's name was Edith), of the pretty sound of her laugh, and of her ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a seller of tobacco; artless and gullible in the extreme. He was building a new house, and came to Subtle "the alchemist" to know on which side to set the shop door, how to dispose the shelves so as to ensure most luck, on what days he might trust his customers, and when it would be unlucky for him so to do.—Ben Jonson, The ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... necessary in order to permit the payment of dividends. Thus the farmer might find himself without his railroad stock, with a mortgage on his land which he had incurred in order to buy the stock, with an increased burden of taxation because his township had also been gullible enough to buy stock, and with a railroad whose excessive rates allowed him but a narrow margin of profit ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... interests that you should return to Bhutan. A more gullible agent would be preferable. Therefore, unless you implicitly obey my instructions, you ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... sufferings have had their share of attention, though, remembering his enormous popularity, the better poets have left to the more gullible rhymsters the echo of his tirades against persecution, [Footnote: See T. H. Chivers, Lord Byron's Dying Words to Ada, and Byron (1853); Charles Soran, Byron (1842); E. F. Hoffman, Byron (1849).] and have conceived of the public as beaten at its own game by ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... congratulated on her engagement, mentioning the man whose attentions Marguerite had accepted as a heavenly dispensation. This was in Florence. The woman hurried away that day for London. The Grey One, just a gullible girl, was left half dead. When her lover came, she refused to see him. He wrote a letter which she foolishly sent back, unopened. And she returned to Paris—all this in the first shock.... She did not ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... intelligence as a man, that he should have been taken in by it. Always, he told himself, he was being taken in by some woman. After the lesson he had had, he ought to have learned wisdom, but it seemed that he was as gullible as ever. And it was this romantic folly of his which vexed him now; not the fact that a simple child over whose fate he had sentimentalized, was a rich and popular stage-dancer. Miss Ray was probably a good enough young woman according to her lights, and it was not she who need be ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... he took himself away: leaving me in a mixture of contrarious feelings, part ashamed to have played on one so gullible, part raging that I should have burned so much incense before the vanity of England; yet, in the bottom of my soul, delighted to think I had made a friend—or, at least, begun to ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mr. Sherwood, "this may be merely a scheme by unprincipled people to filch small sums of money from gullible people. The 'foreign legacy swindle' is worked in many different ways. There may be calls for money, by this man who names himself Andrew Blake, for preliminary work on the case. We haven't much; but if he is baiting for hundreds of Blakes in America he may secure, in the aggregate, a very ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... to Hedin an obsession; they spoke a language he knew. He hated the grosser furs, as he loved the finer. He despised the trade tricks and spurious trade names by which the flimsiest of furs are foisted upon the gullible purchasers of "seal," "sable," "black fox," "ermine," and "beaver." He prided himself that no misnamed fur had ever passed over his counter, and in this he was backed up by his employer. The cheaper furs were there, but they sold under their true ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... its parts. It has been taken with a spiritual sauce that has disguised its real flavor. Anything in the Bible, no matter how raw, is taken as God's food. It is used to demonstrate problems of diet which do not provide a balanced ration; it is accepted by the gullible though contradicted by the revelations of Geology, Astronomy, Anthropology, Zoology, and Biology. Taken as prescribed by the doctors of divinity, the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... even on the day before Grey had informed the German Imperial Chancellor that it would be a shame for England to remain neutral and allow France to be crushed, we here find a new proof of the unreliability of his conduct. If he has been gullible, the declaration of 1912, the dangerous character of which is increased by its apparently undefined tenor, has enmeshed him more and more. Also the military and naval circles, whose consultations with the representatives of the French Army and Navy certainly have been ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... extent. To make a long story short, the house of Lyson, which had the reputation of being the wealthiest in Ionia, was quite cleared out. No sooner was this the case, than Chariclea abandoned Dinias, and went off in pursuit of a certain golden youth of Crete, irresistible as he, and not less gullible. Deserted alike by her and by his parasites (who followed the chase of the fortunate Cretan), Dinias presented himself before Agathocles, who had long been aware of his friend's situation. He swallowed his first feelings of embarrassment, and made a clean breast ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... due to the fact that the financial interests piled on load after load of securities until the structures grew topheavy and fell over. Then they got in on the receiverships, made money at the expense of gullible security holders, and started the same old ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... Indians live. He won their good will to such an extent that they elected him king, and for several years he ruled over them. Then the Chilians started a war and Orelie I decamped. In Paris he still calls himself King of Araucania, and makes a precarious living by selling titles of nobility to gullible or ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... adventurer named Stefan Mali sprang himself upon the land. He claimed to be the murdered Peter III. of Russia, and easily imposed himself upon the gullible Montenegrin. But he had the interests of Montenegro sincerely at heart, and proved an excellent ruler. His imposture was exposed by Catherine II., but owing to the weakness of the Petrovic heir, the people determined to keep him as their ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... to his mouth. There was no superstition in the affair this time. The once gullible Dragoon, moreover, was playing all the leads. "Of course," Driscoll agreed heartily, "I'd certainly like it right well," and he went on eating. But his wits were in a receptive state, alert for the meaning when it should come. The ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... "O ETERNAL GULLIBLE!—Since I saw you on Lake George, I have run back to London, and promptly come out again. I had business to transact there, indeed, which I have now completed; the excessive attentions of the English police sent me once more, ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... device for casting the shadow. He had expected to have his house attacked at night, presumably while he was at home; but he had felt that it was not necessary for him to stay there to make sure. Lawless men of this class were sometimes exceedingly simple and gullible. ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... manners, a shallow-brained, cowardly creature, always howling about the Boer, but too discreet to go out and fight him, though ready at all times to malign him, to ridicule him as a farmer or a fighter, and it is a perfect bear's feast to this hybrid animal to get hold of a gullible newspaper correspondent to tell him gruesome tales ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... the newspaper, Queed was something like those eminent fellow-scientists of his who have set out to "expose" spiritualism and "the occult," and have ended as the most gullible customers of the most dubious of "mediums." The idea of being editor for its own sake, which he had once jeered and flouted, he had gradually come to consider with large respect. The work drew him amazingly; it was applied science of a peculiarly ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Switzerland, reaching Zurich on August 1st, and encamped during six days before the town, exciting much sympathy by their pious tale and sorrowful appearance. In Switzerland the inhabitants were more gullible, and the soft parts of their nature were easily getatable, and the consequence was the Gipsies made a good thing of it for the space of four years. Soon after leaving Zurich, according to Dr. Mikliosch, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... if it was from utter lack of all imagination or from the possession in undue proportion of a particular kind of it, or from both—and the three alternatives are possible—but it was discovered that this man who had been raised to such a height by the credulity of the public was himself more gullible than any of his depositors. He had been the prey of all sorts of swindlers, adventurers, visionaries and even lunatics. Wrapping himself up in deep and imbecile secrecy he had gone in for the most fantastic schemes: a harbour and docks on the coast of Patagonia, quarries ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... sincere. But they are not sincere nor honest fundamentally. Their leaders are for the most part Malites, or Oroids with Malite blood. And they are fooling the people. Their followers are all the more unintelligent, more gullible individuals, or those in whom there lies a latent ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... disorder. The minute she conquers a Russian province she puts down disorder with an iron hand. But in the Ukraine, in Great Russia and in Finland she encourages the party of the Reds, she encourages the Bolshevists; and the poor, ignorant, gullible peasants follow the lead of the men, however criminal—sometimes rather more lunatic than criminal—who would throw them under Germany's feet. The American Bolshevists would tear America to pieces, exactly as ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... seem a page torn from one of those old-time fairy books they used to love to read when much younger, and more gullible. In the first place, it was a wonderful piece of luck that came their way, when the School Directors agreed, after the summer was half over, that the school buildings required considerable alterations in order to make them sanitary ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... inquired of the butcher whether he had any cattle for sale, and arranged to meet him in the forest and pay 300 crowns in cash for 500 horned heads. But, when the gullible sheriff reached the trysting-spot, he was borne captive to Robin's camp, where the chief, mockingly pointing out the king's deer, bade him take possession of five hundred horned heads! Then he invited the sheriff to witness games exhibiting the outlaws' strength and skill, and, after ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... that mule-driver there, but he thinks he has; and yet, even in his own political line, he is the most ill-informed and gullible of fools, even among the mass of incompetent agents who have done their utmost to ruin every plan that has been formed. I doubt whether he has ever been correct in a single statement that he has made, and am quite sure that every prophecy he has ventured upon has been falsified, ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... the rising generation was more easily amused and not quite so wide-awake as at present. The point of the narrative is, that a facetious old gentleman named Captain Compass beguiles a group of juveniles—who must have been singularly gullible even for those early days—by describing in mysterious and alien-sounding terms the commonest home objects, such as coals, cheese, butter, and so on. It would almost seem as though Hood must have been perpetrating ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... corrected Casimir. "Heart he never had. Why, Desprez, for a clever fellow, you are the most gullible mortal in creation. Your ignorance of human nature and human business is beyond belief. You are swindled by heathen Turks, swindled by vagabond children, swindled right and left, upstairs and downstairs. I think ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and they, and they only, are the ones who desire its repeal. Such base slanders as the specimen you sent me excite in the minds of Wyoming citizens only feelings of disgust and contempt for the author, and wonder at the ignorance of any one who is gullible enough to ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... fell in the days of old, as the men of Taiarapu tell, A youth went forth to the fishing, and fortune favoured him well. Tamatea his name: gullible, simple, and kind. Comely of countenance, nimble of body, empty of mind, His mother ruled him and loved him beyond the wont of a wife, Serving the lad for eyes and living herself in his life. Alone from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as she threw out this illusory prospect, devoutly hoping that Apollyon was gullible; but her hope sank when the old gypsy woman said, "Stop a bit, stop a bit, little lady; we'll take you home, all safe, when we've done supper; you shall ride ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... copied from the paper of last year, saying that this is the most severe spring in thirty years. Every one, in fact, believes that it is, and also that next year the spring will be early. Man is the most gullible of creatures. ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... the Indian Jadoo-wallah. I admit that Magic may have come originally from the East. The Egyptians for instance, had wonderful illusions that were freely used by their priests in the temples mainly for the extortion of money or valuables from their gullible disciples. These illusions were merely mechanical devices such as the mysterious opening and shutting of doors on the sound of a certain word like "Abracadabra." These devices can be duplicated by our skilful mechanics, but would not be worth very much these enlightened ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... on this occasion to have no recollection of him, and looked over and beyond him in the airiest way, as though he were a far-off Jew in Jerusalem, instead of being the assumptive-Orthodox proprietor of several European newspapers published for the general misinformation and plunder of gullible Christians? Dismayed at the Royal coldness of eye, Jost stepped back with an uncomfortably crimson face; and one of the ladies present, personally knowing him, and seeing his discomfiture, ventured to call the King's attention to his presence and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli |
