"Unimaginative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... surmount many another church, appears not to have suffered the dangers of fire. As a fifteenth-century work, it merits special mention. Rising abruptly from a heavy square base, the pyramid is very acute, and is ornamented at the angles with foliaged crockets, basely called stone cauliflowers by unimaginative persons. One might say, with the gentle Abbe Bourasse, that the "ornamentation breaks into sky and cloud with an exceedingly agreeable effect, far beyond that of a straight line." The inconsistency lies only in the juxtaposition of the two western transition towers, which have hardly enough ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... this respect just as markedly as, for instance, the Dutch do from the French. And this is true not only of those who are classified by their friends as being respectively imaginative or unimaginative, but of those whose gifts or habits are ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... were subterranean passages which led from the house to unfrequented parts of the grounds. These passages were well built, arched with brick, and high enough for people to walk upright in them; and although persons of quiet and unimaginative minds thought that they were constructed for the purpose of allowing the occupants to go down to the lake or to the other portions of the grounds without getting wet if it should happen to be raining, ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... In the years that followed, wherever Grimshaw was, there also was Marie—little, swarthy, broad of cheek and hip, unimaginative, faithful. She had a passion for service. She cooked for Grimshaw, knitted woollen socks for him, brushed and mended his clothes, watched out for his health—often, I am convinced, she stole for him. As for Grimshaw, he didn't know that she ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... a grievance in the very first word, "Dearest." What right had he to call her "Dearest"? She was one of those unintelligible females who do not shower superlatives on every chance acquaintance. She must, no doubt, have been callous as judged by modern standards, or at least, singularly unimaginative, for among her few correspondents she had not one whom she addressed as "dearest." No, not even her aunt, for at such rare times of absence from home as she had occasion to write to Miss Joliffe, "My dear ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... relation. It was, perhaps, the very finest in the world. But as a job, it wasn't so satisfactory. Four-fifths of it, anyway, could be done with better results for the children by a placid, unimaginative, tolerably stupid person, who had no stronger feeling for them than the mild temporary affection they could excite in any one not a monster. And the other fifth of it wasn't strictly ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... stepping into the ring, and after stamping the sawdust once or twice, as if to assure himself that he was really there, began dancing around it, and indulging in such a remarkable series of fistic manoeuvres with an imaginary adversary that the unimaginative detective precipitately backed into ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... of exaltation, whose eyes beheld a vision. And Peter, although he had been the subject of her conversation, well knew that he was not included in the vision. He smiled a little as he looked at her. It is becoming apparent that he is one of those unfortunate unimaginative beings incapable of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... reached the earth and, falling on the lily, which hitherto had been purple, purified it to whiteness. In similar guise might the legend of the Southern Cross be framed—but who has the audacity to reveal it! And have not the unimaginative blacks anticipated the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... luxuriant tangles of tropical vegetation had a delightfully home-like look to eyes accustomed for two years to South American surroundings. Seen through a glass from the ship's deck, the Public Buildings in Trafalgar Square, solid and substantial, had all the unimaginative neatness of any prosaic provincial townhall at home. We were clearly no longer in a Latin-American country. It was really a piece of England translated to the Caribbean Sea, and we few passengers, some of whom had not seen England for many weary years, were forbidden to set foot on ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... questions which my mind had suggested while I was standing at his door repeated themselves with double force. Tell this man, this unimaginative, hard-headed, raw-boned, sandy-haired North countryman,—tell this man a story which the most credulous school-girl would have rejected ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... beings into those who are content with the world as it is and those who wish to reform it is the most comforting to me. No division of sheep and goats was ever more blatantly simple. Some are born dull-witted, conservative, insensitive, unimaginative—they cling passive to the old planet, content to be whirled round in the purposeless dance of the heavenly bodies. Others are chronic sufferers from divine discontent—they open their eyes with critical intent, they are always conscious of the oblique, the unrighteous, the worthless ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... to the unimaginative mind, but the very confusion is a challenge to human intelligence. Here are all the materials for a more beautiful world. All that is needed is to find the proper combination. Goodness alone will not do the work. ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... and effect really made void on our behalf? The people of the island, it is true, are slow to make up their minds; their respect for experience and their care for justice make them distrust quick action if it is not instinctive action. They are unimaginative in this sense, that they are not very readily excited by the theatrical exhortations which are addressed to them from day to day. In a much deeper sense they are imaginative; they have a sure instinct for the realities of life. When they are presented with a doubtful novelty, they ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... expected to ride. It looked frightfully steep, and whenever she thought of him descending that trail, worn and perhaps ill, her heart ached with anxiety. But Redfield rambled on comfortably, explaining the situation to the doctor, who, being a most unimaginative person, appeared to take it all as a matter ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... There are two statues, the one of a general who fought in the Indian Mutiny and afterwards lived and died in the Square, the other of a mid-Victorian philanthropist whose stout figure and urbane self-satisfaction (as portrayed by the sculptor) bear witness to an easy conscience and an unimaginative mind. There is, round and about the fountain, a lovely green lawn, and there are many overhanging trees and shady corners. An air of peace the garden breathes, and that although children are for ever racing ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... of between fifty and sixty years of age, was gaunt with recent sickness, patient and unimaginative in aspect. He preached extemporarily, with the aid of notes; and it cannot be said that his discourse was remarkable for interest, at any rate in its beginning. Doubtless the sparse congregation, so prone to slumber, discouraged him; for offering exhortations to empty benches is but weary ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... salute the happy morn," has the stiffness and formality or its period, but it is not without a certain quaintness and dignity. One could hardly expect fine Christmas poetry of an age whose religion was on the one hand staid, rational, unimaginative, and on the other "Evangelical" in the narrow sense, finding its centre in the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... in general, a character of the traditional kind known as "northern," though it would be much more just to describe it as the "temperate" or "central" type of man. Wherever there is exaggeration in nature, there is exaggerated imagination in man. The solid and unimaginative part of the English character is undeniably derived from the Angles or from the Flemish; it is morally the best part, but it is by all odds the least interesting—it is found in the type of man belonging to the plains in a temperate zone, who differs in every respect from the real northman, ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... which the unwonted and momentary remorse awakened, a boding voice whispered, "And thinkest thou that thy schemes shall prosper, and thy aspirations succeed?" For the first time in his life, perhaps, the unimaginative Vargrave felt the mystery of a presentiment of ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sarcophagus is a shrine within this temple of science which will serve to stimulate generations of workers here to walk worthily in the footsteps of the great founder of the institution. For he must be an unimaginative person indeed who, passing beneath that arch bearing the simple inscription "Ici Repose Pasteur," could descend into the simple but impressive mausoleum and stand beside the massive granite sarcophagus without feeling the same kind of mental ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... died in the house of a niece, to whom by way of legacy he left his map. For the satisfaction of his anxious mind, still poring on the treasure, she wrote down what she could grasp of his instructions, and then, being an unimaginative woman, gave the matter little further heed. For years the map lay among other papers in a drawer, and here it was at length discovered by her son, himself a sailor. He learned from her its history, and having been in the Pacific, and heard the tales and rumors ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... Against unimaginative men, who retain some coolness and consequently the faculty of reasoning in danger, moral effect will be as material effect. The mere act of attack does not completely succeed against such troops. (Witness battles in ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... had given her something of his soul, and he had no wish to take it back. He had given her the reviving aspirations of an originally noble nature; the sun of her had shone upon the barren soil, and the harvest was hers. He was an unimaginative man, but he was inclined to believe that if there was a future existence, Magdalena would belong to him then and for ever, that something even less definable than the soul of each belonged to the other. For there was nothing to be ashamed of in his love for Helena. She appealed as powerfully ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... robe, let his beard grow like a Yogi ... was irritated with the unimaginative, self-seeking smugness of ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... and rhetoric. But it is the manner of the age. Many persons I suppose get over it, perhaps like it; but I long for the same thoughts, the same tenderness and truthfulness, and faithful searching words with a clear, simple, not unimaginative diction. Yet his book is ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... beautiful evidences of an absorbing loyalty—of a feeling that is true as truth, for if it was a mere conventional flame we should take no note of it—that the editor of the Athenaeum, a most grave, considerate gentleman, should be cited to Gray's-inn Coffee-house, and by an ignorant and unimaginative mob of jurymen voted incapable of writing reviews upon his own books, or the books of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... grimmest or most passionate of writers could hardly have improved the scene where the body of the magnificent Zenobia is discovered in the river. Every touch goes straight to the mark. The narrator of the story, accompanied by the man whose coolness has caused the suicide, and the shrewd, unimaginative Yankee farmer, who interprets into coarse, downright language the suspicions which they fear to confess to themselves, are sounding the depths of the river by night in a leaky punt with a long pole. Silas Foster represents the brutal, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... to talk in tens of millions. Its stock became gilt-edged, unattainable. Lucky ones who had bought of it diffidently, discreetly, with modest visions of four and a half per cent in their unimaginative minds, saw their dividends doubling, trebling, quadrupling, finally soaring gymnastically beyond all reason. Listen to the old guide who (at fifteen a week) takes groups of awed visitors through the ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... of mind, and to be of no further consequence in the determination of conduct. But further, this misuse of reason, this inciting of the mind to memorise facts unrelated except by their mere accidental time or space relations, will if persisted in tend to render the individual dull, stupid, and unimaginative. ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... no "transcendentalism" in this plain, straightforward Address. The facts are collected and related with the patience and sobriety which became the writer as one of the Dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful, very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative Massachusetts Historical Society. It looks unlike anything else Emerson ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix. One would almost as soon have expected to see Emerson equipped with a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... be a young, and as Fong had said, "awful smart boy." Smuggled into the country in his childhood, he spoke excellent English, interspersed with slang. He repeated his story with a Chinaman's unimaginative exactness, not a detail changed, omitted or overemphasized. The young men were impressed by him, intelligent, imperturbable and self-reliant, a man admirably fitted to put in execution the move they ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... fighting and appalling losses he retired to the city. Bragg had won a victory similar in every respect to that which crowned Meade's efforts at Gettysburg. Though slow, unpopular with officers and men, and unimaginative, he soon seized the strong points on the river above and below the city, and Rosecrans was surrounded, besieged, for the single, almost impassable road to Nashville and the North would not bear the burden of necessary supplies. If Bragg had proved watchful and alert, it would have been only ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... fancy ways," I answered, "necessary to you if later on you think of entering a competition. This morning, seeing we are late, I shouldn't worry too much about style. If I were you, this morning I should adopt the ordinary unimaginative method, and aim ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... can be depicted within the narrow compass of a porcelain plate without the larger one completely obliterating the smaller or the smaller becoming actually invisible by comparison with the other! Hitherto this unimaginative person had not considered the possibility of showing other than dragons, demons, spirits, and the forces which from their celestial nature may be regarded as possessing no real thickness of substance and therefore being particularly suitable for treatment on a flat surface. ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... and soil for the lowlands: but as for this newfangled admiration of them, it is a proof that our senses are dulled by luxury and books, and that we require to excite our palled organ of marvellousness by signs and wonders, aesthetic brandy and cayenne. No. I have remarked often that the most unimaginative people, who can see no beauty in a cultivated English field or in the features of a new-born babe, are the loudest ravers about glorious sunsets and Alpine panoramas; just as the man with no music in his soul, to whom a ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... that penniless young nobody, Ruric the clerk, was not trapped as you are trapped. For from the faith of others there is no escape upon this side of the window. World-famous Manuel the Redeemer has in this place his luck and prosperity to maintain until the orderings of unimaginative gods have quite destroyed the Manuel that once followed after his own thinking. For even the high gods here note with approval that you have become the sort of person in whom the gods put confidence, and so they favor you ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... and supernatural happening by the superstitious credulity of the original narrator; but there were others of an equally weird and unaccountable character, which had been told by hard-headed, intelligent, unimaginative men as having come within the scope of their own personal experience, that seemed to indicate that the nyangas really possessed powers denied to the great majority of their fellow-men. Moreover, it must be remembered ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... unimaginative— An apprehension clear, intense, Of his mind's work, had made alive 310 The things it wrought on; I believe Wakening a ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... coffee. Now we smoked by the great fire, looked up at the marvellously bright stars, and told, as is the way of travellers, tales of our wanderings. My companion, whom I took at first to be a rather ironic, sceptical, and by nature "unimaginative globe-trotter—he was a hard-looking, iron-grey man of middle-age—related the usual tiger story, the time-honoured elephant anecdote, and a couple of snake yarns of no special value, and I was beginning to fear that I should get little entertainment from so prosaic a sportsman, when ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... latter-day science, the extravagances of human passion—all these he dexterously uses for the purpose of involving his hero in perilous scrapes from which he no less dexterously extricates him by expedients which, however far-fetched they may appear to the unimaginative, are certainly not lacking in originality of device, or cleverness of construction.... This is a specimen incident—those which succeed it derive their special interest from the action of Rontgen rays, subterranean torrents, and devastating inundations. The book is very readable ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... I had discovered that one law of the spiritual world, in which all others were contained, was Righteousness? and that disharmony with that law, which we call unspirituality, was not being vulgar, or clumsy, or ill-taught, or unimaginative, or dull; but simply being unrighteous? that righteousness, and it alone, was the beautiful, righteousness the sublime, the heavenly, ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... the more graceful, though the effect inside is tame and flat in comparison. This is owing partly to its lesser size and height, and partly to our hard, transparent atmosphere, which lends no charm or illusion, but mainly to the stupid, unimaginative plan of it. Our dome shuts down like an inverted iron pot; there is no vista, no outlook, no relation, and hence no proportion. You open a door and are in a circular pen, and can look in only one direction,—up. If the iron pot were slashed through here ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... prerogative, fancifully assigns this office to the well-educated, well-nurtured, and, above all, well-born, colonial-experiencer, fresh from the English rectory. But I am a mere annalist, and a blunt, stolid, unimaginative one at that; therefore not entirely lost to all sense of the fitness ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of Latin names is not to be regretted, for the Latin nomenclature was of the most unimaginative description, while the Old German names are more like those of Greece; e.g. Ger. Ludwig, which has passed into most of the European languages (Louis, Lewis, Ludovico, etc), is from Old High Ger. hlut-wig, renowned in fight, equivalent to the ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... took psychological works out of the library, and would listen for hours to Hollins while he read Schelling or Fichte, and then go home with a misty impression of having imbibed infinite wisdom. It was, perhaps, a natural, though very eccentric rebound from the hard, practical, unimaginative New-England mind which surrounded us; yet I look back upon it with a kind of wonder. I was then, as you know, unformed mentally, and might have been so still, but for the experiences ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... excellence human nature in particular might arrive. Nor is it unlikely that before the cataclysm comes time will be afforded for more improvement than moral philosophy has ever dreamed of. For it is remarkable how inane and unimaginative Utopias have generally been. This possibility is not uninspiring and may help to console those who think the natural conditions of life are not conditions that a good life can be lived in. The possibility of essential progress is bound up with the tragic possibility that progress ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... dare say it must be a very stupid life. So little opportunity, as he says. What a pity he is a tailor, papa! Such an unimaginative employment! How delightful it would be to send him to college and make him ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... had the most contradictory education possible for a young girl of an ordinary and unimaginative nature—the conventional surface education of a school of that time followed by the talks with Shelley, which were doubtless far beyond her comprehension. What could be the outcome of such a marriage? Had Shelley, indeed, been a different ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... inclined to doubt that slowly stirring effort of memory. He was a man of unromantic temperament, unimaginative, and by no means of an adventurous turn of mind. He sought naturally for the most reasonable explanation of this strange picture, which no effort of his will could dismiss from his memory. It was a dream, of course. But the dream did not fade. Slowly it spread itself out so that ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... just finished dinner and are sitting around sipping cool green mint, trickling through little lumps of ice. What I'd like—" he stopped and shut one eye and gazed, with his head on one side, at the unimaginative MacWilliams—"what I'd like to do now," he continued, thoughtfully, "would be to sit in the front row at a comic opera, ON THE AISLE. The prima donna must be very, very beautiful, and sing most of her songs at me, and there must be three ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... apparently impossible contrasts, the magic illusions of color made it a land of remote enchantment, even to the most unimaginative. And to Hanson the world outside became as unreal as a dream that is past. Here was beauty, and the wide, free spaces of nature, where every law of man seemed puny, ineffectual and void. In this unbounded, uncharted freedom ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... this world imagining ourselves to be not as we are, but as we should like ourselves to be. No man who is not wholly unimaginative can escape this form of self-consciousness. Certainly no man who has in him anything of the artist can escape it: less still a man who is so much of an artist as Mr. Belloc. It has been remarked of Mr. Belloc time and again that he would make an extraordinarily fine revolutionary leader, ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... unimaginative person, but a long legal experience had built up within him a certain shrewdness of perception. He had naturally glanced once or twice at the girl sitting still at her mending, and he had observed that ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was lonely. The lands of the market-gardeners separated it from other houses. Jealously surrounded by its own high walls, the cottage suggested, even to the most unimaginative persons, the idea of an asylum or a prison. Reuben Limbrick's relatives, occasionally coming to stay with him, found the place prey on their spirits, and rejoiced when the time came for going home again. They were never pressed to stay against their will. Reuben Limbrick was not a hospitable ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... unimaginative man's complacency in ferreting out such a dramatic scheme, and began to think next upon the somewhat important detail of how to get proofs before he commenced to frustrate it. Chance seemed to make Tazzuchi play into his hand. ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... mind to make a clean breast of the matter then and there, and explain to them how curiously the reading of that book had affected him. But he reflected that Silas was rather unimaginative, and would probably be more mystified than enlightened by ...
— Two Days' Solitary Imprisonment - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... consent, and very naturally said nothing to them about his plan, but thereafter he laid by every cent of money he could earn, until his thrift became a source of comment. To Jack he talked for hours of the journey they were to make. Jack, unimaginative and engrossed with his studies at the seminary, took the whole matter very calmly. It seemed a long way off at best, and his studies were pleasant and needed his whole mind. Harold was thrown back upon the company of his sweetheart, who was the only ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... appreciable by men—being then, however, many stages, I believe, upon its journey—beginning is an irrepressible fact; and, however far from good or humble even after many days, the man here began to grow good and humble. His dull, unimaginative nature, a perfect lumber-room of the world and its rusting affairs, had received a gift in a dream—a truth from the lips of the Lord, remodeled in the brain and heart of the tinker of Elstow, and sent forth in his wondrous parable to be pictured and printed, and lie in old ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... education that had failed to elevate the mind, or give it wide conceptions of life, and religion, and duty, a certain satisfaction at having done with secular life and its cares, and at having their future here and hereafter comfortably provided for, was perhaps the general tone amongst this prosaic, unimaginative community. We are, indeed, far from affirming that in that little society there was no higher tone of religious enthusiasm, that there were not some who not only found their highest religious ideal in the life they had chosen, but ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... thin straight lips, the long silences, the "front-piece" that didn't match her hair, the very obvious "parting" that seemed sewed in with linen thread on black net,—there was not a single item that appealed to Rebecca. There are certain narrow, unimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous, and sometimes the worst traits in children. Miss Miranda, had she lived in a populous neighborhood, would have had her doorbell pulled, her gate ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... effort. But exactly these aerial burdens, whether of gratitude or of honour, most oppressed me as being least tangible and incapable of pecuniary or other satisfaction. No sinking fund could meet them. And even the dull unimaginative woman herself, eternally held up to admiration as my resolute benefactress, got the habit (I am sure) of looking upon me as under nameless obligations to her. This raised my wrath. It was not that to my feelings the obligations were really ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... sympathise with them, but they are certainly pretty numerous) who cannot take interest or can only take a reduced interest in things that "did not really happen"; letters may be even more interesting than novels. Only to very wayward or very unimaginative ones can they be less so, if they are in any respect good of ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... convincing herself that there must be some sort of echo which made it appear that a team passing in the road had come up the drive—when she was suddenly sure that she heard a hurried step in the corridor—it passed the door. Now she was naturally a very unimaginative person, and had never had occasion to know fear. So, after a bit, she put out her light, saying to herself that a belated servant was busy with some neglected work—nothing more likely—and ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... cannot help ourselves from becoming unimaginative, unsympathising, destructive and brutish when we are hard pressed by agony or by fear. Therefore, let such of us as have stuff for finer things, seize some of our only opportunities, and seek to become harmless in ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... his chosen work, and it was his object to fit himself, as by a species of training, to make the most and best of that good time, which lay like gold among the debris of the day. It seemed to him that the solid, unimaginative work of the morning cleared away a certain heaviness and sluggishness of apprehension, which was the shadow of sleep; that the open air, the active movement of the afternoon, removed the clumsier and grosser insistence of the body; and that there ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;—their voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery, without elasticity or oil. I wish it were fair to print a letter a young girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since. "I am *** *** ***," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... London Library and recently I was able to buy a copy for the modest sum of 15 francs. There was therefore every possibility of Nilus being suddenly confronted with the source of his plagiarism. Further, is it conceivable that a plagiarist so unskilful and so unimaginative would have been capable of improving on the original? For the Protocols are a vast improvement on the Dialogues of Joly. The most striking passages they contain are not to be found in the earlier work, nor, which is more remarkable, are ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... her; he could only watch her, and he always looked on at her with curiosity and a novel sensation rather like pleasure. She wakened up at sight of him, when he called, in a way that was attractive even to an unimaginative man. Her eyes seemed to warm, and she often looked flushed and softly appealing. He began to note vaguely that her dresses were better, and oftener changed, than they had been at Mallowe. A more observant man might have been ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... he almost wished he had kept away. He was not sure of his welcome and did not know what line to take if Featherstone showed his doubts. For one thing, he did not mean to talk about his adventures in Newcastle and on Spadeadam waste. The affair was too theatrical for the unimaginative country gentleman to believe, and for that matter, when Foster went up the drive past the well-kept shrubberies and lawn he found it hard to realize that he had been hunted by determined men and ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... Scraggs. In his eagerness he had driven his head so deep into the box that he came within an inch of kissing what the box contained—which happened to be nothing more nor less than a dead Chinaman! Mr. McGuffey, always slow and unimaginative, shouldered the skipper aside, and calmly ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... head is rough because unshaved or uncombed; also the fur of an animal is rough. Hence the term could be used for unkempt, disheveled, shaggy, hairy, coarse, bristly. "The child ran its hand over its father's rough cheek" and "The bear had a rough coat" are sentences that even the most unimaginative mind can understand. We speak of rough timber because its surface has not been planed or made smooth. We speak of a rough diamond because it is unpolished, uncut. Note that all these uses are literal, that in each instance some unevenness ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... causes, and so she gradually changed from the chronicler with strong sympathies to the interpreter with a reasoned philosophy. She discovered that a great deal of the suffering in this world is due not so much to original sin, but to a kind of original stupidity, an unimaginative, stubborn stupidity. People were dishonest because they believed, wrongly, that dishonesty was somehow successful. They were cruel because they supposed that repulsive exhibitions of power inspired ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... by a day on her account, and there came a morning when he drove through Bloomsbury and realized that he had not thought about her for a fortnight. The British Museum suggested her to him there—the British Museum, and the certainty that within its massive walls a number of unimaginative young women in collarless sage-green gowns were copying casts of antique sculptures at that moment. But he did not allow himself to suppose that she could possibly ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... School Mission on to some institution for the care of boys—an orphan school or a training ship. Only the most sensitive are shocked and distressed by the sight of hard conditions of life it all, and as a rule boys have an extraordinarily unimaginative way of taking things as they see them, and not thinking much ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... nervous sensibility, partly through his inbred dislike of extremes and habit of minimizing the expression of everything, is a perfect example of the conservation of energy. It is very difficult to come to the end of him. Add to this unimaginative, practical, tenacious moderation an inherent spirit of competition—not to say pugnacity—so strong that it will often show through the coating of his "Live and let live," half-surly, half-good-humored manner; add a peculiar, ironic, "don't care" sort of humor; an underground ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the telephone exchange at Belmont at once and was referred to the superintendent. He found the latter a brisk, unimaginative man—a creature of rules ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... little jagged islands the Phenicians knew, If, and Rion, Jaros, strange un-French names ... the sunshine yellow as a lamp, and the sea blue as flax, and the green woods, and the ancient grayish white city—all a picture some unimaginative painter would have loved. Next to Belfast, Marseilles was to Shane Campbell a second home. There it ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... reticence! Damn your unimaginative silence! Why don't you study the psychology of these boys and ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... had just assumed coat-tails, and the assumption of new responsibilities apparently following as a matter of course, we were among the candidates for confirmation. I wish I could say that the solemnity of our feelings was on a level with the solemnity of the occasion; but unimaginative boys find it difficult to recognize apostolical institutions in their developed form, and I fear our chief emotion concerning the ceremony was a sense of sheepishness, and our chief opinion, the speculative and heretical position, that it ought to be confined ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... shoulder to shoulder through a crisis of sufficient magnitude and she had showed then a cautious judgment, a reliability of purpose that had been purely masculine in its strength and sanity. She had been wholly matter-of-fact and unimaginative, unswayed by petty trivialities and broad in her decision. She had displayed a levelness of mind which had almost excluded feeling and which had enabled him to deal with her as with another man, confident of ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... subsided. He drew a deep breath, and sat down again. But Turkey must have been a very wise or a very unimaginative Turkey, for ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... me, what a very unimaginative person you are! I have, frequently; and yet, I do not think I am any brighter than ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... much, particularly when it was done in company and before strangers. In consequence he became on such occasions a sort of comic-paper caricature of his race, and by dint of much practice, added to a naturally alert mind, he became astonishingly ingenious in the torture of that honest but unimaginative gentleman whom he considered his best friend. He achieved the most surprising expressions by the mere literal translation of French idiom, and he could at any time bring Hartley to a crimson agony by calling him "my dear "'before other men, whereas at the ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... that this may be a portrait of one of the Querini family, who were Palma's patrons, has nothing tangible to support it, once Palma's authorship is contested. But the unimaginative Palma was surely incapable of such things as this and ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... the moral dyspepsia that seized the soul of the wonderful Tolstoy was the outcome of a riotous youth, a youth overflowing with the "joy of life." Ibsen, like Carlyle, battled in his early days with poverty; but his message—if you will have a definite message (Oh, these literal, unimaginative folk of the Gradgrind sort, who would wring from the dumb mysterious beauty of nature definite meanings—as if sheer existence itself is not its own glorious vindication!)—may be a hopeful one. The individual is all in all; he is the evangel of the future; his belief is buoyant ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... in which you tell me I am connected with it in your recollection of your dear child, now among the angels of God, gives me courage to approach your grief—to say what sympathy we have felt with it, and how we have not been unimaginative of these deep sources of consolation to which you have had recourse. The traveller who journeyed in fancy from this world to the next was struck to the heart to find the child he had lost, many years before, building him a tower in heaven. Our ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... Act, which empowers the unemployed members of the constabulary who find time hanging on their hands to arrest known criminals on suspicion if they are seen out in questionable circumstances. And as all circumstances are questionable to the unimaginative 'flattie,' and his no less obtuse friend the 'split,' I will retire to the bedroom and stuff my ears ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... righteous or unrighteous persons? What if I had discovered that one law of the spiritual world, in which all others were contained, was righteousness; and that disharmony with that law, which we called unspirituality, was not being vulgar, or clumsy, or ill-taught, or unimaginative, or dull, but simply being unrighteous? What if I had discovered that righteousness, and it alone, was the beautiful righteousness, the sublime, the heavenly, the Godlike—ay, God Himself? And what if it had dawned on me, as by a great sunrise, what that righteousness was like? What ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... to express is not, it must be confessed, of the highest quality, because his reactions are limited and rather undistinguished. He has only two or three notes, and they are neither rich nor rare. For an artist he is unimaginative, and often in their blank simplicity his conceptions are all but commonplace. In actual expression, too, though a first-rate craftsman who paints admirably, he lacks sensibility. In his handwriting—his lines and dashes, smudges ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... world." They were all cheerful, facing things with the pluck which is their chief characteristic and which seems never to desert them, withal they were cursing the country with lurid metaphors quite refreshing after a month of unimaginative, monotonous Cockney swearing. The Cockney has one oath, and one oath only, the most indecent in the language, which he uses on any and every occasion. Far different is the luminous and varied Western swearing, which ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... hour after hour, under the hot sun? Nothing. They are letting the rhythm of water and sky lull them into a sleep—a surcease from living. This is a very poetical thing for a hundred battered-looking men to attempt. Yet life may be as intimidating to honest, unimaginative ones as ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Western race the right to flaunt her Empire's flag in Asiatic seas? And America! Once again he felt the slow rising of wrath as he recalled the insults of past years ... the adventurous sons of his country treated like savages and negroes by that uncultured, strong-limbed race of coarse-fibered, unimaginative materialists. There was a call, indeed, to the soul of his country to avenge, to make safe, the homes and lives of her colonists. Across the seas he looked into the council chambers of the wise men of his race. He ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of character and will impresses him. The bending of such a nature to faith, the acceptance of things spiritual, by one real, unimaginative and unsophisticated, and, above all, the self conquest, just where a great Greek hero would have failed, have certainly told on George, so that I see more hope than ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... criminal, and is lost in a sense of the grandeur of justice; and the spectator who beholds an execution, solely as it appears to the eye, without recognition of the idea which towers behind it, must be a very unspiritual and unimaginative spectator indeed. ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... play-bill here reproduced specifically announces a five act tragedy, and it is to be inferred that the form of the play, as given at the Broadway Theatre, New York, September 26, 1855,[B] was the only one used by him. Winter claims that as Lanciotto, Davenport was "unimaginative, mechanical, and melodramatic," and that the whole piece "proved tedious." This is strange, considering the heroic and romantic characteristics in Davenport's method of acting. It may be that he attempted Boker's play because of his interest in the development of American drama. He had assisted ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... little shocked at the unimaginative and superfluous criminality in him that had turned old cramped and stagnant Fishbourne into a blaze and new beginnings. (I wish from the bottom of my heart I could add that he was properly sorry.) But something constricting and restrained ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... most things except flowers was rather momentary or conventional than continuous and heart-felt; but of the flowers he loves to talk, whether he weaves us a garland for the Thame's wedding, or gives us the contents of a maund of simples; and his love, if somewhat homely and unimaginative, is apparent enough. But the main inspiration, as it is the main theme, of the Polyolbion is the glory and might and wealth, past, present, and future, of England, her possessions and her folk. Through all this glory, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... old conclusion in which, to quote "Rasselas," "nothing is concluded." It is a thousand pities that so able, attractive and intelligent a race as the Irish should have such an accursedly impossible temperament. It is the unimaginative, easygoing, supremely practical Englishman who is the ideal governor in this foolish world, not ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... historical and psychological stuff as the foundation of his air-castles. His latent radicalism furnished him with a touchstone of criticism as he interpreted the moral standards of ancient communities; no reader of "The Scarlet Letter" can forget Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the unimaginative harshness of the Puritans. His own judgment upon the deep matters of the human conscience was stern enough, but it was a universalized judgment, and by no means the result of a Calvinism which he hated. Over-fond as he was ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... little group of men gathered about the chair in which sat the huddled body. Two of them I already knew. One was Detective-sergeant Simmonds, and the other Coroner Goldberger, both of whom I had met in previous cases. Simmonds was a stolid, unimaginative, but industrious and efficient officer, with whom Godfrey had long ago concluded an alliance offensive and defensive. In other words, Godfrey threw what glory he could to Simmonds, and Simmonds such stories as he could ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... spoken. In those words "reasonable and practical" is the Chinese Wall of America, that narrow boundary which contracts our vision to the moment, cuts us off from the culture of the world, and makes us such provincial, unimaginative blunderers over our own problems. Fixation upon the immediate has made a rich country poor in leisure, has in a land meant for liberal living incited an insane struggle for existence. One suspects at times that our national cult of optimism is no real feeling that the world ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Sawyer ... late of Edmonton, her conviction, condemnation and Death.... Written by Henry Goodcole, Minister of the word of God, and her continuall Visiter in the Gaole of Newgate.... 1621. The Reverend Mr. Goodcole wrote a plain, unimaginative story, the main facts of which we cannot doubt. They are supported moreover by Dekker and Ford's play, The Witch of Edmonton, which appeared within a year. Goodcole refers to the ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... men went "insane in pairs," either devotedly admiring or completely distrusting him. Cleveland was almost devoid of personal charm except to his most intimate associates. He was brusque and tactless, unimaginative, plodding, commonplace in his tastes and in the elements of his character. Men threw their hats in the air and cheered themselves hoarse at the name of Blaine; to Cleveland's courage, earnestness and honesty, they gave a tribute of admiration. When the campaign ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... had taken up was the Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning[25]; but I had called it a favorite of Usher's more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... it be Bob West, I asked myself, as I half-dazedly looked for a place to sit down among the litter of small luggage with which the first occupant of the carriage had strewn every seat. I knew that Bob was as much in love with Di as a man of his rather unintellectual, unimaginative type could be, and he hadn't shown himself as friendly lately to me as he once had: still, I didn't think he was the sort of fellow to trip up a rival in the race by a trick, even if he could possibly have found out that I was ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... lovable," Blanche declared. "There must have been a certain ruthlessness about those old Challoners which you couldn't show. After all, their pictures suggest that their courage was of the unimaginative, physical kind." ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... at a distance and this distance once chosen must be firmly held against a pushing world. Verse, ritual, music and dance in association with action require that gesture, costume, facial expression, stage arrangement must help in keeping the door. Our unimaginative arts are content to set a piece of the world as we know it in a place by itself, to put their photographs as it were in a plush or a plain frame, but the arts which interest me, while seeming to separate from the world and us a group ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... being shifted to another end of the factory. In despair he turned to Ada, the eldest of the little Buttons, who now had reached years of comparative discretion, and strove to interest her in his dreams, veiling his identity under a fictitious name; but Ada, an unimaginative and practical child with a growing family to look after, either listened stupidly or consigned him, in the local ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... austerely black and white. Could he tell anyone—anyone but Nan—how she had seemed to him there, the old, old picture of motherhood, divine yet human? It was too much to risk. If he did lay his mind bare about that moment which was his alone, and Dick met it with his unimaginative astuteness, he could not trust himself to be patient with the boy. He said little more than that he had given her the freedom of the hut, and that he meant always to have it ready for her. Then he came to this last night ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... appear to have been a major factor in his actions prior to the Revolution, the first significant attack not occurring until 1788. Instead, the stolid and often plodding king tended to rely upon men like the unimaginative Lord Bute or his somewhat stodgy wife, Charlotte of Mecklenberg (for whom two Virginia counties and the town of Charlottesville are named.) The breakdown of the once-powerful Whig political coalition also added to ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... this there is no touch of ecstasy; no spark of the inspiration which in a St. Francis, a St. Teresa, or a Charles Wesley, scales the heights of hymnody. And, as the unimaginative Roman temperament lacked the instinct of adoration, so was it deficient in that other constituent of supernatural faith, the belief in immortality. There might be a shadowy world—the poets said so—Odysseus visited its depths and ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... an unimaginative point of view, most of the cottage folk have been, until quite lately, far from regarding the public-house as a public nuisance. It had a distinct value in their scheme of living. That fact was demonstrated plainly in an outburst of popular feeling some years ago. The licensing magistrates of the ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... Fan it was no pleasure to sit down to eat by herself, and for her midday meal she was satisfied to have a mutton chop with a potato—that hideously monotonous mutton chop and potato which so many millions of unimaginative Anglo-Saxons are content to swallow on each recurring day. And Mrs. Fay, her landlady, had a soul; and her skill in cooking was her pride and glory. Cookery was to her what poetry and the worship of Humanity, and Esoteric Buddhism ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... acquired that solemn dignity that comes of living up to one's husband's reputation. They both looked on their families—Mrs. Rossiter on Clare and Mrs. Galleon on Millicent, Percival and Bobby—with curiosity, tolerance and a mild soft of wonder. They were both massively happy and completely unimaginative. They were, indeed, old friends, having been at school together, they were Emma and Jane to one another and Mrs. Rossiter could never forget that Mrs. Galleon came to school two years after herself and was therefore junior still; whilst ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... group of old families accustomed to power and consequence. It is in the main a society of gentlemen, dignified in manner, and kindly towards each other, and it is also a society of high culture and literary ability, though poor in creative genius, and unimaginative. On the other hand, it is a class which has lost its interest in the State, and is energetic only when pursuing its own interests: pleasure-loving, luxurious, gossiping, trifling with serious matters, ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... not a noble specimen of a Christmas-tree. Looked at with cold, unimaginative eyes, it might have been considered lopsided; undersized it undoubtedly was. Yet a pathetic familiarity in the desolate aspect of the little tree aroused our sympathy as no rare ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... Petrograd, when alone with her and on fire with love, he had shown his true and bravest self to her. She was impatient, she had hoped that the others would see him as she had seen him. She watched them as they expressed their surprise that he was not the practical, fearless and unimaginative Englishman who was their typical figure. Whilst he found them far from the Karamazovs, the Raskolnikoffs, of his imagination, they in their turn could not create the "sportsman" and "man of affairs" whom they ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... tendency in these minds would be expression of the universal tendency toward positivism—or Completeness—or conviction that these few regularized vessels constituted all. Now I think of some especial savage who suspects otherwise—because he's very backward and unimaginative and insensible to the beautiful ideals of the others: not piously occupied, like the others, in bowing before impressive-looking sticks of wood; dishonestly taking time for his speculations, while the others are patriotically witch-finding. So the other higher and nobler savages ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... informing his master. This was quite possible, for the slave's keen eyes certainly had not failed to notice how little he and Myrtilus valued the opinion of the honest, skilful, but extremely practical and unimaginative man, who could not create independently even the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... beyond measure, for he was used to unimaginative, rather dull skippers, who revered their berths and stood before him, hat in hand, plainly uncomfortable in the presence of the creator of the payroll. "Dashed young scoundrel! Well, we had some fun anyhow, ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... highway of life people who had seen nothing of life's mystery, saw it clearly, and others who had been deaf to every voice but that of pleasure heard for the first time the voice of love and found it as 'musical as Apollo's lute'; or that evil passions fled at his approach, and men whose dull unimaginative lives had been but a mode of death rose as it were from the grave when he called them; or that when he taught on the hillside the multitude forgot their hunger and thirst and the cares of this world, and that to his friends who listened to ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... ways of living give place to common ways, while vulgar tastes, slatternly habits, clouds and despondency reign in the house. Little children under five years of age die in needless thousands because of the dull, unimaginative women on whom they depend. Such women have been satisfied with just getting along, instead of packing everything they do with brains, instead of studying the best possible way of doing everything ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... anticipations of the glories of Solomon's reign, or the happy prospects of a return from Babylon, with the higher glory and happiness of Messiah's advent, such transitions of thought are in perfect accordance with the ordinary laws of poetry, and ought not to perplex even the most unimaginative student of the Bible." ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... exist, and the whole German war-machine was thereby foiled. G.J. was on the point of a full explanation, but he checked himself. A recital of the circumstances would not immediately help, and it might hinder. Concealing his astonishment at the excesses of which unimaginative stolidity is capable, even in an Italian, he turned down ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... as much, the Allies will be forced also to link their various State firms together into a great allied trust, trading with a common interest and a common plan with Germany and America and the rest of the world.... Youth and necessity will carry this against selfishness, against the unimaginative, against the unteachable, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... her audience she relied mainly on her own imagination and her voice; striking no attitudes, and allowing herself nothing of that facial distortion which is the resort of the unimaginative, and destroys not creates illusion. Of course, her face changed, but the change was one of which she was probably unconscious, and which she couldn't have reproduced to her mirror; it was not a play of features, but a play of lights and shadows and nerves, a flow or an ebb of radiance ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... succumb to software rot when their 2-digit year counters {wrap around} at the beginning of the year 2000. Actually, related lossages often afflict centenarians who have to deal with computer software designed by unimaginative clods. One such incident became the focus of a minor public flap in 1990, when a gentleman born in 1889 applied for a driver's license renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina. The new system refused to issue the card, probably because with 2-digit years the ages 101 and 1 cannot ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... and shadows in its shifting depths. Every one was swimming in an uncertain world; the unreality grew with the heat. Maggie herself, at the end of Mr. Warlock's prayer, felt that her test of a real solid and unimaginative world was leaving her. She was expectant like the rest, as ready to believe anything ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... after all it was wonderfully impressive—even to me with all I feel about the Irish question. For the image it presented—set forth by the physical aspect of the orator—was such as I can imagine to be wonderfully impressive to that dull, unimaginative, and unsentimental personage—the man of the shifting ballast, whose almost impenetrable brain has to finally decide this question. And the image presented to that very creature of clay was this: "Here is a man who is my Foreign Secretary; as such, he has every day of his life to deal with ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... deep breath of wonder, and it was evident that his unimaginative mind was struggling with new conceptions. There was a gleam of humour in his eyes which contrasted oddly with the suggestion of awe in his voice, as he looked up and answered: "It must be a great place for lovers, professor. And how far away might ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... commonly known as thoughtlessness. Without Thought, Imagination, and Affection, one could not be a human being. Mankind differ from each other, not in kind, but in degree. It is the low degree of activity in either of these great divisions of the human mind that causes one to seem thoughtless, unimaginative, or without affection. The end of all training should be to develop each one of these faculties so that it shall cooeperate with the others, and all as fully as possible. A just balance of power is the ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... unimaginative man I thought he seemed unusually receptive that night, unusually open to suggestion of things other than sensory. He too was touched by the beauty and loneliness of the place. I was not altogether pleased, I remember, ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... we are still rich enough not to require assistance from any one. We are leaving Paris, and when our journey is paid, we shall have 5,000 francs left." The blood mounted to the temples of Debray, who held a million in his pocket-book, and unimaginative as he was he could not help reflecting that the same house had contained two women, one of whom, justly dishonored, had left it poor with 1,500,000. francs under her cloak, while the other, unjustly stricken, but sublime in her misfortune, was yet rich with a few deniers. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... good humour for working that day, and I had just dipped the nib of my pen into the ink-bottle when I heard some one ring. Should any one ever read these pages written by an unimaginative old man, he will be sure to laugh at the way that bell keeps ringing through my narrative, without ever announcing the arrival of a new personage or introducing any unexpected incident. On the stage things are managed on the reverse ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Crook" (vol. iii. p. 116.).—However unimaginative the worthy Cit may be for whose explanation of this popular phrase J. D. S. has made himself answerable, the solution sounds so pretty, that to save its obtaining further credence, more than your well-timed note is needed. I with safety can contradict it, for I find that "Tusser," ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various
... Thurstane had taken a fancy to swap him for that girl Pepita? What a bright and cheerful fire there would have been for him before sundown! How thoroughly the skin would have been peeled off his muscles! What neat carving at his finger joints and toe joints! Coarse, unimaginative, hardened, and beastly as Texas Smith was, his flesh crawled a little at the thought of it. Presently it struck him that he had better do something to propitiate a man who could send him to ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... of all this homily is that I, Allan, the most practical and unimaginative of persons, just a homely, half-educated hunter and trader who chances to have seen a good deal of the particular little world in which his lot was cast, at one period of my life became the ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... horseman made his rounds, and several times the sentinels shot at him without effect, the white horse and white rider showing no annoyance at these assaults. When it came the turn of a sceptical and unimaginative old corporal to take the night detail, he took the liberty of assuming the responsibilities of this post himself. He looked well to the priming of his musket, and at midnight withdrew out of the moonshine and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... "crime"? When would they realize that making "crimes," and manufacturing "criminals" from honest men, is not discipline, is not making soldiers, is not improving the Army—is not common ordinary sanity and sense? When would they break their dull, unimaginative, hide-bound—no, tape-bound—souls from the ideas that prevailed before (and murdered) the Crimean Army.... The Army is not now the sweepings of the jails, and more in need of the wild-beast tamer than of the kind firm teacher, as once it was. How long will they continue to suppose ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... unimaginative and of restricted mental horizon does not think in terms of masses of mankind. Masses vaguely appall him. They exist in the big cities on which he turned his back in his unaudacious youth. His contacts are with individuals. His democracy consists ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... as she was called, is described as pretty by some and as of a "pleasing appearance," by others. The painter Pecht called her very pretty, but blamed her for a sober, unimaginative soul. Richard Pohl calls her a prosaic domestic woman, who never understood her husband, and who might have been an impediment to his far-reaching ideas, if Richard Wagner could have been impeded in his career by anything. Wagner himself seems to have been genuinely fond of her, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... limits of their area,[1411] and long lived under the monotonous influence of the desert; thus, it is said, their conception of the world became objective and limited—they were clannish, practical, unanalytic, and unimaginative. But the origin of races is obscure, and the genius of every ancient people was formed and developed in remote ages under conditions not known to us. We can do little more than note the characteristics ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... but Balzac the prophet, the seer, the great natural force—like Rodin himself. That is why these kindred spirits converse across the years, as do the Alpine peaks in that striking parable of Turgenieff's. No doubt in bronze the Balzac will arouse less wrath from the unimaginative; in plaster it produces the effect of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Kitty had one of those family reputes, so hard to survive, for childish attempts of her own in the world of fiction where so great part of her life had been passed; and Mrs. Ellison, who was as unliterary a soul as ever breathed, admired her with the heartiness which unimaginative people often feel for their idealizing friends, and believed that she was always deep in the ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... even her bold and unimaginative spirit somewhat daunted by the ghostly silence of the house. Sylvia tiptoed to the swinging-door and pushed it open. Yes, there was the pantry, like the kitchen, in chaotic disorder, tissue paper and excelsior thick on the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... talents to their best use. He had no stubborn material for his hands, for even in his youth Mr. Ticknor showed many of those traits which most clearly marked him in after life; among others, an intelligent, unimaginative, but also unmalicious observation of his kind for his relaxation, and for his work in life warm devotion to the study of letters. How scanty were the opportunities in this way at that period may be seen from his difficulties in getting any knowledge ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... with him; and we have to thank, I believe, the high romanticks for it. They must have devilry, it seems, or cayenne pepper. But I say, Scorn not the sentimental, though it be barley-sugar to ambrosia, a canary's flight to a skylark's. Scorn it not; it's the romantic of the unimaginative; and if it won't serve for a magic carpet, it makes ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... a pale man in blue spectacles, some stranger stories than ever were written in a romance; told, too, with a simple, unimaginative steadfastness, which was terribly efficacious in compelling the auditor to receive them into the category of established facts. He cited instances of the miraculous power of one human being over the will and passions of another; insomuch that settled ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the established Church, taking literally the figurative, allegorical, and mythical language of a collection of Oriental books of different ages, directly and inevitably led. The same result long after followed the folly of regarding the Hebrew books as if they had been written by the unimaginative, hard, practical intellect of the England of James the First and the bigoted stolidity of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and tolerably sudden. It began with the Orb Deposit Bank. Under the name of that institution de Barral with the frantic obstinacy of an unimaginative man had been financing an Indian prince who was prosecuting a claim for immense sums of money against the government. It was an enormous number of scores of lakhs—a miserable remnant of his ancestors' treasures—that ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... sensitive to beauty, so penetrated with a passionate interest in life, so endowed with the power to express and immortalize that interest, can ever really enjoy destruction for its own sake. The French hate "militarism." It is stupid, inartistic, unimaginative and enslaving; there could not be four better French reasons for detesting it. Nor have the French ever enjoyed the savage forms of sport which stimulate the blood of more apathetic or more brutal races. Neither prize-fighting nor bull-fighting is of the soil ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... elaborate rules for restricting the hours of toil, making its performance needlessly complex, and shirking with extreme ingenuity and conscientiousness. In the older trades, of which the building trade is foremost, these two traditions, reinforced by unimaginative building regulations, have practically arrested any advance whatever.[26] There can be no doubt that this influence has spread into what are practically new branches of work. Even where new conveniences have called for new types of workmen and have opened the way for the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... chiefly determined the strong effect she produced on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than Bertha's. She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined to dissect all my favourite poems, and especially contemptous towards the German lyrics which were my pet literature at that time. To this moment I am unable to define ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... accepted morality, then the warfare on the system should not include warfare on the men themselves, unless they decline to amend their ways and to dissociate themselves from the system. There are many good, unimaginative citizens who in politics or in business act in accordance with accepted standards, in a matter-of-course way, without questioning these standards; until something happens which sharply arouses them to the situation, whereupon they try to work for ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... emasculated "science," a little history, a little reading in the silent or timidly orthodox English literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, all eight had imbibed the same dull gentlemanly tradition of behavior; essentially boyish, unimaginative—with neither keen swords nor art in it, a tradition apt to slobber into sentiment at a crisis and make a great virtue of a simple duty rather clumsily done. None of these eight had made any real experiments with life, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... The unimaginative mechanic whose wits were scattered by this fantastic proposition used his bit of cotton waste as a handkerchief, and remarked with vague politeness that it was a pity the gentleman was not an engineer. But Septimus deprecated the compliment. He ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... history and politics of Italy and Greece. He widened the horizon of his contemporaries, bringing within their ken wonders and beauties hitherto unknown or unfamiliar, and in so doing he heightened and cultivated, he "touched with emotion," the unlettered and unimaginative many, that "reading public" which despised or eluded the refinements and subtleties of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... I—took No. —— Lower Seedley Road, no possibility of the place being haunted crossed our minds. Indeed ghosts were the very last things we reckoned on, as neither of us had the slightest belief in them. Like the generality of solicitors, I am stodgy and unimaginative, whilst my wife is the most practical and matter-of-fact little woman you would meet in a day's march. Nor was there anything about the house that in any way suggested the superphysical. It was airy and light—no dark corners nor sinister staircases—and equipped throughout with all modern conveniences. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... get 'guile' spotted as not," affirmed the unimaginative Emma Jane. "I think it's an awful foolish word; but now we're all named and our officers elected, what do we do first? It's easy enough for Mary and Martha Burch; they just play at missionarying because their folks work at it, same as Living ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... don't think so, and I will tell you why. I believe the brave man is not he who is insensible to fear, but he who is able to rise above it in doing his duty. People are sometimes called courageous who are really so unimaginative and dull that they cannot understand danger—so of course they are not afraid. They go through their lives very quietly and comfortably, as a rule, but they do not often leave great names behind them, although they may ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... there already any young maiden in whose bosom, had such an advertisement come in her way, it would have raised a conscious flutter? If so, did she live near Oxford?" If there is anything worse than an unimaginative man trying to write imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fancies he is being facetious. He tramples out the last spark of cheerfulness with the broad damp foot of ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell |
