"Uninspired" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Caswall was, if not mad, close to the border-line. Madness in its first stage—monomania—is a lack of proportion. So long as this is general, it is not always noticeable, for the uninspired onlooker is without the necessary means of comparison. But in monomania the errant faculty protrudes itself in a way that may not be denied. It puts aside, obscures, or takes the place of something else—just as the head of a pin placed before the ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... passage as this, however, those strong racy phrases which somehow find their way into the most uninspired of Tudor translations, are not wholly wanting. Thus when the careless nymph at last goes off to seek her desperate lover, Daphne in the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... that we should lose credit by divulging the circumstance? And lastly, can we not only be content to return our enemies good for evil, (for this return, as has been remarked by one of the greatest of uninspired authorities,[95] may be prompted by pride and repaid by self-complacency) but, when they are successful or unsuccessful without our having contributed to their good or ill fortune, can we not only be content, but cordially ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... enable her to distinguish between the inspired and the uninspired parts of the Bible; for this ability ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... vindication of God's justice, not as a vicarious satisfaction of the law.19 If the leading theologians of Christendom, such as Anselm, Calvin, and Grotius, have so thoroughly repudiated the original Christian and patristic doctrine of the atonement, and built another doctrine upon their own uninspired speculations, why should our modern sects defer so slavishly to them, and, instead of freely investigating the subject for themselves from the first sources of Scripture and spiritual philosophy, timidly cling to the results reached by these biassed, morbid, and over sharp ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... causes of prostitution. There can, I think, be little doubt that, as a thoughtful student of London life has concluded, the problem of prostitution is "at bottom a mad and irresistible craving for excitement, a serious and wilful revolt against the monotony of commonplace ideals, and the uninspired drudgery of everyday life."[203] It is this factor of prostitution, we may reasonably conclude, which is mainly responsible for the fact, pointed out by F. Schiller,[204] that with the development of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Still uninspired by any definite design, I tried the gate and found that it was unlocked. Like some wandering soul, as it has since seemed to me, I descended. There was a lamp over the archway, but the glass was broken, and the rain apparently had extinguished ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... true mediaeval fashion loom up over the river Yonne; not that the entrance is not pleasing: the reverse is actually the case, though one's way into the town lies through newly made roads. However, upon contemplation of the pleasant prospect of town and river, he would be an uninspired person indeed who would not be able to pick out the Cathedral of St. Etienne, with its singular reddish brown roof, from among its less imposing neighbours. It is the central building of the three, and it rises majestically above all, enhanced by the fine grouping ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have made the late war, and that Victorian ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... by the adherents of the Baconian faith. The tasks which the greatest of our poets set himself when near the age of thirty, and to which he presumably brought all the powers of which he was then conscious, were the uninspired and pitilessly prolix poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and THE RAPE OF LUCRECE, the first consisting of some 1,200 lines and the second of more than 1,800; one a calculated picture of female concupiscence ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... two ways by Sir Walter Scott. The historical novel, which had been before his day either an essay in anachronism with nothing historical in it but the date, or a laborious and uninspired compilation of antiquarian research, took form and life under his hands. His wide reading, stored as it was in a marvellously retentive memory, gave him all the background he needed to achieve a historical setting, and allowed him to concentrate his attention ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... of the great majority that denies because they are—dead!" he cried. "Smothered! Undivining! Living in that uninspired fragment which they deem the whole! Ah, my friend,"—and he came abruptly nearer—"the pathos, the comedy, the pert self-sufficiency of their dull pride, the crass stupidity and littleness of their denials, in the eyes of ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... men upon whose decision hung such momentous issues, the Council which met that evening at Westminster seemed alike unambitious in tone and uninspired in appearance. Some short time was spent in one of the anterooms, where Julian was introduced to many of the delegates. The disclosure of his identity, although it aroused immense interest, was scarcely an unmixed joy to the majority ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... who pays, and baser prose— Hang uninspired patter! 'Tis in verse That angels praise, and fiends ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... the raw material, beneath the touch of Charley's wise hands, emerged a wondrous cosmos of biscuits, light as the heart of a boy. And Frank, singing a French ditty, created wheat cakes. His method struck me as poetic. He scorned the ordinary uninspired cook's manner of turning the half-baked cake. One side being done, he waited until the ditty reached a certain lilting upward leap in the refrain, when, with a dexterous movement of the frying-pan, he tossed the cake into the air, making it execute a joyful somersault, and catching ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... imposing exhibition, grave bishops, laden with the traditions and rivalries of particular nations or places, have been guided in their decisions by the commanding genius of individuals, sometimes young and of inferior rank. Not that uninspired intellect overruled the super-human gift which was committed to the council, which would be a self-contradictory assertion, but that in that process of inquiry and deliberation, which ended in an infallible enunciation, individual ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... Stolid and uninspired as he seemed to the whites, the Indian of the Sound was not without his touch of poetry. He had that imaginative curiosity which marked the native {p.028} American everywhere. He was ever peering into the causes of ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... manner, he said, "Conwell, all within this gate is PARADISE and all without it MARTYRDOM." In that wonderful sentence, which I feel sure I recall accurately, he uttered the most glorious expression that could ever come from uninspired lips. ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... conservative. He belonged to the classical school, and to its least liberal section. He regarded literary forms as imposed from without on the content of poetry, not as growing from within; passion and imagination he would reduce to the strict bounds of uninspired good sense; he placed Virgil above Homer, and preferred French tragedy to that of ancient Greece; from his involuntary admiration of Shakespeare he recoiled in alarm; if he admired Corneille, it was with many reservations. Yet his taste was less narrow than ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... introduction to another work of enormous length which was to have presented his views of Man, Nature, and Society. Of this plan he completed two detached parts, namely the fragmentary 'Recluse' and 'The Excursion,' which latter contains some fine passages, but for the most part is uninspired. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... that the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so out all trooped into the starry midnight, falling the street with gay laughter, to be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed by the dull inhabitants of an uninspired world. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... might be taken as a reckless abandonment of artistry in favor of the national, but commonplace; and in fact, Heimatkunst, when assimilated to folklore, as it was in this gospel, did run the risk of an uninspired monotony. Such writers as Sohnrey and Frenssen have not altogether escaped the danger. Only the synthesis of form and content, only creation conscious of racial peculiarity but obedient to severe esthetic ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... in most of my trips into the wild. He was blood brother to my father, and cousin to my heroic uncles. He represented the finest phases of pioneering. "Matt Kelley," "Rob Raymond" and "Jack Munroe," I knew and loved, and their presence in this labor war redeemed it from the sordid, uninspired struggle which such contests usually turn out to be. In my design these three ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... result of desperation as philosophy. He felt himself an outcast as well from home as from love, and it mattered to him very little, in the morbid excitement of his present mind, whether he fell by the hand of his rival, or lived to pine out a wearisome existence, lonely and uninspired, a gloomy exile in the bitter world. He waited, it may be said, with some impatience for the fire of his antagonist. Once he saw the pistol of Stevens uplifted. He had one in each hand. His own hung beside him. He waited for ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... of men who were getting five times that amount—but I can get you a start of sorts, right away. Come around now to the Record office, and I'll introduce you to Dodgson, the editor, a perfectly uninspired person, who ought to have been a grocer's assistant and have sung in a chapel choir. But he has the grace to realise his limitations, and take my advice. It will mean two guineas every now and then for a Page Four article—a thousand words, ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... reading he was sure he read ten of the Bible. But, up to that November day in 1825 when he first met a praying band of disciples, he had never to his recollection read one chapter in the Book of books; and for the first four years of his new life he gave to the works of uninspired men practical ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... as the mortal enemy of all the Christian holds dear, and to take no rest until this infidel and atheistic foe has been utterly destroyed."* Dr. Woodrow maintained that the science of theology, as a science, is equally human and uninspired with the science of geology. He cited illustrations from the long warfare of science and theology to show that the church would make a great mistake if it attempted to shut off the human intellect from the search of truth as reverent investigators in the realms of geology and biology might find ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... exposed the narrowness and weakness of that dogma, so pertinaciously adhered to by persons of cold hearts and limited understandings, that Religion is not a fit theme for poetical genius, and that Sacred Poetry is beyond the powers of uninspired man. We do not know that the grounds on which that dogma stands have ever been formally stated by any writer but Samuel Johnson; and therefore with all respect, nay, veneration, for his memory, we shall now shortly ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula. They originated that critical and rather hostile scrutiny of Semitic ideas and values in present civilization, which plays no small part in the dilettante naturalism of the moment. Thus the nature and place of man, under the influence of these "uninspired" literatures and cultures, became more and more important as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceased to be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendence of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... a grievous wrong, That man commits who uninspired presumes To sing the heavenly sweetness of their song— To paint the glorious tinting of their plumes— Plumes bright as jewels that from diadems Fling over golden thrones their diamond rays— Bright, even as bright as those ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... snatched her forcibly from my life at a time when sustaining hope was most needed. The hypnotizing poets were to blame. As I read the letters, I got the notion that I was responsible for the inspired as well as the uninspired portions, and so became topheavy and foolhardy in handling a kind of fire I did not understand. Many another has been burned the ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... as much to the age as to the writer. In description he is too copious and detailed: his poems abound with long speeches: his parade of varied learning, his partiality for abstruse mythology, are just the natural defects of a lettered but uninspired epoch.' ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... males at the fateful spring and autumn seasons denominated house-cleaning. Who can say whither the awful gods, the prophetic fates, may drive our fair household divinities; what sins of ours may be brought to light; what indulgences and compliances, which uninspired woman has granted in her ordinary mortal hours, may be torn from us? He who has been allowed to keep a pair of pet slippers in a concealed corner, and by the fireside indulged with a chair which he might ad libitum fill with all sorts of pamphlets ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... far above all human efforts, his poems fail in these representations. God is a spirit; he is here presented as a body, and that by an uninspired pen. The poet has not been able to carry us up to those infinite heights, and so his attempt only ends in a humanitarian philosophy: he has been obliged to lower the whole heavenly hierarchy to bring it within ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... every English-speaking nation, as long as the English language exists. Not only our own countrymen, but travellers from every country and colony into which Englishmen have spread, may here examine the original manuscripts of books which have been more widely read than any other uninspired writings throughout the world. Thousands, it cannot be doubted, who have been indebted for many an hour of pleasurable enjoyment when in health, for many an hour of solace when in weariness and pain, to these novels, will be glad to look upon them as each ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... the National Literary Society of Loughrea, under whose auspices Miss Gonne the other day delivered the rebel lecture quoted in the Killaloe letter. Our fellow-citizen speaks of "the spirit of revival that is abroad amongst you, of your new society rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the old, not uninspired, we may suppose, by the project of your being in the near future masters in your own house, the arbiters of your own destiny, for you will be governed by the men of your own choice." Side by side with this heart-felt utterance let us print another letter ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... inconstant power. St. Paul raises Eutychus from death, and his garments effect miraculous cure; yet he leaves Trophimus sick at Miletum, recognizes only the mercy of God in the recovery of Epaphroditus, and, like any uninspired physician, recommends Timothy wine for his infirmities. And in the second place, our own energies are inconstant almost in proportion to their nobleness. We breathe with regularity, and can calculate upon the strength necessary for common tasks. But ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in the Lectures have lost whatever novelty they may have possessed. All its predictions have been submitted to the formidable test of time. They appear to have stood it, so far, about as well as most uninspired prophecies; indeed, some of them require much less accommodation than certain grave commentators employ in their readings of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... before her, by laying them down as such on their chart. Not from the gross and earthy fires of political movement in the present day, or from the cold grey ashes of movement semi-political in some uninspired age of the past, must that pillar of flame now ascend which is to marshal her on her pilgrimage through the wilderness, at once reviving her by its heat and guiding her by its effulgence. The light borrowed from the one would but flicker idly before her, a wandering and delusive meteor; the ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... potentates in 'Tameran,' the self-styled 'Island of Braves.' This, too, was the site of the Tahoro, or Tagoror, temple and senate-house of the ancients. The principal interest of these wild people is the mysterious foreknowledge of their fate that seems to have come to them by a manner of intuition, of uninspired prophecy. [Footnote: So in Candelaria of Tenerife the Virgin appeared in effigy to the shepherds of Chimisay in 1392, a century before the Norman Conquest, and dwelt fifty-four years amongst the Gentiles of Chinguaro. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... was impossible to find, in many hundreds of pages dictated by the Holy Spirit, fifty or sixty chapters more edifying than any thing which could be extracted from the works of the most respectable uninspired moralist or historian. The leaders of the majority therefore determined to shun a debate in which they must have been reduced to a disagreeable dilemma. Their plan was, not to reject the recommendations of the Commissioners, but to prevent those recommendations from being discussed; and with this ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in his brain the image of love's infinite grace and the sense of the inexhaustible joy that lives in beauty. No! What he imparted to the Editor were no emotions, but mere facts conveyed in a deliberate voice and in uninspired words. ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... not bear the same meaning to all, though what human creature can fail to be spurred onwards by "Work while it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work." But I mean those beautiful thoughts—who can say that they are uninspired thoughts?—which may be gathered from a hundred authors to match a hundred uses. A fine thought in fine language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and ornament. To take the nearest example, there ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fine thing in art; but I do not care whether a poem is written in conventional metre or in free verse, so long as it is unmistakably poetry. And no garments yet invented or the lack of them can conceal true poetry. Perhaps the Traditionalist might reply that uninspired verse gracefully written is better than uninspired verse abominably written. So it is; but why bother about either? He might once more insist that inspired poetry gracefully written is better than inspired poetry ungracefully written. And I should reply that it depended ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... contemplate the spectacle of one man contending against the world! Not a chieftain, at the head of an army, subduing kingdom after kingdom, but a priest, without a carnal weapon, resisting a continent combined at once to crush him, and finally vanquishing by his death. Uninspired by ambition, assailed by every earthly motive, God alone could have directed, and God only could have upheld him. The Emperor of Austria had sworn to depose him, the Italians promised to assist his antagonist. With scarce ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... the rest of my meal untasted. The food choked me. I could have shed tears for the noble, patient life thus self-sacrificed. One hero the less in this world of unheroic, uninspired persons! I sat silent, lost in sorrowful thought. The landlord ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... prison, Of flesh and bone, curbs, and confines, and frets 21 Our spirit's wings: despondency besets Our pillows; and the fresh to-morrow morn Seems to give forth its light in very scorn Of our dull, uninspired, snail-paced lives. Long have I said, how happy he who shrives To thee! But then I thought on poets gone, And could not pray:—nor can I now—so on I move to the ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... servant, nothing is left to hope for but discharge or death. I hit upon the idea of teaching him French; and accordingly, from Lichfield, I became the distracted master, and he the scholar—how shall I say? indefatigable, but uninspired. His interest never flagged. He would hear the same word twenty times with profound refreshment, mispronounce it in several different ways, and forget it again with magical celerity. Say it happened to be STIRRUP. 'No, I don't seem to remember that word, Mr. Anne,' he would say: 'it don't seem ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the labors of scholarship and are generally ill-advised to scorn or reject them, however uninspired and uninspiring they may seem. Moreover when authors do enter into dispute with "laborious men of low genius" they frequently meet with more than their match. Miss Elstob's bold and aggressive defense of Northern ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... calculations—is simply untrue. No such observations were ever made. The pretended records of such have been proved, in the case of the Hindoo astronomy, to be forgeries, and in the case of the Egyptian records, blunders of the discoverers. There is not an authentic uninspired astronomical observation extant for ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... retired to voluntary poverty on account of the persecution of the Presbyterians, saying, 'I should not dare to introduce Christianity itself with such cruelties, how much less for a surplice, and the name of a bishop.' If there could be an intermediate space between inspired, and uninspired writings, that space would be occupied by Leighton. No show of learning, no appearance, or ostentatious display of eloquence; and yet both may be shown in him, conspicuously and holily. There is in him something that must be felt, even as the ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... remain faithful to its primitive and inspired lineaments. This church, whilst administered by inspired men during the first century, must also have been more pure, than in its subsequent periods, when placed under uninspired and fallible teachers, and in corrupting contact with Pagan philosophy, as well as in debasing union ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker
... receives, or refuses, the several gifts expressed by that general benediction, he enters or is cast out from the inheritance of the saints,—in the exact degree in which he denies the Christ, angers the Father, and grieves the Holy Spirit, he becomes uninspired or unholy,—and in the measure in which he trusts Christ, obeys the Father, and consents with the Spirit, he becomes inspired in feeling, act, word, and reception of word, according to the capacities of his nature. He is not gifted with higher ability, nor called into new offices, but enabled ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... known! Things that until then had seemed to me lovely lost their charm by comparison with delights I had not even a name for! Then, when you went from among us, peace and happiness were gone too. The minstrels' songs seemed to me an uninspired affair, dim of meaning, languid of execution. My dreams were full of dull pain, my waking hours a dejected dream. All capacity for joy forsook my heart. Heinrich, Heinrich, what had you done to me?" The "singer bold," the "daring minstrel," is of a candour matching ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... of apoplexy in February, 1834. It is a notable fact that nearly the whole of the prominent figures in the drama of the Empire and its fall had passed beyond the portal before the great captain's remains were brought back to France. These individuals are only remembered now as uninspired small men, benighted in mind, who had wrought ignobly to bring about the fall of a powerful leader, and to the end of their days were associated with and encouraged a fiendish persecution of the Emperor while he lived, and of his family ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... field after the battle, and massacred those miserable wretches who lay maimed and expiring: nay, some officers acted a part in this cruel scene of assassination, the triumph of low illiberal minds, uninspired by sentiment, untinctured by humanity. The vanquished adventurer rode off the field, accompanied by the duke of Perth, lord Elcho, and a few horsemen; he crossed the water at Nairn, and retired to the house of a gentleman in Strutharrick, where he conferred with old lord ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... will make, if the reader will allow, a supposition analogous to some which the author of "Supernatural Religion" has made in pages 360 and following of his first volume. We will suppose that all the ecclesiastical literature, inspired and uninspired, previous to the Council of Nice, had been blotted out utterly, and the Four Gospels alone preserved. And we will suppose some critic taking upon himself to argue that the Gospel of St. John was written after the Nicene Creed. On the principles and mode of argument of the author ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... sense; it implies a gross, harsh, and revengeful character in the executioner, that is eminently perplexing and incredible to those who expect to find an idea of justice in the government of the world, at least not materially below what is attained in the clumsy efforts of uninspired publicists. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... mother and yourself, I had no welcome. But, apart from this immediate circle, and apart from the deep, comfortable glow experienced at the first sight of the "old country," I found England and the English dull, conventional, and uninspired. There was no poignancy. The habits and the outlook stood precisely where I had left them. The English had not moved. They played golf as of yore, they went to the races at the appointed time and in the appointed garb, they gave heavy dinner-parties, they wrote letters to the Times, ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... was apathetic. All those bodies, so tightly wedged together that arms and legs were held in an iron vice, stayed motionless, and once and again there would be a short burst of applause or a sibilant whisper, but it would be something mechanical and uninspired. I could see one soldier, in the front row behind the barrier, a stout fellow with a face of supreme good humour, down whose forehead the sweat began to trickle; he was patient for a while, then he tried to raise ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... observers say that the Reds have always shown a grasp of the new life, while the Trades Union men were crawling along with the uninspired programme of wages and hours; that the Reds were the sacrificing idealists and the Unionists the selfish Tories who wanted nothing more than to slowly improve their condition. Well, the logic of events seems to show that in the ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... concede. Doederlein's views of inspiration were much more elevated than those held by many of his confreres; but he too speaks of poetical excitement, and draws a line of distinction between the inspired and uninspired parts of Scripture. But Ammon represents this subject better than Doederlein. It was his opinion that the idea of a mediate divine instruction is applicable to all human knowledge. He rejects the notion peculiar to revelation. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... a universal inspiration, on which the special inspiration of the Old and New Testament rests. There are inspired men and uninspired men. There are inspired writings and uninspired writings. There is a general inspiration, out of which the particular inspiration of Bible writers grew. Universal inspiration is a genus, of which this is a species. We cannot understand the inspiration of the writers of the Bible till we understand ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... number of his pieces never were), and were left in manuscript till they appeared in the Biography. Most of these are so little worthy of the author that the marvel is how he came to write them—in what uninspired hours. Unlike Wordsworth, he could weed the tares from his wheat. His studies were in Greek, German, Italian, history (a little), and chemistry, botany, and electricity—"cross-grained ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... openly reproved thus before her friend, lifted her uninspired hands from the keys and spake. When she had finished ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... in other ways also a historic coloring to his account. We may safely say that to write a prophecy after the event in such a form as that which we have in either of the first three gospels, transcends the power of any uninspired man; and as to inspired narratives, the objectors with whom we are ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... in like wise, which gives its peculiar grandeur to that wonderful 18th Psalm, David's song of triumph; his masterpiece, and it may be the masterpiece of human poetry, inspired or uninspired, only approached by the companion-Psalm, the 144th. From whence comes that cumulative energy, by which it rushes on, even in our translation, with a force and swiftness which are indeed divine; thought ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... himself is the ruminative hermit already mentioned—a species of uninspired Thoreau. His name was Benjamin Lear. So far as his craziness went, he might have been a lineal descendant of that ancient king of Britain who figures on Shakespeare's page. Family dissensions made a recluse of King Lear; ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... they lack creative energy. They wear ready-made clothing, for example, without taking the trouble to improve upon it. The same goes for their homes. Mere uninspired adornment won't do, let me add. That's simply the mark of the nouveau upper middle class. One doesn't receive such persons in ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... remember that he had still only a rude language to employ, the speech of boors and burghers, which, though it might possess a few songs and satires, could afford him no models of heroic narration. In such an age the first occupant passes uninspired over subjects which might kindle the highest enthusiasm in the poet of a riper period, as the savage treads unconsciously in his deserts over mines of incalculable value, without sagacity to discover or inplements to explore them.' We give the following ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Thomas Hughes, though twenty-five years later, may be placed next to Gorboduc in our discussion of the rise of tragedy. It will serve as an illustration of the kind of tragedy that was being evolved from Senecan models by plodding uninspired Englishmen before Marlowe flung his flaming torch amongst them. To understand the story a slight introduction is necessary. Igerna, the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, was loved by King Uther, who foully slew her husband and so won her for himself. As a result of this union were born Arthur and ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... Shakspeare after 1642, when the theatres were suppressed, and the fanatical fervor in its noontide heat. Yet even then he did not belie his reverence intellectually for Shakspeare; and in his younger days we know that he had spoken more enthusiastically of Shakspeare, than he ever did again of any uninspired author. Not only did he address a sonnet to his memory, in which he declares that kings would wish to die, if by dying they could obtain such a monument in the hearts of men; but he also speaks of him in his Il Penseroso, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... chloroformed, drugged, stoned; palsy-stricken. indifferent, lukewarm; careless, mindless, regardless; inattentive &c. 458; neglectful &c. 460; disregarding. unconcerned, nonchalant, pococurante[obs3], insouciant, sans souci[Fr]; unambitious &c. 866. unaffected, unruffled, unimpressed, uninspired, unexcited, unmoved, unstirred, untouched, unshocked[obs3], unstruck[obs3]; unblushing &c. (shameless) 885; unanimated; vegetative. callous, thick-skinned, hard-nosed, pachydermatous, impervious; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and historical subjects, but is best remembered for his charming 'Table-talk, a book of which Coleridge remarked, "There is more weighty bullion sense in this book than I can find in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer" (1584-1654). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... tendrils, and his limbs like smooth plant-stems. He was so healthy and well-made, why did he make one ashamed, why did one feel repelled? Why should Gerald even dislike it, why did it seem to him to detract from his own dignity. Was that all a human being amounted to? So uninspired! thought Gerald. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... persecution it was George Whitefield, bringing great masses of the people into the kingdom of God, wearing himself out for Christ's sake: and yet the learned Dr. Johnson called him a mountebank. Robert Hall preached about the glories of heaven as no uninspired man ever preached about them, and it was said when he preached about heaven his face shone like an angel's, and yet good Christian John Foster writes of Robert Hall, saying: "Robert Hall is a mere actor, and when he talks about heaven the smile on his face is the reflection of his own vanity." ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... government; and blind, indeed, must he be if he does not discern that, in neglecting to cherish the Protestant faith, or in too easily yielding to any encroachments on it, he is foregoing the use of a state engine more powerful than all the laws which the uninspired legislators of the earth have ever promulgated, in promoting the happiness, the peace, prosperity, and the order, the industry, and the wealth, of a people; in forming every quality valuable or desirable in a subject or a citizen; in sustaining the public mind at that ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... stands in the front rank of the second class. Shelley, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, far surpass him; and the sweet singer of Michigan, even in uninspired moments, never "threw off" ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... the night before. He was rested; the interval of eight hours that had passed since he last saw her gave him, however slight, a certain perspective, while his normal surroundings, seen in broad daylight, tended to steady him further. The hotel clerk, busy about his uninspired duties; the impassive waiters in black and white; the solid-looking Englishmen and their wives who began to make their appearance, lent a sense of unreality to the ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... I need not speak of the peace to be found in faith in God and trust in an overruling Providence. Christ taught that our lives are precious in the sight of God, and poets have taken up the thought and woven it into immortal verse. No uninspired writer has exprest it more beautifully than William Cullen Bryant in his Ode to a Waterfowl. After following the wanderings of the bird of passage as it seeks first its southern and then its ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... thoughtful man, able to detect errors in Warton and Percy, but his zeal in his enterprise led him to praise versifiers inordinately that had used the "Gothic fables." He quotes liberally from writers whose books are not to be had in this country, and certainly the uninspired verses merit the neglect that this fact indicates. He calls Sayers' pen "masterly" that wrote ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... had learned to distrust my own race; yet no sooner did I chance to stand again beside the sweeping current of the broad Mississippi, than I was gripped by the old irresistible yearning, and, although uninspired by either hope or purpose, drifted downward to the ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... spires, uninspired statuary, and weary, smoke-darkened trees shed their garments of commonplaceness and shimmered like the mosques and turrets of ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... scarcely balder than the book itself, which also, as can be seen from the summary, and would be more fully seen from the book, has no literary merit of any kind. It reads more like an excessively uninspired precis of a larger work than like anything else—a precis in which all the literary merit has, with unvarying infelicity, been omitted. Nothing can be more childish than the punctilious euhemerism by which all the miraculous elements ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... expected. But there are names in the history of Science which recall so imposing a combination of these several gifts, that, comparing the men who bore them with the civilization of their time, we can hardly conceive that uninspired intellect should come nearer the imaginary standard. Such a man was Aristotle. The slender and close-shaven fop, with the showy mantle on his ungraceful person and the costly rings on his fingers, who hung on the lips of Plato for twenty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... began to feel the vanity of all human pursuits, when his nerves began to be unstrung, his hair to fall off, and his teeth to drop out, and he then composed sacred pieces entitling him to rank with—we were going to say Caedmon—had we done so we should have done wrong; no uninspired poet ever handled sacred subjects like the grand Saxon Skald—but which entitle him to be called a great religious poet, inferior to none but the protege ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... far as he was concerned. He could do nothing—not even beg his dearest lady to plead for him. Besides, rumour had it that the Princess had cancelled her town engagements and gone to Morebury. So he walked in cold and darkness, uninspired, and though he worked with feverish energy, the heart and purpose of ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... pleased to learn that the man in the moon is a poet. Possibly some uninspired groveller, who has never climbed Parnassus, nor drunk of the Castalian spring, may murmur that this is very likely, for that all poetry is "moonstruck madness." Alas if such an antediluvian barbarian be permitted to "revisit thus the glimpses of the moon, making ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... us compare the ideas of this God with the ideas of uninspired men. I am making this long preface because I want to get it out of your minds that the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... built. What eternal nonsense it is to be quarreling about whether he and his Father are of the same essence. The truths of Christianity and of Protestantism are found in the teachings of the anti-Nicene fathers, but we must remember that these were uninspired men, and therefore displayed no standard of truth. The term fathers, without qualification, includes a vast range, comprising a period of eleven hundred years, from Clemens to Bernard, from the Bishop of Rome to ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... attaches to the gentleman who cannot do short division. I remember once at school having to do a piece of Latin prose about the Black Hole of Calcutta. It was a moving story as told in our prose book, and I had spent an interesting hour turning into fairly correct and wholly uninspired Latin—the sort of Latin I suppose which a small uneducated Roman child (who had heard the news) would have written to a school-boy friend. The size of the Black Hole was given as "twenty foot square." I had no idea how to render ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... philosophy, but to furnish instruction and inspiration in the truth of things; and unless it can work home to the business and bosoms of plain practical men, it might as well be struck from the roll of legitimate interests. Now, in the circle of uninspired forces, Shakespeare's art may be justly regarded as our broadest and noblest "discipline of humanity." And his characterization, not his dramatic composition, is his point of contact with us as a practical teacher. In other words, it is by his thorough at-homeness with ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... willing to displeasure a man so esteemed as Mr. Richardson, here made an apology for his jesting, and said that, as to the Cambridge version, it was indeed faithful; and that it was no blame to uninspired men, that they did fall short of the beauties and richness of the Lord's Psalmist. It being now near noon, we crossed over the river, to where was a sweet spring of water, very clear and bright, running out upon the green ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... much. I was not surprised when, laying down the ornament with which she had been toying, she turned on me one of those rare smiles to which the King could refuse nothing; and wherein wit, tenderness, and gaiety were so happily blended that no conceivable beauty of feature, uninspired by sensibility, could vie with them. "Good friend, I have sinned," she said. "But I am a woman, and I love. Pardon me. As for your PROTEGEE, from this moment she is mine also. I will speak to the King this evening; and if he ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... a severe questioning by the foreman, Carl was given a week's try-out without pay at the Lodestar factory. He proved to be one of those much-sought freaks in the world of mechanics, a natural filer. The uninspired filer, unaware of the niceties of the art, saws up and down, whereas the instinctive filer, like Carl, draws his file evenly across the metal, and the result fits its socket truly. So he was given welcome, paid twenty-five cents an hour, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... men be if they can help it. I have liked to call these employers inspired millionaires. I would rather have the machine owner or employer a millionaire, because the more machines an inspired employer can own, the more he can buy and get away from the uninspired ones, the sooner will the right of labour and the will of the people be accomplished. When the machines are in the hands of inspired and strong and spirited men—men of real competence or genius for business, the machines will be seen on every hand ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the mysteries of superior beings), by the celebrated Mrs. Hannah Moore! We shall probably give great offence by such indiscretion; but still we must be excused for treating it as a book merely human,—an uninspired production,—the result of mortality left to itself, and depending on its own limited resources. In taking up the subject in this point of view, we solemnly disclaim the slightest intention of indulging ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... find them peculiarly subservient to correction and instruction in righteousness. Many writers have done more for the details of Christian conduct; but for purposes of heart-discipline and for the nurture of devout affections, there is little uninspired authorship equal to the more practical publications of Owen. In the Life of that noble-hearted Christian philosopher, the late Dr. Welsh, it is mentioned that in his latter days, besides the Bible, he read nothing but "Owen on Spiritual-Mindedness," and the "Olney Hymns;" ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... applicable to art, for art and science are not coextensive; nay, to some extent, are even inimical to each other. Indeed, to call a work of art purely and simply "scientific," is tantamount to saying that it is dry and uninspired by the muse. In dwelling so long on this point my object was not so much to elucidate Liszt's meaning as Chopin's ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... failed to produce, who were indeed in the dark old times the hidden antiseptic of all our hustling, hating, faithless lives. They made their secret voiceless worship, they did their steadfast, uninspired, unthanked, unselfish work as helpful daughters, as nurses, as faithful servants, as the humble providences of homes. She was almost exactly three years older than I. At first I found no beauty in her, she was short but rather sturdy ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... revolutionary troops possessed little more discipline than the Vendeans themselves and, being uninspired, as were the latter, by a feeling either of religion or of patriotic enthusiasm, they were no match for men who were willing to give their lives ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... attempt at description. How is it that you can make your little German town fascinating, when I can only make this vast, stupefying India sound dull? It wouldn't sound dull if I were telling you about it by word of mouth. I could make you see it then; but what can a poor uninspired one do with a pen, some ink, and a sheet ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... Nancy said. "I hate the way that the most uninspired ways of doing things turn out to be the best policy after all. I don't believe in stereotyped philanthropy, but I did think I had found a way around this problem of feeding up people ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... centuries been trying to tell whom this Substitute was like, and every comparison, inspired and uninspired, evangelistic, prophetic, apostolic, and human, falls short, for Christ was the Great Unlike. Adam a type of Christ, because he came directly from God; Noah a type of Christ, because he delivered his own family from deluge; ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... the interpretation of the Scriptures,—to be settled by learning and reason. It was not until rationalism arose, and rejected plain and obvious declarations of Scripture, as inconsistent with reason, as interpolations, as uninspired, that the authority of the Scriptures was weakened; and these rationalists—and the land of Luther became full of them—have gone infinitely beyond the Catholics in undermining the Bible. The Catholics never ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... sufficient number of finished and absolutely authentic oil pictures from his own hand to afford illustrations for this short chronological sketch of his life's work. The few that do remain, however, are of so exquisite a quality—or were until they were "comforted" by the uninspired restorer—that we can unreservedly accept the enthusiastic records of tradition in respect of all his works. To rightly understand the essential characteristics of Leonardo's achievements it is necessary to regard him as a scientist quite as much as ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... St. Paul's for the Queen's Jubilee. Went with Edy and Henry. Not at all adequate to the occasion was the ceremony. The Te Deum rather good, the sermon sensible, but the whole uninspired, unimpassioned and dull. The Prince and ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... the paper aside. She did not care even to glance at the exercises prescribed or at the diet and the routine of daily work. How dull and uninspired! How grossly material! Stomach! Chewing! Exercising machines! Plodding dreary miles daily, rain or shine! What could such things have to do with the free and glorious career of an inspired singer? Keith was laughing ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips |
