"Vapid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some moment, even at this early stage. Mothers sometimes forget that children cannot read slipshod, awkward, redundant prose, and sing-song vapid verse, for ten or twelve years, and then take kindly ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value. When friends grow cold, and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and commonplace, these only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... "I'm an artist. So are you. I'm also a philosopher. You are not. Therefore, I'll deign to instruct you. Ben de Laney has a father and a mother. The father is pompous, conceited, and a bore. The mother is pompous, conceited, and a bore. The father uses language of whose absolutely vapid correctness Addison would have been proud. So does the mother, unless she forgets, in which case the old man calls her down hard. They, are rich and of a good social position. The latter worries them, because they have to keep up ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... I adore women. I value their good opinion. There is much in them to applaud and imitate. There is much in them to elicit faith and reverence. If, only, one could see their good alone, or, seeing their vapid and vicious ones, could contemplate them with no touch of tenderness for the owner, life might indeed be lovely. As it is, while I am at one moment rapt in enthusiastic admiration of the strength and grace, the power and pathos, the hidden resources, the profound ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... art, to learn a truth, To paint on the internal page A clearer picture of the age. His age, you say? But ah, not so! In his lone isle of long ago, A royal Lady of Shalott, Sea-sundered, he beholds it not; He only hears it far away. The stress of equatorial day He suffers; he records the while The vapid annals of the isle; Slaves bring him praise of his renown, Or cackle of the palm-tree town; The rarer ship and the rare boat He marks; and only hears remote, Where thrones and fortunes rise and reel, The thunder of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her from using what she knew, to any advantage; and what she knew, though it had the originality of first observation, and a grace of expression so great that more met the ear than was meant, was still so wanting, either in insight or reflection, as to be poor and vapid as small-beer after the first sparkle is gone. The manner was all in Mrs. Lewis, but that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... containing eighteen gallons of beer, becoming vapid, put a pint of ground malt, suspended in a bag, and close the bung perfectly; the beer will be improved during the whole time of ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... a very good girl, but it might almost be a question whether she was not too good. She had learned, or thought that she had learned, that most girls are vapid, silly, and useless,—given chiefly to pleasure-seeking and a hankering after lovers; and she had resolved that she would not be ...
— The Mistletoe Bough • Anthony Trollope
... illustration of the universal law—that action is always in inverse proportion to power. For the second, you will find that there is a pleasure in overcoming difficulties, compared with which all easily attained or naturally possessed advantages appear tame and vapid:[83] and besides the difference in the pleasurable excitement of the contest, you are to consider the advantage to the character that is derived from a ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... not to FEEL Francie Dosson. He thanked God she was just the sort of imponderable infinite quantity, such as there were no stupid terms for, that he did feel. He didn't know what old frumps his father might have frequented—the style of 1830, with long curls in front, a vapid simper, a Scotch plaid dress and a corsage, in a point suggestive of twenty whalebones, coming down to the knees—but he could remember Mme. de Marignac's Tuesdays and Thursdays and Fridays, with Sundays and other days thrown in, and the taste ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... that it reaches heights there no other nation can approach. An Englishman writing about Germany lately says that you often hear very bad music there, but I think his experience must have been exceptional and unfortunate. I am sure that Germans do not tolerate the vapid dreary drawing-room songs we listen to complacently in this country; for in England people often have beautiful voices without any musical understanding, or technical facility without charm. I suppose such cases must occur amongst Germans too, and ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... strange sense of escape which drives us into activity and energy seems given us not that we may realise our aims, which turn out hollow and vapid enough when they are realised, but that we may drink deep of experience for the sake of its beneficent effect upon us. The failure of almost all Utopias and ideal states, designed and planned by writers and artists, lies in ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... those who dream as I, Aspiringly, are damned, and die: Yet should I swear I mean alone, By notes so very shrilly blown, To break upon Time's monotone, While yet my vapid joy and grief Are tintless of the yellow leaf— Why not an imp the graybeard hath, Will shake his shadow in my path— And e'en the graybeard will o'erlook ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... issue in such an estimate of human nature as Mahomet took? "A deification of humanity upon its own grounds, an exaltation which is all height and no depth, wants power because it wants truth. It is not founded upon the facts of human nature, and therefore issues in vain and vapid aspiration, and injures the solidity of man's character." As he says, "The Gospel doctrine of the Incarnation and its effects alone unites the sagacious view of human nature with the enthusiastic." And now what is the historical root and basis from which this one great moral ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... much talk, due, no doubt, to long years in the wilderness. Neither were they carried away by any sudden impulse on the spur of the moment. They never had anything in common with Curly and his gang, although they had often listened to their vapid boastings. So now when they learned of the despicable affair up the narrow creek, they did not take matters into their own hands, and visit upon the miscreants swift and dire punishment. They decided, after a brief consultation with ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... German language, a literal translation of the "Child of Love" was given to me by the manager of Covent Garden Theatre to be fitted, as my opinion should direct, for his stage. This translation, tedious and vapid as most literal translations are, had the peculiar disadvantage of having been put into our language by a German—of course it came to me in broken English. It was no slight misfortune to have an example of bad grammar, false metaphors and similes, ...
— Lover's Vows • Mrs. Inchbald
... with the bereaved mother who has lost her only child and the hope of China; but on the other hand if there is little room for congratulation, there is still less for regret. The nation has been deprived of its nominal head, a vapid youth of nineteen, who was content to lie perdu in his harem without making an effort to do a little governing on his own responsibility. During the ten years that foreigners have resided within half a mile of his own apartments in the palace at Peking, he has either ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... entirely rebuilt in the last century, and is now scarcely worth visiting. Still, enough remains in the un-restored churches of Ravenna to captivate the attention of every student of history and every lover of early Christian art. It is only necessary to shut our eyes to the vapid and tasteless work of recent embellishers, as we should close our ears to the whispers of vulgar gossipers while listening to some noble and entrancing piece ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... will remember (though that miserable worm, the vapid and irreflective reader, will have forgotten) that at the beginning of the term the fags of Kay's had endeavoured to show their approval of Fenn and their disapproval of Kennedy by applying to the former for leave ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... How vapid, meagre, frigid, and unaffecting has been the performance of this part since Mr. Kemble's reign. According to his institutes, Macbeth closes the door with the cold unfeeling caution of a practised house-breaker, then listens, in order to be secure, and addresses lady Macbeth as if, in such a ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... have their entrances, Lady Betty is revealed to us through the medium of the lively dialogue quoted a few pages back, and then there is another stir. In comes Lord Foppington, otherwise Colley Cibber, in all the vapid glory of fine clothes, and a great periwig. A very prince of coxcombs, with his soft smile and conscious air of superiority—a mere bag of vanity, whose emptiness is partly hidden by gorgeous raiment, gold embroidery, rings, snuff-box, muff and what-not. With ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... really tired of it, and then, too, Johnny had found out that what mother had said about dogs was very much exaggerated. Johnny had met two dogs, so he thought he knew something about them. One was a sleek, fat, black puppy, with a vapid smile, called Juno; and the other was an amber-eyed spaniel with woolly, fat legs. They had run after Johnny one day when he was out playing on the road, and he had led them across a ploughed field. Johnny was accustomed to add, ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... it would not have been easy to attribute any just notion of the claims of religion to him. He looked as if all his motions, except those of physical strength, were vapid and paltry. Still, this was what he said, and ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... national superiority. The courts-martial that so often succeeded general actions, had taught them that there were all degrees of spirit, as well as all degrees of a want of spirit; and they knew too much, to be the dupes of flourishes of the pen, or of vapid declamation at dinner-speeches, and in the House of Commons. Men, well led and commanded, they had ascertained by experience, were worth twice as much as the same men when ill led and ill commanded; and they were not to be told that the moral ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired of an existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being utterly vapid! How many fashionable women at the end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate monotony ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of large designs or sustained effort, lose every aspiration and forget every ideal. Our gilded youth want such examples as this of Motley, not a solitary, but a conspicuous one, to teach them how much better is the restlessness of a noble ambition than the narcotized stupor of club-life or the vapid amusement of a dressed-up intercourse which too often requires a questionable flavor of forbidden license to render it endurable to persons of ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and apples, accompanied with some invective. Yet there is certainly something to interest us in the examination of that cheerless damp closet, whose painted wooden walls no furniture or company can make habitable, wherein our friend is to spend so many vapid days and restless nights. The sight of these apartments, yclept STATE-ROOMS,—Heaven knows why, except it be from their want of cosiness,—is full of keen reminiscences to most Californians who have not outgrown the memories of that dreary interval when, in obedience to nature's ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... vivid lines assume The garb and dignity of ancient Rome.— Let college verse-men trite conceits express, Trick'd out in splendid shreds of Virgil's dress; From playful Ovid cull the tinsel phrase, And vapid notions hitch in pilfer'd lays: Then with mosaick art the piece combine, And boast the glitter of each dulcet line: Johnson adventur'd boldly to transfuse His vigorous sense into the Latian muse; Aspir'd to shine by unreflected light, And with a Roman's ardour think ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... ourselves. And thus it is that death, which we are accustomed to consider an evil, really acts for us the friendliest part, and takes away the commonplace of existence. My life, and your life, flowing on thus day by day, is a vapid enough piece of business; but when we think that it must close, a multitude of considerations, not connected with ourselves but with others, rush in, and vapidity vanishes at once. Life, if it were to flow on forever and thus, would stagnate ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... according to fixed rules and according to aesthetic principles; so that the highest poetry of these people becomes, in the very process of utterance, the finest music; while the utterance of base sentiments, or of fustian, becomes, by the very nature of the language, discordant, or at best vapid and unmelodious. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... statement of the historical points of the case, to say nothing of his utter ignorance of Hariot's biography and true position as an English man of science, one feels justified in rejecting it as worthless : as one also is compelled to do the vapid conclusions drawn from Montucla which have since found their way into many recent biographical dictionaries and into many pretentious articles in learned encyclopdias respecting Hariot and his works. The truth seems to be that Hariot was unlucky and fell into oblivion accidentally. He ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... quantity of alcohol; but this escapes from the froth, or bubbles of carbonic acid gas, as it reaches the surface, carrying along with it all the aroma which is so agreeable to the taste. The liquor in the glass then becomes vapid. This has been clearly proved. The froth of champagne has been collected under a glass bell, and condensed by surrounding the vessel with ice; the alcohol has then been found condensed within the glass. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... callers there would be no time in crowded cities for any sort of work, or repose, or leisure for self- improvement. For, with the many idle people who seek to rid themselves of the pain and penalty of their own vapid society by calling and making somebody else entertain them, with the wandering book-agents and beggars, or with even the overflow of society, a lady would find her existence muddled away by the poorest and most abject of occupations—that of receiving a number ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... again? But if he can breathe it with impunity, and still retain the fervour of his early enthusiasm, and the simplicity and purity of the faith that was once delivered to the saints, why not extend the benefit of his own experience to others, instead of taunting them with a vapid pastoral theory? Or, if our popular and eloquent divine finds a change in himself, that flattery prevents the growth of grace, that he is becoming the God of his own idolatry by being that of others, that the glittering of coronet-coaches rolling down Holborn-Hill ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... from a noble duke, or a noble marquis, or a noble earl, or baron bold, would certainly increase and diversify the amusements of this town, which begins to grow satiated with the uniform round of its vapid dissipations. I should only stipulate that these new Mess-Johns in robes and coronets should keep some sort of bounds in the democratic and levelling principles which are expected from their titled pulpits. The new evangelists will, I dare say, disappoint the hopes that are ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty, the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man's city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not acquired that eager hunger ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... think that. But it does forbid singing you know not what in a foreign tongue, or mere dead nonsense in your own. I cannot see, for my part, why it is much better to sing "idle words" than to say them. How vapid, how senseless, is many a song one hears from a pretty mouth and a sweet voice. And in music as elsewhere, there is no middle ground: whatever does ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... with their original powers, laboring to strike out sparks of wit, with a restless anxiety to shine, and with a labored affectation to please, which never pleases? All this be far from them! But we do wish to see the conversation of well-bred women rescued from vapid commonplaces, from uninteresting tattle, from trite communications, from frivolous earnestness, from false sensibility, from a warm interest about things of no moment, and an indifference to topics the most important; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... greatly admire the story which he introduces with the poem, nor the discrimination of his characters, nor, what may be called strictly, the pathos of the piece. Indeed, considering the size of the poem, there is so much that is vapid and common, that the counter-balancing excellences must be great ere they could have floated it so long. To use an expression suitable to the theme, the vessel which has sailed so far, notwithstanding its numerous leaks, must be of a strong and ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... was absolutely different from the type she had imagined. Always she had seen her as one of those vapid, pretty little creatures who had become old long before her time; peevish, spoiled, inclined to be flirtatious, refusing to give up her youth, still living in the recollection of her little ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... what he was saying, so anxiously he watched her. Was she hurt or in trouble, and if so, what was the trouble? Did the vapid little guest and the Freshman Vamp have anything to do with it? Somehow he forgot all about himself now and his own grievance—he only wanted to comfort her whom he loved, and it never entered his head that just ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... progress of each being answerable to its origin! Yet so it is. And not a memoir-writer of that age is reprinted in this, but we have a preface from some red-hot Anti- jacobin warning us with much vapid common-place from the mischiefs and eventual anarchy of too rash a spirit of reform as displayed in the French revolution—not by the example of that French revolution, but by that of our own in the age of Charles I. The following passage ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... in; and the examiners assembled to adjudge the prize. The first vessel was unsealed. Its odour was such that the judges, without tasting it, pronounced unanimous condemnation. The next was opened: it had a villainous taste of clay. The third was sour and vapid. They proceeded from one cask of execrable liquor to another, till at length, in absolute nausea, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to love and serve women in all places, and under all forms and circumstances. His was not a light, silly, vapid, complimentary devotion, but deep in his nature, through and through, he reverenced woman as something sacred and high, and above the vulgar nature of men; this reformed his mind, and inspired his manners; and, while he was generally disliked by men, he was favorably ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... seeing Mr. Holmes's face in the carriage as she did so. He did not look at her; had his head turned towards the gray distance. Lois's vivid eye caught the full meaning of the woman beside him. The face hurt her: not fair, as Polston called it: vapid and cruel. She was dressed in yellow: the color seemed jeering and mocking to the girl's sensitive instinct, keenly alive to every trifle. She did not know that it is the color of shams, and that women like this are the most deadly of shams. As the phaeton went slowly down, Margaret came ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... the minds of the average pietist with holy horror; nevertheless I believe that (granting the premises) these conclusions are both logically and theologically defensible. The Divinity of my fancied paradise resembles in no way the vapid conceptions of Fra Angelico, or the Quartier St. Sulpice. His physical aspect, at least, would be better represented by some Praxitilean demigod or ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Idalium, and in Urian haven, and who doth foster Ancona and reedy Cnidos, Amathus and Golgos, and Dyrrhachium, Adriatic tavern, accept and acknowledge this vow if it lack not grace nor charm. But meantime, hence with ye to the flames, crammed with boorish speech and vapid, Annals of ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... an unutterable bore. The man of brain is not for the woman of brain. What the intellectual woman requires in man is not something to argue with, but something to look at. To an empty-headed woman I can imagine the soldier type proving vapid and uninteresting; to the woman of mind he represents her ideal of man—a creature strong, handsome, well-dressed, and not ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... papier-mache, with broken hinges; faded fans and chipped paper-weights; gorgeous picture-books with loosened covers, and a magnificent portrait-album which had been deflowered and had nothing left in it but the old and ugly, the commonplace middle-aged, and the vapid young; with many other things besides, all ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... tragic figure that is not stuffed with sawdust and tricked out in the rags of the green-room. Fortunately, there is scant opportunity for idle tears in Tristram Shandy.... Yet no occasion is lost.... Yorick's death is false alike to nature and art. The vapid emotion is properly matched with commonness of expression, and the bad taste is none the more readily excused by the suggestion of self-defence. Even the humour of My Uncle Toby is something: degraded ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not heard of the Celebrity's ignoble escape. As the meal proceeded it was easy to mark that her eye now and again fell across his empty chair, and glanced inquiringly towards the door. I made up my mind that I would not be the bearer of evil news, and so did Farrar, so we kept up a vapid small-talk with Mr. Trevor on the condition of trade in the West. Miss Trevor, however, in some way came to suspect that we could account for that vacant seat. At last she fixed her eye inquiringly on me, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... endow'd him with an ardent mind, Which unrestrain'd still presses on for ever, And whose precipitate endeavour Earth's joys o'erleaping, leaveth them behind. Him will I drag through life's wild waste, Through scenes of vapid dulness, where at last Bewilder'd, he shall falter, and stick fast; And, still to mock his greedy haste, Viands and drink shall float his craving lips beyond— Vainly he'll seek refreshment, anguish-tost, And were he not ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... existed in pugilism. At peace, Veuillot was no more than a mediocre writer. His poetry and novels were pitiful. His language was vapid, when it was not engaged in a striking controversy. In repose, he changed, uttering banal ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... turns my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy; for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so!" ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... countenances, shaven clean, Hard lips, and eyes alert with strength and spleen; Visages vain and vapid, All wreathed with the conventional bland smile That covers weary scorn or watchful guile, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... tolerable verses; more would have been worse than useless. He dressed admirably, and, as his cheval de battaile, he talked with a keenness of observation and a dexterity of language, scarcely less rare than wit, and still more exciting among the exhausted minds, and in the vapid phraseology, of fashion. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... her particularly to desire horse-exercise was a visit from Captain Lydgate, the baronet's third son, who, I am sorry to say, was detested by our Tertius of that name as a vapid fop "parting his hair from brow to nape in a despicable fashion" (not followed by Tertius himself), and showing an ignorant security that he knew the proper thing to say on every topic. Lydgate inwardly cursed his own folly that he had drawn down this visit by consenting ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... delirious hour for Harry, that dinner. He knew that Alison was pleased to be in the gayest spirits, and his father, in his father's own flamboyant style, seconded her heartily. He joined in, too, and seemed to himself loud and vapid, yet had no power of restraint. It was as though his usual placid, critical mind were detached and watched himself in the happy exuberance of drunkenness—which was a state unknown to him, for excess of liquor could only move him with drowsy gloom. And ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... water, tied round with rags and twine. The tea kettle and gun barrel are to be kept continually wet by means of swabs and sea water, to cool and condense the steam. This distilled water is at first vapid and nauseous, both to the taste and the stomach; but by standing open for some time, especially if agitated in contact with air, or by pumping air through it, as is commonly done to sweeten putrid water, this unpleasant and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... the heroes and goblins of the third. She heard the tune through once, and then her attention wandered, and she gazed at the audience, or the organ, or the architecture. Much did she censure the attenuated Cupids who encircle the ceiling of the Queen's Hall, inclining each to each with vapid gesture, and clad in sallow pantaloons, on which the October sunlight struck. "How awful to marry a man like those Cupids!" thought Helen. Here Beethoven started decorating his tune, so she heard him through once more, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... of the nursery, and the shopman at Newbery's hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs. Barbauld's and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. Barbauld's books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learned that a horse is an animal and Billy is better than a horse, and such like, instead of ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... accepted?" murmured Straws. "Discerning Tortier! Excellent dilettante! Let him henceforth be known as a man of taste!" Here the poet critically examined the bottle. "Nothing vapid, thin or characterless there!" he added, holding it before the blaze in the grate. "Positively I'll dedicate my forthcoming book to him. 'To that worshipful master and patron, the tasteful Tortier!' What did he say, Celestina, when you tendered him ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... "Most Bourbons are cynical about human life, but he goes farther; he is cynical about his own wealth. And that brings me to my quarrel with you, Mr. Moreton. How could you let your brother spend his beautiful vigorous youth as a parasite to Cord's vapid son? Was that ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... effortless ease, of self-indulgence, to the infinitely deeper, the infinitely higher pleasures that come to those who know the toil and the weariness, but also the joy, of hard duty well done, why, that race or that individual must inevitably in the end pay the penalty of leading a life both vapid and ignoble. No man and no woman really worthy of the name can care for the life spent solely or chiefly in the avoidance of risk and trouble and labor. Save in exceptional cases the prizes worth having in life must be paid for, and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... in the feline tribe. In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, not of a reflected but of an intrinsic lustre, as does a candle or the sun; yet their ordinary condition was so totally vapid, filmy, and dull as to convey the idea of the eyes of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it a most conspicuous place among the royal treasures which he brought home from the sacking of the capital of Armenia. The fruit of the gean-tree is rather harsh till fully ripe, and then becomes somewhat vapid and watery, yet it is very grateful to the palate after a day's rambling in the woods; and, moreover, this wild stock is the source whence we have, by culture, obtained the rich varieties which now grace our gardens. The cherry is a very prolific tree. We have heard of one, the fruit of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... resources. I lived in Italy and Greece as a student, concerned especially with the old civilisations; I read little but Greek and Latin. That brought me out of the track I had laboriously made for myself I often thought with disgust of the kind of work I had been doing; my novels seemed vapid stuff so wretchedly and shallowly modern. If I had had the means, I should have devoted myself to the life of a scholar. That, I quite believe, is my natural life; it's only the influence of recent circumstances that has made me a writer of novels. A man who can't journalise, yet must ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... not let us be discouraged or deceived by any fine, vapid, empty words. The true material age is the stupid Chinese age, in which no new or grand revelations of nature are granted, because they are ignorantly and insolently repelled, instead of being diligently ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... coming into my house and sitting mute for two hours. Heaven forbid that your blood should be found on my skirts! but I believe I shall kill you, if you do. The only reason why I have not laid violent hands on you heretofore is that your vapid talk has operated as a wire to conduct my electricity to the receptive and kindly earth; but if you intrude upon my magnetisms without any such life-preserver, your future in this world is not worth a crossed six-pence. Your silence would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Land where things are so much estimated by what they cost Listen appreciatingly even if deceivingly Man and wife are one, and that one is the husband Mean more by its suggestions and allusions than is said Must we be always either vapid or serious? Newspaper-made person No power on earth that can prevent the return of the long skirt No room for a leisure class that is not useful Persistence of privilege is an unexplained thing in human affairs Poor inhabitants living along only from habit Repose ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... accompanies Harold the Dauntless. I thought once I should have made it something clever, but it turned vapid upon my imagination; and I finished it at last with hurry and impatience. Nobody knows, that has not tried the feverish trade of poetry, how much it depends upon mood and whim. I {p.139} don't wonder, that, in dismissing all the other deities of Paganism, the Muse should have been ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... conversation, but in such condensed tabloids that it doesn't take her long. Most things don't seem to her to be worth saying. She'll let, for instance, a chatterbox like Juke say a hundred words to her one, and still she'll get most said, though Jukie's not a vapid talker either. ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... Dare I say that I, a plain, prosaic lieutenant in the republican service have done the incredible things here set out for the love of a woman—for a chimera in female shape; for a pale, vapid ghost of woman-loveliness? At times I tell myself I dare not: that you will laugh, and cast me aside as a fabricator; and then again I pick up my pen and collect the scattered pages, for I MUST write it—the pallid splendour of that thing I loved, and won, and lost is ever before ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... loveliness, born of the stars and wild-flowers, of moonlight shining through autumn mists upon the river and the fields; yet, by contrast with the higher order of beauty I had just momentarily been in touch with, she seemed almost ugly. How dull her eyes, how thin her voice, how vapid her smile, and insipid her ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... other associated matter by priestly societies and organized in a scheme of legendary doctrine and an imposing ritual, that constituted the basis and the central meaning of the old Mysteries; and not a vapid tradition about Noah and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... against the wall beside her partner, and rack her brain to find a word to say to him. As for anything that he said, every word—whether of Ascot, or the last Academy, or the new plays, or the hunting and the elections—sounded to her more vapid ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... waste no more time, he told himself, in foolish spiritualistic seances with his own shadow. He had too much before him, and too short a time in which to do it. His troubles, when he came to face them, would be realities, and not a train of vapid and morbid self-vaporings. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... the children of these parents to possess a constitutional weakness in the alimentary canal; and, on inquiry, I was told, that they had been kept upon a vapid diet, under the impression that it would contribute to their health. In the present case, therefore, the principal object was to communicate strength to the stomach and bowels. With this view, the child was accustomed, from an early period of infancy, to a ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... petty dispute about land in the Hebrides, to some question of high policy in Egypt, India, or other portions of the Queen's world-wide empire; and all this amidst endless distractions, enforced attendance through dreary debates and vapid talk, and a running fire of cross-examination from any volunteer questioner out of the six hundred odd members who sit outside the Government circle. The consequence is, that Parliament is getting less able every year to ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... displayed in the quiet unpretending discharge of the humblest every-day duties. Truth is superior to Fiction: we feel at home among these brave good people; their fortune interests us more than that of all the brawling, vapid, sentimental heroes in creation. Yet to make them interest us was the very highest problem of art; it was to copy lowly Nature, to give us a copy of it embellished and refined by the agency of genius, yet preserving the likeness ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... complete knowledge of his own mind, some brutality, much practical intelligence, great resolution, no imagination, and plenty of conceit. And he looked at the woman. She was pretty, but her face was vapid, and seemed to have no character at all. And from one to the other he looked, and the more he looked the less resemblance he saw between them, till the objects of his scrutiny grew restive.... Then, ceasing to examine ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... daffodils by the lake-side. And if this falls out capriciously with the healthy, how much more so with the invalid! Some day he will find his first violet, and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may see a group of washerwomen relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and something significant ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sickly, remarkable for his extreme thinness and the almost yellow tint of his visage, which was, however, lit up by "two eyes sparkling with keenness and will-power"—evidently a Corsican falcon, pining for action, and fretting its soaring spirit in that vapid town life. Action Buonaparte might have had, but only of a kind that he loathed. He might have commanded the troops destined to crush the brave royalist peasants of La Vendee. But, whether from scorn of such vulture-work, or from an instinct that a nobler quarry might be started at ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... he may be said to sleep neither night nor day; and if Petronius died, the Count seems determined never to die at all. (He was at this time about eighty-five years of age.) It may well be supposed that all this, though now perfectly vapid and uninteresting, was extremely flattering to Grammont; and the result was, that he very much wished to have his life, or part of it, at least, given to the public. Hamilton, who had been so long connected with him, and with whose agreeable talents ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... recall the conversation, but it was one of those inconsequential talks that Bohemians consider so brilliant and everybody else so vapid. As we skimmed from one subject to another, treating the big facts of life as if they were mere incidents and the little as if they overshadowed all else, I could see that Craig, who had a faculty of probing into the ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... Composed of words of one syllable, for literary babes who never tire of testifying their delight in the vapid compound by appropriate googoogling. The words are commonly Saxon—that is to say, words of a barbarous people destitute of ideas and incapable of any but the ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... science was so perfect, should ever have written, or suffered others to write, the work published under his name; true it is that the opening part which you have so feelingly recited, is composed with a grace, a charm beyond the reach of art; but the instructions are vapid, and frequently so erroneous, as to make me suspect their authenticity; but, after all, cooking is not capable of becoming a written science—it is ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... contaminated, as that the lower Evangelicals, never notable for sense in the arts, should have got their Bibles dishonored. Those 'Elaine' illustrations are just as impure as anything else that Dore has done; but they are also vapid, and without any one merit whatever in point of art. The illustrations to the 'Contes Drolatiques' are full of power and invention; but those to 'Elaine' are merely and simply stupid; theatrical betises, with the taint of the charnel-house ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... subjects that would have told her more than she feared already, taking refuge in themes she had once considered vapid and inane. To miss nothing, she hurried homeward on that May afternoon, so as to be beside her tea-table in the drawing-room before any one appeared. And yet, the minute came when she cast aside all ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... philosophical. A frail being should labour to be gentle. But when forbearance confounds right and wrong, it ceases to be a virtue; and, however convenient it may be found in a companion, that companion will ever be considered as an inferior, and only inspire a vapid tenderness, which easily degenerates into contempt. Still, if advice could really make a being gentle, whose natural disposition admitted not of such a fine polish, something toward the advancement of order would be attained; but if, as might quickly ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... saturated himself in Florida water. The flesh gladdened the hearts of the crew and lower-deck passengers and also of the inhabitants of Lembarene, who got dashes of it on our arrival there. Hippo flesh is not to be despised by black man or white; I have enjoyed it far more than the stringy beef or vapid goat's flesh one gets ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... over, but never tedious—nunquam sufflaminandus erat. He is one of those writers who can never tire us, not even of himself; and the reason is, he is always 'full of matter.' He never runs to lees, never gives us the vapid leavings of himself, is never 'weary, stale, and unprofitable,' but always setting out afresh on his journey, clearing away some old nuisance, and turning up new mould. His egotism is delightful, for there is no affectation in it. He does not talk ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... for the absence of the country people, specially wont to visit the town when the quarterly court was in session, but now all dutifully in place voting in their own remote districts. The dust, the suffocating heat, the stale, vapid air, the indescribable sense of a lower level—all these affected her like a veritable burden, accustomed as she was to the light and rare mountain breeze, to the tempered sun, the mist, and the cloud. The new and untried conditions of town life trammeled and constrained her. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... charge, who have completed the arrangement of the Fair, have studiously avoided preceding it with noisy and demonstrative babblings, which are so often the vapid precursors of promises as empty as those who make them; therefore, in some quarters, our Fair has been overlooked. It is not, we think, a presumptuous interpretation of this great movement, to say, that the voice of God now seems to utter "Speak to the people that they ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... sprang to her side and laid a heavy hand upon her arm before she could interfere with Otobu's attentions to the young man. At first, as she turned toward the ape-man, her face reflected only mad rage, but almost instantly this changed into the vapid smile with which Smith-Oldwick was already familiar and her slim fingers commenced their soft appraisement ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... composition, whether prose or rhyme, were well characterized by the lack of native thought and feeling, the cold pedantry, the mimicry of classic models, common to all such productions. Mr. Fessenden had the good taste to disapprove of these vapid and spiritless performances, and resolved to strike out a new course for himself. On one occasion, when his classmates had gone through with their customary round of verbiage and threadbare sentiment, he electrified them and their instructor, President Wheelock, by reading ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... when the oak-leaves change into night-moths, one of your amiable stories will be the utmost we can strengthen our intellects with. Select which you will. In the meantime, food will be brought to refresh you after your benevolent exertions in conversing with a person of my vapid understanding. When you have partaken, or thrown it away as utterly unendurable, the time will have arrived, and this person, together with all his accomplices, will put themselves in a position to be subjected to all the most ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... which, as the reader knows, he had felt himself under the necessity of killing for the fair widow's entertainment. We pass over the relation of the circumstances which, as the lady discovers, render her mission fruitless, and which are detailed in a strain of the most vapid silliness—and proceed to the interview which brings about the union of Mabel and Sir Hubert. The latter, some time after these occurrences, pays a visit to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... lost their bloom and breath And life itself is vapid, Why, as we reach the Falls of Death, Feel ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... picture of the same subject. After Mr. Swinburne's superb description of the sea-birth of the goddess in his Hymn to Proserpine, it is very strange to find a cultured artist of feeling producing such a vapid Venus as this. The best thing in it is the painting of an apple tree: the time of year is spring, and the leaves have not yet come, but the tree is laden with pink and white blossoms, which stand out in beautiful relief ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... Family Lyceum. Many of these lived only a year or two, yet they show a desire among the people for a native literature, however crude and sentimental it might be. During this period also came the evanescent "Annual," a species of vapid literature borrowed from Germany through England. Upon the centre-table, near the case of stuffed birds, you could find The Token or The Pearl. Perhaps the giver had preferred The Casket or The Western Souvenir. Symptoms of a more advanced regard were denoted by the choice ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... between thirty and thirty-five, a woman of a bright and smiling beauty, which she owed to her blue eyes, to her wavy hair, to all the charm of her rather vapid but amiable and very pretty face. She wore a long, figured-silk cloak over an evening dress that showed her ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... and though the tea itself had been put in with a sparing hand, she had then been mistress of the occasion. She had had her own way, and in stinting herself had found her own reward. But now—the tea had no flavour now that it was made in the kitchen and brought to her, cold and vapid, by a man in livery whom she half feared to keep waiting while she ministered to ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... was The Evening New Yorker, the most vapid of all the local prints, catering chiefly to the uptown and shopping element. Its heading half-crossed the page proclaiming "Guest of Yachtsman Shoots Down Thugs." Nowhere in the article did it appear that Banneker had any connection with the newspaper world. He was made to ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... brought together into one home, to lead a common family life with common purposes and prospects, the religious equality principle breaks down; you must have common religious teaching and common worship, and these must be utterly vapid and miserable, unless there be a hearty agreement upon the grounds and articles of faith, such as is only possible for those who are of one Church, or at all events of one denomination. Doubtless on this very account ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... something still more involved, to the effect that her presence would make a god out of the most unworthy mortal. It was all vapid, unreal, elaborate, artificial. ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... tame and vapid acquiescents are not to be found in literature. Sometimes they furnish material for literature. Their principal use in life is to kindle the souls of reformers with the resentment of which great ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... again; but he found that the spring had dried up in him. Life was now too sombre a thing, the happy spontaneous jingles came no more. And what he did by main force of will sounded hollow and vapid to him—and must have sounded so to the editors, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... contraries—to leave alone by way not of punishing the object, but of avoiding consequences for the subject. The straightforward meaning, and the ironical, are both good; anything between them, in which the real meaning is merely to leave alone, and severely is no more than an echo, is pointless and vapid and in print intolerable. Examples follow: (1, straightforward) You must show him, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, your detestation of the crime; (2, ironical) Fish ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... moment had not yet arrived! Then he bade Sporus begin to sing his funeral song, and begged some one to show him how to die. Even his own intense shame at his cowardice was an insufficient stimulus, and he whiled away the time in vapid epigrams and pompous quotations. The sound of horses' hoofs then broke on his ears, and, venting one more Greek quotation, he held the dagger to his throat. It was driven home by Epaphroditus, one of his literary slaves. At this moment the centurion who came to arrest him rushed in. Nero was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... profit. They are plucked when quite hard, and then placed in boxes till they gradually soften; but the flavor of fruit thus treated is very inferior to that of a peach or nectarine ripened by the sun. Seed-fruits, such as strawberries, come very vapid in four or five hours after they have been picked, if they were ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... delicious colour: tones of miraculous subtlety seem to be flowing into an enchanted pool and chasing one another there. From this pool emerge gradually forms which appear sometimes vaporous and sometimes tentative, but never vapid and never woolly. When we have realized that the pool of colour is, in fact, a design of extraordinary originality and perfect coherence our aesthetic appreciation is at its height. And not until this excitement begins to flag do we notice that the picture carries a delightful ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... I daresay we shall meet some one we know at the table d'hote to-day. It is extraordinary that the only travellers we have encountered, since we left Paris, have been one horribly vapid Englishman and wife whom we dropped at Basle, one boring Englishman whom we found (and, thank God, left) at Geneva, and two English maiden ladies, whom we found sitting on a rock (with parasols) the day before yesterday, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... course, too imaginative a turn of mind to leave facts in their native nakedness, but this tendency of his is too apparent to need pointing out. What betrays him is the wonderful family likeness of his portraits, a kind of vapid esprit, not distantly related to silliness, with which the limner endows his unfortunate sitters, Chopin as well as Liszt and Tausig. Indeed, the portraits compared with the originals are like Dresden china figures compared with Greek statuary. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks |
