"Crass" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... colorlessly spoken; but everyone felt that a crass misunderstanding of the possibilities of conduct in the case of a person like Mrs. Manderson had ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... exploited in shop and factory; feminine virtue can be made the object of commerce, and yet woman is not allowed to defend directly the interests of her sex, owing to one of those aberrations of the moral sense that spring from the crass egoism and brutal tyranny ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... the London correspondent of the New York Tribune, which represents Jupiter Tonans in the Western World. He may be unable to write with independent tone—few Anglo-Americans can afford to confront the crass and compound ignorance of a "free and independent majority"—but even he is not called upon solemnly to state an untruth. Before using Mr. Smalley's article as a circular, my representative made a point of applying to him for permission, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... in which the pompous disorder and correct agitation hurt him in that hour like a want of frankness. No doubt it was not Beethoven or Schumann that he heard, but their absurd interpreters, their cud-chewing audience whose crass stupidity was spread about their works like a heavy mist.—No matter, there was in the works, even the most beautiful of them, a disturbing quality which Christophe had never before felt.—What was it? He dared not analyze it, deeming it a sacrilege to question his beloved masters. But ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... meat-fed instincts, and what with the county Members, the Bishops, the Peers, all the hereditary force of the country, they still rule the roast. And there's a certain disease—to make a very poor joke, call it 'Pendycitis' with which most of these people are infected. They're 'crass.' They do things, but they do them the wrong way! They muddle through with the greatest possible amount of unnecessary labour and suffering! It's part of the hereditary principle. I haven't had to do with them ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a power or (to retain the procreation metaphor) the impregnation with such a power.] Therefore this word was revealed and spoken to me: 'This is space and place where the love realm is to arise and become verdant with its natural inhabitants, who have laid aside their crass self-love [selfishness] and left it behind them, as it might not come here; even as it is the one which makes the entrance so narrow and crowded....' Hereupon I saw in my spirit unexpectedly different persons, modified out of measure in their bodies, and they were so highly versed ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... in circles, hide under the willows, and attempt to creep into the rat-holes in the banks, a stupidity so crass that it merits instant death, which it somehow always escapes. Then they come out in couples and waddle under the wrong fence into the lower meadow, fly madly under the tool-house, pitch blindly in with the sitting hens, and out again in short order, all the time quacking and ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... with somewhat of a manner, asking for an immediate cup of hot water, and to Lilly there was something esoteric even in that. The sturdy, fine machine of her own body had the crass ability to start off the day with bacon and eggs. She blushed for the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... shouldered his instrument and took his place on the platform. The storm was abating but there were still thunderings and occasional flashes of lightning concerning the crass ignorance and stupidity of the people of Orchard Glen and Methodists ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... them in coloured sparkles. Gold! Gold! The opera house is a treasure-box of gold. Gold in a broad smear across the orchestra pit: Gold of horns, trumpets, tubas; Gold—spun-gold, twittering-gold, snapping-gold Of harps. The conductor raises his baton, The brass blares out Crass, crude, Parvenu, fat, powerful, Golden. Rich as the fat, clapping hands in the boxes. Cymbals, gigantic, coin-shaped, Crash. The orange curtain parts And the prima-donna steps forward. One note, A drop: transparent, iridescent, A gold bubble, It floats... floats... And bursts against the lips ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... believe most firmly that President Wilson gave the criminal such chances of reform as no court of law in the world would grant. But, at last, his patience was exhausted. Whether the enslavers of Germany thought, in that crass ignorance of other men's minds they have so often displayed, that America meant to keep out of the war at all costs, or were merely careless of consequences so long as the immediate end was attained, is now immaterial. From the welter of Teutonic misdeeds and lies arises the vital, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... were almost halfway to Detroit when the tidings of the outbreak of hostilities overtook them. General Hull forthwith hurried his troops to the Maumee River, leaving their camp equipment and heavy stores behind. He now committed his first crass blunder. Though the British controlled the waters of Lake Erie, yet he sent a schooner ahead with all his hospital supplies, intrenching tools, official papers, and muster rolls. The little vessel was captured within ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... of this pleasant sport was one Comber, a large, pale-faced boy, some years older than his place in the school justified, but of a crass stupidity, a greedy stomach and a vicious cruelty. Peter had already met him in football and had annoyed him by collaring him violently on one occasion, it being the boy's habit, owing to his size and ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... flight. He shuddered as he thought of the dull, wet days on the Atlantic and his hideous week in America. He had been in a perpetual state of protest against everything from the hotel service to what he termed the "crass ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... rattletrap furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as worthless—a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant, fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners, making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear there was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long years I saw ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... really the tender thing is gone away at last. He will take this half of a broken sixpence back: it was given in happier times. If ever he should marry, he will know that one far away prays for his happiness. And if—if these unwomanly tears—And suddenly the crass idiot discovers that she is laughing at him, and that she has secured him and bound him as completely as a fly fifty times wound round by a spider. The crash of applause that accompanied the lowering of the curtain stunned Macleod, who had not quite come back from ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... Here is a man with no moral convictions, with no conscious relations to society save those which are hostile, with no personal affections; at the same time, vaguely aware of certain faculties in himself for which life affords no scope and encouraged in various kinds of conceit by the crass stupidity of all with whom he associates. It is suggested to him all at once that there is a very easy way of improving his circumstances, and that by exercise of a certain craft with which he is perfectly familiar; ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... writer {27c} describes the air as being “crass, and full of rotten harrs”; and Drayton, in his “Polyolbion” {28a} speaks of the “unwholesome ayre, and more unwholesome soyle”; but that condition of things has long ago passed away. Another charming effect of these distant ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... husband had deserted her and her children, and was living with a concubine all that time! Why should a person attempt to write biography when the simplest facts have no meaning to him? This book is littered with as crass stupidities as that one—deductions by the page which bear no ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was continually handing up prisoners to be judged. All in the inclosed space stood and moved a mass of careless men, the lawyers, hangers-on, and all who fatten upon crime—careless, laughing, nudging, talking openly to the women of the street. A crass scene, a scene of bitter cynicism, of flashy froth, degrading and cheap. Not here to-night the majesty of the law; here only a ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... eyes. They were very small and bright, as the eyes of the obese often are, or as they seem by contrast with a large crass face. Langholm fancied he perceived a glimmer of his own enlightenment, ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... hourly life-and-death excitement is a keen delight to most wild creatures, but must be peculiarly distracting to the comfort-loving temperament of others. The latter are alone suited to endure the crass habits and dull routine of domesticated life. Suppose that an animal which has been captured and half-tamed, received ill-usage from his captors, either as punishment or through mere brutality, and that he rushed indignantly into the forest with his ribs ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... held, Wagner supervising them all. In the end, even the anti-Wagnerites who went to curse, admitted that unheard-of results had been achieved: they would not give in about the music, which remained, in their crass ears, "without form or melody"; and we may therefore the more readily accept their testimony as to Wagner's supremacy as a musical director. The late Mr. Joseph Bennett's reports—and he was till his last breath a violent anti-Wagnerite—are ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... fear that you are a crass materialist. I am beginning to despair of ever inculcating in you any respect for the finer and subtler things of life. I must try Bolton. Bolton, have you ever seen a finer moon? Remember that I won't move ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... check, and with the single important incident of taking Ghuzni by storm on the way. Our positions at and about Cabul were not seriously molested until late in 1841, when the paralysis of demoralisation struck our soldiers because of the crass follies of a wrong-headed civilian chief and the feebleness of a decrepit general. Nott throughout held Candahar firmly; the Khyber Pass remained open until faith was broken with the hillmen; Jellalabad held out until the "Retribution Column" ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... occasional, though only occasional, faults of criticism. I do not recommend anybody who has not the faculty of critical adjustment, and who wants to like Leigh Hunt, to read his essay on Dante in the Italian Poets. For flashes of crass insensibility to great poetry it is difficult to match anywhere, and impossible to match in Leigh Hunt. His favourite theological doctrine, like that of Beranger's hero, was, Ne damnons personne. He did not ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... he said, that for many days he felt no repentance of the act nor was in the least lonely. There was an infinite relief merely in getting clean away from the huge world of men, with all its exactions and temptations and the myriad rebukes and rebuffs of its crass propriety and thrift. He had endured solitude enough in it; the secret loneliness of a spiritual bankruptcy. Here was life begun over, with none to make new debts to except nature and himself, and no besetments ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... hours of moral anguish man seeks a refuge either in love or in faith. Unhappily the family and friends of Francis were incapable of understanding him. As to religion, it was for him, as for the greater number of his contemporaries, that crass fetichism with Christian terminology which is far from having entirely disappeared. With certain men, in fact, piety consists in making one's self right with a king more powerful than any other, but also more severe and ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... as I watched the tall, lissom figure vanish through the portals of the chateau. "Did ever God create so crass and obstinate ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... than Bunyan did. And yet such a lion was he for the truth, such a disciple of Luther was he, and such a defender and preacher of the one doctrine of a standing or falling church, that he fills page after page with the crass ignorance of the otherwise most learned of all the New Testament men. Bunyan does not accuse the rising hope of the Pharisees of school or of synagogue ignorance. That young Hebrew Rabbi knew every jot and tittle of the law of Moses, and ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... and his face assumed a terribly blank expression, for the coroner went on to say that never in the whole course of his experience, which now extended over a quarter of a century, had he been cognisant of such utterly crass stupidity as that of this policeman—a man who, in his opinion, ought to ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... for "calm," and that the cockneyism, though shuffled, was not thus corrected. In "The Saturday Review," June 25, 1898, the publication of Messrs. Duckworth was criticized; and the writer very properly pointed out that I had made a crass mistake. "Mr. Rossetti," he said, "must be a very hasty reader of texts. What is printed [in 'The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine'] is 'swarm,' not 'swam,' and the rhyme with 'warm' is perfect, stultifying the editor's criticism ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... place alongside of that chaos of cupidities and stupidities a vision of a rational world-order which seems easily attainable if only some malignant spell could be lifted from the spirit of man. But he finds himself impotent in face of the crass inertia of things-as-they-are. Except the gift of oratory, he has all possible advantages for the part of a social regenerator. He has the pen of a ready and sometimes very impressive writer; he has a fair training in science; he has a fertile and inventive ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... certain than that we are about to free ourselves from the crass blindness of the nineteenth century in its great delusion that the wealth of a nation consists in the number of things it makes and possesses. Parenthood and childhood will shortly come to be recognized as the first concern of the State ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... This is illustrated by the crass excesses of certain radical satirists of religious forms. Those who are the enemies of religion for economic, social, or intellectualistic reasons combine a singular sense of the literal absurdities of religious forms with a marked insensibility to their symbolic values. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... bounds, endeavours to define what is, by its nature, undefinable; and finding that the one poor means which he has of conveying fallacious impressions of illusory things to his mind through his deadened senses, is utterly insufficient to give him an idea of what alone is real, he takes refuge in his crass ignorance and coarse grossness of language, and asserts boldly that the human mind is too limited in its nature to conceive of infinite space, or of ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... somewhat precipitately from the chasm; but whether that be its original pattern, or it has been gradually forced upwards by eager pilgrims to her shrine of adjustable pearls, is a secret hidden in her own heart. Like Willy Wally Astor, she finds the customs of this country too crass to harmonize with her supersensitive soul, and spends much time dangling about the titled slobs "on the other side." Some time ago she purchased the epicene young Earl of Craven as husband for her daughter, in the humble hope of mixing cooperage and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... last war Connick-a-coppul, and that other, the big un intirely, where the crass road takes away to Buttevant, that was Glounthauneroughtymore. Faix and that's been the murthering hill for cattle since first I knew it. Bedad yer honer 'll make ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... man comes, finally, to deceive himself, believing himself a being whose happiness consists in the renunciation of self and all that is earthly, and in the thought of his moral excellence.—The crass assumptions in Mandeville's reasoning are evident at a glance. After analyzing virtue into the suppression of desire, after labeling the impulse after moral approbation vanity, lawful self-love egoism, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... recount here in detail all the difficulties which they occasion, I should have to take twice the space. In short, everyone there is lamenting; and these people come in smiles, and even negotiating for the honors which belong to others, with crass insolence; and, worse yet, it seems to the governor that his own people alone deserve all there is, and the rest are of no account. To give color to their impudence, one of them has dared to write to your Majesty that there was ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... out all day, and sat down to dinner at nine o'clock in the evening with the face of a somnambulist. Her husband thought it absurd; however, he might perhaps have never known the reason for this; a profound ignorance of women, a crass confidence in his own merit, and in his own fortune, might perhaps have always hidden the truth from him, if the two lovers had not, so to speak, compelled him to ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the man gazed at the heavens and dropped his rockets to the floor. Memories of memories stirred to life in the dead recesses of his mind. The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his soul. Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leaped the lone majesty of kings long dead. He arose within the shadows, tall, straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly scepters hovering to his grasp. It was as though some mighty Pharaoh lived again, or curled Assyrian lord. He ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... richness of the deposit, and exploited its treasures by quarrying from the other side of the hill. But their crass ignorance of modern science led to their undoing. The accumulation of liberated carbonic acid gas in the workings killed them in scores. They probably fought this unseen demon with the tenacity of their race, until the place became accursed and banned of all living things. Yet ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... completely thrown off his balance by what he had just learned—"if I understand you aright, my good Xaxaguana, all this means that the lives of my friends and myself have been put into the utmost jeopardy by my crass folly of last night, I knew—yes, I knew, when it was too late, that I had been ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... pass, glad growing grass!- I climb the air with lissome mien; Unsheathing keen The vivid sheen Of springing green, I thrill the crude, exalt the crass Fine-flex'd and fluent from ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... prayin', nae doot, that James Moore—curse him!—will win ma Cup awa' from me, yer ain dad. I wonder ye're no 'shamed to crass ma door! Ye live on me; ye suck ma blood, ye foul-mouthed leech. Wullie and me brak' oorsel's to keep ye in hoose and hame—and what's yer gratitude? Ye plot to rob ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... advance. But Regeneration was no longer a burning matter; Medora's thoughts were on the great, new, different thing that Abner was now shaping. He had finally come to an apprehension of the city. In certain of its aspects it was as interestingly crass and crude as the country, and the deep roar of its wrongs and sufferings was becoming audible enough to his ears to exact some share of his attention. In The Fumes of the Foundry he was to show a bold advance ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... a king with his fellow, Hold converse of desolate speech: And her waters are haggard and yellow And crass with the scurf of the beach: And his garments are grey as the hoary Wan sky where the day lies dim; And his power is to her, and his glory, As hers ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... "peace", negotiated with the Cherokees at the close of 1759, was worse than a crime: it was a crass and hideous blunder. His domineering attitude and tyrannical treatment of these Indians had aroused the bitterest animosity. Yet he did not realize that it was no longer safe to trust their word. No sooner did the governor withdraw his army from the borders than ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... suggests revolt against the ruler: his mental torpidity, founded upon physical indolence, renders immediate action and all manner of exertion distasteful: his conscious weakness shows itself in overweening arrogance and intolerance. His crass and self- satisfied ignorance makes him glorify the most ignoble superstitions, while acts of revolting savagery are the natural results of a malignant fanaticism and a furious hatred of every creed beyond the pale ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... to be common knowledge. That such a subject is not considered a necessary part of education is indeed lamentable, for the crass ignorance that everywhere abounds upon the subject of nutrition and diet is largely the cause of the frightful disease and debility so widespread throughout the land, and, as a secondary evil of an enormous waste of labour in the production and ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... ghos'es 'ud want to be believed in by anybody so ignirant!" said Mr. Macey, in deep disgust at the farrier's crass incompetence to apprehend the ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... course, the cost of the war must be laid according to the capacity to bear it. It would be fatuous folly and crass selfishness to wish it laid or endeavor to have it laid otherwise. All I am advocating in effect is that in the public interest not too much be exacted at once, but that by dividing the burden over a reasonable number of years, capital in no one year and especially not during ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... happened to be an exceedingly obstinate man, he might have been defeated by the crass Toryism of Mr. Chawner. But Mr. Povey was obstinate, and he had resources of ingenuity which Mr. Chawner little suspected. The great, tramping march of progress was not to be impeded by Mr. Chawner. Mr. Povey began to make his own tickets. At first he suffered ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the supper-bell! And yet your duffing Uncle Bob Has never told you what befell When all his team got out for blob. So much for bad poetic gas That gets my ancient dander up! Well, to the banquet! What is crass Shall deeply drown in radiant Bass While we as Vikings greatly sup, ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... portray the dangerous haste with which sentiment degenerates into sentimentality; and because of its purpose, the story discloses a less excellent art than its fellows. 'Pride and Prejudice' finds its motive in the crass pride of birth and place that characterize the really generous and high-minded hero, Darcy, and the fierce resentment of his claims to love and respect on the part of the clever, high-tempered, and chivalrous heroine, Elizabeth ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... the point: This honest fellow had long been in the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father before him; but these were irresponsible inventions, told for the teller's pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure quitted for another, on fancy's least suggestion. So that the little people who manage man's internal theatre had not as yet received a very rigorous training; and played upon their stage like children who should ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I to myzell, 'poor Tom wun't coom here to-day: arl up with her, if 'a doeth: and who be there to suckzade 'un?' Mark me now, all these charps was good to shutt 'un, as her coom crass the watter; the watter be waide enow there and stony, but no deeper ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... heard worse from me than what I am saying to-night, God help me! 'T isn't the men I care about, nor their doings. But whin the young girls would crass the street, les' they should come near me, and the dacent mothers 'ud throw their aprons over their childres' heads, les' they should see me, ah! that was the bitter pill. And many and many a night, whin you wor in your bed, I stood down on dem rocks ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... given them a contempt for learning, it would be difficult to determine. Probably both misconceptions are evenly distributed amongst the victims of the process. But the fact that this should be the case at all speaks eloquently for the crass ignorance which results from the confounding, on the part of so-called educationists, of mere fact-cramming and subject-compulsion with the proper ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... I; and the r'ason comes next, as is seen by this oder stick. And, so, Nick and meself was in the chaplain's room all alone, and n'ither of us had any mind to dhrink; Nick becaase he was a prisoner and felt crass, and full of dignity like; and meself becaase I was a sentinel; and sarjeant Joyce, there, had tould me, the Lord knows how often, that if I did my duty well, I might come to be a corporal, which was next in rank to himself; barring, too, that I was a sentinel, and a drunken sentinel ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... smiled. At the bottom of his heart he shared Patricia's regret that the Stapylton pedigree was unadorned by a potentate, because nobody can stay unimpressed by a popular superstition, however crass the thing may be. But for all this, an appraisal of himself and his own achievements profusely showed high lineage is not invariably a guarantee of excellence; and so he ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... of the egregious Deeford, was quite charming to watch and hear. Mr. CYRIL RAYMOND should, I am sure, mitigate the asinine priggishness of the young viscount's bearing in the First Act. His conversion from this to the merely crass stupidity of the second was too much for us to bear. Mr. VINCENT STERNROYD as Mr. Hugh Meyers looked quite as if he might have been able to put his hand on two million; Mr. HARBEN as Sir Michael Probert ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... point with a good deal of fullness his theory that the motifs of the sonnets recur in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece—in Venus and Adonis, a certain crass naturalism; in Lucrece a high and spiritual morality. In the sonnets the same antithesis is found. Compare Sonnet 116—in praise of friendship—with 129, in which is pictured the tyranny and the treachery of sensual love. These two forces, sensual ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... Kervick flamed up. He clearly had played the fool—clumsily over-plying the simpleton with drink till he had killed him. The shadow of murder indubitably hung over the thing. And then—the crass witlessness of telegraphing! Already, doubtless, the police of Edinborough were talking over the wires with Scotland Yard. A reference to a death in Edinborough, in a telegram from Newcastle—it was incredible that this should escape the eye of the authorities. Any minute might bring a detective ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... the summer morning there floated an exquisite fragrance of pine. If all the angles of the architects could have been put together, nothing could have been designed more utterly opposite to the graceful curve of the fir tree than this red-bricked crass building. Bethel Chapel combined everything that could be imagined contrary to the spirit of nature, which undulates. The largest erection of the kind, it was evidently meant for ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the moor, or by the burn side, there was peace and brightness; but wherever he met with man he found something to sadden him. Did they rest in a monastery, there was often irregularity, seldom devotion, always crass ignorance. The manse was often a scene of such dissolute life that Malcolm shunned to bring his sister into the sight of it; the peel tower was the dwelling of savagery; the farm homestead either rude and lawless or in constant terror; the black spaces on many a brae side showed ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by some that this narration is a biassed one. But those acquainted with the charlatanry in these days of what is called 'Christian Science,' and know the extent to which crass ignorance and predisposed credulity can be duped by childish delusions, may have some 'idea how acute was the spirit-rapping epidemic some forty or fifty years ago. 'At this moment,' writes Froude, in 'Fraser's ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... every brazen Napper Tandy in the town. It was, as I have said, all the fault of the Governor; the custom was adhered to in deference to His Excellency rather than with malice prepense on the part of a friend to indulge in wanton candour. There were monsters who out of sheer, crass good nature did offend; but even they took care to couple with their "remarks" an apologetic laugh, which was intended to convey that the joke, though carried far, was just a joke. The wags—the species was not yet extinct—were especially felicitous. They ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... gently, "you make a speech. It will be recorded. You disclaim the crass and vulgar mechanical details and emphasize that you are like Einstein, dealing in theoretic physics only. That you are naturally interested in attempts to use your discovery, but your presence is a sign of your ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the mail order instructions were concerned, they were crude and unscientific—merely a hodge-podge of pseudo-technical phraseology and crass ignorance—a meaningless jargon scarcely intelligible to the most highly educated, and practically impossible of interpretation by the average stammerer who was supposed to follow the course. Even after I had, by persistent effort, interpreted the instructions and followed them closely ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... was not responsible for the crass and purblind idiocy of railway officials, I ignored this expression of ingratitude and continued ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... really humorous witness tells a story which involves very considerable consequences, but which he does not really end with tragic conclusions. Suppose the subject to be a great brawl, some really crass deception, some story of an attack on honor, etc. The attitude toward the event is altered with one turn, even though it would seem to have been generated progressively by ten preceding witnesses and the new view of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... burden of meeting the cost of the war must be laid according to capacity to bear it. It would be crass selfishness to wish it laid otherwise and fatuous folly to endeavor to have ...
— Government Ownership of Railroads, and War Taxation • Otto H. Kahn
... that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of this crass and earthly vanity. In towns or the busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of other men's existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear contempt. But Irvine had come scathless through life, conscious only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in the silence ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deeply pained, Mr. Philander, that you should have evinced such a paucity of manly courage in the presence of one of the lower orders, and by your crass timidity have caused me to exert myself to such an unaccustomed degree in order that I might resume my discourse. As I was saying, Mr. Philander, when you ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... with gross fictions as an aid to their docility and their value as food for powder,' [Footnote: A. G. Bradley, The fight with France for North America (London, 1905, p. 388).] is to display a rare combination of hopeless bigotry and crass ignorance. The habitant of the old regime in Canada was neither a slave nor a serf; neither down-trodden nor maltreated; neither was he docile and spineless when his own rights were at issue. So often has all this been shown that it ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... when you've won her for a wife, And ante-nuptial glamour dies, What food for matrimonial strife Her crass inconsequent replies. How terrible to find her dense, And never grasping what you mean; You'll think one gleam of common sense Worth more than ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 7, 1891 • Various
... amazed at this sudden change from devotion to crass indifference. On entering her room she flew to the glass, almost expecting to learn that some extraordinary change had come over her pretty countenance, rendering her intolerable for evermore. But it was, if anything, fresher than usual, on account of the exercise. 'Well!' she ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... fertile field for crass, popular propaganda. On the one hand the Allies urging China to join with them. On the other hand America, their friend. This great country sways back and forth between ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... the self-respecting operetta recently established in London. No contributions from a new and dubious foreign element had yet come to cheapen our taste, to disturb our nervous systems, or to throw upon the negro, the Hawaiian, or the Argentine the onus of a crass passion that one was more desirous of expressing than of acknowledging. No; there was assuredly no excess of emotional life—whether good or bad—in the body of music we favored. Perhaps what our little circle really desired was simply ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... greeted him, and as he responded to the old pastor's outstretched hand, he knew he met with one in whom firm gentleness and affable dignity were the chief charm of character. There was not, as he anticipated, coarse, crass assertiveness—a semi-cultured man whose narrow creed joined hands with barren intelligence. Far otherwise; he stood before one whose presence commanded reverence, one at whose feet he felt ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... Abraham. It is easier for some natures to suffer than to change. If the farmer had ever drunk water himself, except as tea or coffee, or mixed with something stronger, he must have been an early victim, to his own crass ignorance. He was a vigorous, heavy-set man, a grand field for typhoid. But he prospered, and the young doctor was turned down with the full weight and breadth of the Van Elten thumb, or the Broderick; Abraham's build ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... to be much depressed by this counsel's opinion; and had, indeed, several minutes of delightful meditation on the crass complacency of a clever man when taken off his ground. It was deplorable, he said to himself, that men should be so content with their limitations. But it was always the way, he reflected. To be a specialist ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... to disarm such a suspicion by a half-articulate sigh. No one, however crass, could have failed to be touched by this token of a grief so bitter as to refuse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... recently had a bad blow in the refusal of his magnum opus—a vast allegorical group—by the Commissioners of the Minneapolis Exhibition. He took the rejection with Promethean irony, proclaimed it as the clinching proof of his ability, and abounded in reasons why, even in an age of such crass artistic ignorance, a refusal so egregious must react to the advantage of its object. But his sister's indignation, if as glowing, was a shade less hopeful. Of course Caspar was going to succeed—she knew it was only a question of time—but ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... weekly papers. You can entertain them at the most select fashionable restaurants. Indeed, the shareholders of fashionable restaurants would look very blue without the said harlots. (Only they aren't called harlots.) But if you desire to read a masterpiece of social fiction, some mirror of crass stupidity in a circulating library will try to save you ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... abominable? Oh, what crass ignorance one comes across in this benighted land. My name is Antonia Bernard Temple, and I am an art student. I claim nothing higher. I shall be an art student as long as ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... wrecked my studio. Two stupid little boys; two little boys who have been taught their Catechism, and will one day aspire to the priesthood." And that it should be two stupid little boys who had broken his statue seemed significant. "Oh, the ignorance, the crass, the patent ignorance! I am going. This is no place for a sculptor to live in. It is no country for an educated man. It won't be fit for a man to live in for another hundred years. It is an unwashed country, that is ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... character. Beliani likened him to Bayard, it is true, and Marulitch had scoffingly adopted the simile; but that was because each thought Bayard not admirable, but a fool. The somber history of the Kosnovian monarchy, a record of crass stupidity made lurid at times by a lightning gleam of passion, justified the belief that Alexis would follow the path that led Theodore, and Ferdinand, and Ivan, and Milosch to their ruin. Each of these rulers began to reign under favorable auspices, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... generalization. Does the fact look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... filled with the pernicious influence of apocalyptic, Jewish fictions and the crass concept the Apostle had of the kingdom of Christ. Page after page is filled with proof that he expected the Lord to come in his day and was sorely mistaken, making that confession at the close of his writings and turning his attention to death and the grave, no longer having expectation of the Coming ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... It is, of the one part, A humid exhalation, which we call Material liquida, or the unctuous water; On the other part, a certain crass and vicious Portion of earth; both which, concorporate, Do make the elementary matter of gold; Which is not yet propria materia, But common to all metals and all stones; For, where it is forsaken of that moisture, And hath more driness, it ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... define righteousness. Surely it did not mean adherence to human creeds! It was vastly more than observance of forms! "God is a spirit," he read; "and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." Then, voicing his own comments, "Why, then, this crass materializing of worship? Are images of Saviour, Virgin, and Saint necessary to excite the people to devotion? Nay, would not the healing of the sick, the restoration of sight to the blind, and the performance of the works of the Master by us priests do more than ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Beauvisage. His one gleam of commercial rapacity had seemed to the notary the result of superior powers; the shrewd old man had mistaken youth for strength, and luck for genius in business. Phileas certainly knew how to read and write and cipher well, but he had read nothing. Of crass ignorance, it was quite impossible to keep up even a slight conversation with him; he replied to all remarks with a deluge of commonplaces pleasantly uttered. As the son of a farmer, however, Phileas was not without a certain commercial good ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... approached with its favourite fruit. At length, feeling pretty sure that it would not fly away, she let it loose just before its usual feeding time, and then held out some fruit which she had got in readiness. The bird flew towards her; and from that day followed her about wherever she went. "Crass," (the name we gave to the curassow), soon became a great favourite, and made Quacko and Ara very jealous. The monkey would, now and then, steal down and slyly try to pluck the feathers out of Crass, which would immediately run for protection to Marian; while Ara would ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... with urbanity, to regard life as, upon the whole, a countrified performance. De Puysange liked that air; he liked the reticence of every glance and speech and gesture,—liked, above all, the thinnish oval of her face and the staid splendor of her hair. Here was no vulgar yellow, no crass and hackneyed gold ... and yet there was a clarified and gauzier shade of gold ... the color of the moon by daylight, say.... Then, as the pleasures of digestion lapsed gently into the initial amenities ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... to enjoy a vision of himself defeating her purpose to ensnare the Hollins youth. Once he would have considered it crass presumption, but that was before a certain sarcophagus on the left bank of the Nile had been looted of its imperial occupant. Now he merely recalled a story about a King Cophetua and a beggar maid. It was a comparison that would have intensely interested the flapper's mother, who was this ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... her, huddled in her wicker chair. If I had been a woman, I would have fled from Melora Meigs even into the arms of a bearded farmer; I would have listened to the most nasal male the hills had bred. I would have milked cows, to get away from Melora. But I am a crass creature. Besides, what son of the soil would want her: unexuberant, delicate, pleasant in strange ways, and foreign to all familiar things? She wouldn't even fall in love with Arnold Withrow, who was her ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Carrington Davies encountered unexpected opposition in gaining admittance. It seemed that no one had known who he was and, what was more, no one seemed to care after being informed. Such crass ignorance irritated Davies greatly, but he held his patience. The disregard shown him was only due to the prevailing excitement. If any one of them had ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... of the glare in the sky caused at night by the determination of the Imperial to make itself known. She had been brought up to believe that, gas being dear, no opportunity should be lost of turning a jet down, and that electricity was so dear as to be inconceivable in any house not inhabited by crass spendthrift folly. She now saw electricity scattered about as though it were as cheap as salt. She saw written in electric fire across the inner entrance the beautiful sentiment, "Our aim is to please YOU." The "you" had two lines of fire under it. She saw, ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Justice, the prejudiced priest, rigid in a pious convention, who could neither bend nor break. The sin of an infidel breaker of the law, that was one thing; the crime of a son of the Church, which a human soul came to relate in its agony, that was another. He had a crass sense of justice, but there was in him a deeper thing still: the revelation of the human soul, the responsibility of speaking to the heart which has dropped the folds of secrecy, exposing the skeleton of truth, grim and staring, to the eye ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as may have lurked in her hearers was soon got the better of. For, crass realists though these young colonials were, and bluntly as they faced facts, they were none the less just as hungry for romance as the most insatiable novel-reader. Romance in any guise was hailed by them, and swallowed uncritically, ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... Sawyer's party, and who is described in the original work as "a dirty, slipshod girl, in black cotton stockings, who might have passed for the neglected daughter of a superannuated dustman in very reduced circumstances." No one had ever realised the crass stupidity of that remarkable young person—dense and impenetrable as a London fog—until her first introduction in these Readings, with "Please, Mister Sawyer, Missis Raddle wants to speak to you!"—the dull, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... subtile barrier which he had not foreseen. Ever since John Porter's death, there had been strengthening in him a joyous sense that Milly's life and his own must have been running parallel all this time, and that it needed only a little widening of channels to make them join. His was no crass certainty of finding her ready to drop into his hand; it was rather a childlike, warm-hearted faith in the permanence of her affection for him, and perhaps, too, a shrewd estimate of his own lingering ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... have merely to drug it, you have merely to caress it with interminable platitudes, or else with the most uplifting avoidances of anything which happens to be unprintably rational. And you must remember always that the crass emotions of half-educated persons are, in reality, your chosen keyboard; so play upon it with an axe if you haven't any handier implement, but hit it somehow, and for months your name will be almost as famous as that of ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... bad luck to yer ugly carcase! You're a nate-looking baste to interfere with a pair of illigant craythers! Be the crass! he's all shill, boys. Och, mother o' Moses! I can't find a ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... Even in the crass matter of profits, I found the small town richer in easily harvestable "stories" than the biggest city in the world. A few years later I spent a week in London, but I picked up less there to write about than I found in Sabetha, Kansas, ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... on her his scorn of the provincial. She had to share it. She had a vision of the Five Towns as a smoky blotch on the remote horizon,—negligible, crass, ridiculous in its heavy self-complacency. The very Orgreaves themselves were tinged with this odious ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... courtiers' anger and M. de Maurepas' growing jealousy were directed. "Once upon a time there was in France," said a ,pamphlet, entitled Le Songe de M. de Maurepas, attributed to Monsieur, the king's brother,—"there was in France a certain man, clumsy, crass, heavy, born with more of rudeness than of character, more of obstinacy than of firmness, of impetuosity than of tact, a charlatan in administration as well as in virtue, made to bring the one into disrepute and the other into disgust, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... are, fifteen months later, with Balaclava and Inkerman behind us, and the world ringing with the story of our valour; and something here and there being said about the staring incapacity of our commanders and the crass dishonesty and stupidity of our contractors. The army which left home in such bright array is transformed to a crowd of ragged vagabonds, and all the services are mixed together in the trenches and the camps before ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... crushes her, earth holds her, mold grips her. Fiends, do you not know that she is dead?... "Let us dance the pavon!" she said; the waxlights glittered like swords on the polished floor. Twinkling on jewelled snuffboxes, beaming savagely from the crass gold of candelabra, From the white shoulders of girls and the white powdered wigs of men... All life was that dance. The mocking, resistless current, The beauty, the passion, the perilous madness — As ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... the whisperings of sorrow unto sorrow, the messages of God which these immortal and yet unmeasured compositions embody,"* then will America give to music the place it deserves. Music will be one of the redeemers of the people from crass commercialism. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... fog. An old writer says “The air of the fens was crass, and full of rotten harrs.” A “sea-harr” is a fog coining inland ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... religion so necessary that she had built up a formal system of it and made it a part of herself. As it was the duty of the citizen to support the state in every part of her activity, it was clearly his duty to support the state religion. Hence there arose that crass contradiction, which existed in Rome to a large degree as long as these particular systems of philosophy prevailed, between the duty which a man, as a thinking man, owed to himself, and the duty which he, ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... indeed sorry to hear that Estan Medina was shot," he said after a pause. "Even in the interests of the Cause it was absolutely unjustifiable. The man could do no harm; indeed, he served to divert suspicion from others. Only crass stupidity would resort to brute violence in the effort to further ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... of the Frankfort lotteries. The Convention passed a decree of death against those who hawked foreign lottery-tickets, and procureur-syndics used to traffic in them. So much for the sense of our legislator and his driveling philanthropy. The encouragement given to savings banks is a piece of crass political folly. Suppose that things take a doubtful turn and people lose confidence, the Government will find that they have instituted a queue for money, like the queues outside the bakers' shops. So many savings banks, so many riots. Three street boys hoist a flag in some corner ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... The crass obtuseness of most of the nobility made it a relief to return to the usual habits of the Sorel household when the court had left Ulm. Friedmund, anxious to prove that his new honours were not to alter his home demeanour, was drawing on a block of wood ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... writes, "why the procession of foreign visitors who go to Yasnaya Polyana, who lavish adulation and hysterical praises upon that crass socialist and mischief-maker of his day, never think to look around them and use their reasoning powers. Would it not be the logical thing for Yasnaya Polyana to be the model village of Russia? Something cleaner than Edam or Marken? A little of his magnificent ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Allowing that the restoration of their house had cost them thirty thousand francs, the brother and sister possessed between them at least ten thousand francs a year. This they considered wealth, and with it they endeavored to impress society, which immediately took the measure of their vulgarity, crass ignorance, and foolish envy. On the evening when they were presented to the beautiful Madame Tiphaine, who had already eyed them at Madame Garceland's and at Madame Julliard the elder's, the queen of the town remarked to Julliard junior, who stayed a few moments after the ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... This was crass, intolerant prejudice. The whaling ship was careless of appearances, it is true, and had the air of an ocean vagabond; but there were other duties more important than holystoning decks, scraping spars, and trimming the yards to a ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... work. He tried to pass me unrecognised, but I stopped him, and once more the invitation to a nip proved irresistible. My curiosity was keen to learn his attitude toward his own work and that of his master, and I attempted to draw him out with a crass compliment. He denied me gently. 'The best things I do, or rather did, young feller, are jest a little poorer than his worst. Between ourselves, he painted some pretty bum things. Some I suppose he did, like me, by lamplight. Some he sketched with one hand while he was lighting that there ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... most blessed, till crass fate Brought Love and Women forth, unfortunate To all that ever tasted of their smiles, Whose actions are all double, full of wiles: Like to the subtil Hare, that 'fore the Hounds Makes many turnings, ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... to Aimee and call in his black! To have been thrown, disarmed.... It was crass stupidity. It was ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... seriously. Still I cannot but wish that an angry English journalist with his clever and fiery pen, would fall upon Sombart's book and give its author a sample of English spirit. The work teems with unjust, incorrect opinions; is full of crass ignorance and grotesque exaggerations, which lead the unlearned astray, injure Germany's cause, and annoy those who know better—so far as they do not ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... at my door—and the dear knows I had enough of my own to answer for, let alone to be set down for that of other people; but, any way, there was many a thing done in my name, when I knew neither act nor part about it. One of them I'll mintion: Dick Cuillenan, father to Paddy, that lives at the crass-roads, beyant Gunpowdher Lodge, was over head and ears in love with Jemmy Finigan's eldest daughter, Mary, then, sure enough, as purty a girl as you'd meet in a fair—indeed, I think I'm looking at her, with her fair flaxen ringlets hanging ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Italian painter, disdained the ideal and the ideal style of art, and kept generally to crass reality, often in its grossest forms; a man of a violent temper, which hastened his end; a painting by him of "Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus" is in the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... saw two things in one glance. Raffles had stepped a few inches backward, and stood poised upon the ball of each foot, his arms half raised, a light in his eyes. And another kind of light was breaking over the crass features ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... father to you, my poy. She would rather not pe knowing, for ta man might pe a Cam'ell poth. And if she couldn't pe lofing you no more, my son, she would pe tie pefore her time, and her tays would pe long in ta land under ta crass, my son." ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald |
