"Duller" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they do not unfit me for French company. The present tone is serious enough in conscience. Unluckily, the subjects of their conversation are duller to me than my own thoughts, which may be tinged with melancholy reflections, but I doubt from my constitution ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... evening of Gorman's dinner with the King I happened to meet Sir Bartholomew Bland-Potterton at another, a much duller dinner party. Sir Bartholomew was not yet Secretary of State for Balkan Problems, but he was well known as an authority on the Near East, and was in constant unofficial touch with the Foreign Office. He is a big man in his way, ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... work a more dire mischief than in the teaching of ethics. It is bad to have students forever shun the best books because of poor instruction in literature; the damage is worse when it is the subject of moral obligation which they associate with only the duller hours of their college life. Not that the aim of a course in ethics is to afford a number of entertaining periods. The object rather is to help our students realize that here is a subject which seeks to interpret for them the most important problems of their own lives ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... only laughed a trifle at this commentary upon the botanical Latin nomenclature, and once more he was leaning from his saddle, peering down the aisles of the forest with a smiling, expectant interest, as if they held for him some enchantment of which duller mortals have no ken. A brown geode, picked up in the channel of a summer-dried stream, showed an interior of sparkling quartz crystal, when a blow had shattered it, which Hite had never suspected, often as he had seen the rugged spherical stones lying along the banks. All the rocks had a ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... other robust and not over-decorous social recreations in which the rural youth and maidens of that day delighted, were not for the storekeeper's fastidious daughter. The gentlemen's families in town did, indeed, afford a more refined and correspondingly duller social circle, but naturally enough in the present state of politics, there was very little thought of ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... of my despair grew comfort, slowly at first, and more vigorously anon. The sudden shock of the news had robbed me of some of my wit, and had warped my reasoning. Later, as the pain of the blow grew duller, I came to reflect that what she had done was but a proof—an overwhelming proof—of how deeply she had cared. Such hatred as this can be but born of a great love; reaction is ever to be measured by ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... his shoulders as he glanced around; "I find military life duller than I expected. And since this is the first night ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... speaking to me at all. He dropped the cord suddenly as if letting go his reserve, and said slyly, with a grave smile: "Perhaps the romantic think the unknown is worth looking into because it may be better than what they know. At Tabacol I used to think the unknown country beyond it looked even duller than usual. There was a forest, a river, a silence, and it was either day or night. That was all. If the voice of Nature is the voice of ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... country. People can't have everything. I don't suppose you'd change with anybody really, if you could. People are like that. They grumble, but they like being themselves. Suppose you were a young man in a shop, measuring cloth or selling bacon. You'd find that much duller, I should think.' ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... among them all with the dull reviewer, who is neither good nor useful. The excellent books he has poisoned as though by opiates! The dull books he has made duller! No one has cause to love him unless it be the authors of weak books, who thank their dull critics for exposing them in reviews so tedious that no one discovers what the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... can be or are usually ripe, artificial gardens and fishponds on the tops of houses, all things opposite to the vulgar sort, intricate and rare, or else they are nothing worth. So busy, nice, curious wits, make that insupportable in all vocations, trades, actions, employments, which to duller apprehensions is not offensive, earnestly seeking that which others so scornfully neglect. Thus through our foolish curiosity do we macerate ourselves, tire our souls, and run headlong, through our indiscretion, perverse will, and want of government, into ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... one of Harlequin's assailants. "The comic part of the English Pantomimes," he says, "being duller than anything before shown on the stage could only be set off by the superlative dulness of the serious portion, in which the gods and goddesses were so insufferably tedious, that Harlequin was always a relief from still worse company." Eager for theatrical reform, the "Weekly Miscellany" of 1732, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... people to write about there?" she said. "Tragedies and comedies and the human drama? Barrie found it in a duller place." ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... knew you would." (Yes, he was duller!) "That's the point. I can't strip my wife and children to carry out a plan—a plan so nebulous that even its inventor.... The long and short of it is that the whole scheme must be re-studied, reorganized. Paul lived in a world ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... as familiar to his hands as fingers since he had passed twelve. And when, as a steel-worker, he had been one of the first settlers in the foundry towns of the Asteroid Belt, he had found life no gentler there. But it was all right as far as he was concerned. He had heard of safer and duller ways to live but had never wanted them. Life as a moonbased transport manager had been a short interval of nonviolence, five years of startling calm which he had not yet grown ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... among his horses and dogs, his short-horns and orchids; his pictures rested temporarily under a cloud, and he was rarely to be found in the spacious gallery. In London, Victor Nevill enjoyed life with as much zest as his conscience would permit; Madge Foster dragged through weary days and duller evenings at Strand-on-the-Green; and the editor of the Illustrated Universe wondered what had become of his bright young war-artist since the one brief ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... the game proved, after ten minutes or so, to be one of the duller ones. Whatever people say, I don't think it compares with cricket, for instance. It is certainly not ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... at all in his way. She went on a visit to some girls in the neighborhood and remained away a week, hoping that she might be missed. Tryon expressed no regret at her departure and no particular satisfaction upon her return. If the house was duller in her absence, he was but dimly conscious of the difference. He was still fighting a battle in which a susceptible heart and a reasonable mind had locked horns in a well-nigh hopeless conflict. Reason, common-sense, the instinctive ready-made judgments ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... must not be suffered to continue in their society; if we converse with them who speak with more address than ourselves, then we repine equally at our own dulness, and envy the acuteness that accomplishes the speaker; or, if we converse with duller animals than ourselves, then we are weary to draw the yoke alone, and fret at our being in ill company; but if chance blows us in amongst our equals, then we are so at guard to catch all advantages, and so interested in point d'honneur, that it rather cruciates than recreates us. How many make ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... children's heads a blank,' said Felix, 'and Edgar's good taste ought to be trusted in his own home, for his own sisters. Even you might stretch a few points to keep him happy and occupied with Cherry. Besides, I believe we do live a duller life than can be really good for any one. It can't be right to shut up all these young things all their holidays without ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... vision I always feel, this is reality, and all those other times, when I have no such vision, simple unreality. If I were a painter, it is for such fervent vision I should wait, before moving brush: This, so intimate, inner vision of reality, indeed, seems in duller moments well-nigh grotesque; and hence that other glib half-truth: "Art is greater than Life itself." Art is, indeed, greater than Life in the sense that the power of Art is the disengagement from Life of its real spirit and significance. But in any other sense, to say that Art ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... absurd client's lackey being sent to fetch it before the actual conference took place. But the silliness of the story itself is a fair sample of Montreux' wits, and these wits manage to make anything they deal with duller by their way of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... entered from a quiet street which showed hardly a sign of life. There were lions couchant guarding the entrances. The walls on that side showed mostly blank, uninteresting windows. With an odd pride the great houses showed only their duller aspects to the world. ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... each other. There is no more variety in any of them than can be found in the copious advertisements of the Messrs Doudney. Still, it cannot but be that some gems shall scintillate more than others, or, at all events, be of coarser and duller water. With conscious impartiality, and without imputing the palm of slang to any particular individual, I shall give the precedence to Gemini, and their last approved duodecimo. Messrs Taylor and Smith have bestowed upon the public three dramas—to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... out of my knowledge. When pamphlets unpleasing to the ministry were presented as libels, he would order the offensive paragraphs to be read before him, and said it was strange that the judges and lawyers of the King's Bench should be duller than all the people of England; and he was often so very happy in applying the initial letters of names, and expounding dubious hints (the two common expedients among writers of that class for escaping the law) that he discovered much more than ever the authors intended, as many of them ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... and found out what you were feeling and emoting, and then they broadcast it to other closeby Skins, which then projected their hosts' psychosomatic responses. The whole was then integrated so that each Skin-wearer could detect the group-feeling and at the same time, though in a much duller manner, the feeling of ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... is an unfailing source of happiness. In his brief life, Regnault, the great painter, had more genuine enjoyment than a score of men of duller perceptions. He had cultivated his sense of color and proportion until nothing beautiful escaped his eye. If we are to enjoy the beauty about us, there is need of similar preparation. What we get out of ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... bent on a literary pilgrimage to Rome; an artist or two, better provided with enthusiasm than with either knowledge or taste, journeying with poetical longings towards skies and tints of Italy; a troupe of street jugglers, who had been turning their Neapolitan buffoonery to account among the duller and less sophisticated inhabitants of Swabia; divers lacqueys out of place; some six or eight capitalists who lived on their wits, and a nameless herd of that set which the French call bad "subjects;" a title that is just now, oddly enough, disputed between the dregs of society and a class ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... and Mr. Morrison, of Walham Green, who each independently established a kennel of these dogs, with such success that eventually the fawn Pugs were spoken of as either the Willoughby or the Morrison Pugs. At that period the black variety was not known. The Willoughby Pug was duller in colour than the Morrison, which was of a brighter, ruddier hue, but the two varieties have since been so much interbred that they are now undistinguishable, and the fact that they were ever familiarly recognised as either Willoughbys ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... piano, playing the Gluck, which he knew by heart. Old Fritz took off his shoes quietly behind the stove and lay down on the lounge before his masterpiece, where the firelight was playing over the walls of Moscow. He listened, while the room grew darker and the windows duller. Wunsch always came ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... duller than others, and at last I got into a very dull one, about the vine, and it had a good deal of Greek in it, and we have ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... man with his strange story, and the cap and the cloak and the locket. Did it mean simply a renewal of the old hope, destined to fade away again into a hopelessness duller ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... its moral end. But he takes no note of the awkward fact that the dismissed wife is not and cannot be in the same position as she was before her marriage. Nor does he give the wife any corresponding rights to get rid of her husband. These, and a hundred other difficulties all too visible to duller eyes, he utterly ignores as he proceeds on his violent way of deliverance from what he calls "imaginary and scarecrow sins." Nothing is allowed to stand in his path. For instance, the awkward texts in the Bible, whose authority he accepts, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... always been insufficient to meet the demand, and the deficiency has been supplied by importations from other cities, chiefly from Cincinnati. This season not only has there been a considerable increase in the number packed, but the market opens a great deal duller than last year, when the Canada trade and the building of the Detroit and Port Huron link of the Grand Trunk Railway ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... night for the first time; then it froze; and the trees in the Tuileries are now showing the white lines of their branches against a dreary sky. The daylight seems all the duller by comparison with the glitter of the snow-covered ground.... I slowly follow the little black path made by the sweepers; I receive an impression of solitude; the streets are very still; it is as though sick people lay behind the closed windows; and the voices of the children playing ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... the master; "he was a fine chield, as you say; but he nott (needed) mair time and gentler treatment to mak onything o' him. Ye see he had a guid hert, but was a duller kin' o' cratur a'thegither, and cared for naething he could na see or hanle. He never thoucht muckle aboot God at a'. Jacob was anither sort—a poet kin' o' a man, but a sneck drawin' cratur for a' that. It was easier, hooever, to get the slyness ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Suddenly a duller shade fell over the air; and one of the two gigantic crests into which the summit had been divided, rocked and waved to and fro; and then, with a sound, the mightiness of which no language can describe, it fell from its burning base, and rushed, an avalanche of fire, down the sides ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... Harry, looking rather cross, probably at being disturbed in his reading, "young ladies' love of finery seems quite inexhaustible; it is sometimes incomprehensible to the duller perceptions of ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprang a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... many scenes that torrid summer in New York, when Athalie intuitively felt that the year which had begun so happily for her with the entrance of Clive into her life, was growing duller and greyer; and that each succeeding day seemed to be swinging her into a tide of anxiety and mischance,—a current as yet merely perceptible, but already increasing in speed toward something swifter ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... realm of practical politics. But if this political interference is impossible, moral remonstrance is all the more in point. There is in all parts of the world a better and more enlightened as well as a duller and more callous public opinion, and the better opinion of a colony is powerfully reinforced by judicious expression of feeling in the mother country. There are occasions when that opinion should even be formally expressed ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... works. Nearly all the classics would have gone by the board. What havoc we should have made with the British poets! The Elizabethan dramatists would mostly have fallen under the ban of our negation, to a play, if not to a man. Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible; Spenser's poetry is generally duller than the Presidents' messages before Mr. Roosevelt's time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse; Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse; Shakespeare himself, when he is reverently supposed ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... speed, due to the fierce wind, allows me plenty of time to admire the strangely beautiful surroundings. Above is the inverted bowl of blue, bright for the most part, but duller towards the horizon-rim. The sun pours down a vivid light, which spreads quicksilver iridescence over the cloud-tops. Below is the cloud-scape, fantastic and far-stretching. The shadow of our machine is surrounded by a halo of sunshine as it darts along the ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... double white narcissus variegated in one night. Of this species there is a variety with yellow berries which are not quite so handsome as the red, though very attractive. R. humilis differs from lvis in having hairy leaves, those of lvis being quite smooth. It also differs in the duller red color of the berries, lvis being much the prettier. Both are natives of the West ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... tremendous noise beyond the stage would have spoilt the play. French batteries were hard at work and their shells came rushing like fierce birds above the trees. The sharp "tang" of the French "Soixante-quinze" cracked out between the duller thuds of the "Cent- vingt" and other heavy guns, and there were only brief moments of silence between those violent explosions and the long-drawn sighs of wind as the shells passed overhead and then burst with that final crash which ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... a little duller, in Wiltshire,' said Frank King. 'I wish you'd come to Kingscourt for a few days. We haven't shot the best of the ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... hung round with portraits up to its curious ceiling—vaulted and ribbed like the inside of a ship's hull. He looked even more blond and pink and white, more absolutely mediocre in his tweed suit; and also, I thought, even more good-natured and duller. He took me into his study, a room hung round with whips and fishing-tackle in place of books, while my things were being carried upstairs. It was very damp, and a fire was smouldering. He gave the embers a nervous kick with his foot, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... shut. It seemed to me that my soul was dead. I was without hope for myself: everything around me was dark. Sometimes I locked the door and tried to pray, but no words came, nor thoughts—not a ray of light penetrated the darkness. My mind and intellect became duller and duller. It was at this time that I came across the writings of Schopenhauer; and Schopenhauer suggested to me a method of relief. I may be doing him an injustice, but it was his philosophy that made me reason that, as I did ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... inventive creatress has originated something new. This evening, which Valerie meant to be a success for her, she had placed three patches. She had washed her hair with some lye, which changed its hue for a few days from a gold color to a duller shade. Madame Steinbock's was almost red, and she would be in every point unlike her. This new effect gave her a piquant and strange appearance, which puzzled her followers so much, that ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... to the working out of the geological results of the voyage often made many demands on his patience and indomitable courage. Most geologists have experience of the contrast between the pleasures felt when wielding the hammer in the field, and the duller labour of plying the pen in the study. But in Darwin's case, innumerable interruptions from sickness and other causes, and the oft-deferred hope of reaching the end of his task were not the only causes operating to ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... love for his absent friend, and were literally wet with tears. There are natures extremely attached to home like lap-dogs. The meeting of the friends was enthusiastic. Within two days everything was as before and even duller than before. "My friend," Stepan Trofimovitch said to me a fortnight after, m dead secret, "I have discovered something awful for me... something new: je suis un simple dependent, et rien de plus! Mais ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... conviction, "Not watch my neighbour's faith with fretfulness, "Still spying there some dereliction "Of truth, perversity, forgetfulness!" Better a mild indifferentism, "Teaching that both our faiths (though duller "His shine through a dull spirit's prism) "Originally had one colour! "Better pursue a pilgrimage "Through ancient and through modern times "To many peoples, various climes, "Where I may see saint, savage, sage "Fuse their respective creeds ...
— Christmas Eve • Robert Browning
... as of a heavy mass of stone or metal striking full upon the thwart behind him, while crash again, right upon the first sound, there was a duller and more crushing noise. ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... but also much duller were the minor classes which were being instructed in philosophy and Oriental ethnology by earnest spinsters. Most of them met in the highly varnished Sunday School room, but there was an overflow to the basement, which was decorated with varicose water-pipes and lighted by small windows ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... could have excited you so much," he went on masterfully, still hypnotizing her with his eyes, until even a duller woman would have grasped his meaning. But maybe he wanted to read out the news himself? Nurse Yorke ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... The teacher shall abuse these inclinacions to the profite of hys study. If he shall profite nothing by prayers, and fayre meanes, neyther by gyftes mete for chyldren, nor prayses, he shal make a contencion with hys equales. Hys felowe shall be praysed in the pres[en]ce of the duller. Desyre to be as good shall quicken forwardes, whom only adhortacion coulde not do. Yet it is not meete so to geue the mastrie to the victor, as thoughe he shulde haue it for euer: but somtime he shall shewe hope to hym that is ouercome, that by takyng ...
— The Education of Children • Desiderius Erasmus
... was fierce, strong fencing. One could not note its methods; even the keen-eyed wolverine, crouching low upon an adjacent monster limb, could never have followed the swift movements of these stone axes. The dreadful play was brief. The clash of stone together ceased as there came a duller sound, which told that stone had bitten bone. Oak, slightly the higher of the two, as they stood thus in the fray, leaned forward suddenly, his arms aloft, while from his hand dropped the blue ax. He floundered ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... the positions of the different vedettes, and all was so brilliant and clear that he saw where the men had stood up their muskets against bush or tree, noted the flash from bayonets and the duller gleam from musket-barrels. In one case, too, the men were sheltering themselves beneath a tree, and this sent an additional pang of suffering through the lad, as he felt for the first time that the sun was playing with burning ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... shining victory packed into fewer or duller words? Broke's scorn of the histrionic is shown by his reply to one of his own men who, when the Chesapeake, one blaze of fluttering colours, was bearing down upon her drab-coloured opponent, said to his ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... gardens, to the suspension-bridge over the river, followed by a crowd of girls, all decorated with wreaths and garlands, and wearing almost the same dress that we had seen at Tahiti—a coloured long-sleeved loose gown reaching to the feet. The natives here appear to affect duller colours than those we have lately been accustomed to, lilac, drab, brown, and other dark prints being the favourite tints. Whenever I stopped to look at a view, one of the girls would come behind me and throw a lei of flowers ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... qualify, the list of things that must not be done, and the list of things that must be done. Qualification exacts a little exertion, as evidence of good faith, and it is designed to weed out the duller dull and many of the base. Our schooling period ends now about fourteen, and a small number of boys and girls—about three per cent.—are set aside then as unteachable, as, in fact, nearly idiotic; the rest go on to ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... himself for failing, he can hear his playmates jeer, For they've left him with the dullards—gone ahead a half a year, And he tried so hard to conquer, oh, he tried to do his best, But now he knows, he's weaker, yes, and duller than the rest. He's ashamed to tell his mother, for he thinks she'll hate him, too— The little boy who didn't pass, who ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... purposely inserted may convey glimpses of it—the vigour and picturesqueness of the recital. That Villehardouin was an eyewitness explains a little, but very little: we have, unfortunately, libraries full of eyewitness-histories which are duller than any ditch-water. Nor, though he is by no means shy of mentioning his own performances, does he communicate to the story that slightly egotistic interest of gossip and personal detail of which his next great successor is perhaps the first example. It is because, while writing a ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... social life depend; the substitute Of God's own wisdom in this toilsome world; The providence of man. Yet oft in vain, To earn her aid, with fix'd and anxious eye He looks on Nature's and on Fortune's course: Too much in vain. His duller visual ray The stillness and the persevering acts 90 Of Nature oft elude; and Fortune oft With step fantastic from her wonted walk Turns into mazes dim; his sight is foil'd; And the crude sentence of his faltering tongue Is but opinion's verdict, half believed, And prone to change. Here thou, who ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... circulation)? Or did you separate them nicely, and arrange the pink and salmon peas with the lavender in that plain-coloured Sevres vase that is unusually accommodating in the matter of water, then putting the gay colours in the blue-and-white Delft bowl and the duller ones in cut glass to give them life? Having plenty, did you change them every other day, or the moment the water began to look milky, or did you leave them until the flowers clung together in the first stages of mould? Meanwhile, the ungathered flowers on the vines were seriously developing ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... period can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic divination, restore the missing notes in the "music of humanity," and reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us, and interpret it to our duller apprehension—this form of imaginative power must always be among the very rarest, because it demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigor. Yet we find ladies constantly choosing to make their mental mediocrity more conspicuous by clothing it in a masquerade of ancient names; ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the sound—their breathing—I told you at the time that I heard something stirring in the closet. But you had your answer. For an experienced man, Munro, you are duller ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... be called, that it might be in some measure conveyed to those of duller mind, but by some ordinary word? And what, among all parts of the world can be found nearer to an absolute formlessness, than earth and deep? For, occupying the lowest stage, they are less beautiful than the other higher parts ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... Ratona, and many fell victims to the softly blown conch shells of sloops which, as they enter harbour, sound surprisingly like a distant steamer's signal. And some could name you the vessel when its call, in your duller ears, sounded no louder than the sigh of the wind through the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... body at all, wandering in the air and hiding in the trees. This was for their sins. Then, after some months, they were born again as twin boys. 'It used,' said the elder boy, 'to be so clear, I could remember everything; but it is getting duller and duller, and I cannot now remember as ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... however, by the sheer weight of its grinding daily machinery, worked its slow effect upon him. He became less sensitive to impressions. These duller periods were interrupted sometimes by states of brilliant receptiveness, as at Bourcelles; but there was a fence between the two—a rather prickly frontier, and the secret of combining them lay just beyond his reach. For his London mind, guided by reason, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... broken, The dull wheel wearies of its ceaseless round, The duller distaff sickens of its load; I will not ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... boots to his liking, so he began reading the Riot Act one day, and concluded by saying, 'I'm blowed if I couldn't clean them better myself with a little pump-water.'—The next day, up came the boots duller than ever.—'Bless my soul,' exclaimed he, 'why, they are worse than before, how's this, sir?'—'Please, sir, you said you could clean them better with a little pump-water, so I tried it, and I do think they are worse!' Haw! haw! haw!—Yon chap in the black plush breeches and ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... wrote A Picturesque Tour through Holland, Brabant, and part of France, in 1789, while a few years later one of Charles Lamb's early "drunken companions," Fell, wrote A Tour through the Batavian Republic, 1801; and both of these books yield a few experiences not without interest. Fell's is the duller. I quote from them now and again throughout this volume, but I might mention here a few of their ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... contemplating the Infinite, but it reduced Sam to an almost imbecile state of boredom. He tried counting sheep. He tried going over his past life in his mind from the earliest moment he could recollect, and thought he had never encountered a duller series of episodes. He found a temporary solace by playing a succession of mental golf-games over all the courses he could remember, and he was just teeing up for the sixteenth at Muirfield, after playing Hoylake, St. Andrew's, Westward Ho, Hanger Hill, Mid-Surrey, Walton Heath, and Sandwich, ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... fabric hath the colour Of lovely and velutinous skin. Its perfect freshness maketh duller Environing hues incarnadine. ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... perfectly Arabian Nights' scene, and the Princess Scheherezade [herself] at last saw in very fact one of the scenes that her glowing fancy had painted; but being now freed from the fear of death, her mind had lost its terrific stimulus and returned to its normal condition, or perhaps was a little duller than usual from being so long overtaxed; at all events, she did not compose a new story on the occasion, as might have been expected. A great many people spoke to me of the splendor of my dress. Mamma was so delighted with the becomingness of my black velvet jacket, that she has bought ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... in tin-smelting; it closely resembles the phosphide, but the crystals have a duller grey appearance. It contains simply tin and arsenic. The determination is made by treating 1 gram of the substance with nitric acid and weighing the mixed oxides of tin and arsenic in the same manner ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... last gloom, too, had passed from that happy community, for Olioll, who had always been stupid and unteachable, grew clever, and this was the more miraculous because it had come of a sudden. One day he had been even duller than usual, and was beaten and told to know his lesson better on the morrow or be sent into a lower class among little boys who would make a joke of him. He had gone out in tears, and when he came the next day, although his ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... duller reaction and the events of the last few minutes repeated themselves, impersonally, spectacularly,—as though they were the actions of another man; one for whom he felt very sorry. He even went into the future and saw this same man lying down with a tiny bottle in his hand, preparing ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... clairvoyantly. It was one of those scenes, just touched with that fine and almost imperceptible perfume of the ludicrous, in which you especially delight. There are a thousand minute shreds of the absurd which my duller sense overlooks, but which never can hope to escape your ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... a little, but cannot speak it. My brother is more powerful, although I am not a weakling either, but of duller wit." ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the tissue paper from one of the buttons and found its brightness a little faded, and that distressed him mightily in his dream. He polished the poor faded button and polished it, and if anything it grew duller. He woke up and lay awake thinking of the brightness a little dulled and wondering how he would feel if perhaps when the great occasion (whatever it might be) should arrive, one button should chance to be ever so little ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... together they had run other people's sheep and cattle and made a lucrative, if dishonest, living at the game, and during their visits to the towns had made it a point of warped honor to pay their expenses with the ill-gotten gold of some duller fellow-creature. On top of it all they had a carelessness of life and a free hand with their easily-earned wealth that found them friends ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... the voice of Buck Daniels broke at length; and it was a cheerless and lonely voice in that large room, in the dull darkness, and the duller lights. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... daylight passed. From the house of De La Garcia the other division of Texans began to fire, the sharp lashing of their rifles sounding clearly amid the duller crash of musketry and cannon from the Mexicans. The Texans in the lower part of the Veramendi house were also at work with their rifles. Every man was a sharpshooter, and, whenever a Mexican came from behind a barricade, he was picked off. But the Mexicans had also ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... she had, the little Bo-Peep! They had tears to laugh with, and tears to weep. So fringy, and shy, and blue, and sweet, That even the summer skies in color, Or the autumn gentians under her feet, Less tender were and duller. ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... trying sound from rotten eggs; Your several new-found remedies Of curing wounds and scabs in trees; Your arts of flexing them for claps, And purging their infected saps; 50 Recov'ring shankers, crystallines, And nodes and botches in their rinds, Have no effect to operate Upon that duller block, your pate? But still it must be lewdly bent 55 To tempt your own due punishment; And, like your whymsy'd chariots, draw, The boys to course you without law; As if the art you have so long Profess'd, of making old ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... certain women what magic lanterns are to children,—a pleasure to the eyes, but rather shallow and full of disappointments. The more sentiments a man of talent excites at a distance, the less he responds to them on nearer view; the more brilliant fancy has pictured him, the duller he will seem in reality. Consequently, disenchanted ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... representative at all, of course. We were the most important people they had there, and I'm sorry now that we went. Who are the Israelses and the Hoecksemas, anyhow? That dreadful woman!" (She was referring to Mrs. Hoecksema.) "I never listened to duller remarks ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... opportunity escape, but make it a rule always to pursue a weaker with a stronger force. (21) These, indeed, are rules of procedure, which it only requires a simple effort of the mind to appreciate. Creatures far duller of wit than man have this ability: kites and falcons, when anything is left unguarded, pounce and carry it off and retire into safety without being caught; or wolves, again, will hunt down any quarry left widowed of its guard, or thieve what they can in darksome corners. (22) In case a dog pursues ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon
... steaming saucepan, and the next was lifting a full milk-jug or opening a wine-bottle. Above the clatter of the dishes and the stirring of spoons arose the thick Normandy voices, deep alto tones, speaking in strange jargon of speech—a world of patois removed from our duller comprehension. It was made somewhat too plain in this country, we reflected, that a man's stomach is of far more importance than the rest of his body. The kitchen yonder was by far the most comfortable, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... hanker for a touch of colour, So to relieve their sombre air; For me, I like my clothes to be much duller Than what the nigger minstrels wear; I hold by sable, drab and grey; I do not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... sweat-boxes, which is, in fact, a very dilute acetic acid, but of no commercial value. During the process of "sweating" the cotyledons of the cocoa-bean, which are at first a purple colour and very compact in the skin, lose their brightness for a duller brown, and expand the skin, giving the bean a fuller shape. When dry, a properly cured bean should crush between the ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... out at last. Looking back, he saw his own progress toward this hill of elation no longer as a sometimes sordid and always gray decade of worry and failing enthusiasm and failing dreams, years when the moonlight had grown duller in the areaway and the youth had faded out of Olive's face, but as a glorious and triumphant climb over obstacles which he had determinedly surmounted by unconquerable will-power. The optimistic self-delusion ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of the sky had altered since noon; the west became gradually duller and the air stiller; and now, over the Gayfield hills, a tall cloud thrust up silvery-edged convolutions toward a zenith ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... know that a master's eye makes a ready servant. Accordingly, with his tunic ungirdled on his portly stomach, his easy slippers on his feet, a small wand in his hand, wherewith he now directed the gaze, and now corrected the back, of some duller menial, he went from chamber to chamber of his ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... looked at it on just such darksome autumnal evenings long ago, when she was little more than a child! This very room had been her mother's dressing-room. She remembered it deserted and tenantless, the faded finery of the furniture growing dimmer and duller year by year. She had come here in an exploring mood sometimes when she was quite a child, but she never remembered the room having been put to any use; and as she had grown older it had come to have a haunted air, and she had touched the inanimate things with a sense of awe, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... some early form of life acquired a slightly greater tendency to react to an external stimulus. In this way they were brought into closer touch with the outer world and thereby gained the lead of their duller neighbor cells, and became the real rulers of the body, and ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... have the master's approval, or that there could be any accord between them. In any encounter, the composer generally managed to be master of the situation, through the exercise of his wit, something which the duller Johann could neither appreciate nor imitate. It may be said in passing, that the master supplied the funds which enabled Johann to start in business. This was in 1809. He made money rapidly in army contracts, a business for which ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... fire, over heaps of slain, General Sir Redvers Duller passed into Ladysmith—passed in just in time; passed in to see men with wan cheeks and sunken eyes—an army of skeletons; but passed in to find the ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... were themes that could be made by ingenious youth to admit a hundred cunning sidelights upon the catholic question, the struggle of the Greeks for independence, the hard case of Queen Caroline, and the unlawfulness of swamping the tories in the House of Lords. On duller afternoons they argued on the relative claims of mathematics and metaphysics to be the better discipline of the human mind; whether duelling is or is not inconsistent with the character that we ought to seek; or whether the education of the poor is ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... speaks, the poet when he Versifies, but neither cares how stupid he may become when the oration is delivered and the lyric set down on paper. The stimulant serves to bring out the talent when it is wanted, like the wind in the pipes of an organ. "What will it matter if I am even a little duller afterwards?" says the genius; "I can afford to be dull when I have done." But the truth still remains that there are stimulants and stimulants. Not the nectar of the gods themselves were worth the dash ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... Highboy. "Duller than mine. You see, he has nothing to be afraid of. To be afraid of something gives you a thrill, you know. But everybody's afraid of time, and Grandfather's Clock has ...
— The Cat in Grandfather's House • Carl Henry Grabo
... presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant lustre of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with a too—too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became of the transparent waxen hue of the grave, and the blue ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of Oyl of Cinnamon. If you intend to give it the taste of Raspes, then adde more barm, to make it work well, and during that time of working, put in your Raspes (or their Syrup) but the fruit gives a delicate Colour, and Syrup a duller Tincture. Drink not that made after the first manner, till six moneths, and it will endure drawing better then wine; but Bottleled, it is more spirited then ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... at last we see That what was could not always be, It girds our loins and steels our hands In duller days and smaller lands To recollect the country where The world was wide ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... Arabella Louisa made herself very cross-eyed looking down at her gold beads, but was too bashful to speak. Next Annie brought out the purple ball and laid it down. Then the red and green ones came out, and, lastly, the orange and blue. Now the teacher began to look very dull, even duller than her scholars; her eyelids began to droop, and she spoke very slowly, and said: "Children,—can—you—count—the—balls?" but not hearing any answer, she looked up and found they had all disappeared, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... importance attached to the minutest circumstances connected with the place and the time and the man (if man he was) that first laid open to me the Paradise of Opium-eaters. It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless: and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London. My road homewards lay through Oxford Street; and near "the stately Pantheon" (as Mr. Wordsworth has obligingly called it) I saw a druggist's shop. The druggist—unconscious minister of celestial pleasures!—as if in ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... evolution of opinion upon matters which, for want of a more embracing and satisfactory word, we must be content to call "religious," follows a uniform course in the minds of all men, except those "duller than the fat weed that roots itself at ease on Lethe's wharf," who never get beyond the primary stage. This course is separable into three periods. The first is that in which a man accepts unhesitatingly the doctrines which he has received ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... is a poor creature, incapable of strong sins. It is far more often the man of superior gifts, with faculties overwrought and nerves strained above concert pitch by excessive mental exertion, who turns to vicious excitement for the sake of rest, as a duller man falls asleep. Men whose lives are spent amidst the vicissitudes, surprises and disappointments of the money market are assuredly less idle than country gentlemen; the busy lawyer has less time to spare than the equally gifted fellow of a college; the skilled mechanic works infinitely ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... darling, how did it happen?" I asked. "I mean, what did it seem like? Did things gradually grow duller and duller, ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... deep, too deep, probably, for his wisdom; at any rate he had to control himself not to interrupt angrily such dry, interested palaver, the false voice of commerce and of cant. He stared tragically out of the window and saw the stupid rain begin to fall; the day was duller even than his own soul, and Jersey Villas looked so sordidly hideous that it was no wonder Mrs. Ryves couldn't endure them. Hideous as they were he should have to tell Mrs. Bundy in the course of the day that he was obliged to seek humbler quarters. ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... partiality (if we may say so) of conflagration-light which gives to it the character of impressive power with which we are all so familiar—the intense lights being here cut sharply off by equally intense shadows, and then grading into dull reds and duller greys. The sun, on the other hand, bathes everything in its genial glow so completely that all nature is permeated with it, and there are no intense contrasts, no absolutely black and striking shadows, except in caverns and holes, ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the mind the duller the sentence; and the younger the fingers the older, more wrinkled, and more sidling the handwriting. Dickens, who used his eyes, remarked the contrast. The hand of a child and his face are full of rounds; but his written O is tottering ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... have certainly not communicated much of their gentility to the lower orders of the population—a riotous and drunken set, the only bad specimens of Cornish people that I met with in Cornwall. The streets of Helston are a trifle larger and a trifle duller than the streets of Liskeard; the church is comparatively modern in date, and superlatively ugly in design. A miserable altar-piece, daubed in gaudy colours on the window above the communion-table, is the only approach to any attempt at embellishment in the interior. In short, the town has ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... some nations everybody is by nature so astute, versatile, and sympathetic that education hardly makes any difference in manners or mind; and it is there precisely that generation, follows generation without essential progress, and no one ever remakes himself on a better plan. It is perhaps the duller races, with a long childhood and a brooding mind, that bear the hopes of the world within them, if only nature avails to execute what she has planned on so great ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the details were becoming more and more difficult to catch. The reliefs grew more and more blurred and the outlines dimmer and dimmer. Even the great mountain profiles began to fade away, the dazzling colors to grow duller, the jet black shadows greyer, ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... in "Robinson Crusoe" he never repeated. His entire lack of artistic conscience is shown by his adding a dull second part to "Robinson Crusoe," and a duller series of serious reflections such as might have passed through Crusoe's mind during his island captivity. Of even the best of Defoe's other novels,—"Moll Flanders," "Roxana," "Captain Singleton,"—the writer must confess that his judgment coincides with that of ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... certain to come a great and deadly calm. Uganda is not a subject that excites anybody but Mr. Labouchere and Mr. Burdett-Coutts; and even on them it has a disastrous effect. Mr. Burdett-Coutts is always dull; but Uganda makes him duller than ever. Labby is usually brilliant; while he discoursed on Uganda he actually made people think Mr. Gladstone ought to have made him a Cabinet Minister—he displayed such undiscovered and unsuspected powers ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... duller. There was a very great overplus of every thing, it seemed, in the world. Harvests were so abundant, and prices so low, they were not worth the moving. Fruit lay and rotted on the ground: you could get nothing ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... symphonies soft and sweet colour It courted me then, Till evasions seemed wrong, Till evasions gave in to its song, And I warmed, till living aloofly loomed duller ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... the street you would rush to the window. And if anyone were to say that you were as cruel as the people who let the lion loose on the man, you would be justly indignant. Now that we may no longer see a man hanged, we assemble outside the jail to see the black flag run up. That is our duller method of enjoying ourselves in the old Roman spirit. And if the Government decided to throw persons of unpopular or eccentric views to the lions in the Albert Hall or the Earl's Court stadium tomorrow, can you doubt that all the seats would be ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... notable as affording the first sign that Fielding was now leaving party politics for the wider, and much duller, field of Constitutional liberty. A man might die for the British Constitution; but to be witty about it would tax the resources of a Lucian. And, accordingly, in place of that gay young spark Mr Pasquin, who laid his cudgel with so hearty ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... more butterflies and moths which winter in the perfect state, the most common and the most handsome is the "Camberwell beauty" or "mourning cloak," Vanessa antiopa L., a large butterfly whose wings are a rich purplish brown above, duller beneath, and broadly margined with a yellowish band. It is often found in winter beneath chunks which are raised a short distance above the ground, or in the crevices of old snags and fence rails. It is then apparently lifeless, with the antennae resting close along the back, above which ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... intellect. He put not his faith in princes, and of titles says: "Formerly titles were inherited by men who could not write; they now are conferred on men who will not let others. Theirs may have been the darker age; ours is the duller. In theirs a high spirit was provoked; in ours, proscribed. In theirs the bravest were pre-eminent; in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the great logs, crumbling low, Sent out a dull and duller glow, The bull's-eye watch that hung in view, Ticking its weary circuit through, Pointed with mutely warning sign Its black hand to the hour of nine. That sign the pleasant circle broke My uncle ceased his pipe to smoke, Knocked from its bowl the refuse gray, And ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... girl rises about eight o'clock in the morning, and is off to rehearsal by nine. A duller, more dreary sight than a rehearsal of a ballet by daylight, and in plain dress, cannot be imagined. The theatre is dark and gloomy, the stage not much lighter, and everything is in confusion. There is a smell of escaping gas in all parts of the building. Scattered about ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... handsomest man present, and splendidly attired. Louis was small and mean-looking, and clad in an old blue suit, with a hat decorated with little leaden images of the saints, but his smooth tongue quite overcame the duller intellect of Edward; and in the mean time the English soldiers were feasted and allowed their full swing, the French being strictly watched to prevent all quarrels. So skilfully did Louis manage, that Edward consented to make ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shaped for him by Time: only in the transitory Time-Symbol is the ever-motionless Eternity we stand on made manifest. And yet, in such winter-seasons of Denial, it is for the nobler-minded perhaps a comparative misery to have been born, and to be awake and work; and for the duller a felicity, if, like hibernating animals, safe-lodged in some Salamanca University, or Sybaris City, or other superstitious or voluptuous Castle of Indolence, they can slumber-through, in stupid dreams, and only awaken when the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... beech she sat down and the broad rim of her hat scratched the trunk of it and annoyed her, so she took it off and leaned her head against the tree, looking up into the underworld of leaves through which a sunbeam filtered here and there—one striking her hair which had darkened to a duller gold—striking it eagerly, unerringly, as though it had started for just such a shining mark. Below her was outspread the little town—the straggling, wretched little town—crude, lonely, lifeless! She could not be happy in Lonesome Cove after she had known the ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... following morning. I was so worried about my speech that I mentioned it to several men, and most of them said that they would come to the debate, which was the last thing I wanted them to do. I had, however, to go through with it, so I consoled myself by the thought that I couldn't be duller than some of the people whom I had heard speaking at our debates; but when I went into the common room and found a larger crowd of men there than I had ever seen at a previous meeting, I wished that I had never come near the place. Before Lambert spoke we had to go through a lot ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... practised for its own sake, like a highly-developed skill in cannoning billiard balls. After all, the point of view is what gives distinction to either vice or virtue: a morality with ground-glass windows is no duller ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... the only big man in the locality, and carried everything with a high hand, had disappeared for ever. Now all was bustle, hurry, and confusion, the getting and sending of telegrams, quick dispatches by railway, the watching of markets at a distance, rapid combinations that bewildered Gourlay's duller mind. At first he was too obstinate to try the newer methods; when he did, he was too stupid to use them cleverly. When he plunged it was always at the wrong time, for he plunged at random, not knowing what to do. He had lost heavily of late both in grain and cheese, ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... expect our ambition to remain fresh and vigorous through years of inactivity, indolence, or indifference? If we constantly allow opportunities to slip by us without making any attempt to grasp them, our inclination will grow duller and weaker. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... imaginative, and imbecile state of mind, produces indolence and incapacity for manly or continuous exertion, and sinks its votary into a state of careless inactivity and selfish enjoyment of vice." Professor L. H. Gause writes: "The intellect becomes duller and duller, until at last it is painful to make any intellectual effort, and we sink into a sensuous or sensual animal. Any one who would retain a clear mind, sound lungs, undisturbed heart, or healthy stomach, must not smoke or chew the poisonous plant." It is commonly ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... opposition. Nay, they are so pitifully mean as to laugh at Dr. Franklin, who has such thorough reason to sit and laugh at them. What triumph it must be to him to see a miserable pamphlet all the revenge they can take! There is another, still duller, called Opposition Mornings, in which you are lugged in. In truth, it is a compliment to any man to except him out of the number of those that have contributed to the shocking disgraces inflicted on this undone country. When Lord Chatham was minister, he never replied ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... envied the lot of those who can hunt for work, instead of having to stay at home and wait for others to come, whose will they cannot influence. His heart began to sicken with hope deferred, and dim forebodings of the future; and he saw, with grief, that his wife was getting duller and duller, and that her days dragged more heavily, far than his ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... felted wool or fur, now let us expose a third. In the black dyeing of the hat-forms a boiling process is used. Let us hear what Dr. Bowman, in his work on the wool fibre, says with regard to boiling with water. "Wool which looked quite bright when well washed with tepid water, was decidedly duller when kept for some time in water at a temperature of 160 deg. F., and the same wool, when subjected to boiling water at 212 deg. F., became quite dull and lustreless. When tested for strength, the same fibres which carried on the average ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... sucked into its socket. The temperature was still high, too high to allow of that placid sleep. I contemplated the thermometer meditatively. The port was shut, and the only sounds that broke the night were the dull beating of the screw and the duller wash of the waves against the side of the Sea Queen. The boatswain stood ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... for supporting the constitution both in church and state.[91] The Critical Reviewers, I believe, often review without reading the books through; but lay hold of a topick, and write chiefly from their own minds. The Monthly Reviewers are duller men, and are glad to read ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... sitting-room, was roused from his contemplation of an etching he had picked up in town that day by a deep-throated bark from Olga. She had been lying in the hall; and doubtless her sharp ears had heard some approaching footstep which to his duller human hearing ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... tickled Muse The plighted coterie of Phoebus he bespoke And laughing with reverted faces ran, And somewhat the broad freedom to excuse They had allow'd the audacious Greek to use Swore they mistook him for their own good man! If the good dulness be the home of worth Duller than Frogs co-ax'd, or Jeffrey writ We, too, will Aristoff ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... declining the proffer with a motion of his hand, 'for having ranked you among the humble instruments who are obvious and in all men's sight. I should have done more justice to your genius. Men of your capacity plot in secrecy and safety, and leave exposed posts to the duller wits.' ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... these merry days Should we, I pray, be duller? No, let us sing some roundelays To make our mirth the fuller. And whilst we thus inspired sing, Let all the streets with echoes ring; Woods, and hills, and everything Bear witness we ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... greet him; Up he draws the clouds, and pours Down again their shining showers; Out he draws the grass and clover, Daisies, buttercups all over; Out he wiles all flowers to stare At their father in the air— He all light, they how much duller, Yet son-suns of every colour! Then he draws their odours out, Sends them on the winds about. Next he draws out flying things— Out of eggs, fast-flapping wings; Out of lumps like frozen snails, Butterflies with ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... cannot be duller, those who remember it formerly were astonished at the change that time has wrought, and those ho look forward to the future, hope it will not always be so; but without a joke, except the Opera and ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... man's way of being friendly, but even a duller-fibred man than Champers would have understood Mrs. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... celestial powre The duller earth it quickneth with delight, And life-full spirits privily doth powre Through all the parts, that to the looker's sight They ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... coasts of Arctic America, certainly present us with a new stock. The Esquimaux (among whom the Greenlanders are included), in fact, though they share the straight black hair of the proper Americans, are a duller complexioned, shorter, and more squat people, and they have still more prominent cheek-bones. But the circumstance which most completely separates them from the typical Americans, is the form of ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Halliwell,[263] Esq., F.R. and A.S.S., but the tremendous effort which the learned writer then made to excel many titled competitors for honors in the antique line appears to have had a sad effect upon his mental powers—at any rate, his efforts have since yearly become duller and duller; happily, at last, we should suppose, 'the ancient {149} and modern usage in reckoning' indicates the lowest point to which the vis inertia of the learned writer's peculiar genius ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... not gone next morning, though it had subsided into a duller sensation. His aunt at breakfast noticed that he had no appetite, merely trifling with his grapefruit and tasting his coffee. At once she inquired the reason, remarking at the same time that he had not his ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell |
