"Unconvincing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and beauty into an otherwise bald and unconvincing mob. I assure you I love horse-racing—if I could see it. But of all the people who congregated the little crooked hills of Epsom, I doubt if ten people in a hundred saw it. You knew that the horses had started ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... conclusion that it is an imitation from the Greek and in support of this instances Curculio's use, while running, of the presumed translations from the Greek: agoranomus, demarchus, etc. He also cites as parallels some unconvincing phrases from fragments of New Comedy, while developing an ingenious theory that the device is a heritage from the Greek orchestra, where it could have been performed with a hippodrome effect. Terence berates the practice,[128] but makes ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... anxiety. In vain he told lie upon lie about a legacy of some old uncle in the clouds; in vain he stuck to the foolish and transparent falsehood, with a dogged pertinacity that appealed, not to reason, but to blows; in vain he made affirmation weaker by his oath, and oaths quite unconvincing by his cudgel: no one believed him: and the mystery was rendered more inexplicable from his evidently nervous state and uneasy terror ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... "corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative." From the same authority we ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... be difficult to find, couched in such euphemistically appreciative language, so accurate a summary of the intention and quality of this book. Casanova is pale, diffuse, and unconvincing, indeed, beside the d'Annunzio who so early gave his full measure as the supreme novelist of sensual pleasure in this book. As Arthur Symons so well says, "Gabriele d'Annunzio comes to remind us, very definitely, as only an Italian can, of the reality and the beauty of sensation, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... less than a Person—though possibly more. It is contended by many authorities that we cannot regard any collective being, such as a college or a regiment—and Nature is a collective being—as a true person. But their arguments are unconvincing. They allow that "I" am a person because "I" possess rationality and self-consciousness. But "I" am a system or organisation of innumerable beings—electrons, groupings of electrons, groups of groupings in rising ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... be seen, save by astronomers, in the photographs that could be bought in any form from a picture-postcard to a five-guinea reproduction of the actual thing, there was still an air of unconvincing unreality about. Of course it might be coming, but it was still very far away, and it might not arrive after all. Yet when that fateful night had passed and millions of sleepless eyes had seen the south-western stars shining ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... during their calmer moments, talk in would-be old English is more amusing than culpable; but the author's philosophy of the unseen, as expounded by Amine or Krantz, is both weak and tiresome, and his religious discourses, coloured by prejudice against the Romanists, are conventional and unconvincing. The closing ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... stated, pointing to a quaint Gothic doorway, "they dispense the succulent pig's foot and the innocuous and unconvincing near-but-not-very-beer. It is also possible to get something to eat and drink. May I help ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... romanticism, and might have been written in the thirties, except that in that case the comedy element would not be so insipid as it is, but would have tasted of the pungent realism which was the virtue of the best romantics. The characters are unconvincing, the love-story a poor parallel ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... every line of future publicity and every sentence of salesman's talk will be based. Without a complete understanding throughout the establishment of the "editorial attitude" the entire publicity will be aimless and unconvincing. ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... topsy-turvy state of his world, found time to think that a gamekeeper who used such words as that had most likely a romantic past. But at the same time he saw that such a man would be far less easy to "square" with an unconvincing tale than Eliza, or Johnson, or even Mademoiselle. In fact, he seemed, with the only tale that they ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... masked and buskined, with the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe in. We thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and costumes of our school performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as yet to touch these things to life again. It was like the ghost of an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and condensed into a gritty dust of construing ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... self-conscious, climbed to its collective feet as the band crashed into the opening bars of the Marseillaise, the Pacificist had already decided upon his conduct. He sat still, even for a few moments he feigned to be absorbed in his favourite newspaper, but almost immediately gave this up as unconvincing and remained staring straight ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various
... MacDowell's temperament, which was only at its best in subjects having some definite poetical basis. The work was later revised by the composer, and while quite a good example of its form, as a MacDowell work it is unconvincing. ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... houses, at all times of day. Servants opened front doors for her with a careless smile, and having shut front doors they left her loose, like a familiar cat, to find what she wanted. They seldom "showed" her into any room, nor did they dream of acting before her the unconvincing comedy of going to "see" whether masters or ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... one of the inducements to marry is removed. These arguments are generally used with the greatest gravity by bachelors. If men have families to support, women by the hundreds support brothers and sisters and weak parents. That they are incapable of doing as much sounds unconvincing to one who has seen the work of sweat-shops. The argument that men have more expensive tastes to satisfy is too feeble to deserve attention. Finally, when men argue that women should be forced to marry by giving them smaller wages, ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... conviction his manner showed embarrassment as he began his explanation. The smooth phrases he had used so often that he could have spoken them in his sleep came readily to his lips, but even to himself they sounded hollow and unconvincing. He was embarrassed too, by Persis' tendency to ask questions, to inform herself as to every detail of the plan he was unfolding. So persistent was she in her cross-examination, that Mrs. Hornblower showed ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... after anything so short, simple, and unconvincing as that three minutes with the clergyman to-day. The utter unreality of that had seemed to blend with the silent, snowy day, and with the dulled and dreamy condition of her own brain. Snow was falling softly when she had met Richard Carter at ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... other way. What does he mean by allowing his retreat to be cut off like that? What does he mean by using a shotgun when silence was his one chance of escape? Come, Mr. Holmes, it's up to you to give us a lead, since you say Mr. White Mason's theory is unconvincing." ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Sir John Harvey are as unconvincing as those to belittle Bacon. Certainly the Sackville Papers, recently made available to historians, contain nothing to warrant any change in the conclusion, long accepted by Virginia historians, that ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... his arrival at Stafford becomes dull, shadowy, and unconvincing—a strong argument against its truth; for while Borrow easily lived the life romantic, he seems to have lacked the power to imagine it. He describes himself as accepting a somewhat nondescript office at the posting-inn ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... in danger of losing one's sympathy by a badly selected frame. Near it hangs a trifolium of virgins, of very anaemic colour. The drawing, however, is so very sensitive in this canvas that it makes good for the unconvincing anaemic colour scheme. ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... her head as she forced herself to eat a morsel of bread. How unconvincing sounded the argument from another's lips! and yet she knew now that secretly it had carried with it more weight than she had realized. Miss Delia glanced apprehensively at the folded paper as it lay on the table. She herself was ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... nowadays more than ever we are holding our tongues about Hell. We know the horrible idea which Hell commonly conveys. Therefore we keep it in the background trusting that our hearers will leave it there during the sermon on God's love. But they do not, and so we are very unconvincing about both doctrines. ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... it all, and at first she regarded the "King" with an approving eye, but by-and-by the approval changed to a frown. There was something forced in his manner; it was just the least bit unconvincing. It was clear to her that he was overdoing it, and in her opinion that was as bad as not doing it at all. Nor did she like the spectacle of a middle-aged man of affairs trying to play the gallant; ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... filtered to what he called home—one room in the cottage of an oldish woman who had prejudices against the perilous night air. He was too sleepy to go through any toilet save pulling off his shoes, and achieving an unconvincing wash at the little stand, whose crackly varnish was marked with white rings from ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... dismayed. It was the first time he had spoken to her in that way. She stammered something about "general principles," but he was regarding her so fixedly that her attempt at dissembling was most unconvincing. ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... willows and cuttings of other plants; the distinction is thus obliterated under the influence of environment. The fixed polarity of cuttings from full grown stems cannot be destroyed; it is the expression of previous development. Vochting speaks of polarity as a fixed inherited character. This is an unconvincing conclusion, as nothing can be deduced from our present knowledge as to the causes which led up to polarity. We know that the fertilised egg, like the embryo, is fixed at one end by which it hangs freely in the embryo-sac and afterwards ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... wealth and poverty, breeding and vulgarity, cheerfully rub shoulders; the descriptions of the wistful beautiful West of Ireland in autumn and winter; and above all the horses. Added to all this there are Sinn Fein raids, real and imaginary, to bring things up to date. A rather unconvincing plot, with a dash of Great Expectations in it, yet offers a situation which has plenty of amusing possibilities. Honor and Evie Nutting, two middle-aged spinsters, find themselves the possessors of eight thousand a year, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... little subtleties of rascaldom, little touches of criminality, that I could have put that man up to, which would have transformed his Judas from woodenness into breathing life. As it was, with no one in the village apparently who was worth his salt as a felon to teach him, his performance was unconvincing, and Judas became a figure to laugh rather than ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... arrow, and promptly shoots a Swan, one of the prides of Montsalvat. He is too stupid to understand that he has done any wrong—wrong to a helpless bird or his own nature. Gurnemanz explains in very unconvincing accents; Parsifal, the poor, "pure" fool, bursts into tears, breaks his weapons and throws them away. And now the reader must bear with me if I am both tedious and inexplicable in my explanation. At some unknown period in the past it was prophesied that only the "pure fool" taught by suffering ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... a key—I mean I found the front door unlatched. Please don't misunderstand me; I know it sounds unconvincing, but I really have a key ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... palpable initiation into the unseen were still insufficient or unconvincing, the common ground on which we are treading sometimes shakes under us, and we feel as Humboldt describes himself to have felt at the first shock of an earthquake. Strange pieces of mysterious wildness ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... of an unassisted gun to move two feet. And on such rules as these we fought a number of battles. They were interesting, but not entirely satisfactory. We took no prisoners—a feature at once barbaric and unconvincing. The battles lingered on a long time, because we shot with extreme care and deliberation, and they were hard to bring to a decisive finish. The guns were altogether too predominant. They prevented attacks getting home, and they made ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... sick. He had expected McNabb's anger at his foolish whim, and knew that he deserved it—but that McNabb should accuse him of theft! Sick at heart, he faltered his answer, and in his own ears his voice sounded strange, and dull, and unconvincing. "You think I—I ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... becoming suddenly and utterly oblivious of present company in the consciousness of deeds that need attention. Generals of command, great captains of industry, and a few rare statesmen have it; but the statesmen are most rare, because they are trained to pretend, and therefore unconvincing. The generals and captains are detested for it by all who have never humbled themselves to the point where they can think, and be unselfishly absorbed. Kagig stepped out of one zone of thought into the next, and shut the door ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... usurpers and insurgents and attempted to frighten the Convention with a vision of the inevitable failure of the insurrection, which, he claimed, would be suppressed by the forces from the front. His address sounded unconvincing and out of place within the walls of a hall where the overwhelming majority of the delegates were enthusiastically observing the victorious advance of the ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... in his delightful Island Life as well as other writers in many important works, have put forward ingenious hypotheses to account for the identity of flora and fauna on widely separated lands, and for their transit across the ocean, but all are unconvincing, and all break down at ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... signification, that word "Dolcedorme": it means Sweet slumber. But no one could tell me how the mountain group came by this name; they gave me a number of explanations, all fanciful and unconvincing. Pollino, we are told, is derived from Apollo, and authors of olden days sometimes write of it as "Monte Apollino." But Barrius suggests an alternative etymology, equally absurd, and connected with the medicinal herbs which are found ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... saw, by the French thinker that in some respects the modern age is superior in conduct and morals to antiquity, but he said little on the matter. Hakewill develops the suggestion at great length into a severe and partial impeachment of ancient manners and morals. Unjust and unconvincing though his arguments are, and inspired by theological motives, his thesis nevertheless deserves to be noted as an assertion of the progress of man in social morality. Bacon, and the thinkers of the seventeenth century generally, confined their views of progress in the past to ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... are soldiers in the same army; ought we not at all costs to maintain a united front? On the destructive side (which I have barely touched upon) his book is brilliantly effective; on the constructive side, if unconvincing, it is thoughtful, imaginative, stimulating, a thing on the whole to be grateful for. Ought one not rather to hold one's peace than to afford the common enemy the encouragement of witnessing a squabble in ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... but merely gave him opportunity to imitate, and it is by no means impossible that he would have succeeded had the key been larger and had the situation required less accurately coordinated movements. However, it is fair to say that the evidence of the idea of using the key in the lock was unconvincing. My assistant's observation was, perhaps, misleading in so far as it suggested that idea. It may and probably was purely by accident that the animal used the ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... about his childhood. They are for the most part clumsily constructed and unconvincing, though probably we shall be justified in accepting the evidence they bear of a mind singularly well ordered and resourceful. At the age of sixteen he was employed by a Buddhist priest to assist in distributing amulets, and by the agency of this priest he obtained an introduction to ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... digestion and ruin her teeth, but she had confounded him utterly by displaying twin rows as sound as pearls, as white and regular as rice kernels. Her digestion, he had to confess, was that of a Shetland pony, and he had been forced to fall back upon an unconvincing prophecy of a toothless and dyspeptic old age. He pictured her at this moment propped up in the middle of the great mahogany four-poster, all lace and ruffles and ribbons, her wayward hair in adorable confusion about her face, as she pawed over the sweets and breathed ecstatic ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... felt the unconvincing ring of his tone, lacking the full and complacent self-assurance usual to it, for as if groping for something to make good the lack he sought backward through his memories and unfolded bit by bit the tale of his experiences. Scotch born of ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... same stakes as his great forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare Ferdinand Fathom with Jonathan Wild: and the effect is very damaging to the Count. Much of the book is dull: and Fathom's conversation is (to adopt a cant word) extremely unconvincing. The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality of various kinds, and he did well to close it. He had published three novels ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... 'You've brought me to this, Carlotta!' And the profound injustice of that cry tainted even the sad sweetness of my immense sorrow. To this day, whenever I hear it, as I do still, my inmost soul protests, and all the excuses which my love found for him seem inadequate and unconvincing. I was a broken creature. (How few know what it means to be broken—to sink under a tremendous and overwhelming calamity! And yet who but they can understandingly sympathize with the afflicted?) As for my friends, I did not give them the occasion to desert ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... soundless night ride to the hotel seemed unreal; the lights in the cafe, the noise and movement, the pretty face of his aunt with the pink reflection from the candle shades on her cheeks—all seemed as unconvincing as himself and this thing that he could not grasp—could not understand—could not ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... with that solemnity he could assume to bolster a baldly unconvincing statement. "Not now, Bob. Not now, I admit; ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... that most people will find with this story is that it is unconvincing. Its scheme is improbable, its atmosphere artificial. To confess that the thing really happened—not as I am about to set it down, for the pen of the professional writer cannot but adorn and embroider, even to the detriment of his material—is, I am well aware, only an aggravation ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... "body" of music: that part which is visible even to the unobservant eye and audible to the indiscriminating ear. This is a matter of notes and tones quite apart from any real meaning or value. Such would be an academic exercise, or a technically correct but unconvincing ballad. It might possibly make some appeal to the intellect by by virtue of the "exhibition of balance and symmetry, the definiteness of plan and design, the vitality and proportion of organic growth,"[25] but this would not suffice to place it ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... not yet surrounded themselves with the atmosphere of experience and association, and they had lost the romance of novelty; they lay before him detached, so to say, and unconvincing. ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... woman in all respects, from her broad face and squat body to her forced, timbreless voice and her unconvincing gestures. It was only her clumsiness that had prevented her from opening the French window; the lock was all right. Ellen felt that she would die if she did not have an hour alone with Richard to relearn that life could be lived easily and with grace. But it would be just ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West |
