"Incurious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of rage against her, they returned to Psyche, and said to her craftily, "Thou livest in an ignorant bliss, all incurious of thy real danger. It is a deadly serpent, as we certainly know, that comes to sleep at thy side. Remember the words of the oracle, which declared thee destined to a cruel beast. There are those who ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... your friendliest invitation. But I have a new reason why I should not come to England,—a blessed babe, named Ellen, almost three weeks old,—a little, fair, soft lump of contented humanity, incessantly sleeping, and with an air of incurious security that says she has come to stay, has come to be loved, which has nothing mean, and ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and had there made certain purchases at a chemist's shop, conferred privately for some time with a photographer, sent off a reply-paid telegram, and made an enquiry at the telephone exchange. He had said but little about the case to Mr Cupples, who seemed incurious on his side, and nothing at all about the results of his investigation or the steps he was about to take. After their return from Bishopsbridge, Trent had written a long dispatch for the Record and sent it to be telegraphed by the proud hands of the ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... solitary, and silent. How should she find that which none has ever named or known? Men only stammer of it in such words as Eternity, Fate, God. All the outcries of all creatures, living and dying, sink in its depth as in an unsounded ocean. Whether this listening silence, incurious, yet hearing all, is benignant or malevolent, who can say? The wistful dreams of men haunt this theme for ever; the creeds of men are so many keys that do not fit the lock. We ponder it in our hearts, ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... themselves have, for the first time, unfortunately for mankind, become the subject of doubt and discussion. I shall consider it as my duty to abstain from all mention of these awful events, and of these fatal controversies. But the mind of that man must indeed be incurious and indocile, who has either overlooked all these things; or reaped no instruction from ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... native peasant flies the rank vegetation round; but he, a stranger and a foreigner, no associates, no companions, except books and instruments of science. He is often seen wandering over the grass-grown hills, or sauntering through the streets of the new city, not with the absent brow and incurious air of students, but with observant piercing eyes that seem to dive into the hearts of the passers-by. An old man, but not infirm,—erect and stately, as if in his prime. None know whether he be rich ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Martin. In Heaven's name, what manner of outlander was he? Squat and bulky in oilskins, broad-faced, high-cheeked, brown-colored, his forehead was tattooed, and ridges of horrible scars disfigured both plump cheeks. His eyes were small, feral; he gave Martin a fleeting, incurious glance, and turned his attention to his work. He stood impassive, clutching ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... said Ducie. "I think that after the thorough search made by me the chances are twenty to one against the MS. ever being found. But granting that it does turn up, the finder of it will probably be some ignorant navvie or incurious official, without either inclination or ability to master the secret ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... only now and then a sidelong half-smile or nudging request for this or that. Elspeth ate little, sat with her brown eyes fixed out of the window. Robin Greenlaw ate heartily enough, but he had an air distrait, and once or twice he frowned. But Jenny Barrow could not long keep still and incurious, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... flower can avail, more than the touch of monarchs, against hereditary pain; if it be no better account of a pink to say it is nut-leaved, than of a nut to say it is pink-leaved; and if the modern mind, incurious respecting the journeys of wise men, has already confused, in its Bradshaw's Bible, the station of Bethlehem with that of Bethel,[48] it is certainly time to take some order with the partly false, partly useless, and partly forgotten literature of the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... flickering of intelligence, a good-natured brute with the strength and mental caliber of a gorilla. His hand pressed heavily upon me, and I knew the weight of the muscles behind. I looked at the other brutes, two of them unperturbed and incurious, and one of them that gloated over the spectacle; and my reason came back to me, my muscles relaxed, and I sank ...
— The Road • Jack London
... by some disease (as it often happens), or by age, they have grown leaner than they are allowed to be by the statutes, have lost their honour, together with the bulk of their carcass. Their streets were paved with polished marble; which seemed strange amongst a people so incurious, both because the workmanship was troublesome, and there might be danger in its being slippery. But the true reason of it was, that they might not be forced to lift their feet higher than ordinary by ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... is all right," declared Peyton, who felt impelled to take the side of his brother in a family discussion. He was an incurious and gay young man, of active sporting interests and immaculate appearance, with so few of the moral attributes of the Culpepers that his mother sometimes wondered how he could possibly be the son of his father. Indeed there were times when this ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... absolutely impassive. But even more amazing was the voice that contradicted both these impressions, being most sweetly and delicately modulated, with a musical ring that charmed the ear as the notes of a well-sung song. The others, hearing us addressed, turned an incurious gaze upon us for a moment, and then fastened their attention anew ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... by side with aggressive brutality in masculine nature, the inquiries into her circumstances had not been pushed very far. She had checked them by a visible compression of the lips and some display of an emotion determined to be eloquently silent. And the men would become suddenly incurious, after the manner of their kind. She congratulated herself more than once on having nothing to do with women, who being naturally more callous and avid of details, would have been anxious to be exactly ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Hence, after chapel, he took a match, and, creeping into the shop, procured a crimson stamp from his father's desk. Then he went forth, by the back way, alone into the streets. The adventure was not so hazardous as it seemed and as it felt. Darius was incurious by nature, though he had brief fevers of curiosity. Thus the life of the children was a demoralising mixture of rigid discipline and freedom. They were permitted nothing, but, as the years passed, they might take nearly anything. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... incurious glance at the coarse gold, poured himself a cup of coffee at the fire, and sat down. Joy sensed something wrong and looked at him with eagerly solicitous eyes. Shorty, however, was disgruntled by his partner's lack of ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... Lady Drogheda bewailed, "it is all so big—the incurious west, and the sea, and these rocks that were old in Noah's ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... strengthened with my strength. Now the New England people, especially Bostonians, are inordinately given to knowing everything about everybody, and to "tittle- tattle," while the Southerners are comparatively free from it and very incurious. Two-thirds of the students at Princeton were of the first families in the South, and there my indifference to what did not personally concern one was regarded as a virtue. But there is a spot in this sun—that he who never cares a straw to know about the affairs of other people, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... flowers, I for the most part forgot my botany and ornithology. In the cool of the day, then (the phrase is an innocent euphemism), I climbed the hill, and after an hour or two on the plateau strolled back again, facing the sunset through a vista of moss-covered live-oaks and sweet gums. Those quiet, incurious hours are among the pleasantest of all my Florida memories. A cuckoo would be cooing, perhaps; or a quail, with cheerful ambiguity,— such as belongs to weather predictions in general,—would be prophesying "more wet" and "no more wet" in alternate breaths; or two or three night-hawks would ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... not have told how she knew that the girl had come to college to please a mother whose great regret was to have missed such training, nor did she remember when her incurious friend had learned her tense determination of flight; she could have sworn that she had never spoken of it. Sometimes, so perfectly did they appear to understand each other beneath an indifferent ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... lieges, maintaining the obligatory laws and apostolic usages established among them and justifying them, one against other, and sparing their blood and warding off hurt from them; and of his qualities should be that he never abide incurious of the poor and that he succour the highest and lowest of them and give them each the rights to them due, so that all bless him and are obedient to his commend. Without doubt, a King who is after this wise of his lieges is beloved and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... after the visit of Tancred to Bethany, of which he had said nothing to Baroni, the only person at his command who could afford or obtain any information as to the name and quality of her with whom he had there so singularly become acquainted. He was far from incurious on the subject; all that he had seen and all that he had heard at Bethany greatly interested him. But the reserve which ever controlled him, unless under the influence of great excitement, a reserve ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... 21, '88), of which No. i., dealing with my first and second volumes, is written after the facile American fashion, making the book review itself; that is, supply to the writer all the knowledge and familiarity with the subject which he parades before an incurious and easily gullible public. This especial form of dishonesty has but lately succeeded to and ousted the classical English critique of Jeffrey, Macaulay, and the late Mr. Abraham Hayward, which was mostly a handy peg for the contents of the critic's noddle or note book. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... with a pointed beard, and Trask had to look twice at him before he recognized the face of Andray Dunnan. It looked more like the face of Duke Angus of Wardshaven as he last remembered it. Dunnan looked at him in incurious contempt. ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... 13s. 4d.' Charles II., like his forbears, was not a book-buyer, and so far as he is concerned we must content ourselves with repeating a little anecdote after Dibdin, who refers to an 'old and not incurious library at Workingham, in Suffolk,' where there was a very fine ruled copy of Hayes's Bible, published at Cambridge, 1674, in two volumes folio; on the fly-leaf it contains the following memorandum: 'N.B.—This ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... services of the Church accorded with his depressed condition; they were the only events of his life, and he cherished them. His attendants now permitted and even encouraged him to speak; but he seemed entirely incurious and indifferent. Sometimes they read to him, and he listened, but he never made remarks. The works which they selected had a religious or ecclesiastical bias, even while they were imaginative; and it seemed difficult not to be interested ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Chicago newspaper. Captain Will Hallam often had occasion to employ Joe, and thus Duncan had come into acquaintance with the young man's peculiar abilities for finding out things. Joe Arnold had an innocent, incurious, almost stupid countenance that suggested a chronic desire for sleep rather than any more alert characteristic. He had a dull, uninterested way of asking questions which suggested the impulse of a vacuous mind to ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... recalled the story of her Creole grandmother, married at fifteen—her own present age. That young lady had met her future husband just this way on Roosevelt's famous New Orleans, earliest steamboat on the Mississippi. But there sat Hugh, as square, as solid, and as incurious as an upended bale of cotton. And still ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... digger with a loaf of bread under his arm had slouched from the business tent, and stood watching the scene with incurious eyes. ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... seemed to dread interruption to her passionate drama of emotion, in which sorrow and joy were combined in indeterminate parts. From her window she could see the snow-capped peaks of the Williston range, rising with immortal and changeful beauty into the purple heavens. As she watched them with incurious eyes, marking them in the first light of the day, when their iridescence made them seem as impalpable as a dream of heaven; eyeing them in the noon-height, when their sides were the hue of ruddy granite; watching them at sunset when they faded from swimming gold to rose, from ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... completely (except so far as it is kept alive by purely utilitarian considerations) when education of the conventional type has done its deadly work. It has been said that children go to school ignorant but curious, and leave school ignorant and incurious. This gibe is the plain statement of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... the span became too wide, they thickened the posts (the columns of Paestum are 7 ft. in diameter) and increased the strength of the beam (the architrave). Hence the vast solidity of the Doric order of the temples of Sicily and Magna Graecia. The Greek was incurious about construction qua construction. He found, in the column and the lintel, means perfectly adequate to realize his ideal of high unalterable beauty, and he was content. The Romans, who for a time were satisfied with these simple methods, became impatient ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... to a small Village about four miles distant from the Castle of Lindenberg. Upon arriving there a story was related to the Host at whose Inn I descended, which prevented his wondering at my making so long a stay in his House. The old Man fortunately was credulous and incurious: He believed all I said, and sought to know no more than what I thought proper to tell him. Nobody was with me but Theodore; Both were disguised, and as we kept ourselves close, we were not suspected to be other than what ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... aware of him from the moment of his spectacular entrance, though no slightest sign of interest manifested itself in her indolent, incurious eyes. Indeed, his abundant and picturesque area was so vivid that it would have been difficult not to feel his presence anywhere, let alone on a journey so monotonous as this was ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... There was something maddeningly incurious about her. He couldn't understand why she didn't even pause to hear what Georgina had done and what he had to say about it. A person so wrapped up in her personal and private dignity makes a man want to throw stones. Perhaps she knew of Georgina's ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... weather, the Master's roses, some recent article in the Church Times or the Guardian. The talk was never very strenuous; for whereas Mr. Colt could never learn to distinguish one rose from another, on Church affairs or on politics the Master was hopelessly tolerant, antiquated, incurious even. What could one do with a dear old gentleman who, when informed of the latest, most dangerous promotion to a bishopric, but responded with "Eh? 'So-and-so,' did you say? . . . Yes, yes. I knew his father . ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... innumerable thousands of daybreaks in the Broad, these Emperors, counting the long slow hours till the night were over. It is in the night especially that their fallen greatness haunts them. Day brings some distraction. They are not incurious of the lives around them—these little lives that succeed one another so quickly. To them, in their immemorial old age, youth is a constant wonder. And so is death, which to them comes not. Youth or death—which, they had often asked themselves, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... trouble of the business, and—as two neighbors agreed, seeing him gallop past—rode like the devil, yet not coming upon Nan and Jerry until they were at the station platform. Nan saw him first. She was gloriously glad, waving her hand and laughing out. Jerry stood with mouth open, silent but incurious, and Raven dismounted and threw him ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... sanctimoniously that he had died in harness. As it was we merely stripped him of his harness and deposited it in the brake! We unhitched the leader and put him between the shafts, side by side with the other horse, both incurious and indifferent, wasting nor glance nor nasal rub upon their defunct comrade. We men feign better. And then we drew him to the edge of the track, a rigid, lumbering mass; and the garrulous inhabitant discussed the value of the carcase, and the driver ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... audience, we do not accurately know. Some good he would do even in the Reich's-Diet there; and out of doors, over a German public, still more; and is worth his frugal wages,—say 1,000 pounds a year, printing and all other expense included! This is a mere guess of mine, Dryasdust having been incurious: but, to English readers it is incredible for what sums Friedrich got his work done, no work ever better. Which is itself an appreciable advantage, computable in pounds sterling; and is the parent of innumerable others which no Arithmetic or Book-keeping by Double ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... blank-eyed young man on the bed had swallowed it all passively, looking at her with dull, incurious eyes, she went back to her room and closing the door put the washstand against it. She did nothing theatrical. She went over to the window and stood looking out where the trees along the drive were fading in the dusk from green to grey, from grey to black. And ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart |
