"Insipidness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rehearsal without any breakfast, which was horrible! but not so horrible as my performance of Lady Teazle promises to be. If I do the part according to my notion, it will be mere insipidity, and yet all the traditional pokes and pats with the fan and business of the part, as it is called, is so perfectly unnatural to me that I fear I shall execute it with a doleful bad grace. It seems odd that Sir Peter always wears the dress of the last century, while the costume ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... eyelashes were many shades darker than her hair, relieving her face altogether from that charge of insipidity which is so often, and for the most part so truly, brought against fair-haired and fair-featured beauties. The eyes themselves, which those long lashes shrouded, were of the deepest violet blue; so deep, that at first sight you would have deemed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... the livid flash, in evanescent twilight, and rendered darkness visible. Though made to bend a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature, yet he knew how to follow her into her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity and baldness, and plucked a flower in every desert. None ever, like Rembrandt, knew how to improve an accident into a beauty, or give importance to a trifle. If ever he had a master, he had no followers; Holland was not ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... an old man with white hair and a face as white as that of an old woman, endowed with a kindly smile and a gentle and persuasive voice, redeemed the insipidity of his rather mincing face by a fine intellectual brow and a pair of keen eyes. Of medium height, and very well made, he still wore the old-fashioned black coat, silver shoe-buckles, breeches, black silk stockings, and a black waistcoat on which lay his clerical bands, giving him a distinguished ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... all this, that while we constantly distrust our guide, while we perpetually refuse the appreciation he offers to us of men and events, we still read on with interest a work which is, at least, relieved from the charge of insipidity or dulness; and indeed, if we had not derived some entertainment from its perusal, we should not have thought of bringing it under the notice of our readers. To have engaged ourselves merely in combating its errors and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... retired to the country, "either be contented to turn baby again and play with the rattle, or he will pine away like a great fish in a little pond, and die for want of his usual food." He was more than once offered good country livings if he would take orders, but he knew that he would find the "insipidity and uniformity" of country life intolerable: and he stayed on to become the greatest of Londoners. There is probably to this day no book, not a professed piece of topography, which mentions the names of so many London streets, ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... she approach to the style of beauty and expression and native gifts of a porcelain doll. The mind and the character can be so symmetrical that they will lose all charm and all significance. They descend into simple prettiness, which is simple insipidity. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... soda pop, ginger ales, and other soft drinks were triumphs of insipidity, and their birch beer sickened the thirstiest child. But the making and the marketing and even the drinking of them were matters of high emprise compared to the keeping of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... it to enfeebled health; and yet he remains active and vigorous; he ascribes it to the powerful odors of certain trees which affect his brain. These trees he destroys around him, but his uneasiness continues; he ascribes it to his food, the insipidity of the fish which he has eaten without salt, since his quarter of pork is consumed, and his stores of pickled fish exhausted. In fact, the flesh of fish has for some time given him a nausea, occasioned frequent indigestions; he renounces it; his stomach recovers its tone; but his ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... indifferent, or to lament yourself as unhappy; you have lost that only which it was impossible to retain, and it were graceless amid the pleasures of a prosperous summer to regret the blossoms of a transient spring. Neither unwarily condemn your bride's insipidity till you have recollected that no object however sublime, no sounds however charming, can continue to transport us with delight when they no longer strike us with novelty. The skill to renovate the powers of pleasing is ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... no longer make anyone cry even a little; and instead of keeping us out of bed, it sends us there—or would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action. Macaulay, who confesses its absurdity and insipidity, says that no reader, probably, ever thought it dull. "The story, whatever its value may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no digressions, or unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every sentence carries the action forward. The ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... very plain. She had that rare beauty—a soft eye. I do not mean the grace of insipidity, nor the quality of mere form and colour; but the full lustrous softness that speaks a character strong in the foundations of peace and sweetness. Many an eye can be soft by turns and upon occasion; it is rarely that you see one where sweetness and strength have ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... Italy the cicisbeatura was in its origin partly Gothic and partly Oriental. It combined the chivalry of northern friendship with the refined passion of the South for the seclusion of women. As an experiment in protest against the insipidity which is too often an accompaniment of conjugal intercourse the institution might well seem to deserve a more tolerant and impartial investigation than it has yet received at the hands of our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could hardly be expected to ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... in which Milton has contrived to strengthen our interest in Satan is the number and insipidity of the good angels. There are old rules as to the necessity of a supernatural machinery for an epic poem, worth some fraction of the paper on which they are written, and derived from the practice of Homer, who believed his gods and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of Denmark, Christian VII., was brother-in-law of George III. He visited England; a mere boy in years, and still more a weak boy in insipidity of character. A large dinner-party was given in his honor at the Royal Palace. Franklin was one of the guests. In some way unexplained, he impressed the boy-king with a sense of his inherent and peculiar greatness. Christian invited a select circle ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... neighbourhood of the tenebrosi. When, towards the end of the seventeenth century, Gregorio Lazzarini set himself to shake off these influences, he went to the opposite extreme. Although a beautiful designer, he becomes cold and flat in colour, with a coldness and insipidity, indeed, that take us by surprise, appearing in a country where the taste for luminous and brilliant tints was so strongly rooted. The student of Venetian painting, who wishes to fill up the hiatus which lies between the Golden ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the far plantation!' They explained to me once that being found out and punished added the same zest to their pleasures that cayenne pepper does to their diet; a little too much of it stings, but just the right quantity relieves the insipidity and adds to the interest; and then there is the element of uncertainty, which has a charm of its own: they never know whether they will 'catch it hot' or not! When they are found out they always confess everything with a frankness which is quite provoking, because ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... shall be regarded as null and void, and that the arrested insurgents shall be set free. For repressive purposes, it dispatches a sentimental exhortation to the French people, consisting of twelve pages of literary insipidity, which Florian might have composed for his Estilles and his Nemorins.[3267]—New conflagrations, as an inevitable consequence, kindle around live coals which have been imperfectly extinguished. In the district of Saintes,[3268] M. Dupaty, counselor of the parliament of Bordeaux, after having exhausted ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... owing to the fastidiousness of my caprice than the delicacy of my taste; but I am so often tired, disgusted and hurt with insipidity, affectation, and pride of mankind, that when I meet with a person "after my own heart," I positively feel what an orthodox Protestant would call a species of idolatry, which acts on my fancy like inspiration; and ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... laymen. The actors were boys belonging to the brotherhoods, and the plays were intended to be edifying for youth. They are more refined than the northern religious dramas, but only too often fall into insipidity. ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... requisitioned to narrate the story of Paradise and Peri, I don't know. Anyway the story hardly harmonized with Betty's engagement and that love-obstructing clothes-press. But just as Fortune is said to smile on everyone once in a lifetime, so, in the midst of the flatness and insipidity of everyday life, it seems that something always happens which gives that one who lays hold of it opportunity to lift himself above the ordinary and commonplace. To the drowning man a voice calls: "Stretch out ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... Brunswick specimen, backed by Seckendorf and Vienna, proves on consideration the desirable to Friedrich Wilhelm in this matter. But his Son's notions, who as yet knows her only by rumor, do not go that way. Insipidity, triviality; the fear of "CAGOTAGE" and frightful fellows in black supremely unconscious what blockheads they are, haunts him a good deal. And as for any money coming,—her sublime Aunt the Kaiserinn never had much ready money; one's resources on that side are likely to be exiguous. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... did all the others she had known seem by comparison with him—how contemptible the polished insipidity of Walpole, how artificial the neatly-turned epigrams of Atlee. How would either of these have behaved in such a moment of danger as this man's? Every minute he passed there was another peril to his life, and yet he had no thought for himself—his whole anxiety was ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... afternoon under the apple trees, now seemed so paltry that he tore it up and rolled it into pipe spills. What had he known of love, till she seized his hand and kissed it! And now—what did he not know? But to write of it seemed mere insipidity! He went up to his bedroom to get a book, and his heart began to beat violently, for she was in there making the bed. He stood in the doorway watching; and suddenly, with turbulent joy, he saw her stoop and kiss his pillow, just at the hollow made ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... physical beauty may cross one's pathway only once in a lifetime—or not at all. In the latter case it is natural to doubt the absolute truth of the rumours that the thing exists. The abnormal creature seems a mere freak of nature and may chance to be angel, criminal, total insipidity, virago or enchanter, but let such an one enter a room or appear in the street, and heads must turn, eyes light and follow, souls yearn or envy, or sink under the discouragement of comparison. With the complete harmony and perfect balance of the ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of ridicule: her shape was neither good nor bad: her countenance bore the appearance of the greatest insipidity, and her complexion was the same all over; with two little hollow eyes, adorned with white eye-lashes, as long as one's finger. With these attractions she placed herself in ambuscade to surprise unwary hearts; but she might have done so in vain, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... others? To tell of aerial adventure one needs a new language, or, at least, a parcel of new adjectives, sparkling with bright and vivid meaning, as crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and delightful to it. For there is something ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... is an excellent specimen of an English woman. Pretty, without vanity or affectation; gentle, without insipidity; and simple, yet highly polished, in mariners. She has, too, a low, "sweet voice, an excellent thing in woman," and, to me, whose ears offer even a more direct road to the heart than do the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... to accept the dishes that are presented, and to drink at your own time the wines which are handed round. A fashionable dinner, on the contrary, seems to presume beforehand on the silence, dulness, and insipidity of the guests, and to have provided little interruptions, like the jerks which the Chaplain gives to the Archbishop to prevent his going to sleep during ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... cerebral organs that extent of exercise which gives health and vivacity of action, and in a few months the change produced will be surprising. Health, animation, and energy, will take the place of former insipidity and dulness. ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... antiquity, hence they are inclined to look upon this study as barren, superseded, out-of-date. This herd has turned with much greater zest to the science of language: here in this wide expanse of virgin soil, where even the most mediocre gifts can be turned to account, and where a kind of insipidity and dullness is even looked upon as decided talent, with the novelty and uncertainty of methods and the constant danger of making fantastic mistakes—here, where dull regimental routine and discipline are desiderata—here ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... not be forgotten, while condemning the meaningless insipidity of Wyatt's work, that it was enthusiastically approved in his own day, and that the public generally were as much to blame ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... insipidity, blandness; tastelessness &c. adj. V. be tasteless &c. adj. Adj. bland, void of taste &c. 390; insipid; tasteless, gustless|, savorless; ingustible|, mawkish, milk and water, weak, stale, flat, vapid, fade, wishy-washy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... schemes; and even if infirmity creep upon age, the mind, the mind still triumphs over the mortal clay, and in the quiet hermitage, among books, and from thoughts, keeps the great wheel within everlastingly in motion. No, the better class of spirits have always an antidote to the insipidity of a common career, they have ever ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... engendered unnatural and impossible things. Indeed, I must frankly own it is a very shame that a history, which another and cleverer hand might have exhibited in all its comic force, has been reduced to mere insipidity by our good man's pen. What would not John Paul Richter have made of it! In a word, my dear friend, many who are yet ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... acquaintance with the heroic sorrows of the world. There is no page of history, however dark, there is no beautiful old tale, however tragic, which does not impart some strength and some distinction to the awakening mind. It is possible to overrate the superlative merits of insipidity as a mental and moral force in ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... face was weak rather than decided, saved from insipidity by the large enquiring eyes; denied beauty, now that she was sheltered indoors, by the lack of colour and definite outline. Moreover, a hesitation in speaking, or rather a tendency to use the wrong words, made ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... dresses—trailed the crying bad taste of their toilets over the fresh green sward; while beside them young men postured in their fashion-plate accouterments with light gloves, varnished boots, canes, the size of a thread, and single eye-glasses punctuating the insipidity ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... desire no better senses than we have." Well you are like the mole, which does not yearn for the light because it does not know what light is. Of course all the ancients thought the mole blind. A glance will show the insipidity of the sense given by Halm's reading. Quererer cum deo: would enter into an altercation with the god. The phrase, like [Greek: loidoresthai tini] as opposed to [Greek: loidorein tina] implies mutual recrimination, cf. Pro Deiotaro 9 querellae cum Deiotaro. ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... disposition to tranquillity. Vivian's good-nature had induced him for some time to submit to restraint; but if, instead of weakly yielding to the fond importunity of his wife—if, instead of tolerating the insipidity of her conversation and the narrowness of her views, he had with real energy employed her capacity upon suitable objects, he might have made her attachment the solace of his life. Whoever possesses the heart of a woman, who has common powers of intellect, may improve her understanding in ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... Has brought you to this insipidity,' My mother said: 'such sentimental pap, You never got from me. Come, hurry down; Put off that sullen look. The carriages Begin to roll; the guests are on the stairs. Learn to command your ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... productions that would otherwise have taken the place of the trash now before us. Even in the worst of these productions, there are, no doubt, occasional little traits of delicate feeling and original fancy; but these are quite lost and obscured in the mass of childishness and insipidity with which they are incorporated; nor can any thing give us a more melancholy view of the debasing effects of this miserable theory, than that it has given ordinary men a right to wonder at the folly and ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... or rather Bribri Deshoulieres, as we have seen, was beautiful, and simple, and tender—beautiful from the admirable sweetness of her expression—simple, as young girls are simple: that is to say, with a small spice of mischief to relieve the insipidity—and tender, with a smile that seems to open the heart as well as the lips. What struck people in her expression at first, was a shade of sadness over her features—a fatal presentiment, as it were, that added infinitely to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... does it matter? The question is, am I to look my best? which I think is my duty to you and to Providence; or am I just," said Phoebe, with indignation, "to look a little insipidity—a creature with no character—a little girl like ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... of you, the more you appear in my eyes an object of contempt.— I feel myself every way disposed and determined to hate you. Believe me, I never had an intention to offer you my hand. Our last conversation has left a tedious insipidity, which has by no means given me the most exalted idea of your character; your temper would make me extremely unhappy, and if we are united, I shall experience nothing but the hatred of my parents, added to their everlasting ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... of some of the most popular stage pieces of his day. Yet his extravaganzas have no wit but that of violence; his rhyming couplets are without polish, and decorated only by forced and often pointless puns. His sentiment had T.W. Robertson's insipidity without its freshness, and restored an element of vulgarity which his predecessor had laboured to eradicate from theatrical tradition. He could draw a "Cockney" character with some fidelity, but his dramatis ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... sister-in-law would be a large woman in the future; she was a large woman now, stoutly built and very fat about the face. Her face was pasty in complexion without a scrap of color in it, and her eyes were of too light a blue to redeem the general insipidity of her appearance; but when she spoke that insipidity vanished, for her lips were very firm, and were apt to utter incisive words, and at such moments her pale blue eyes would flash with a light fire which was full of sarcasm, and might even rise to ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... sculpture redeemed from reproach; the art of gardening, or, as he prefers to call it, 'the art of creating landscape,' pressed forward to perfection; engraving much elevated; and painting, if less perceptibly advanced, still (towards the close of the reign, at any rate) ransomed from insipidity by the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The king himself, it was conceded, had 'little propensity to refined pleasure;' but his consort, Queen Caroline, was credited with a lively anxiety to reward merit and to encourage ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... enchantment, out of the generations of living trees," he seemed to see the possibility of satisfaction at last. For here there was a perfect love and self-sacrifice, outwardly expressed with a mystic grace better than the Greek blitheness, and a new beauty which contrasted brightly with the Roman insipidity. It was the humanism of Christianity that so satisfied him, standing as it did for the fullness of life, in spite of all its readiness for sacrifice. And it was effective too, for it seemed to be doing rapidly ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... had to give [247] instances of these defects, then I should say, that Pope, in common with the age of literature to which he belonged, had too little curiosity, so that there is always a certain insipidity in the effect of his work, exquisite as it is; and, coming down to our own time, that Balzac had an excess of curiosity—curiosity not duly tempered ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Travels in the East, to emblazon, with the brightest colours of the rainbow, forty volumes of ordinary adventure. We long for some repose amidst the constant repetition of dazzling objects; monotony, insipidity, ordinary life, even dulness itself, would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott says, in one of his novels—"Be assured that whenever I am particularly dull, it is not without an object;" and Lamartine would ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... purpose." Still another says: "The giving of so little time to serious reflection and for preparation for the responsible duties of life. In other words, frivolity of manner, shallowness of thought, and, as a consequence, insipidity of speech are strongly marked faults in some young ladies." This writer pleads for deeper, intenser earnestness. "Young women will reach a high excellence of moral character only as they prepare themselves for life by self-discipline and culture." Another puts it down as "A want of ...
— Girls: Faults and Ideals - A Familiar Talk, With Quotations From Letters • J.R. Miller
... contriving and managing. He doesn't need any cooking; he's ready to serve just as he is, couldn't be improved. There's absolutely nothing to be done. Mrs. Owl would get a divorce from him inside of a month, on the ground of insipidity. Her fine capabilities for making much out of nothing, would turn saffron for lack of use. Mr. Owl is the mate for her. To every man according to his taste; to every woman according to ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... of pronunciation is giving to every word that sound, which the most polite usage of the language appropriates to it."—Murray's Key, 8vo, p. 200. "To occupy the mind, and prevent our regretting the insipidity of an uniform plain."—Kames, El. of Crit., Vol. ii, p. 329. "There are a hundred ways of any thing happening."—Steele. "Tell me, signor, what was the cause of Antonio's sending Claudio to Venice, yesterday."—Bucke's Gram., p 90. "Looking about for an outlet, some rich ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... authority as a husband, to prevent my indulging in my favorite entertainments. This state of affairs continued, my dear, until you attained the age of sixteen, when you began to feel a distaste for the insipidity of a domestic life, and longed for a change.—Our positions were then precisely similar: we both were debarred from the delights of gay society, for which we so ardently longed. One obstacle, and one only, lay in our way; that ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... contrast to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at last saddened into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit of the past had not only something of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There was so little of Herculaneum: only a few hundred yards square are exhumed, and we counted the houses easily on the fingers of one hand, leaving the thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with its flagging ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... dangerous animals, while the marshy basins of the French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures. That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, we like a crocodile better than a frog; we prefer a barbarism of Shakspere to an insipidity of Campistron." But above all things—such is the doctrine of this preface—do not imitate anybody—not Shakspere any more than Racine. "He who imitates a romantic poet becomes thereby a classic, and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... perversity remain the masters of this world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods. Nor is it otherwise in art; for there genuine work, seldom found and still more seldom appreciated, is again and again driven out by dullness, insipidity, and affectation. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... are called by the vulgar ague-cakes. As these glands are stimulated into action by the specific pungency of the fluids, which they absorb, the general cause of their quiescence seems to be the too great insipidity of the fluids of the body, co-operating perhaps at the same time with ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin |
