"Mindless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unutterably mournful as it was, Mary felt it a relief when he ceased to be capable of watching the progress of it himself: his misery at least was over. Thereafter he slipped into perfect mindlessness, happy and harmless, but hopelessly mindless and vacant. Meantime, Lady Louisa Moor made a very brilliant marriage to a marquis, the eldest son of a duke, the account of which Mary Brunton read in the newspapers while watching her brother's face with its meaningless ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... saints below. Eternal reason then shall give her doom; And, sever'd wide, the tenants of the tomb Shall seek their portions with instinctive haste, Quick as the savage speeds along the waste. Then shall the golden hoard its trust betray, And they, that, mindless of that dreadful day, Boasted their wealth, its vanity shall know In the dread avenue of endless woe: While they whom moderation's wholesome rule Kept still unstain'd in Virtue's heavenly school, Who the calm ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... cursed to death because it did not bear fruit out of season—how childish that tale of a virgin mother, who conceived 'without sin,' as it is somewhere naively put—an ideal of absolutely flawless falsity. Even the great old painters were helpless before it. They were driven to make mindless Madonnas, stupid bits of fleshy animality. It's not easy to idealise mere physical motherhood. You see, that was the wrong, perverted idea of motherhood—'conceiving without sin.' It's an unclean dogma in its implications. I knew somewhere once a ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... down to the big living room and drew Vance away, mindless of her guests. He came humming until he was past the door and in the shadowy hall. Then he touched her arm, suddenly ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... better dead. He had said so and it was true, in spite of Francey Wilmot and her childish sentimentality. Suddenly the woman in the hospital and this riotous houri were definitely merged into one composite figure of a mindless greed and viciousness. He clenched his hands behind his back, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... And mindless of the scorn it brings, For 't is in desert land That angels come with sheltering wings To lead us ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... day wears on and vesper draweth nigh. Christians and Pagans, sword in hand, engage; And valiant are their chiefs, nor mindless they Of battle cries:—"Precieuse!" the Emir shouts, And Carle:—"Montjoie!" the glorious sign. Each knows The other by the clear sonorous voice, And 'mid the field encountering, gives and takes Fierce blows. ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... and, for an irrational moment, he hated everything that was blue that should have been green, everything sweet that should have been vicious, everything intelligent that should have been mindless. ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... the glowing light elysian. Sweet were red-mouthed plenty mindless grown of pain. Sweeter yet behold—a sore-bewildering vision! Idly took we thought, and stopped our ears ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... stood, Half spi'd, so thick the Roses bushing round About her glowd, oft stooping to support Each Flour of slender stalk, whose head though gay Carnation, Purple, Azure, or spect with Gold, Hung drooping unsustaind, them she upstaies 430 Gently with Mirtle band, mindless the while, Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour, From her best prop so farr, and storm so nigh. Neerer he drew, and many a walk travers'd Of stateliest Covert, Cedar, Pine, or Palme, Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen Among thick-wov'n Arborets and Flours Imborderd ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... and the dark gusts which from time to time swept along the waters, heralding the rising land-wind, all was still and breathless. One could not help asking oneself how long this scene had existed as we now beheld it? Was it designed for thousands of years to be viewed only by savages, mindless as the birds or fishes that frequented its waters? Had it always existed thus, or been growing during centuries under the hand of Nature, until it should be adapted to the habitation of civilized man? And was that period now arrived, or were we premature ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... a very young thirteen—pretty and mindless as a Persian kitten—but developing rapidly a coquettish instinct for the value of a red ribbon in her dark curls, and the set of a bracelet on her plump arm. Beside her curves and curls and pretty frilled ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... and went towards the door, Alice followed me. The house agent sat in helpless amazement. He filled me with a sense of nausea. He seemed so gross, so mindless. ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... mindless of thy friend, Neglecting, not the living, but the dead? Hasten, my fun'ral rites, that I may pass Through Hades' gloomy gates; ere those be done, The spirits and spectres of departed men Drive me far from them, nor allow to cross ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... artists have lied about Pan, because they listened to the haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How many Pan has called and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless eyes and hands that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise—too wise for that. He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... red-eyed and drooping in her father's door, he lingered an instant and held out his hand. There was defiant sympathy in his act—disdain of the judgment of Kingsborough—and of General Battle, who was passing—and pity for a bruised common thing that looked at him with beautiful, mindless eyes. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... to cloak it by this cannonade. With that in eye he has bundled leftwardly Thomiere's division; mindless that thereby His wing and centre's mutual maintenance Has gone, and left a yawning vacancy. So be it. Good. His laxness ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... still less poor people poorer than before—or how they regard the rich who have what they have lost. They did not understand any huftian feeling—not even the silliness they called LOVE—a godless, mindless affair, fit only for the doll-histories invented by children: they had a feeling, or a feeling had them, till another feeling came and took its place. When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... plain gable-roofs, of a pitch neither high enough nor low enough for beauty, and disfigured, moreover, by mere excrescences of attic windows, and over the whole structure the awkward angularity, and the look of barren, mindless conformity and uniformity in the general outlines, and the meagre, frittered effect inherent in the material. But when we come to build, we find that the blockheads who invented this style, or no-style, have got at the cheapest way of supplying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... and once or twice before morning. The sleep was deep, and nothing seemed to arouse her. Gairdner mentions the case of a woman who, for one hundred and sixty days, remained in a lethargic stupor, being only a mindless automaton. Her life was maintained by means of the stomach tube. The Revue d'Hypnotisme contains the report of a young woman of twenty-five, who was completing the fourth year of an uninterrupted trance. She began May 30, 1883, after a fright, and on the same day, after several convulsive attacks, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... was, a battle that was a hundred thousand little battles, a battle in a sponge of ways and channels, fought out of sight of sky or sun under the electric glare, fought out in a vast confusion by multitudes untrained in arms, led chiefly by acclamation, multitudes dulled by mindless labour and enervated by the tradition of two hundred years of servile security against multitudes demoralised by lives of venial privilege and sensual indulgence. They had no artillery, no differentiation into this force or that; the only weapon on either ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells |
