"Shallowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we lay roasting in the sun until mid—day, the current sweeping us to the northward, and still farther on to the bank, until the water shoaled to three fathoms. At this time the sun was blazing fiercely right overhead; and from the shallowness of the water, there was not the smallest swell, or undulation of the surface. The sea, as far as the eye could reach, was a sparkling light green, from the snow—white sand at the bottom, as if a level desert had been suddenly submerged ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... "O shallowness of human judgments! It was enough to be born a Samaritan in order to be rejected by the priest, and despised by the Levite. Yet now, what to us the priest and the Levite, of God's chosen race though they were? They passed from the hearts ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... in our history Bolingbroke must be pronounced to be most of a charlatan; of all the writing in our literature, his is the hollowest, the flashiest, the most insincere.' This is true. By his 'execution,' consummate though it be, he is unable to conceal his insincerity and shallowness. 'Bolingbroke,' said Lord Shelburne, was 'all surface,' and in that sentence his ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge, but to force upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects; of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not; of considering an acquaintance with the learned names of things and persons, and the possession of clever duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent lecturers, and membership with scientific institutions, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... estimate a human being; what constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish, without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be just to the popular theories. and yet not to blind ourselves to their shallowness and injustice-that is a problem for us, for the solution of which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, without any recognized ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and a melodramatic situation. They should learn—and that they can only learn by cultivation—to discern with joy and drink in with reverence, the good, the beautiful, and the true, and to turn with the fine scorn of a pure and strong womanhood ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... with the promiscuous rubbish of libraries, and with facts which were transformed into rubbish by his treatment of them, was combined in him with a diseased imagination, and a personal vanity almost surpassing belief. His mental shallowness and consequent restlessness rendered anything like original thought impossible to him; and the faculty of intellectual digestion was not less beyond him. It is probable that curiosity was the motive ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... another man shows more knowledge, greater love of truth, a sounder judgment, better understanding than we, or generally exhibits intellectual qualities which cast ours into the shade, we can at once annul his superiority and our own shallowness, and in our turn be superior to him, by being insulting and offensive. For rudeness is better than any argument; it totally eclipses intellect. If our opponent does not care for our mode of attack, and ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Gizeh is indescribable. We lived for eleven days on melons and water, besides being momentarily exposed to the musketry of the Arabs and the fellahs. We luckily escaped with but a few killed and wounded. The rising of the Nile was only beginning. The shallowness of the river near Cairo obliged us to leave the xebec and get on board a djerm. We reached Gizeh at three in the afternoon of the 23d ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... its traditions, revealing himself only in glimpses. He attracted her immensely through his subtle impersonality underlying all that was seemingly personal. She could not fathom his depth, nor determine his shallowness—she did not even guess which it might be. She was irresistibly drawn to him; yet she was on her guard, as one who, looking down from a great height, in fear of vertigo clings to the parapet over which he leans. The parapet she clung to was her own good American common sense. ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... Persida, mother of a daughter who is in the fresh bloom of youth. She is now a sort of combination of her two earlier selves: in religious loyalty and subjection she is Zoe: in triviality of character and shallowness of judgement—together with a touch of vanity in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... writings. The good sense, caution, and conservatism of his nature appear in the "Persian Letters" less conspicuously than in his later works; yet, even there, are in marked contrast to the haste and shallowness of many of the Philosophers. "It is true'," he says, "that laws must sometimes be altered, but the case is rare; and when it happens, they should be touched with a trembling hand; and so many solemnities should be observed, and so many precautions used, that the people may naturally ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... held up, through all the future, as the most instructive lesson in American political history—the most significant warning and beacon-light to coming generations. I say that the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth terms of the American Presidency have shown that the villainy and shallowness of rulers (back'd by the machinery of great parties) are just as eligible to these States as to any foreign despotism, kingdom, or empire—there is not a bit of difference. History is to record those three ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... bringing the philosophy of sensation, the philosophy of Locke and Condillac, into the political field, and of deriving from it new standards and new forces for social reconstruction. And in spite of its shallowness and paradoxes, his book did contain the one principle on which, if it had been generally accepted, the inevitable transition might have taken place without a ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... deals, somewhat more sensibly, with the same social class as Bulwer's 'Pelham.' In his novels of this period, as in his dress and manner, he deliberately attitudinized, a fact which in part reflected a certain shallowness of character, in part was a device to attract attention for the sake of his political ambition. After winning his way into Parliament he wrote in 1844-7 three political novels,' Coningsby,' 'Sybil,' and 'Tancred,' which set forth his Tory creed of opposition to the dominance ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Idealism, Fatalism, are all very simple theories, and explain all difficulties with a marvellous rapidity. This makes them, at first, attractive to the intellect, which always loves clear and distinct views; but afterwards, when it is seen that they obtain clearness by means of shallowness they are ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... keeping my hands, face, and neck constantly wet, I am convinced that the balance of blood was on my side. The trout jumped most within a foot or two of shore, where the water was only a few inches deep. The shallowness of the water, perhaps, accounted for the inability of the fish to do more than lift their heads above the surface. They came up mouths wide open, and dropped back again in the most impotent manner. Where there is any depth of water, a trout will jump several feet into the air; and where there is ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... footpaths, and access to the houses is obtained by three or four loose planks stretching across the open festering gutters. As a natural result, small pox and cholera commit yearly ravages amongst the populace. Another great evil against good sanitation, exists in the shallowness of their graves. The Japanese have also a ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the mind to (as they ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... college presidents, and men who under the old regime had been in high walks of life. Occasionally some conservative newspaper or magazine would praise him and his company highly; but he knew the shallowness of all the patter of praise. He knew that he paid for it in one way or another, and he grew cynical; and in his lonely afternoons on the river, often he laughed at the whole mockery of his career, smiled ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... the evil effects of speculation and newspaper reading is, that people have got in the way of not thinking much for themselves; of regarding as truth whatever is printed, and of not opening their eyes wide enough to discover the shallowness of the reasonings and falsehoods that are put forth at the behests of speculators, or of those who are managing corporations for speculative purposes. The American people have had an amazing experience in losses from following advice thus plentifully and freely given; nevertheless, ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... encountered governmental hostility in the unfriendliness of Bonaparte, whose rejection alike of Gall and of Fulton, who wished to introduce steam navigation, demonstrated that great military and political ability may co-exist with great shallowness of mind in reference to all things new, original, and philanthropic. So it has always been, and so ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... under her feigning, an undercurrent of watchful pride and passion, of which her model was destitute. The last of the circle was a fair-haired, broad-shouldered lad, who stood apart from the others, big, shy, silent:—but he was earnest amid their shallowness, noble amid their hollowness, and devoted amid their fickleness. How he gazed on the arch, haughty girl, with her lilies and roses, her pencilled brows, her magnificent hair magnificently arranged, with her rich silk and airy lace, and muslin folded and gathered and falling into lines which ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... chest can get the same kind of cortege round his tent. These people, who hung upon Him thus, were those of whom He had afterwards to say that it would be 'more tolerable for Sodom, in the day of judgment, than for them.' But though He knew the shallowness of the impression, He was not deaf to the misery; and, with power which knew no weariness, and sympathy which had no limit, and a reservoir of healing virtue which the day's draughts had not emptied by a hairs-breadth, He healed them ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... from Porto Bello, Morgan organised another expedition with which he sailed into the Gulf of Maracaibo. His ships could not proceed far on account of the shallowness of the water, but by placing his men in the canoas he penetrated to the end of the Gulf. On the way he sacked Maracaibo, a town which had been sacked on two previous occasions—the last time by L'Ollonais only a couple of years before. Morgan's men tortured ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... to the Ambassador if we desired, but unofficially we were warned to think twice before we took such a step, the hint being thrown out that it would be better for us to refrain from talking to him unless first questioned. The shallowness of the official decree was vividly brought home to us when we were forcibly confined to barracks, and this frequently occurred while the ambassadorial visitor was in ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... manner of reaction to the phenomena he represents, the whole of his alleged "naturalistic philosophy," stems directly, not from Zola, Flaubert, Augier and the younger Dumas, but from the Greeks. In the midst of democratic cocksureness and Christian sentimentalism, of doctrinaire shallowness and professorial smugness, he stands for a point of view which at least has something honest and courageous about it; here, at all events, he is a realist. Let him put a motto to his books, and it ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... that we arrived in the wake of the stranger we tacked and stood directly after her; and we had not been on the new tack more than ten minutes when I found, to my great gratification, that the Dolphin, despite the exceeding shallowness of her hull, was quite as weatherly a vessel as the chase, which was now nearly four miles ahead of us. But it was not until we had been in direct pursuit of her for a full hour that I was able to assure myself that we were undoubtedly gaining ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... was with great difficulty I could reach the shore. At another time, when swimming over to the small island, a shovel-nosed shark, which, as well as alligators, abound in those seas, struck me in the thigh, just as my foot could reach the bottom, and grounded itself, from the shallowness of the water, as I suppose, so that its mouth could not get round towards me. The blow I felt some hours after making the shore. By repeated practice, I at length became a pretty dexterous swimmer, and amused myself by passing from one island to ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... called in to relieve; though by this very means, like the dog and the shadow in the fable, they lost both aims with me; for I never was deceived in one rule, which I made early; to wit, that the stillest water is the deepest, while the bubbling stream only betrays shallowness; and that stones and pebbles lie there so near the surface, to point out the best place to ford ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... This shallowness has no part in Byron himself. His weariness was a genuine outcome of the influence of the time upon a character consumed by passion. His lot was cast among spent forces, and, while it is no hyperbole to say that he was himself the most enormous ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... the body leant forward till the head descends nearly to the feet when the spine and knees are extended. In the flat plunge, the swimmer must fling himself forward in an inclined direction, according to the depth or shallowness of the water; when he touches the bottom, he must rise in the same manner ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... to come to the surface touchingly in his old age. Miss Charpentier, or Carpenter, as she was called, with her vivacity and quaint foreign speech "caught his heart on the rebound"; there can be no doubt that, in spite of a certain shallowness of character, she made him a good wife, and that his affection for her deepened steadily to the end. The young couple went to live at Lasswade, a village near Edinburgh, on the Esk. Scott, in whom the proprietary instinct was always very strong, took great pride in the pretty little ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... of their antics, but Americans just from farms, workshops, commercial pursuits, and the back woods and country villages of the north, are not of the material that foreign officials are made of, and in trying to imitate them they only show their shallowness. Do not, I beg of you, change one particle from what you have been as a private soldier, unless it is to have your pants fit better, and wear a collar. Of course, you will be thrown among officers more than you have before. Imitate their better qualities, ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... of the French Academy of Sciences deals with Mr. Darwin as the first Napoleon would have treated an "ideologue;" and while displaying a painful weakness of logic and shallowness of information, assumes a tone of authority, which always touches upon the ludicrous, and sometimes passes the limits ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxiety and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man. The rest of the population was landless and, except by working directly or indirectly for the Secure, had no legal right to exist. And such was the shallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such the stifled egotism of all our feelings before the Last Days, that very few indeed of the Secure could be found to doubt that this was the natural and only conceivable order ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... risen suddenly before me, I could not have been more astounded. It was a note from her,—and such a note!—full of love, suffering, and humility,—poured out of a heart so deep and tender and true, that the shallowness of my own seemed utterly contemptible, in comparison with it. I cannot tell you what was written, but it was more than even my most cruel and exacting pride could have asked. It was what would once have made me wild with joy,—now it almost maddened me with despair. I, who had often talked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... spirits, which are indeed one of the greatest of earthly blessings, often play around the most earnest thought and the tenderest affection, and with far more grace than when they are united with the shallowness and hardness of him who is, in the sight of God, a fool. It were a strange notion, that we could never be merry without intoxication, yet not stranger than to think that mirth is the companion only of folly or of sin. But, setting God in Christ before us, then the conscience ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... label and overlooking the thing, of seeing intellectually instead of seeing emotionally, accounts for the amazing blindness, or rather visual shallowness, of most civilised adults. We do not forget what has moved us, but what we have merely recognised leaves no deep impression on the mind. A friend of mine, a man of taste, desired to make some clearance in his gardens, encumbered as they were with a multitude of trees; unfortunately ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... hunger for learning, her own strength and weakness, and while she had lost to the Widow Plosell, she had clearly seen that it was not her fault but Gus Carline's meagreness of mind and shallowness of soul. Instead of losing her confidence, she had found her ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... along shore was more westward; and this, with the increasing shallowness of the water, made me apprehend that the Gulph would be found to terminate nearly as represented in the old charts, and disappoint the hopes formed of a strait or passage leading out at some other part of Terra Australis. At four o'clock, after ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... unpractised thoughts, by the confidence it has in the guidance and protection of its teacher. To acquire and retain the proper ascendancy over the mind of a child, two things are essential, ample knowledge and entire honesty. Shallowness and pretension may mislead for a while. But to hold a child firmly and permanently, the teacher must abound in knowledge, and must have thoroughly ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... man of sense with all his fanaticism One of his sayings is preserved "Odious is contentiousness in Kings, more odious vexation in judges uncomprehending a case; yet more odious is shallowness of doctors in religions and most odious are avarice in the rich, idleness in youth, jesting in age and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... disposable for service in that quarter is quite inadequate to effectually guard the line, even at those points where the incursions are usually made. An experiment of an armed vessel on the Rio Grande for that purpose is on trial, and it is hoped that, if not thwarted by the shallowness of the river and other natural obstacles, it may materially contribute to the protection of the herdsmen ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... something desperate, but at last I would come up smiling, calm in the faith that my life was deeper, richer for the experience, and that yours was, too. Or if it proved that yours was not, I should be amused at the shallowness of the Claire that was, for having been so simple a dunce as to imagine that you were worth while. I should thank you for teaching the present Claire to forsake that shallow one, and should find you a rung on my ladder ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... manner puzzled Joyce. It seemed to her that Lucy attached immense importance to so trivial a thing as a mourning veil, yet she could not feel that this was all girlish frivolity and shallowness. Something in the child's whole manner disputed such a suggestion. Neither was her attitude towards Nate quite clear. She said she could not forgive, yet instinctively Joyce felt that neither did she entirely condemn. Could it be that deep within her she not only forgave, ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... .' Beauchamp hesitated to name the number of hours. He stood divided between a sense of the bubbling shallowness of the life about him, and a thought, grave as an eye dwelling on blood, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Famagusta, the bay and roads of Larnaka, the roads of Limasol, which latter were greatly improved by the opening of an iron pier in 1882, and the small harbour of Paphos (Kuklia). The great disadvantage of all these harbours and roadsteads is the shallowness of the water for some distance from the land; this has the effect of raising a great deal of surf when the wind blows on shore, and also of compelling vessels of any size to anchor at a considerable distance out, thus making the operations of landing and embarking cargo both tedious and expensiue. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... British government steamer made its first trip in November 1900. On the other great lakes and on most of the navigable rivers steamers were plying regularly before the close of the 19th century. However, the shallowness of the water in the Niger and Zambezi renders their navigation possible only to light-draught steamers. Roads suitable for wheeled traffic are few. The first attempt at road-making in Central Africa on a large scale was that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... eagerness to finish things shows weakness. It certainly leads to shallowness, "Without haste, without rest" was Goethe's motto. I have heard of a woman who began to study botany at ninety. That shows a mind so trained and cultivated that the soil could not be exhausted with age. How good it was that ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end; attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Henry Morgan and twelve hundred men, packed closely in their canoes; they never stopped, saving now and then to rest their stiffened legs, until they had come to a place known as Cruz de San Juan Gallego, where they were compelled to leave their boats on account of the shallowness of the water. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... mistake that would suppose the man who has thus multiplied the objects of his exertion to be of necessity superficial; superficial, that is, in the sense of shallowness or ignorance. Ordinary minds are bound by fetters, no doubt. Custom has rendered the pursuit of more than one idea all but impossible to them, and the vulgar adage of "Jack of all trades, master of none," applies to them in full force. But it must be remembered ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... disappeared, evidently finding its way out underground. Climbing the cross wall, from the top Smoke saw the lake beneath him. Unlike any mountain lake he had ever seen, it was not blue. Instead, its intense peacock-green tokened its shallowness. It was this shallowness that made its draining feasible. All about arose jumbled mountains, with ice-scarred peaks and crags, grotesquely shaped and grouped. All was topsyturvy and unsystematic—a Dore nightmare. So fantastic and impossible ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... an amount of thought and philosophy to which only a very elaborate analysis would do justice. It is a book of very high merit. We hope its reception will be such as to induce the author to continue it. Its neglect would be a mark of the shallowness of the age and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... in and escape by swimming towards St. Appollonia, which you will reach in a wretched condition, not knowing where to turn to next. You must remember that the leads are slippery, and that if you were to fall into the canal, considering the height of the fall and the shallowness of the water, you would most certainly be killed if you could swim like sharks. You would be crushed to death, for three or four feet of water are not sufficient to counteract the effect of a fall from such a height. In short, the best fate you can expect is to find yourselves ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... treeless, the forests for which Dalmatia was once famous having been cut down by the Venetian ship-builders or wantonly burned by the Uskok pirates, while every attempt at replanting has been frustrated by the shallowness of the soil, the frequent droughts, and the multitudes of goats which browse on the young trees. The dreary expanse of the Bukovica, lying between Zara and the Bosnian frontier, is, without exception, the most inhospitable ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think. Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh—soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime—it is free also. You may choose which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now glorifying,—and of its opposite ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... immediately. You see it isn't everybody who is so lukewarm, so anaemic, as to make a cheerful old maid. Cheery old maids are the condemnation of modern English womanhood Their frequency in England shows the shallowness of the average modern woman's passion. Among all warm-blooded peoples old maids are known to be bitter, resentful, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... generations of tumultuous struggle. Oftener had the Shah been seen racing for his life on a Arab of the Hedjas, than eating "dillecrout"[1] in peace, or dealing round a card-table grand crosses of the Dooraunee order. The very origin of Affghan royalty fathoms the shallowness of the water on which it floated. Three coincidences of luck had raised Ahmed to the throne. One dark night his master Kouli Khan, for the benefit of all Asia, had his throat cut. This Kouli, or Nadir ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... had some hope of a more favorable hearing in the future. But he had no conception of any under-current of feeling in Margaret Adair. She had always seemed to him so frank, with a sweet, maidenly frankness, so transparent—without shallowness, that he was thrown into despair when she dismissed him. He was singularly ignorant of the nature of women, and more especially of young girls. His mother's proud, upright, rather inflexible character, conjoined with great warmth of affection and rare ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... of it. I can bear it, since it gives the preciousness of seeing people as they are, their shallowness and their shams. Is there anything genuine in this every-day world? Really, each day I see something ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... the periogues on very well; the day was however so warm that several of the men worked with no clothes except round the waist, which is the less inconvenient as we are obliged to wade in some places owing to the shallowness of the river. At seven miles we reached a large sandbar making out from the north. We again stopped for dinner, after which we went on to a small plain on the north covered with cottonwood where we ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... arrangements, in our plans of life, in our schemes of business, we become, without relinquishing the path of duty, more moderate in pursuit, and more indifferent about the issue. Here also we learn to correct the world's false estimate of things, and to "look through the shallowness of earthly grandeur[104];" to venerate what is truly excellent and noble, though under a despised and degraded form; and to cultivate within ourselves that true magnanimity, which can make us rise superior to the smiles or frowns of this world; that dignified composure of soul which no earthly incidents ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... pictures of manners are true, but not sufficiently elevated above the range of every-day life; he has exhausted the surface of life; and as there is little progression in his dramas, and every thing turns usually on the same point, this adds to the impression of shallowness and ennui, as characteristic of the existing state of society. Willingly would he have abolished masks altogether, but he could hardly have compensated for them out of his own resources; however, he retained only a few of them, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... lower classes, for they seldom fail to give a certain character of rude poetry to their thoughts. Perhaps also this same observation may explain the sterility of the salons, their emptiness, their shallowness, and the repugnance felt by men of ability for bartering their ideas for such ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... grove, at a little distance, looks like a big handful of flowers set in a cup to be kept fresh—a tuft of goldenrods. Its feeding-streams are exceedingly beautiful, notwithstanding their inconstancy and extreme shallowness. They have no channel whatever, and consequently are left free to spread in thin sheets upon the shining granite and wander at will. In many places the current is less than a fourth of an inch deep, and flows with so little friction it is scarcely visible. Sometimes there is not a single ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... blow in the wind and frost had wholly left for the season; to balance this there have been two brief snow squalls, three deluges that washed even big beans out of ground, and a scorching drought that reduced the brooks, unsheltered by leafage, to August shallowness. But to-day has been entirely lovable and full of the promise that after all makes May the garden month of the year, the time of perfect faith, hope, and charity when we may ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... very clear jelly is desired, filter it through a piece of cheese cloth previously wrung out of hot water. Boil the juice,—rapidly at first, but more gently as it becomes thickened,—until of the desired consistency. The time required will vary with the quantity of juice, the shallowness of the dish in which it is boiled, and the heat employed. One hour at least, will be required for one or two quarts of juice. When the juice has become considerably evaporated, test it frequently by dipping a few drops on a plate to cool; and when it jellies ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... holiness acknowledged himself a sinner, went away justified rather than the other. It is probably true that the ordinary man to-day is not worrying about his sins: but if so, the fact proves nothing except the secularity of his ideals and the shallowness of his sense of spiritual issues. It means, in short, that he has not taken seriously the standard of Christ. For the measure of a man's sin is simply the measure of the contrast between his character and the character ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... story, is a defect which she would hardly have tolerated at a later date. Nevertheless, we think her admirers may be satisfied with this example of her youthful style. The charm with which she manages to invest a simple ingenuous girl like Catherine, the brightness of Henry Tilney—even the shallowness of Isabella and the boorishness of John Thorpe—are things we part from with regret. And in parting with our friends at the end of one of her novels, we part with them for good and all; they never re-appear in another ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... vulgarity and coarseness of the account of Boswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a great writer ... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,' and so forth, in which the shallowness of the analysis of Boswell's character matches the puerile rudeness of the terms. Here again, is a sentence about Montesquieu. 'The English at that time,' Macaulay says of the middle of the eighteenth century, 'considered a Frenchman who talked about constitutional checks and fundamental ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... really the 'twice-born' who have sounded the depths of the human heart, and have been the greatest religious leaders. And so far from the sense of the need of repentance being the sign of a diseased mind, the decreasing consciousness of sin in our day may only prove the shallowness of the modern mind. What men need of religion is power. And there is a danger of people to-day losing a sense of the dynamic force of ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... more freely to the use of sporting rifles and ammunition. Another element also in the less clean punctures of the short and cancellous bones was probably the less accurate and hard shooting of the Mauser rifles as they became worn; the bullets seemed to evidence this by the comparative shallowness of their rifle grooves, which, I take it, would mean less velocity and accuracy in flight. This would be of importance, since the clean puncture of cancellous bone was no doubt favoured by a high rate ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... tendency for passion to become strong, has yet arrived.[180] It may also be said that an indifference to sexual relationships, a tendency to attach no personal value to them, is often a predisposing cause in the adoption of a prostitute's career; the general mental shallowness of prostitutes may well be accompanied by shallowness of physical emotion. On the other hand, many prostitutes, at all events early in their careers, appear to show a marked degree of sensuality, and to women of coarse sexual fibre the career of prostitution has not been without attractions ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the difference in circumstances, the fuller, richer life that he must have led in these years of patronage and prosperity, accounts for a certain "shallowness and complacency" which distinguishes his work during this period as sharply from that which preceded as from that which followed it; and fine as is his accomplishment during these years, especially in portraiture, it includes ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... 148, in 1848, Binney expressed the view that the sediments of the Coal Period were marine rather than estuarine, and were deposited on the floor of an ocean, which was characterised by a "uniformity and shallowness unknown" in any oceanic area of the present day. -on marshes of Coal period. -on coal ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... that I have lost or feel uncertain about.' And his last written utterance, signed 'Your Old Niebuhr,' contains a lament that 'depth, sincerity, originality, heart and affection are disappearing,' and that 'shallowness and arrogance are becoming universal.' After all allowances for whatever of defect, one can well point to such a character as an illustrious example of true and ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... water, we again weighed: the serenity of the weather did not long continue, but soon increased to a brisk gale, accompanied by thunder, lightning and rain; we were driven with great impetuosity through the narrow channel between the bar and the shore, and from the shallowness of the water, the rollers continually broke over our heads, threatening our destruction every moment. Providentially we surmounted these dangers, and at 5 P.M. entered the river, which is interspersed with ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... find it deeper or shallower," said the Shining Ones, "according to the depth or shallowness of your belief in the King of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... it is a vulgar catch-penny little book, made up, like Peter Pindar's razors, to sell. To me it seems that to dismiss even the wildest and foolishest opinion which makes way, as if it were a mere absurdity that does not deserve notice, is to show a certain flippancy and shallowness. Do not all thoughtful men pass through certain stages of intellectual growth, and are not the convictions of our youth held very differently from those which we find ourselves swayed by in our later years? The beliefs which the multitude take up with are such as the untrained ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... literature.'" In the same magazine for June, 1874, Paul Hamilton Hayne condemned severely the provincial literary criticism which had prevailed, — "indiscriminate adulations, effervescing commonplace, shallowness and poverty of thought." "No foreign ridicule," he said, "however richly deserved, nothing truly either of logic or of laughter, can stop this growing evil, until our own scholars and thinkers have the manliness and honesty to discourage instead of applauding such manifestations of artistic ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... at none of the cities and towns now, and only set down the rivers and main features, as they continued their steady journey day after day for all of a week. At the end of that time the increasing shallowness of the river, the many sand bars and the nature of the discolored, rolling waters, made them sure they were approaching the mouth of the great Platte River, which, as they knew, rose far to the west in ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... might be given of the shallowness of the Indian's mind. In his student days he will often slave at his books to an extent almost unparalleled in any other student world. But when he has attained the goal and secured his diploma, which is the summit of his ambition, the number of students who make ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... in which we now embarked were very small, owning to the shallowness of the river. The officers, assembled here from different parts of the country, detained us a whole day in order to have an opportunity of laying their several complaints before our physician, at the recommendation of Van-ta-gin, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... the erroneousness and shallowness of this conception of his faith was dimly perceptible to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and he knew that when, without the slightest idea that his forgiveness was the action of a higher power, he had surrendered directly to the feeling of forgiveness, he had felt more ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... mouth of the Rusizi, they pushed up it a short distance, but were stopped by its shallowness, it not being navigable for anything but the smallest canoes. It, however, abounds in crocodiles, though not one ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... continues down to what Schwatka calls Marsh Lake. The miners call it Mud Lake, but on this name they do not appear to be agreed, many of them calling the lower part of Tagish or Bove Lake "Mud Lake," on account of its shallowness and flat muddy shores, as seen along the west side, the side nearly always travelled, as it is more sheltered from the prevailing southerly winds. The term "Mud Lake" is, however, not applicable to this lake, as only a comparatively small part of it is shallow or ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue
... references. The most satisfactory group he describes is that of the traumatic psychoses and there he follows Meyer's admirable study. On the other hand, in introducing the Dementia praecox group, he makes no specific mention of any one of the cardinal symptoms of disassociation or shallowness of affect, scattering of thought, and delusions or hallucinations. His nearest approach is when he says: "Variations in the way of excitement, with dullness and paranoidal excitement are seen during the course of the disease." This is followed by the description of a case which he says ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... challenges belief He has an inscrutable face Very fertile in resource I am loath to believe It is essentially undignified Example is so contagious I am not in her confidence Taken in the aggregate It is a reproof to shallowness There is a misconception here I strongly suspect it so He was covered with confusion It was a just rebuke A pleasing instance of this It lends dignity to life She has a desultory liking for music It seems incredible A kind of detached ideal It blunts the finer sensibilities Beyond ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... and our admiral promptly attacking it, took possession, and levelling it in many places, brought the flotilla over its ruins. Soon afterwards, however, the further progress of the fleet was arrested by the shallowness of the water; but our admiral, knowing the anxiety you must be feeling, dispatched me to inform you of this, and to assure you that he waits but the rising of the tide and a favourable wind to ...
— The Lily of Leyden • W.H.G. Kingston
... with a Protestant throne? is their divided allegiance perilous or not to a Protestant government? are their religious prejudices consistent with the rights of the national religion? We have now the melancholy proof of the shallowness of all the declamation on the subject. We see that power has been used only for public disturbance; that pledges are scoffed at; and that, in the fifteenth year of this boasted conciliation, Ireland is more turbulent, faction ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... long lines, the difficulty of rendering rivers navigable, which in the winter are swelled into impetuous torrents; the want of population along the greater part of the distances to be cut; the differences of elevation; and, above all, the shallowness of the water on all the extremities of the cuts projected, thus only affording admission to small vessels, are among the impediments which, for the time being ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... I turning back Attila he gave new power to the arm of Leo X. His Parnassus and School of Athens seemed to make philosophy easy for the people. Indeed, it is from them that he has reaped his rich reward, for while the Pharisees of art pick flaws in him, point out what they find of shallowness and of insincerity, the people love him more than any other artist has been loved. It is for them that he worked, and on every labor one might read as it were his motto, "I will not offend even one ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... shallowness of the river at this season, and to the rapids, the steam-boat is unable to go up the whole way to Peterborough, and a scow or rowboat, as it is sometimes termed—a huge, unwieldy, flat- bottomed machine—meets the passengers ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the end of June. The mafouk, or king's chief minister of the place, gave them at first a cordial reception, but soon showed hostility, when he learnt that they had no intention of purchasing slaves. Soon after, they entered the Congo, which much disappointed their expectations, on account of the shallowness of its channel. The river, however, was then at a low ebb; its banks were marshy, and its waters moved slowly and silently between forests of mangrove trees. The air was filled with the discordant croak of innumerable parrots, diversified somewhat by the notes of a few singing ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... standards, government, and ideals of his town, his city, and his country. Civic conscientiousness burned strong within him; and he fought to develop and to maintain breadth of public view and sanity of popular ideals. Blind patriotism was impossible for this great American: he exposed the shallowness of popular enthusiasms and the narrowness of rampant spread-eagleism, without regard for consequence to himself or his popularity. What a tribute to his personality that, instead of suffering, he gained in popularity by his honest and downright outspokenness! He wielded the ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... means to ascertain how pupils have been taught; they ought never to be allowed to become the end for which pupils are taught. Teaching with a view to them lowers the teacher in the eyes of his pupils; learning with a view to them is apt to produce shallowness ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... general practice only a few cows were kept on the Marsh farms, for, owing to the shallowness of the dykes, it was difficult to prevent their straying. However, Joanna boldly decided to fence all the Further Innings. She could spare that amount of grazing, and though she would have to keep down the numbers of her sheep till after she had bought Great Ansdore, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... better; some of the large stones likewise might be removed when the water is low, which is expeditiously done by digging a large hole by the side and undermining them; when they are rolled over and buried. But to improve the passage materially, appears to me to be impracticable, from the shallowness of the water, and the rapidity of the current in many of the rivers. We saw that beautiful phenomenon called the 'Aurora Borealis,' or the northern lights, on most clear evenings, consisting of long columns of clear white light, shooting across the heavens with ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... a farewell nod. She was not hurt over the ill-bred manner in which she had been treated. She was disgusted with the other girl's utter shallowness. She was also visited by a sense of dull disappointment. Hurrying to overtake her own party, she discovered she was still carrying the freshman's golf bag. In the annoyance of the moment she had forgotten all about it. Bravely ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... don't know." (As good as it used to?) "No, I don't think so." (What is the difference?) "There is no difference." (What did I ask you?) "The difference." (The difference between what?) "You did not say." In this the shallowness of her comprehension and thinking is well shown, and it seems here again perhaps justifiable to formulate the main defect as one of attention, which prevents completion of a complicated process of comprehension. A feature of further interest in this case is that automatic intellectual processes, ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... surface the Netherland statesmen saw and pondered well. What lurked beneath, they surmised as shrewdly as they could, but it was impossible, with plummet and fathom-line ever in hand, to sound the way with perfect accuracy, where the quicksands were ever shifting, and the depth or shallowness of the course perpetually varying. It was not easy to discover the intentions of a government which did not know its own intentions, and whose changing policy was controlled by so ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley |
