"Shortsighted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... result of used-up matter returning into the circulation, and reaching even the brain and central parts of the nervous system. The cure is gained when the defective organs are brought to act well. It is shortsighted action to deal with the kidneys alone in this trouble. They often fail because they are overloaded through the failure of lungs and skin to do their part. First, it is well to act on the lungs by gentle rubbing with ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... take the greatest interest in you, charming young lady, and in your country, but I have an orderly mind and would be really pleased to see those corners straightened out. Use your influence, which I am sure must be great, with that shortsighted body of gentlemen, your ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... with their usual effective, good-humored, shortsighted common sense, with few pauses for inquiry, and with a characteristically indifferent grasp on the ultimate trend of things, have our politicians brought us. Our politicians, I say, and not our people, because one of the distinctive features of the Revolution so ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... get up again and look down from her foothold of sunshine, down and away at the patterned, level earth, with its villages and its smoke and its energy. So shortsighted the train seemed, running to the distance, so terrifying in their littleness the villages, with ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... of Mr. Bright's public life, the shortsighted selfishness of a landlords' parliament was afflicting the United Kingdom with a continuous dearth. Labour was starved, and capital was made unproductive by the Corn-laws. The country was tied to a system by ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... wheel! Life was not an eternal revolution through identical situations! Only the shortsighted, seeing no farther beyond, as they contemplated this movement, could imagine that it was the only one. The earth itself was the image of life. It ever rotated through determined spaces of time; days and seasons were repeated, as, in the history of mankind, greatness and decline ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... unsatisfactory raid, till the closing months of 1594 when once again a decisively damaging blow was dealt to Philip's naval schemes, the war had given ample occasion for stirring deeds of valour and brilliant feats of arms, but the scheme of operations throughout had been narrow and shortsighted. Though the honours still lay unmistakably with England, Spain had in fact been gaining ground, slowly remedying those defects in her organisation which had been so glaringly exposed by the breakdown of the Armada: and when ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... went on to mention the extraordinary facts that in some of the primary classes of German schools as many as 74 per cent, were shortsighted, and that in his class at Cassel, of the twenty-one pupils, eighteen wore spectacles, while two of them could not see the desk before them without ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... more than a tendency in the early days of the automobile to regard the selling of a machine as the real accomplishment and that thereafter it did not matter what happened to the buyer. That is the shortsighted salesman-on-commission attitude. If a salesman is paid only for what he sells, it is not to be expected that he is going to exert any great effort on a customer out of whom no more commission is to be made. And it ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... as drunk as an Owl. All this is mere Whig personality, the Owl being a Tory of the old school, and a friend of the ancient establishments of church and state. Nay, the same political party, although certainly the most shortsighted of God's creatures, taunt the Owl with being blind. As blind as an Owl, is a libel in frequent use out of ornithological society. Shut up Lord Jeffrey himself in a hay-barn with a well-built mow, and ask him in the darkness to catch you a few mice, and he will ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... know what I am talking about?" he repeated, with his eyes fixed attentively, not on my mother-in-law, but on me. "You shortsighted old woman! where are your spectacles? Look at her! Do you see no resemblance—the figure, not the face!—do you see no resemblance there to ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... as she went to her room, she got out her papers, and carefully reread every one of her stories. Being a little shortsighted, Mr. Bhaer sometimes used eye glasses, and Jo had tried them once, smiling to see how they magnified the fine print of her book. Now she seemed to have on the Professor's mental or moral spectacles also, for the faults of these poor stories glared ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... late become even much more friendly as a result of the English boycott of the International News Service and the exclusion of all the Hearst publications from circulation in Canada. Mr. Hearst has replied to the inconceivably shortsighted policy of the British authorities towards his news service in a series of forcible, full-page leading articles against the British censorship which must have seriously shaken the confidence, apart from this already weakened long ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... the case!" The saint's face held a mild rebuke. "I have left a few paltry rupees, a few petty pleasures, for a cosmic empire of endless bliss. How then have I denied myself anything? I know the joy of sharing the treasure. Is that a sacrifice? The shortsighted worldly folk are verily the real renunciates! They relinquish an unparalleled divine possession for a ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... forget that Heaven's clock is different from ours. In our day there are twelve hours, and in God's a thousand years. What seems long to us is to Him 'a little while.' Let us not imitate the shortsighted impatience of His disciples, who said, 'What is this that He saith, A little while? We cannot tell what He saith.' The time of separation looked so long in anticipation to them, and to Him it had dwindled to a moment. For two days, eight-and-forty hours, He delayed ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... Some of the neighbours thought that to drive two rails every so often, lay up the fences straight, and grub out the shrubs was the way, but father said they were vastly mistaken. He said that was such a shortsighted proceeding, he would be ashamed to indulge in it. You did get more land, but if you left no place for the birds, the worms and insects devoured your crops, and you didn't raise half so much as if you furnished the birds shelter and food. So he left mulberries in the fields and ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... Dominie," she used to say, wagging her head like a profound and thoughtful bird; "this is all very foolish and shortsighted on my part. Five years from now that gutter-godling of yours will be doing work that will make people forget poor little me and ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ointment for something like three months. Then it came and settled and bade fair to remain and thrive upon the fat of his land. Anna's mother came to live with them. He now realized that he had been extremely shortsighted. He should have stipulated in his advertisement that none except motherless ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... selfishness. I feel that I am incapable of working, of making something of myself, and yet I was not intended for a secluded, simple life, lonely enough to kill one, to which I have been condemned by your shortsighted affection.'" ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... dying advice, a maxim of policy, which sufficiently indicates the situation of the empire at that period; it was this—"To enrich the soldiery at any price, and to regard the rest of their subjects as so many ciphers." But, as a critical historian remarks, this was a shortsighted and self-destroying policy; since in no way is the subsistence of the soldier made more insecure, than by diminishing the general security of rights and property to those who are not soldiers, from whom, after all, the funds must be sought, by which the soldier himself ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... canaries," Rachel murmured, never taking her eyes off him. "I wonder, I wonder" she ceased, her chin upon her hand, still looking at him. A bell chimed behind them, and Richard raised his head. Then he opened his eyes which wore for a second the queer look of a shortsighted person's whose spectacles are lost. It took him a moment to recover from the impropriety of having snored, and possibly grunted, before a young lady. To wake and find oneself left alone with one was ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... where, so long as it stood, his wife and the twins would under any circumstances find shelter. Resentment against the Swiss, hatred, and jealousy, had made him a knave, and at the same time the most shortsighted of fools. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... entrance, approached from within, form an impenetrable stockade. Must the poor little creatures perish? Is the flower heartless enough to murder its benefactors, on which the continuance of its species depends? By no means is it so shortsighted! A few tiny drops of nectar exuding from the center table prevent the visitors from starving. Presently the fertilized stigmas wither, and when they have safely escaped the danger of self-fertilization, the pollen hidden under their lobes ripens and dusts afresh ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... boy," sighed the old man, as he mused on what had just occurred. "Alas! that it should have been so long overshadowed. A milder course might have done better. Ah, me! we are weak and shortsighted mortals." ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... back to the North. You can't knife a man without him bearing the marks of it; and I learned in part why he was going back alone. The rest I guessed, by putting two and two together. You're a silly, selfish, shortsighted little fool, if my ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... it is true, comes much of the bad. Berlin is unquestionably the present goal for needy and unscrupulous adventurers of the worst sort. Not a few pessimists, native and foreign, have made the fact a text for dismal prognostications of the city's future degeneracy. Yet this is taking a shortsighted and unjust view of things. The great mass of the population is still sound to the core. The unsettled state of monetary and social relations cannot but be transitory, and compulsory education and military service cannot but operate in the future as they have done in the past. So long as the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... blackbeetle to perform strange and unholy evolutions in my sitting-room. Worst of all, I was victimised by the presence of a blackbeetle in a plate of clear soup served me at my club. I backed my bill, but it was too late, for I am very shortsighted. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... It was doubtless shortsighted and ungrateful in these nobles to attempt to deprive Caesar of his laurels and his promised consulship. He had earned them by grand services, both as a general and a statesman. But their jealousy and hatred ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... We lay very still wondering what they would think, and hoping that they would make no search for us. They could have tracked us in the snow quite easily, but we knew very well they would never think of it, for they were both shortsighted and ignorant of what the Red Indians do when they go tracking. To our surprise their voices came nearer and nearer, till they were at the edge of the clump, but on the side opposite to that in which ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... would hop on the table to pick up crumbs. The quantity of singing birds was very great, for the farmers and gardeners were less cruel and avaricious than they are now—though poorer. They allowed our pretty songsters to share in the bounties of providence. The shortsighted cruelty, which is too prevalent now, brings its own punishment, for, owing to the reckless destruction of birds, the equilibrium of nature is disturbed, insects increase to such an extent as materially to affect every description of crop. This summer ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... the floor of the basin, which was littered with the debris of explosions until it resembled an ice-floe under pressure. She made her way but slowly, and it looked continually as though she must break her legs. But the old lady persevered, bent and withered though she was, with her shortsighted eyes fixed on the rocks before ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... coincidences, which all religion and all poetry have taken for granted. And to three of these it is that I desire to call attention, persuaded as I am that the scientific progress of our day will make short work of all the spurious aestheticism and all the shortsighted utilitarianism which have cast doubts upon the intimate and vital connection between beauty and every other ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... their daughter, preferring their own happiness to hers. Others are so silly as to think no ordinary man good enough for her, and therefore, if they had their own way, would have her to become an old maid. Fortunately, such shortsighted people ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... from Kirilla Matveitch, had answered coldly that he had no intention of deceiving any one, and no idea of marrying, had risen, made his bow, and that was all.... Next day I set off to the Ozhogins'. The shortsighted footman leaped up from his bench on my appearance, with the rapidity of lightning. I bade him announce me; the footman hurried away and returned at once. 'Walk in,' he said; 'you are begged to go in.' I went into Kirilla Matveitch's study.... ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... engineer; I was in a manner a soldier by inheritance. My short sight, indeed, presented some little obstacle, but did not by any means discourage me, as I reckoned to supply that defect by coolness and intrepidity. I had read, too, that Marshal Schomberg was remarkably shortsighted, and why might not Marshal Rousseau be the same? My imagination was so warm by these follies, that it presented nothing but troops, ramparts, gabions, batteries, and myself in the midst of fire and smoke, an eyeglass in hand, commanding with the utmost tranquility. Notwithstanding, when ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... . Ah! heaven,—what is rash or wise, shortsighted or far-seeing, too fast or too slow, upon the profound and terrible question, "What is to be done with slavery?" You have been saying something about it, and I rather think, if I could see it, that I should ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... hat, of distinctive shape, chosen with reference to his own head rather than to the heads of some odd millions of fellow citizens. The story is told of his standing bare-headed in a hatter's shop, awaiting the return of a salesman who had carried off his own beloved head-gear, when a shortsighted bishop entered, and, not recognizing the peer, took him for an assistant, and handed him his hat, asking him if he had any exactly like it. Lord Ailesbury turned the bishop's hat over and over, examined it carefully inside and out, and gave it ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... had brought for lunch, and throwing them about. In trying to hit a boy who sat between him and Mr. Snelling's desk, he somehow or other miscalculated his aim, and to his horror, the sticky pellet flew straight at the bald spot on top of Mr. Snelling's head, as the latter bent his shortsighted eyes over a book before him, hitting it in the centre, and staying there ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... curious contrast between the political stagnancy and the great industrial activity. The great constitutional questions seemed to be settled; and the statesmen, occupied mainly in sharing power and place, took a very shortsighted view (not for the first time in history) of the great problems that were beginning to present themselves. The British empire in the East was not won by a towering ambition so much as forced upon a reluctant commercial company by the necessities of its position. The English race became ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... in the first place, by the Chamber of Deputies. As, in the event of the new Civil List being discussed, I was particularly anxious to avoid the question of the continuation of the court theatre being treated in the ignorant and shortsighted radical fashion, which was to be feared above all, I did not despair of making the acquaintance of some of the most influential among the new members of parliament. In this wise I found myself suddenly plunged into quite a new and strange world, and became acquainted ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... miseries—pain, poverty, suffering and death—are, as we know, the consequences, just and equitable, of original sin, it is a shortsighted faith and a defective vision that find in these crosses only chastisement for sin. Truly, they should not have been, had we never sinned; but as God, in His mercy, draws good out of evil, so has He made these inevitable ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... nose, and eyes set in a mass of wrinkles. His clothes did not fit him particularly well, and were ill cut, and his hat was decidedly shabby. He walked along peering through his glasses as if he were shortsighted, and occasionally even feeling his way with a cane which he carried. When he saw Gwen he hastened towards her with an ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... princes is shortsighted," he said; "the salvation of the Church must come from the Italian republic, as Leo XIII believes and wishes; but the Church will not be saved in the manner which this pious Machiavelli thinks. The revolution will make the Pope lose his last sou, with the rest of his patrimony. And it will be ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... mammas, were driven to despair; but at last they hit upon a remedy. They would be distinguished by hook or by crook, and the only way left now was always to go on foot. So they walked the pavement—wet or dry, nothing could induce them to enter the door of a carriage. Item: they gave up being shortsighted; the few who for reasons distinct from fashion could not resign the habit concealed it, as if it was a defect ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... it from me, Mrs. Hollister had connected! Uh-huh! Not with any last fall outfit, nor yesterday's. About day after to-morrow's, I should call it. And if there wa'n't zipp and scream to it, then I'm shortsighted in the eyes. My guess is that it's a mixture of the last word in Byzantine effects, with a Cleopatra girdle and a Martha Washington polonaise. Anyway, if there ain't much above the waist line but ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... well-known fact, that in revolutionary times the worst so frequently remain the victors. The counter-revolution which is wont to follow on the heels of revolution, and with a corresponding violence, is a compensation only to the most shortsighted. It allows the disease, the familiarizing of the people with the infringement of law, to continue, until the hitherto sound parts are attacked. Hence, a people should, if they would have it go well with them, in the changes ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving to-day a mind's eye that shall see, not the physical world, but the purpose of Life, and thereby enable the individual to work for that purpose instead of thwarting and baffling it by setting up shortsighted personal aims as at present. Even as it is, only one sort of man has ever been happy, has ever been universally respected among all the ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... extenuation of this decision, it may be said that the danger of war with France, which had forced the Adams Administration to double expenditures, had passed; and that Europe was at this moment at peace, though only the most sanguine and shortsighted could believe that continued peace was possible in Europe with the First Consul in the saddle. It was agreed, then, that the expenditures for the military and naval establishments should be kept at about $2,500,000—somewhat below the normal appropriation before the recent ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... to the shortsighted, the real TRUTH is this:—Justice reigns; the happiness of one person is not bought at the expense of another; the law of attraction brings us our own and holds to us our own in spite of all its efforts to get ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... and all of the essential mineral components of organic tissue. The problem of fertilization, therefore, consists of supplying any or all of these elements in which the soil is deficient. The aim of fertilization, as a rule, is merely to increase crop production. But this may prove to be not merely shortsighted, it may turn out to be a social crime. It is criminal, indeed, as a great many diseases are directly traceable to incomplete and ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... pardon. You will believe what I have imperfectly written, for you ever trusted my faith, if you have blamed my faults. I am now comparatively happy—a word from you will, make me blest. And Fate has, perhaps, been more merciful to both, than in our shortsighted and querulous human vision, we might, perhaps, believe; for now that the frame is brought low—and in the solitude of my chamber I can duly and humbly commune with mine own heart, I see the aspect of those faults which I once mistook for virtues—and ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thing in Northumberland.' PERCY. (feeling the stroke,) 'Sir, you may be as rude as you please.' JOHNSON. 'Hold, Sir! Don't talk of rudeness; remember, Sir, you told me (puffing hard with passion struggling for a vent,) I was shortsighted. We have done with civility. We are to be as rude as we please.' PERCY. 'Upon my honour, Sir, I did not mean to be uncivil.' JOHNSON. 'I cannot say so, Sir; for I DID mean to be uncivil, thinking YOU had been uncivil.' Dr. Percy rose, ran up to him, and taking him by the hand, assured him affectionately ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell |
