"Uninspired" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the vowels form the initials of a sentence in Latin and German, signifying, 'The house of Austria is to govern the whole world.'"[26] Notwithstanding the archidiaconal sneer, Frederick III.'s anagram came quite as near the truth as any uninspired prophecy that can be mentioned. In little more than sixty years after the Emperor's death, the house of Austria ruled over Germany, the Netherlands, Naples, Sicily, the Milanese, Hungary, Bohemia, the Spains, England and Ireland (in virtue of Philip II.'s marriage ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... occasionally were, satans at heart. It is essentially at variance with democracy, which it regards as a surrender to the selfish license of the lowest range of unregenerate human nature; and yet it is incompatible with hereditary monarchy, because the latter is based on uninspired or mechanical selection. The writings of Cotton Mather exhibit the peculiarities and inconsistencies of Puritanism in the most favorable and translucent light, for Mather was himself wedded to them, and of a most inexhaustible ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... and bad work alike. Even Pliny the younger, whose cultivation and literary taste place him high above the average literary level of his day, approves of the increase of this melancholy harvest of minor poetry declaimed by uninspired bards.[75] The effect was lamentable. All the faults of the suasoria and controversia made their appearance in poetry.[76] The poet had continually to be performing acrobatic feats, now of rhetoric or epigram, now of learning, or again in the description of blood-curdling ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... as much to the age as to the writer. In description he is too copious and detailed: his poems abound with long speeches: his parade of varied learning, his partiality for abstruse mythology, are just the natural defects of a lettered but uninspired epoch.' —North Pinder. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... away," says Dr Magee very justly, "and we become a race of independent beings, claiming as a debt the reward of our good works; a sort of contracting party with the Almighty, contributing nought to his glory, but anxious to maintain our own independence, and our own rights." The lips of uninspired man never spake more truth in one sentence. Let the aspiring moralist consider it in its nature and consequences. If he obtain humility by the meditation, he will feel the blessedness ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... the writer of this book is inspired, and that nothing can be learned of the meaning of an inspired book by studying uninspired books. I reply that no inspired book can be understood at all without a careful study of uninspired books. The Greek grammar and the Greek lexicon are uninspired books, and no man can understand a single one of the books of the New Testament without carefully studying both ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... piano, openly reproved thus before her friend, lifted her uninspired hands from the keys and spake. When she had ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... below the original when at its lowest grade, that same regard compels me to say that in yet more instances it rises with the same [to a degree] which I believe it is scarcely possible for any individual with the limited powers of uninspired man to surpass. This soaring tendency is particularly observable in the version of the Book of Job, which is certainly the most beautiful, is believed by many to be the most ancient, and is confessedly one of the ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... be assured that neither we nor the Reformed Presbytery, whose committee we are, claim Papal infallibility or Christian perfection; nor do we ask implicit faith in any uninspired documents. But we sincerely believe ourselves that the Auchensaugh Renovation and the Bond, to which the foregoing statements are prefixed, will be found on examination to be sound, faithful, and "in nothing contrary to ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... grave divine however would have liked to maintain, in Henry the Seventh's Chapel, that it was impossible to find, in many hundreds of pages dictated by the Holy Spirit, fifty or sixty chapters more edifying than any thing which could be extracted from the works of the most respectable uninspired moralist or historian. The leaders of the majority therefore determined to shun a debate in which they must have been reduced to a disagreeable dilemma. Their plan was, not to reject the recommendations of the Commissioners, but to prevent those recommendations from being ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the adherents of the Baconian faith. The tasks which the greatest of our poets set himself when near the age of thirty, and to which he presumably brought all the powers of which he was then conscious, were the uninspired and pitilessly prolix poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and THE RAPE OF LUCRECE, the first consisting of some 1,200 lines and the second of more than 1,800; one a calculated picture of female concupiscence and the other a still more calculated picture of female chastity: the two alike abnormally fluent, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... scrutiny of Semitic ideas and values in present civilization, which plays no small part in the dilettante naturalism of the moment. Thus the nature and place of man, under the influence of these "uninspired" literatures and cultures, became more and more important as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceased to be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendence of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance of his creatures, which inform both the Jewish-Christian ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... That is the Republic's way of continuing the craft that was the serious pleasure of kings. But there is now no personal element to give it the vital touch. There is no Gabrielle d'Estrees, nor Henri IV; no Medici, no Louis XIV, no Pompadour. All is impersonal, uninspired. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... the great mass, nor of the queer periphery, nor of uninspired devilgrass. It was a green unknown in living plant before; a glassy, translucent green, the green of a cathedral window in the moonlight. By contrast, the widening circle about it seemed subdued and orderly. The fantastic ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... dinner, chatted with him awhile, and smoked away at his pipe. He wanted to talk with Hayne about some especial matter, and he found it hard work to begin. The more he saw of his patient the better he liked him: he was interested in him, and had been making inquiries. Without his pipe he found himself uninspired. ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... father, and cousin to my heroic uncles. He represented the finest phases of pioneering. "Matt Kelley," "Rob Raymond" and "Jack Munroe," I knew and loved, and their presence in this labor war redeemed it from the sordid, uninspired struggle which such contests usually turn out to be. In my design these three ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... freely. In the form in which it finally appeared, it remains the noblest production of Washington's mind and heart; and has been pronounced by Alison, the eminent British historian, unequalled by any composition of uninspired wisdom. It is a political legacy which not only the countrymen of Washington, but the inhabitants of the civilized world ought to value as one of the most precious gifts ever bestowed by man upon his race. It is permeated with the immortal ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... the history of miracle is of inconstant power. St. Paul raises Eutychus from death, and his garments effect miraculous cure; yet he leaves Trophimus sick at Miletum, recognizes only the mercy of God in the recovery of Epaphroditus, and, like any uninspired physician, recommends Timothy wine for his infirmities. And in the second place, our own energies are inconstant almost in proportion to their nobleness. We breathe with regularity, and can calculate upon the strength necessary for common tasks. But the record of our best work, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... improvise upon my toilette, for they both looked up and saw me at that moment. So there I stood, like a stag at bay, with my nose unpowdered (Henry would say that a stag doesn't powder its nose, but you will know what I mean) wearing my dullest and most uninspired house-frock, and hurling silent anathemas ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... the modern age is organization, and it cannot organize in its religion, there is little to be hoped for in religion. Modern education is a machine. If the principle of machinery is a wrong and inherently uninspired principle—if because a machine is a machine no great meaning can be expressed by it, and no great result accomplished by it—there is little to be ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... grievous wrong, That man commits who uninspired presumes To sing the heavenly sweetness of their song— To paint the glorious tinting of their plumes— Plumes bright as jewels that from diadems Fling over golden thrones their diamond rays— Bright, even as bright as those ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... something to be ashamed of. If there was, heaven knows what it might have been, for their talk was ordinary enough. But Alvina liked to be with Miss Pinnegar in the kitchen. Miss Pinnegar wasn't competent and masterful like Miss Frost: she was ordinary and uninspired, with quiet, unobserved movements. But she was deep, and there was some secret satisfaction in her very ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... The absence of intolerable tension was enough to make her so. As for the society she was thrown with, after the wear of incessant subtleties and uncertainties there was something positively soothing in straightforward uninspired vulgarity. These people knew their own minds, if their minds were not worth knowing; and that was something. It seemed to her that her own mind was growing healthier every day; till, by the time Edith visited her, there was no need to feign recovery, for recovery had come. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... read three or four pages and then in irritation threw the play on to the floor, put out the candle, and drew the bedclothes over him; a little later, after thinking over it, he took the play up again and began to read it; then, getting angry with the uninspired tedious work, he again threw it on the floor and put out the candle. A little later he once more took up the play and read it, then he produced it ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... been classified as, 1st, sacred knowledge and religion; 2d, philosophy; 3d, social rules and caste organization; 4th, criminal and civil laws; 5th, systems of penance; 6th, eschatology, or the doctrine of future rewards. No uninspired or non-Vedic production has equal authority in India. We can only judge of its date by its relative place among other books. It applies Vedic names to the gods, though it mentions Brahma and Vishnu, but it makes no reference to the Trimurti. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... comparative merits of religion, as of law or government; and blind, indeed, must he be if he does not discern that, in neglecting to cherish the Protestant faith, or in too easily yielding to any encroachments on it, he is foregoing the use of a state engine more powerful than all the laws which the uninspired legislators of the earth have ever promulgated, in promoting the happiness, the peace, prosperity, and the order, the industry, and the wealth, of a people; in forming every quality valuable or desirable ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Elevator," will conceive of the shame and regret with which I thought of having upbraided our landlord about our rooms, of having stickled at small preliminaries concerning our contract for board, and for having altogether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me do him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after the Stella d'Oro at Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very sprightly. It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we know, and a poet who does it ought ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... thus (to link things up a little) a younger contemporary of the Indian Samudragupta. He was Ausonius: teacher of rhetoric, tutor to the prince Gratian, consul, country gentleman, large land-owner, and, in a studious uninspired reflective way, a goodish poet. Also a convert to Christianity, but unenthusiastic:—altogether, a dignified and polished figure; such as you might find in England now, in the country squire who has held important offices in India in his time, hunts and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the raw material, beneath the touch of Charley's wise hands, emerged a wondrous cosmos of biscuits, light as the heart of a boy. And Frank, singing a French ditty, created wheat cakes. His method struck me as poetic. He scorned the ordinary uninspired cook's manner of turning the half-baked cake. One side being done, he waited until the ditty reached a certain lilting upward leap in the refrain, when, with a dexterous movement of the frying-pan, he tossed the cake ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... for me*! [ADDITIONAL PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is "stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my ...
— Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books • Cory Doctorow
... to the classical school, and to its least liberal section. He regarded literary forms as imposed from without on the content of poetry, not as growing from within; passion and imagination he would reduce to the strict bounds of uninspired good sense; he placed Virgil above Homer, and preferred French tragedy to that of ancient Greece; from his involuntary admiration of Shakespeare he recoiled in alarm; if he admired Corneille, it was with many reservations. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the arguments contained in the Lectures have lost whatever novelty they may have possessed. All its predictions have been submitted to the formidable test of time. They appear to have stood it, so far, about as well as most uninspired prophecies; indeed, some of them require much less accommodation than certain grave commentators employ in their ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Arnold, Morris, Swinburne. The great "makers" have passed away, and there remain to us but certain highly dexterous word-artificers and melodists, a varied chorus of dainty, musical, scholarly, but mostly uninspired, writers of verse. We have passed the crest of the poetical wave, and are sunk into its trough. It is not unnatural, therefore, that we should, at this particular juncture, feel some misgivings. Finding no ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... widened two ways by Sir Walter Scott. The historical novel, which had been before his day either an essay in anachronism with nothing historical in it but the date, or a laborious and uninspired compilation of antiquarian research, took form and life under his hands. His wide reading, stored as it was in a marvellously retentive memory, gave him all the background he needed to achieve a historical setting, and allowed him to concentrate his attention on the actual telling ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... requested to have his luxuriant locks "trimmed," found himself reduced to a state of penal bullet-headedness before he could protest, and another sacrificed his whiskers and part of one ear to the hairdresser's uninspired scissors. For Leander's eyes were constantly turning to the front part of his shop, where his apprentice might come in at any moment with the answer to ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... the artists of the time were too insincere, too intent upon pleasing shallow-brained and frivolous courtiers, to produce much that was worth while. Great numbers of plays were written, it is true, but they were hopelessly dull imitations of classic models. Imitative and uninspired likewise were statues and paintings and poems. One merit they possessed. If a French painter lacked force and originality, he could at least portray with elegance and charm a group of fine ladies angling in an artificial pool. Elegance, indeed, redeemed ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the slave who pays, and baser prose— Hang uninspired patter! 'Tis in verse That angels praise, and fiends ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... at St. Paul's for the Queen's Jubilee. Went with Edy and Henry. Not at all adequate to the occasion was the ceremony. The Te Deum rather good, the sermon sensible, but the whole uninspired, unimpassioned and dull. The ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... have been free from persecution it was George Whitefield, bringing great masses of the people into the kingdom of God, wearing himself out for Christ's sake: and yet the learned Dr. Johnson called him a mountebank. Robert Hall preached about the glories of heaven as no uninspired man ever preached about them, and it was said when he preached about heaven his face shone like an angel's, and yet good Christian John Foster writes of Robert Hall, saying: "Robert Hall is a mere actor, and when he talks about heaven the smile on his face is the reflection of his own vanity." John ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... (Prov. xiii. 24), and "Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying" (Prov. xix. 18). Compare the Arab equivalent, "The green stick is of the trees of Paradise" (Pilgrimage i. 151). But the neater form of the saw was left to uninspired writers; witness "Spare the rod and spoil the child," which appears in Ray's proverbs, and is ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... More. So exalted was his character, so serene and admirable his temper, so full of harmony his whole intellectual constitution, that, irradiated at once by all the lights of religion and philosophy, and with clearer glimpses of the land of vision and the glories behind the veil than perhaps uninspired mortality ever partook of before, he seems to have reached as near to the full standard of perfection as it is possible for frail and feeble humanity to attain. Dr. Outram said that he looked upon Dr. More as the holiest ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... taught in the original language of the Bible came through inspiration, and needs inspi- ration to be understood. Hence the misappre- 319:24 hension of the spiritual meaning of the Bible, and the misinterpretation of the Word in some instances by uninspired writers, who only wrote 319:27 down what an inspired teacher had said. A misplaced word changes the sense and misstates the Science of the Scriptures, as, for instance, to name Love as merely 319:30 an attribute of God; ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... a sudden unweighed suggestion rather than a deliberate purpose, yet, certainly, as our church has well determined, proves "the infection of our nature, and has in it the nature of sin." Convinced that positive evil may not be committed to procure problematical good, and that no uninspired person should presume to think himself God's champion, unless placed in that station which visibly arms him with his authority, Evellin had often lamented this rash letter, as one of his secret faults. He now severely felt it also, as an imprudence, in having given vent to his angry ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... have received as truths—a method of proceeding which has not been adopted, and, in fact, could not have been, without a manifest absurdity, by those who profess to believe in the inspiration of Plato, Milton, Shakespeare, and other great, but, according to common opinion, uninspired men. All these and various other considerations which might be adduced seem to mark out the Bible, as being a book at least different from all other books, and to lead to the presumption that it may contain that knowledge of God which, as has been remarked in the earlier part of these "Thoughts," ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... credulous faith of childhood—for they are no less. Then there are particular passages in our literature, sacred and profane, which do their share at-upholding the belief in the supernatural, especially as connected with the uninspired foretelling of future events—"fortune-telling." The case of the Witch of Endor and her invocation of the spirit of Samuel, which is given in Holy Writ as an actual occurrence and no fable, of course takes precedence of all others in influence; ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... years B. C. the Scripture history closes, and for the remaining particulars of the Jewish history recourse must be had to uninspired writers, particularly to the books of the ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint and impotent as "the strengthless tribes of the dead" in Homer's Hades, before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a momentary valour. It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality that these collaborating ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... gems, even the most adverse thinkers admit, and above all else we should search for them, prize them, and use them. Study the Bible for the sake of its wonderful and sacred truth, catch the inspiration of its writers, and you will soon discriminate the inspired from the uninspired. With the statements of the true is necessarily more or less error; the Truth we want, the falsity we leave behind. Whatever is good and pure and ennobling is of God; whatever is evil, erroneous, degrading, is from ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... least save it from being judged by standards not applicable to it. It is not naively and unintentionally incongruous. To the modern reader it is dull because he has at hand far better compendia; it is uninspired no doubt: the theme did not lend itself to enthusiastic treatment; the obscurity and awkwardness of expression and the imitative phraseology betray a young unformed style. To analyze the art, however, would be to take the poem more seriously ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... get out of this?" the Judge demanded, coming upon Neil late one afternoon, poring over the uninspired pages of Mr. Thayer by the fading light. "What do ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... of men upon whose decision hung such momentous issues, the Council which met that evening at Westminster seemed alike unambitious in tone and uninspired in appearance. Some short time was spent in one of the anterooms, where Julian was introduced to many of the delegates. The disclosure of his identity, although it aroused immense interest, was scarcely an unmixed joy to the ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Nancy said. "I hate the way that the most uninspired ways of doing things turn out to be the best policy after all. I don't believe in stereotyped philanthropy, but I did think I had found a way around this problem of feeding ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... nonsense it is to be quarreling about whether he and his Father are of the same essence. The truths of Christianity and of Protestantism are found in the teachings of the anti-Nicene fathers, but we must remember that these were uninspired men, and therefore displayed no standard of truth. The term fathers, without qualification, includes a vast range, comprising a period of eleven hundred years, from Clemens to Bernard, from the Bishop of Rome ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... head waiter bowed before them, desolated to relate that the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so out all trooped into the starry midnight, falling the street with gay laughter, to be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed by the dull inhabitants of an uninspired world. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... fashion loom up over the river Yonne; not that the entrance is not pleasing: the reverse is actually the case, though one's way into the town lies through newly made roads. However, upon contemplation of the pleasant prospect of town and river, he would be an uninspired person indeed who would not be able to pick out the Cathedral of St. Etienne, with its singular reddish brown roof, from among its less imposing neighbours. It is the central building of the three, and it rises majestically above all, enhanced by ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... of the Presbyterians, saying, 'I should not dare to introduce Christianity itself with such cruelties, how much less for a surplice, and the name of a bishop.' If there could be an intermediate space between inspired, and uninspired writings, that space would be occupied by Leighton. No show of learning, no appearance, or ostentatious display of eloquence; and yet both may be shown in him, conspicuously and holily. There is in him something that must be felt, even as the ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... not willing to displeasure a man so esteemed as Mr. Richardson, here made an apology for his jesting, and said that, as to the Cambridge version, it was indeed faithful; and that it was no blame to uninspired men, that they did fall short of the beauties and richness of the Lord's Psalmist. It being now near noon, we crossed over the river, to where was a sweet spring of water, very clear and bright, running out ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... revolutionary troops possessed little more discipline than the Vendeans themselves and, being uninspired, as were the latter, by a feeling either of religion or of patriotic enthusiasm, they were no match for men who were willing to give their lives ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... Literary Society of Loughrea, under whose auspices Miss Gonne the other day delivered the rebel lecture quoted in the Killaloe letter. Our fellow-citizen speaks of "the spirit of revival that is abroad amongst you, of your new society rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the old, not uninspired, we may suppose, by the project of your being in the near future masters in your own house, the arbiters of your own destiny, for you will be governed by the men of your own choice." Side by side with this heart-felt utterance let ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... it implies a gross, harsh, and revengeful character in the executioner, that is eminently perplexing and incredible to those who expect to find an idea of justice in the government of the world, at least not materially below what is attained in the clumsy efforts of uninspired publicists. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... theory of Jeanne herself; her saints were true saints from Paradise. On the other hand it is manifest that visions of a bright light and 'auditions' of voices are common enough phenomena in madness, and in the experiences of very uninspired sane men and women. From the sensations of these people Jeanne's phenomena are only differentiated by their number, by their persistence through seven years of an almost abnormally healthy life, by their importance, orderliness, and ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... at Jerusalem, assumed a determinate character in the Greek tongue" ("Introduction to the New Testament," by S. Davidson, LL.D., p. 405. Ed. 1848). Thus we find learned Christians obliged to admit an uninspired collection as the basis of the inspired Gospel, and laying down a theory which is entirely incompatible with the idea that the Synoptic Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Our Gospels are degraded into versions of an older Gospel, instead of being the ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... nonsense. Claremont, however, thought otherwise, and ran his form accordingly. In repetition this was especially noticeable. Kennedy, a small boy with glasses, who was always word-perfect, would nervously mumble through Henry V's speech (they always learnt Shakespeare) in an accurate but totally uninspired way. Mansell would stand at the back of the form and blunder out blank verse, much of which was his own, and little of which was Shakespeare, but which certainly ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... the servant, nothing is left to hope for but discharge or death. I hit upon the idea of teaching him French; and accordingly, from Lichfield, I became the distracted master, and he the scholar—how shall I say? indefatigable, but uninspired. His interest never flagged. He would hear the same word twenty times with profound refreshment, mispronounce it in several different ways, and forget it again with magical celerity. Say it happened to be STIRRUP. 'No, I don't ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that too when we are not kept silent by a consciousness that we should lose credit by divulging the circumstance? And lastly, can we not only be content to return our enemies good for evil, (for this return, as has been remarked by one of the greatest of uninspired authorities,[95] may be prompted by pride and repaid by self-complacency) but, when they are successful or unsuccessful without our having contributed to their good or ill fortune, can we not only be content, but cordially ...
— 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
... us males at the fateful spring and autumn seasons denominated house-cleaning. Who can say whither the awful gods, the prophetic fates, may drive our fair household divinities; what sins of ours may be brought to light; what indulgences and compliances, which uninspired woman has granted in her ordinary mortal hours, may be torn from us? He who has been allowed to keep a pair of pet slippers in a concealed corner, and by the fireside indulged with a chair which he might ad libitum fill with all sorts of pamphlets and miscellaneous literature, suddenly finds ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the way explore With magic rites and heathen lore Obstructed and depress'd; Till Wisdom give the sacred Nine, Untaught, not uninspired, to shine, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... realization of heavenly truths. And there are mediums, too, from whose lips distil a lofty eloquence and a remarkable wisdom upon any or all subjects proposed, with a flow of extemporaneous poetry or of heavenly music which has never been equaled under such circumstances by uninspired mortals. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... Smooth technique is a fine thing in art; but I do not care whether a poem is written in conventional metre or in free verse, so long as it is unmistakably poetry. And no garments yet invented or the lack of them can conceal true poetry. Perhaps the Traditionalist might reply that uninspired verse gracefully written is better than uninspired verse abominably written. So it is; but why bother about either? He might once more insist that inspired poetry gracefully written is better than inspired poetry ungracefully written. And I should reply that it depended altogether on the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have made the late war, and that Victorian England was much nearer to Germany. ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... each hungry soul thy love would fill— Descending out of heaven, we wist not how— Comes by thy grace the holy vision now; While we whose hearts should with the message thrill Cry "Common and unholy!" to thee still, And, uninspired, in ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... you can make your little German town fascinating, when I can only make this vast, stupefying India sound dull? It wouldn't sound dull if I were telling you about it by word of mouth. I could make you see it then; but what can a poor uninspired one do with a pen, some ink, and ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... Authority in its most imposing exhibition, grave bishops, laden with the traditions and rivalries of particular nations or places, have been guided in their decisions by the commanding genius of individuals, sometimes young and of inferior rank. Not that uninspired intellect overruled the super-human gift which was committed to the council, which would be a self-contradictory assertion, but that in that process of inquiry and deliberation, which ended in an infallible enunciation, individual reason was paramount. ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... sooth to say, yon vocal grove Albeit uninspired by love, By love untaught to ring, May well afford to mortal ear An impulse more profoundly dear Than ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... south aisle of the chancel. A metal plate framed, and painted blue with gilt letters, was substituted. In 1845 that was replaced by one of brass, at the expense of several admirers of Ralegh's genius. It bears the uninspired words: 'Within the chancel of this church was interred the body of the great Sir Walter Ralegh, on the day he was beheaded in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, October 29, 1618. Reader, should you reflect on his errors, remember his many virtues, and ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... delight in enclosing her costliest essences in the most frail and perishable vessels:—but Sheridan was a signal exception to this remark; for, with a spirit so "finely touched," he combined all the robustness of the most uninspired clay. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... pursuits, when his nerves began to be unstrung, his hair to fall off, and his teeth to drop out, and he then composed sacred pieces entitling him to rank with—we were going to say Caedmon—had we done so we should have done wrong; no uninspired poet ever handled sacred subjects like the grand Saxon Skald—but which entitle him to be called a great religious poet, inferior to none but ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... careless, mindless, regardless; inattentive &c. 458; neglectful &c. 460; disregarding. unconcerned, nonchalant, pococurante[obs3], insouciant, sans souci[Fr]; unambitious &c. 866. unaffected, unruffled, unimpressed, uninspired, unexcited, unmoved, unstirred, untouched, unshocked[obs3], unstruck[obs3]; unblushing &c. (shameless) 885; unanimated; vegetative. callous, thick-skinned, hard-nosed, pachydermatous, impervious; hardened; inured, casehardened; steeled against, proof against; imperturbable &c. (inexcitable) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... when she had drunk her cup of pleasure, amusement, and excitement to the dregs—perhaps in ten years from now—she would at last reward Donnington's long faithful love and selfless devotion. And rather to her own surprise, during the half-hour which followed Tapster's uninspired proposal, Bubbles thought far more of Donnington than she did of the man who had just asked her ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... is truly his "medieval miracle of song," the supreme achievement of his genius. Here the poetry of the sublime reaches its highest point—the summit on which Dante is a lonely and unchallenged figure. "No uninspired hand," says Cardinal Manning, "has ever written thoughts so high in words, so resplendent, as the last stanza of the Divina Commedia." It was said of St. Thomas: "Post Summam Thomae nihil restat nisi lumen gloriae." It may be said of Dante: "Post Dantis Paradisum nihil restat nisi ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... hand of God I stand and so proclaim mine innocence. Though ye sinless hosts of heaven had foretold ye coming of this most desolating breath, proclaiming it a work of uninspired man, its quaking thunders, its firmament-clogging rottenness his own achievement in due course of nature, yet had not I believed it; but had said the pit itself hath furnished forth the stink, and heaven's artillery hath shook the globe ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... world for reading the uninspired is truly astonishing, and the hundred worst books may be found in every bookseller's window. Would that it were of books that Occam had written: "Non sunt multiplicandi praeter necessitatem"! The men who produce these unnecessary books perform a necessary function, as things are. Why should ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... day in 1825 when he first met a praying band of disciples, he had never to his recollection read one chapter in the Book of books; and for the first four years of his new life he gave to the works of uninspired men practical ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... was obliged at all costs to finish it within a limited time, I do not mind including this in the list of my uninspired compositions. But I was not displeased with it when it was done, more especially when it was played at the rehearsals given by the Dresden choral societies under my personal supervision. When, therefore, twelve hundred singers from all parts of Saxony gathered ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... they lack creative energy. They wear ready-made clothing, for example, without taking the trouble to improve upon it. The same goes for their homes. Mere uninspired adornment won't do, let me add. That's simply the mark of the nouveau upper middle class. One doesn't receive such ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... cannot do short division. I remember once at school having to do a piece of Latin prose about the Black Hole of Calcutta. It was a moving story as told in our prose book, and I had spent an interesting hour turning into fairly correct and wholly uninspired Latin—the sort of Latin I suppose which a small uneducated Roman child (who had heard the news) would have written to a school-boy friend. The size of the Black Hole was given as "twenty foot square." I had no idea how to render this idiomatically, but I knew that a room 20 ft. square contained ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... the great majority that denies because they are—dead!" he cried. "Smothered! Undivining! Living in that uninspired fragment which they deem the whole! Ah, my friend,"—and he came abruptly nearer—"the pathos, the comedy, the pert self-sufficiency of their dull pride, the crass stupidity and littleness of their denials, in the eyes ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... result is the decision of a Superior Power.[252] Although this elevated conception of the One God[253] is deeply impressed upon the Indian's mind, it is tainted with some of the alloy which ever must characterize the uninspired faith. Those who have inquired into the religious opinions of the uneducated and laborious classes of men, even in the most enlightened and civilized communities, find that their system of belief is derived from instruction, and not from ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... brief survey, it is manifest that none of the external divisions of the sacred text rest on any divine authority. They are the work of uninspired men, and are to be treated accordingly. For convenience of reference, a division of the Scriptures into chapters and verses is indispensable; and we may well rest contented with that which now prevails, though it cannot claim perfection. But ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... Science as the mortal enemy of all the Christian holds dear, and to take no rest until this infidel and atheistic foe has been utterly destroyed."* Dr. Woodrow maintained that the science of theology, as a science, is equally human and uninspired with the science of geology. He cited illustrations from the long warfare of science and theology to show that the church would make a great mistake if it attempted to shut off the human intellect from the search of ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the control of the able little cousin he had married. I had known all these men, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... or of following the sophistical arguments of the blind leading the blind. Much reliance is placed upon the history of the "early fathers," so called, who succeeded the Apostles, to settle the question. We ought to remember that these were uninspired men, and we do not know even so much about their characters, as we do of the uninspired fathers of the last century, whose teaching led us all into Babylon. If the true history of the advent doctrine from 1842 to the autumn of 1844, had, with the subsequent events in our history up to 1848, been ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... benevolence had willed it to be prolonged for the behoof of auditors unborn. I therefore came to the conclusion, that, in my individual case, it would be better and more reverent to let my eyes wander about the edifice than to fasten them and my thoughts on the evidently uninspired mortal who was venturing—and felt it no venture at all—to speak here ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the self-styled 'Island of Braves.' This, too, was the site of the Tahoro, or Tagoror, temple and senate-house of the ancients. The principal interest of these wild people is the mysterious foreknowledge of their fate that seems to have come to them by a manner of intuition, of uninspired prophecy. [Footnote: So in Candelaria of Tenerife the Virgin appeared in effigy to the shepherds of Chimisay in 1392, a century before the Norman Conquest, and dwelt fifty-four years amongst the Gentiles of Chinguaro. At least so say DD. Juan ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Wolfram yon Eschenbach's "Parzival". "Guillaime d'Angleterre" is a pseudo-historical romance of adventure in which the worldly distresses and the final reward of piety are conventionally exposed. It is uninspired, its place is difficult to determine, and its authorship is questioned by some. It is aside from the Arthurian material, and there is no clue to its place in the evolution of Chretien's art, if indeed ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... a just God, and I know that I am entirely innocent" replied the noble old seaman in a firm voice. "But it is not for an uninspired man like me, to attempt to reconcile the mysteries of His providence. Far better men than I am, even prophets and apostles, have been brought before magistrates and judges, and their good names lied away, ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... and in consequence were deemed inspired and canonical; at the same time have been forbidden to read the Gospels and Epistles herein published, because they could not perform the same feat, but remained under the table, and were condemned accordingly, as uninspired and apocryphal writings. If you believe this popish legend, you will not read the good books I lay before you, but still continue to possess only HALF THE TESTAMENT, instead of the PERFECT ONE, which will enable ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... whom I hunted, and the voyageurs beside whom I camped, and had learned to distrust my own race; yet no sooner did I chance to stand again beside the sweeping current of the broad Mississippi, than I was gripped by the old irresistible yearning, and, although uninspired by either hope or purpose, drifted downward to the hated ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... are infinite; in that sense it is that he ascribes inexhaustibility to the trackless savannahs of history. These vast hunting-grounds for the imaginative understanding are in fact but charts and surveyors' outlines meagre and arid for the timid or uninspired student. To a grander intellect these historical delineations are not maps but pictures: they compose a forest wilderness, veined and threaded by sylvan lawns, 'dark with horrid shades,' like Milton's haunted desert in the 'Paradise Regained,' ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... from the world (A.D. 266). He had reigned full forty years, rivalling in wisdom, and excelling in justice the best of his ancestors. Some of his maxims remain to us, and challenge comparison for truthfulness and foresight with most uninspired writings. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... us compare the ideas of this God with the ideas of uninspired men. I am making this long preface because I want to get it out of your minds ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of Dostoevski's novels, characteristic in its occasional passages of wonderful beauty and pathos, characteristic in its utter formlessness and long stretches of uninspired dulness, is "Downtrodden and Oppressed." Here the author gives us the life he knew best by actual experience and the life best suited to his natural gifts of sympathetic interpretation. Stevenson's comment on this story has attracted much attention. Writing ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... is running to waste. I do not mean mere Scriptural texts, for they do not bear the same meaning to all, though what human creature can fail to be spurred onwards by "Work while it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work." But I mean those beautiful thoughts—who can say that they are uninspired thoughts?—which may be gathered from a hundred authors to match a hundred uses. A fine thought in fine language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and ornament. To take ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... girlish body of the child-soldier there lived a courage as daring as Danton's, a patriotism as pure as Vergniaud's, a soul as aspiring as Napoleon's. Untaught, untutored, uninspired by poet's words or patriot's bidding, spontaneous as the rising and the blossoming of some wind-sown, sun-fed flower, there was, in this child of the battle and the razzia, the spirit of genius, the desire to live and to die greatly. It was unreasoned on, it was felt, not thought, it was often drowned ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... mentioned,' replied the Nightingale, 'the very cause of my superior excellence. I attend to, and obey, the dictates of Nature. I never sing but by her incitements; nor even yield to importunate, but uninspired inclination.' ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... sub-editor on three pounds a week, correcting the grammar in the copy of men who were getting five times that amount—but I can get you a start of sorts, right away. Come around now to the Record office, and I'll introduce you to Dodgson, the editor, a perfectly uninspired person, who ought to have been a grocer's assistant and have sung in a chapel choir. But he has the grace to realise his limitations, and take my advice. It will mean two guineas every now and then for a Page Four article—a thousand ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... learning or German art, and consider the one pedantic and the other heavy and uninspired. A Frenchman wrote very feelingly the other day, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, about a return to the old French culture, an escape from what he described as the German habit of accumulating mere ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... Himself. The Shorter Catechism, "Agreed upon by the Reverend Assembly of Divines at Westminster," as the old New-England Primer has it, asks the ancient questions what and why and answers them in one short sentence hardly matched in any uninspired work. "Question: What is the chief End of Man? Answer: Man's chief End is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." With this agree the four and twenty elders who fall on their faces to worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, saying, "Thou ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... is represented as the last of the series of Buddhas[1], promulgated a religious system in India which has exercised a wider influence over the Eastern world than the doctrines of any other uninspired teacher in any age or country.[2] He was born B.C. 624 at Kapila-Vastu (a city which has no place in the geography of the Hindus, but which appears to have been on the borders of Nepaul); he attained his superior Buddha-hood ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... uninspired work at best," he said once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years. "It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. It is playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. Far better, it would be, to examine the causes, and then the results ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... cry of youth cheated of its desire. Life brought her no good gifts beyond the slender ineffectual beauty that left her undesired. Her tremulous, expectant womanhood was cheated. She never saw so much as the flying veil of joy, or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she dreamed in Agnes Grey. She was cheated of her ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... expressed by that general benediction, he enters or is cast out from the inheritance of the saints,—in the exact degree in which he denies the Christ, angers the Father, and grieves the Holy Spirit, he becomes uninspired or unholy,—and in the measure in which he trusts Christ, obeys the Father, and consents with the Spirit, he becomes inspired in feeling, act, word, and reception of word, according to the capacities of his nature. He is not gifted with higher ability, nor called into new offices, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... plant-stems. He was so healthy and well-made, why did he make one ashamed, why did one feel repelled? Why should Gerald even dislike it, why did it seem to him to detract from his own dignity. Was that all a human being amounted to? So uninspired! thought Gerald. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Without them labor of the better, more energetic types cannot be secured in the first place or held for any length of time. And the employer who expects, in return for these, any more than the average of uninspired service is sure ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... is true that our local historians commonly avoid all romance as if it were of the Enemy; but if we compare their labors with "The Beauties of England and Wales," for example, the work certainly of uninspired men, we shall be convinced that the American Dryasdust suffers from poverty of material. There is no need to remind us of Hawthorne; but he is such a genius as is rare everywhere, and could conjure poetry out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... doing violence to the divine will. If we contradict the record we call in question the veracity of the spirit which controlled the writer, whether the statement relates to God, man or demons. But this statement does not apply to mistranslations, for it is one thing to contradict an uninspired translator, and another altogether to contradict the statement of one controlled by the spirit of God. We fearlessly assert that the Bible is just the book that common-sense and reason demands that it should be in order to contain a revelation of God to man. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... sufficient number of finished and absolutely authentic oil pictures from his own hand to afford illustrations for this short chronological sketch of his life's work. The few that do remain, however, are of so exquisite a quality—or were until they were "comforted" by the uninspired restorer—that we can unreservedly accept the enthusiastic records of tradition in respect of all his works. To rightly understand the essential characteristics of Leonardo's achievements it is necessary to regard him as a scientist quite as much as ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... defy; Save pains in various readings, and translations; And without Hebrew make most learn'd quotations. A work so full with various learning fraught, So nicely ponder'd, yet so strongly wrought, As nature's height and art's last hand required: As much as man could compass, uninspired. Where we may see what errors have been made Both in the copiers' and translators' trade; How Jewish, Popish interests have prevail'd, 250 And ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... million words). He can buy the one for from three to six dollars, and the other for fifteen cents. Or, if three dollars is all the money he has, he can get his Bible for nothing. When the Supreme Being disseminates a saving Message through uninspired agents—the New Testament, for instance—it can be done for five cents a copy, but when He sends one containing only two-thirds as many words through the shop of a Divine Personage, it costs sixty times as much. I think that in matters ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... such a passage as this, however, those strong racy phrases which somehow find their way into the most uninspired of Tudor translations, are not wholly wanting. Thus when the careless nymph at last goes off to seek her desperate lover, Daphne in ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... these pleasant spots is not absolute; but there are certain points in which the couplet is sound. For example, although Brede Place has no counterpart in Northiam, and although beside Udimore's lovely name Northiam has an uninspired prosaic ring, yet Northiam is alone in the possession of Queen Elizabeth's Oak, the tree beneath which that monarch, whom we have seen on a progress in West Sussex, partook in 1573 of a banquet, on her way to Rye. The fare came from the kitchen of the timbered house hard by, then ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... heartiest support from every one sincerely interested in turning the people toward the best things in music. Incidentally, it is well to admit that while a cheap march-tune is almost as trashy as an uninspired symphony, a good march-tune is one of the best ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the paper aside. She did not care even to glance at the exercises prescribed or at the diet and the routine of daily work. How dull and uninspired! How grossly material! Stomach! Chewing! Exercising machines! Plodding dreary miles daily, rain or shine! What could such things have to do with the free and glorious career of an inspired singer? Keith was laughing at her as he hastened away, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... be at work upon them. And that was a bad habit, he thought; if he was to learn content in the new work, he must first put off love for the old. When the debts were paid, the work for the successful uninspired Dick ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... and authority and unity upon the letters of his country, and who so closed the epoch with which I have been dealing, was singularly suited to his task. Observant, something of a stoic, uninspired; courageous, witty, a soldier; lucid, critical of method only, he corresponded to the movement which, all around him, was ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's and de l'Orme's luxuriance into the conventions of the great colonnades ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... honor of Christ to his own interest, repose, reputation, and life. As a Christian orator, his deep piety, disinterested zeal, and vivid imagination, gave unexampled energy to his look, utterance, and action. Bold, fervent, pungent, and popular in his eloquence, no other uninspired man ever preached to so large assemblies, or enforced the simple truths of the gospel by motives so persuasive and awful, and with an influence so powerful on the hearts of his hearers. He died of asthma, September 30, 1770, suddenly exchanging his life ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... have grown gray in the Church, I need not speak of the peace to be found in faith in God and trust in an overruling Providence. Christ taught that our lives are precious in the sight of God, and poets have taken up the thought and woven it into immortal verse. No uninspired writer has exprest it more beautifully than William Cullen Bryant in his Ode to a Waterfowl. After following the wanderings of the bird of passage as it seeks first its southern and then its northern ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... in like wise, which gives its peculiar grandeur to that wonderful 18th Psalm, David's song of triumph; his masterpiece, and it may be the masterpiece of human poetry, inspired or uninspired, only approached by the companion-Psalm, the 144th. From whence comes that cumulative energy, by which it rushes on, even in our translation, with a force and swiftness which are indeed divine; thought following ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... assert that either the jest or the frankly cynical moral of Pietro of Abano compensates for the jolting in a springless waggon over a rough road and a long. We make the acquaintance of a magician who with knowledge uninspired by love has kicks and cuffs for his reward, and the acquaintance of an astute Greek, who, at least in his dream of life, imposed upon him by the art of magic, exploits the talents of his friend Pietro, and gains the prize of his astuteness, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... and study in cultivating this ability to judge and produce the right touch, but the performer who is more concerned about the technical claims of a composition than its musical interpretation can only hope to give an uninteresting, uninspired, stilted performance that should rightly drive all intelligent hearers ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... the Government doing?' For several days now our columns have been ringing with the world-wide acclamation of this stupendous discovery, beside the potentialities of which the wildest efforts of imaginative literature are reduced to pallid and uninspired commonplaces. Even so cautious a scientist as Sir Potiphar Shucks has declared that the idea of Saturn being inhabited is one that 'should not lightly be set aside,' and has announced his conviction ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... goal on the beaten roads of tradition and habit by uninspired rivalry in arming. We must trace out with clear insight the probable course of the future war, and must not be afraid to tread new paths, if needs be, which are not consecrated by experience and use. New goals can only be reached by new roads, and our military history teaches ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... stands in the front rank of the second class. Shelley, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, far surpass him; and the sweet singer of Michigan, even in uninspired moments, never "threw off" anything worse ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... that a poem by Robert Browning is a sort of prize enigma, of which the solution is to be reached rather by wild and daring guessing than by any commonplace process of reasoning. Although to an ordinary and uninspired intellect it may appear perfectly obvious that a lyric means simply and clearly what it says, the true Browningite is better informed. He is deeply aware that if the poet seems to say one thing, this is proof indisputable ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... exposed the narrowness and weakness of that dogma, so pertinaciously adhered to by persons of cold hearts and limited understandings, that Religion is not a fit theme for poetical genius, and that Sacred Poetry is beyond the powers of uninspired man. We do not know that the grounds on which that dogma stands have ever been formally stated by any writer but Samuel Johnson; and therefore with all respect, nay, veneration, for his memory, we shall now shortly ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson |
