"Brainless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fools? Do you think any born imbecile is good enough to outwit the German Headquarters Staff? Do you think the lives of hundreds of his men—and perhaps the fate of thousands—can be entrusted to any brainless ass? An officer can't have too much brains. We're clamouring for brains. It's the healthy, brilliant-brained men like Randall that the Army's yelling for—simply yelling for," I repeated, bringing my hand down on ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... instinct, stimulus-response loop, conditioned response, instinctive reaction, Pavlovian response. mimicry, aping (imitation) 19. moron, imbecile, idiot; fool &c. 501; dumb animal; vegetable, brain- dead. Adj. unendowed with reason, void of reason; thoughtless; vegetative; moronic, idiotic, brainless [all pejorative]. Adv. instinctively, like Pavlov's dog; vegetatively. V. mimic, ape (imitate) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... varying from twelve to fourteen. They studied because they would be called upon to recite, and recited fairly well for fear of reproof and bad marks should they be derelict. Out of school, books and bookish thoughts were cast to the four winds of heaven. Their talk was cheery chatter, as brainless as the rattle of grasshoppers in ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... to all sorts of hazardous tricks, is an interesting and modest knave; Scapin directly the reverse. He had no cause to boast so much of his tricks: they are so stupidly planned that in justice they ought not to have succeeded. Even supposing the two old men to be obtuse and brainless in the extreme, we can hardly conceive how they could so easily fall into such a clumsy and obvious snare as he lays for them. It is also disgustingly improbable that Zerbinette, who as a gipsy ought ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... abandonment of his personal projects. And to go out when one is tied to the clock is a poor sort of game. But suppose he does seek the society of what friends he can muster in London. Is he made much of, fussed over? Not a bit of it. Brainless subalterns, ridiculous midshipmen, have, in the eyes of the girl whom he has come to see, a reputation that he can never win. They're in the Service; they're so dashing; they're so charmingly extravagant; they're ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... drinking, quite in a real way, at my side. This, no doubt, will seem pathetically naive to most modern young men, who in this respect begin where I leave off. An actress! Great heavens! an actress is the first step to a knowledge of life. Besides, actresses off the stage are either brainless or soulful, and the choice of evils is a delicate one. Well, I have never set up for a man of the world, though sometimes when I have heard the Lovelaces of the day hinting mysteriously at their ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... succession. There was no answer. He knocked again in precisely the same manner, and then a footstep sounded from within, and the door was flung open. "Fools!" growled Shluker in greeting, as they stepped inside and the door was closed again. "A pair of brainless fools!" ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... mimicry, aping (imitation) 19. moron, imbecile, idiot; fool &c 501; dumb animal; vegetable, brain dead. Adj. unendowed with reason, void of reason; thoughtless; vegetative; moronic [Sarc.], idiotic [Sarc.], brainless [Sarc.]. Adv. instinctively, like Pavlov's dog; vegetatively. V. mimic, ape ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... without heads; they just have necks that grow up and are covered with hair. These brainless mollusks are now telling the people that the Sultan of Sulu is to capture Texas and that Japan is to invade Indianapolis; Germany is to capture Quebec, and ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... girl angrily. "You men make me tired. Two kinds of ladies! And ten thousand kinds of men! You want me to dress like a doll, I suppose, and keep my hands soft and white and go around like a brainless, simpering fool! There are two kinds of ladies, my fine friend: the kind that can and the kind that can't! Thank God I'm none of your precious, sighing, ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... in a brainless world?' said Johns. 'Here, simple Nocky, I'll do it.' He leapt off, and with much puffing climbed the post, striking a match when he reached the top, and moving the light along the arm, the lad standing and gazing at ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... disgusted at this woman. Oh, how she longed to tell her something that she would not soon forget. How she was tempted to place Jasper and Sammie side by side and compare them; the one an insignificant, brainless, useless, overdressed nincompoop; the other a strong, self-reliant, masterful man, fighting against fate with face to the front and ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... small deposits that were meant for brains. Yet the proud fabric in the morning's sun Stands all unconscious of the mischief done; Still the red beacon pours its evening rays For the lost pilot with as full a blaze,— Nay, shines, all radiance, o'er the scattered fleet Of gulls and boobies brainless ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... deficient! It is worse with boys than with girls. Compare, for instance, the twine with boys often. What coarse, awkward, unruly lumps of boisterousness youngsters mostly are at that age! I dislike boys, and more than ever when I remember myself at that stage. What an insensible, ungrateful, brainless, and heartless ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... over bars, exchanging that brainless but well-willed talk by which men of his sort come to know men. He sat beside roped rings to witness the best muscle of the world—and not the worst brain—revive in ten thousand men the primeval brute. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... cried. "You pettifogging lawyer—tricky to the last! How gladly you would throw over your friend to prolong your own wretched existence! Do you think you are now talking to a biased judge and a susceptible, brainless jury? Revenged on Heaton? I am revenged on him already. But part of my vengeance involves your death. Are you ready ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... a pretty, brainless madcap. When the abbe preached she laughed, and when he was angry with her she would give him a hug, drawing him to her heart, while he sought unconsciously to release himself from this embrace which nevertheless filled ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... dedicated to the schoolmasters of the United Kingdom." It seems to be a new attempt. He takes no notice of the sentence I have put in italics: nor does he mention my notice of him, unless he means to include me among those by whom he has been "ridiculed and sneered at" or "branded as a brainless heretic." I did neither one nor the other: I thought Mr. Upton a paradoxer to whom it was likely to be worth while to propound the definite assertion now in italics; and Mr. Upton does not find it convenient to take issue on the point. He prefers ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... had not moved, and appeared somewhat to have lost its power upon the imagination; the gorgeous illusions of a few moments before were not repeated. Beneath that flat and brainless brow its black, beady eyes simply glittered, as at first, with an expression unspeakably malignant. It was as if the creature, knowing its triumph assured, had determined to practice no more ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... and brainless, Alden. I can't imagine a boy like my Joey falling in love with a woman like that. He ought to know better. Just remember how he ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... Sinner: "I suggest," runs an extract, "you come to your senses and give me my freedom ... I am going with a man of parts who knows how to give a woman the attentions she craves, and is himself glad to shake off a young chit of a wife who is too brainless ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... brow, furrowed with the folds of idle learning! Aim at this liberty cap, which trembles on the brainless head before every breath from the lips ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... are a people yet, Tho' all men else their nobler dreams forget, Confused by brainless mobs and lawless powers; Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set His Briton in blown seas and storming showers, We have a voice with which to pay the debt Of boundless love and reverence and regret To those great men who fought and kept it ours. And keep it ours, O God, from brute control; ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried. Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the earth with seven-league steps ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... very brainless since I came here. It is the result, I believe, of the Petrograd climate. Nearly everyone feels it. I had a little book in my head which I thought I could "dash off," and that writing it would fill up these waiting days, but I ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... stock entirely new. And so the absorbing, quickening, creative efficacy of Shakespeare's genius is best seen in this, that, taking the Drama as it came to his hand, a thing of unsouled forms and lack-lustre eyes, all brainless and meaningless, he at once put a spirit into it, tempered its elements in the proportions of truth, informed its shapes with grace and virtue, and made it all alive, a breathing, speaking, operative power. Thus his work naturally linked in with ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... club? Why should I, at my age, idle with a lot of idlers and listen to stuffy stories from stuffier individuals? Do you think that stale tobacco smoke, and the idiotically reiterated click of billiard balls, and the vacant stare of the fashionably brainless, and the meaningless exchange of banalities with the intellectually aimless have any attractions ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... is born into a woman's body. Katharina is vexed and plagued by forced submission to a father who cannot see her merit, and by jealousy of a gentle, useless sister. She, who is entirely honest, sees the brainless Bianca, whom no amount of schooling will make even passably honest, preferred before her. Lastly, she is humbled into the state of submissive wifely falsehood by a boor who cares only for his own will, her flesh, and her money. In ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... see nothing horrible about that. The rykors are but brainless flesh. They neither see, nor feel, nor hear. They can scarce move but for us. If we did not bring them food they would starve to death. They are less deserving of thought than our leather. All that they can do for themselves is to take food ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... disorder of his sensitive faculty, and suggest no reason for suspecting that the speculative delusions of a depraved intellect have moved him to invent them. Viewed in this light, they are really of some importance—and deserve to be exhibited in a short abstract; much more indeed than many a brainless product of fantastic philosophers who swell our journals with false subtilties; for a coherent delusion of the senses is always a more remarkable phenomenon than a delusion of the intellect; inasmuch as the grounds of this latter delusion are well known, and the delusion itself corrigible ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... for woman suffrage which bases it upon a fancied grouping of women with the vile and brainless element in the country, appears to me to be at once the weakest and the meanest of all. When the United States Government invited its woman citizens to share in making the Columbian Exposition the most wondrous pageant of any age, they responded ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... than attracted by it; at any rate, in his letters there are to be found frequent expressions of antipathy to Chopin's music, which seemed to him" mannered "(see letter to Moscheles of February 7, 1835). But even the heartless and brainless critic of the Musical World whose nonsense I quoted in Chapter XXXI. admits that Chopin was generally esteemed by the "professed classical musicians," and that the name of the admirers of the master's compositions was ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... peasants laughed at this merry jest, and they quickly followed his lead, as brainless sheep will follow the one that scrambles through a gap. Soon they were all joyously stamping and dancing in what had so lately been a pellucid pool. The water-lilies and blue forget-me-nots were trodden down, the ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... experience tending to evoke gentle feeling or generous action. She had confounded the few genuine admirers, who, infatuated with her beauty, endowed her with all heavenly graces, awaiting only the awakening hand of their love, with the heartless or brainless fellows who were not particular about heavenly graces, provided a girl had a fine figure and ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... its laboured breathing. I perceived that its gigantic, flabby body lay along the ground, and that its skin was of a corrugated white, dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we saw nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile at least of the almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering omnivorous mouth, its little nostrils, and tight shut eyes. (For the mooncalf invariably shuts its eyes in the presence of the sun.) We had a glimpse of a vast red pit as it opened its mouth to bleat and bellow again; ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... a hollow head could chatter words, which had no sense, and laugh in a brainless manner at senseless things. That part of the ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... We are living a simple and brainless life. No field-days, of course, and for this relief much thanks. We don't know in the least what is happening. Troops come and troops go, and guns go by during the night, and Red Cross waggons go hither and thither, and ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... To be found in journeying from here to Hades, I am also, nat-u-rally, a prodid- Gious favorite with all the pretty ladies. I know nothing, but say a mighty deal; My elevated nose, likewise, comes handy; I stalk around, my great importance feel— In short, I'm a brainless ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... a sign of a man. True, there was one hairy, grotesque creature which hung by its hands and feet from the tree-tops, very like thee in some way, Strokor; but its face and head were those of a brainless beast, not of a man. Nowhere was a creature like me ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... an embarrassing position," said Tobermory, whose tone and attitude certainly did not suggest a shred of embarrassment. "When your inclusion in this house-party was suggested Sir Wilfrid protested that you were the most brainless woman of his acquaintance, and that there was a wide distinction between hospitality and the care of the feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-power was the precise quality which had earned ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... others adhered to the idea of the Merry, but certainly not uproarious, Hunchback; Sir John Tenniel showed him as a vivified puppet, all that was earnest, responsible, and wise, laughing and high-minded; Keene looked on him generally as a youngish, bright-eyed, but apparently brainless gentleman, afflicted with a pitiable deformity of chin, and sometimes of spine; Sir John Gilbert as a rollicking Polichinelle, and Kenny Meadows as Punchinello; John Leech's conception, originally inspired, no doubt, by George Cruikshank's celebrated ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... dead repercussions and reporter. The kingdom yields not such another man; Wonder of men he is; the player can And bookseller prove true, if they could know Only one drop, that drives in such a flow. Are they not learned beasts, the better far Their drossy exhalations a star Their brainless admirations may render; For learning in the wise sort is but lender Of men's prime notion's doctrine; their own way Of all skills' perceptible forms a key Forging to wealth, and honour-soothed sense, ...
— English Satires • Various
... question rented a house and yard situate at the end of the field in which the young bird-fanciers had arrived, which house and yard he didn't occupy or keep any one else in. Nevertheless, like a brainless and unreasoning Briton, he persisted in maintaining on the premises a large stock of cocks, hens, and other poultry. Of course, all sorts of depredators visited the place from time to time: foxes and gipsies wrought havoc in the night; while in the ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... and truth the better. Does a really great and preoccupied man care what he wears? "A shocking bad hat" was perhaps as indifferent to Gladstone as a dirty old cloak was to Socrates. I suppose if a man is known to be brainless, it is necessary for him to wear a disguise,—even as instinct prompts a frivolous and empty woman to put on jewels. But who expects a person recognized as a philosopher to use a mental crutch or wear a moral ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... the ignoramus, the lethargic, the brainless, everything that savours of enthusiasm is a craze. The politician who throws himself heart and soul into a political contest is "off his head," is seized with a craze. The philanthropist who builds and endows hospitals and churches is "a crank," following a mere craze. The earnest ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... "Progress of Dulness," in three cantos,—an imitation, in manner, of Goldsmith's "Double Transformation." The title is happy. The decline of Miss Harriet Simper from bellehood to an autumnal marriage, in Canto III., is more tiresome than the progress of Tom Brainless from the plough-tail to the pulpit, in Canto I. The Reverend Mr. Brainless, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don't flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... written in the book of the world's destinies that Germany was bound to win. It was not only, as we are too ready at the first glance to believe, the megalomania of an autocrat drunk with vanity, the gross vanity of some brainless buffoon; it was not the warlike impulses, the blind infatuation and egoism of a feudal caste; it was not even the impatient and deliberately fanned envy and covetousness of a too prolific race close-cramped on a dreary and ungrateful soil: it was none ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... but they were neither more interesting nor less bigoted. Gay young men dazzled by operettas and races, they played lansquenet and baccarat, staked large fortunes on horses and cards, and cultivated all the pleasures enchanting to brainless fools. After a year's experience, Des Esseintes felt an overpowering weariness of this company whose debaucheries seemed to him so unrefined, facile and indiscriminate without any ardent reactions or excitement of ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... manifestation, and determined to make merry. But, heigh-ho! the day of Maypoles was over and gone. From the beginning the jollity and laughter were forced, and the new era of perpetual spring festival soon became an era of brainless indecency. Even the wit of the Restoration was bitter, acid, sardonic (as Charles's own death-bed apology for being an unconscionable time a-dying). Generally it was ill-tempered, and employed to inflict pain. ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... one of the warriors, with a look of ineffable contempt, "Koyatuk is big enough, but he is brainless. He can bluster and look fierce like the walrus, but he has only the wisdom of an infant puffin. No, we will be ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... were a great many vulgar suggestions and unpleasant innuendoes. As a dramatic critic said in my hearing a day or two later, when discussing the popular entertainments of London, 'Most of these shows consist of vulgar, brainless twaddle.' Still, the audience laughed and cheered, and when the curtain finally fell, there was a good deal of applause. Certainly the entertainment would be a great contrast to the experiences which the lads who were home ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... carter, who is now many miles distant, left the ice-box on the sunny side of the tent! Without sense is he, and possessed of a mind equal only to that of a sheep. So much shade to be had, yet of a perversity must he commit this brainless act! What can I do? Had this pair of hands not been incessantly occupied in performing urgent tasks for the comfort of the Memsahib, I might have cast eyes on the packing-case earlier, and myself have removed it to safety. But alas! how much can one poor servant ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... swore at them both for a pair of "blithering idiots." And as he drove away to the station he congratulated himself on the fact that while his fiancee had a "touch of the tar-brush," as he expressed it, in her descent, her English bringing-up and society training under her worldly-minded but rather brainless aunt had led her to accept him as her future husband ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... well thy ambidextrous part, Nor always filch. It was but yesterday, Blundering, they nearly caught thee in the fact; None of thy balls had livers, and the guests, In horror, pierced their airy emptiness. Not even the brains were there, thou brainless hound! If thou art hired among the middling class, Who pay thee freely, be thou honourable! But for this day, where now we go to cook, E'en cut the master's throat for all I care; "A word to th' wise," and show thyself my scholar! There ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... These men will not stand fire, and small blame to them. What chance have they? As your captain says, he could annihilate the lot of them before they crushed in the front door. The men who ran away have far more sense than that brainless spalpeen who led them on, although I can see he is brave enough. One or two more useless attacks will lead him to a more conciliatory frame of mind, unless he appeals to the law, which is what I thought he would do; for ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... rebel," said Jonathan, with marked emphasis on the word, "blown by the wind from a spike on the bridge above us. I don't know whose brainless head it may be, but it'll do for my collection." And he tossed it carelessly into the ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... termites having intelligence," he whispered. "I believe that thing has the only reasoning mind in the mound. Look at those two guards at the door, for instance. There's no earthly need for them to keep guard as eternally as they do. We can't even move, let alone try to escape. They're utterly brainless, commanded to guard the entrance with their mandibles, and continuing to guard it accordingly although the need for ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... as much for the pacification of the unreasonable contentions of Poland. I have to do there with brainless heads, each of which, instead of contributing to the common peace, on the contrary, throws impediments in the way of it by caprice and levity. My embassador has published a declaration adapted to open their eyes. But it is ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... with our family have been long known to me, and I hope your person will be not less so: you will find me an excellent compound of a "Brainless" and a "Stanhope." [7] I am afraid you will hardly be able to read this, for my hand is almost as bad as my character; but you will find me, as ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... laughed. They all laughed when the brainless walrus put my question. There is one little boy—the son I think of Blackbeard—who laughed more than all the rest. He lay down on the ice to laugh, and rolled about as if he ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... "I don't know what has come to them," he would remark irritably; "young men nowadays call their father 'governor,' and speak to him as though he were their equal in age. There is no respect shown to elders. A brainless young puppy will contradict a man twice his age, and there is not even the same courtesy shown to the weaker sex either. I have heard young men and young women—young ladies, I suppose I ought to say—who address each other in a 'hail-fellow-well-met' sort of manner, but ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... talents which we have acknowledged, and which doubtless all will agree with us in acknowledging, the leaders of the Southern rebellion to possess, only enhance the magnitude of their offense, and serve to illustrate with greater force the enormity of their purposes. That a brainless fanatic like Lord George Gordon, or the Neapolitan fisherman, Massaniello, should stir up tremendous agitation, may be matter for critical study, but is hardly a subject of wonder. But that men gifted with exalted ability, undoubted caution, well-balanced intellect, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... possible in this land of progressive liberty; who should love devotedly the vital principles of our democracy;—can be so dazzled by the false glitter of a title, that they deliberately choose to mate themselves (and their riches,) with such sorry specimens of lordliness; such brainless, nerveless bundles of selfishness, is something ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... of exclusives, and would not associate with the rest. Every passion and habit of civilized, is represented in savage life. A perfect democracy, in any country and state of society, is a perfect lie, and a leveller is a brainless fool. There is also an aristocracy in crime and in virtue, in demons and in angels. The slaves are clad variously. Haj Ibrahim tried to give every one of his a blanket or barracan, more or less large. Besides this, the females had a short chemise, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... "You brainless, mindless, contemptible idiot," Garlock sneered. "Are even you actually stupid enough to try to lie with your mind? To minds linked to your own and ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... honeymoon! I am married, married forever to that tousle-headed, bristle-jawed, brainless, heartless dub. I won't stand for it. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... In half an hour more those same little fires would be raging over the crest and destroying acres and acres of forest-trees, to say nothing of causing the work all the farmers and forest-rangers would have in trying to control it. Just because a brainless scout forgot his duty!" The scorn in Alec's ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... reaches a certain height, makes one inevitable mistake, and then as steadily falls, while many of her simple companions, whom she despises as weaklings, succeed from the very simplicity with which they follow the instinctive sagacity of pure and honest feeling. Colonel Rawdon Crawley, a brainless sensualist, whom Becky marries, and in some degree reforms, but who, by having an occasional twinkle of genuine sentiment in his heart, always was her superior, is drawn both with a breadth and a nicety of touch which is ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... I saw no humor in it then, for I was even at this time an intellectual aristocrat. I despised brainless folk. I hated these loafers. I loathed the clerk at the desk who dismissed me with a contemptuous smirk, and I resented the formal smile and impersonal politeness of Mr. Baldwin, the President. Of course I understood that the attendants knew nothing ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... back over the course of organic evolution, we see the unfolding of a great drama, or tragedy, in which, for millions upon millions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless forms of life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during other millions upon millions of years, a savage carnival of huge bestial forms upon the land, amphibian monsters and dragons of the land and air, devouring and being devoured, a riot ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... imagining the sort of appearance she would make there; and the thought even was a momentary clog upon his tongue. How he used to despise these people! Especially he had despised the young men as brainless cowards in regard to their views of women and conduct toward them. All that was changed. He fancied now that they, on the contrary, would despise him, if only they could be aware of the lingering sense he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the matter. If it would hate me, I could bear it. If it would attack me, if it would try to do me some dreadful harm, I should become a man again. I should be braced to fight against it. But this gentleness, this abominable solicitude, this brainless worship of an idiot, persistent, sickly, horribly physical, I cannot endure. What does it want of me? What would it demand of me? It nestles to me. It leans against me. I feel its touch, like the touch of a feather, trembling about my heart, as if it sought to number ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... we can produce it at any time that it's wanted," Prescott made reply. "If anyone has been injured, Dodge, in health or in business, by your stupid, brainless bit of horse play and meanness, then I imagine that you'll find yourself in for a serious time of it. So now you know why we took the tires off your automobile. We knew that our campfire would show you ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... the years of her sojourn at Tunbridge Wells. They had little in common beyond the fellow-feeling that binds those in bondage. Miss Pringle was also a companion. Her task mistress, Mrs. Hubbard, was in Nora's opinion, about as stolidly brainless as a woman could well be. Miss Pringle was always lauding her kindness. But then Miss Pringle had been a companion to various rich women for thirty years. Nora had her own ideas as to the value of the opinions of any woman who had been ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... his answer. "Go ahead an' smash the boats. You can hang some of them. But you can't touch me with the law. 'Tis me that's a crippled creature of circumstance, too weak to raise a hand against any man—a feather blown about by the windy contention of men strong in their back an' brainless ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... monsters; if they are known and common, then he is a plagiarist; if his scenes are serious they are voted dull; if humorous they are 'low' (a true Fielding touch). And not only the critic but also the brainless beau stands, as we have seen, ready to make sport of the poor ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... the Bar and trains all day among the woods and meadows, with a garland on his head and a friend to set the pace; the scent of new leaves is upon them; they rejoice in the freshness of spring; over their heads the plane-tree whispers to the elm, perhaps the most glorious invitation to the brainless life that has ever ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... contained the seeds of mob rule. The anonymous author of The Saints fears "Their frantic pray'r [is] a mere Decoy for Mob" (p. 4) and the author[4] of The Methodist and Mimic claims that Whitefield's preaching sends "the Brainless Mob a gadding" (p. 15). Evan Lloyd is the one anti-Methodist satirist who explores ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... imagination, 'Gentleman and Christian,' wrote indignantly that he considered the agitation of the subject to be both impious and indelicate, and added he was surprised that a paper holding the exalted, and deservedly popular, position of The —- should have opened its columns to the brainless vapourings of 'Mother of ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... use fusees All grow by slow degrees Brainless as chimpanzees, Meagre as lizards; Go mad, and beat their wives; Plunge (after shocking lives) Razors and carving ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... in upon him that he was a mere caricature of an officer, such as he had hitherto despised; perhaps but a more thoughtful, melancholy variation from the whole brainless type. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... desired, to pay the labour of instruction. But there has arisen in the land, men who set at nought the decrees of nature, who undertake to make artificial memories, not only equal but superior to the best natural memory, and who, at the shortest notice, engage to supply the brainless with brains. By certain technical helps, long passages, whole poems, may now be learnt by heart, as they call it, without any aid, effort, or cognizance of the understanding; and retained and recited, under the same circumstances, by any ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... his opera glasses and swept those many superimposed ranges of waxen cells. And the aspect of them was to him very sinister, for everywhere he seemed to encounter soft, voluptuous, brainless faces, violences of hot colour, and costly clothing cunningly devised to heighten the physical allurements of womanhood. Everywhere, beside and behind these, he seemed to encounter the faces of men, gluttonous of pleasure, hungering ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... sure of it," was his father's opinion. "You've got to prove yourself worthy to spend it. Don't you think I shall be content to have slaved all these years merely to provide a brainless young idiot with the means of self-indulgence. I leave my money to somebody worthy of me. Understand, sir?—somebody worthy ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... list; a more disturbing mob, Whose crop is filled with discord and contempt, On which they daily feed, I ne'er have sized. 'Twere well to laws enact to hold in curb These brainless cubs who wield a pricking quill And words indite with vitriol for an ink, Which burns the meaning into quiv'ring brain And leaveth scars which time can ne'er efface. A son of Erin in official place Did eulogize ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... it? do it quick!" The Slacker's skull is very thick. It never penetrates the gray, What Uncle Sammy, has to say. "I want you NOW!" Oh, what a Mutt. The words fall on a brainless nut. ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life—production, politics, and education—rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... Little Brick," he said, "at least tell me what you think: and don't be too learned; remember I'm only a brainless fellow." ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... the extreme north of the Argentine Republic, where Bolivia, the Argentine, Paraguay and Brazil unite, was the place of sacrifice. Thousands of acres, white with the bones of those whom the monsters had engulfed. Brainless, devoid of intelligence, sightless, because even the sense had not become differentiated in them, yet by some infernal instinct the Earth Giants had become aware that this was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... the presidents and others are but the servants of the people. All authority comes from the people, and not from the aristocracy of the air. Upon these texts of scripture which I have just read rest the thrones of Europe, and these are the voices that are repeated from age to age by brainless ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... is no longer plodding, ox-like drudgery, nor is the farm a place of humdrum, brainless routine. Science offers her aid on every hand, and beauty, in numberless forms, is ever present to those who have eyes and hearts capable of recognizing it. The farmer has a literature of his own, which every ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... Sire, Who serve brute vices, crouching in the mire To hounds and conies, beasts that ape our race? Such truckling is called virtue by the base Hucksters of sophistry, the priest and friar,— Gilt claws of tyrant brutes,—who lie for hire, Preaching that God delights in this disgrace. Look well, ye brainless folk! Do fathers hold Their children slaves to serfs? Do sheep obey The witless ram? Why make a beast your king? If there are no archangels, let your fold Be governed by the sense of all: why stray From men ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... of waddling gait On a common once was bred, And brainless was his addle pate As the stubble on which he fed; Ambition-fired once on a day He took himself to flight, And in a castle all decay He nestled out of sight. "O why," said he, "should mind like mine "Midst gosling-flock be lost? ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... else is it but folly to sit up night after night, until the small hours of the morning, waltzing with brainless young men?" ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... Iliad to the Odyssey because Achilles was called "excellent" and Odysseus "versatile". Socrates soon proves to him that Achilles was false too, as he did not always keep his word. He reminds Hippias that he never wastes time over the brainless, though he listens carefully to every man. In fact, his cross-examination is a compliment. He never thinks the knowledge he gains is his own discovery, but is grateful to any who can teach him. He believes that unwitting deceivers ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... seem to me entirely vapid and brainless; at other times you say or do things which suggest that there are possibilities in you; that, properly stimulated and encouraged, you might overcome the handicap of large private means and do something worthwhile. I wonder if that is ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... you, so you've done it again, have you?" he said with a softness that in some indefinable way chilled the blood. "Well, this time we'll let the quills work through your brainless skull—or— Here, Hoots-noo—" he turned to the Indian who was entering the store. "Take this cur out and shoot him. I'm tired of having quills yanked ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... was only a boy then—was mad on card-playing at that time. And I was real worried about him. I knew he would get into a hole sooner or later, and I begged my surly Englishman to keep an eye on him. Oh, I was a fool! I was a brainless, chattering fool! And I'm not much ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... sloughs they roll a prurient skin, They graze and wallow, breed and sleep; And oft some brainless devil enters in, And drives them to the ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... artist, and every defect of face and figure is overcome as far as is possible. Thus adorned, the dull and jaded girl of the morning becomes, under the magical influence of the footlights, a dazzling sprite, and the object of the admiration of the half-grown boys and brainless men who crowd the front ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... to those walls where Folly holds her throne, And laughs to think Monro would take her down, Where o'er the gates by his famed father's hand Great Cibber's brazen,[80] brainless brothers stand." ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... a perfect brainless-looking idiot. But excuse me, old fellow, I didn't know your wife was a widow when you ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... her, utterly at a loss. He did not begin to grasp what she meant. To him she was just "fickle woman" always changing her mind. He had, all his life, generalized about woman; he had never known a woman who was not rather vapid, rather brainless; he had the same idea of women as Professor Kraill had ventilated in his lectures—that they were the vehicles of the race, living for the race but getting all the fun they could out of the preliminary canter, since the race was a rather strenuous, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... "Foolish mob! brainless mob! swinish mob!" cried the stranger, when he at length stood beside the cart upon which the monster was still rending its hapless victim; "whither are ye running, and pressing, and crowding, and what are ye come to see? Know ye not that in Mexico it is forbidden ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... in a green coat, all over big brass buttons, stuck up behind, and a whiskey-faced coachman half-asleep in a great hammercloth, be sure it belongs to some snob who has not a sentence of good English in his head. Yes! perhaps a soap-chandler, an oil-dealer, or a candy-maker. Brainless people always creep into plush-always! People of taste and learning, like me, only are entitled to liveries and crests." This Madame says, inviting her guests to take seats at her banquet-table, at the head of which she stands, the Judge on her right, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... woman whom he intends to make the companion of his life—no such feeling, for instance, as I have for you at this moment. Well, I married you and we lived together as happily as most young couples do. I knew that I had a good wife, and you didn't know, or even suspect, what a brainless, heartless clod you had for your husband. Our married life glided by without anything particular happening to disturb it. But the thing became monotonous to me, and I had the senseless vagabond's desire for change. We did fairly ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... let blockish Ajax draw The sort to fight with Hector. Among ourselves Give him allowance for the better man; For that will physic the great Myrmidon, Who broils in loud applause, and make him fall His crest, that prouder than blue Iris bends. If the dull brainless Ajax come safe off, We'll dress him up in voices; if he fail, Yet go we under our opinion still That we have better men. But, hit or miss, Our project's life this shape of sense assumes— Ajax ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... in the leaden gravity of any money-monger; in whose profession all serious subjects are concluded. But he that shuns trifles must shun the world; out of whose reverend heaps of substance and austerity I can and will ere long single or tumble out as brainless and passionate fooleries as ever panted in the bosom of the most ridiculous lover. Accept it, therefore, good Madam, though as a trifle, yet as a serious argument of my affection; for to be thought thankful for all free and ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... lived in clover; but gradually rumours began to reach him to the effect that he bore the reputation everywhere of a brainless ninny. ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... danger of judgment: but I say unto you" of the new law, saith Christ, "that whosoever is angry with his neighbour, shall be in danger of judgment; and whosoever shall say unto his neighbour, 'Raca,' that is to say, brainless," or any other like word of rebuking, "shall be in danger of council; and whosoever shall say unto his neighbour, 'Fool,' shall be in danger of hell-fire." This card was made and spoken by Christ, as appeareth in the ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... Christ to guard her man. And round her you would have wrought a world of idle significance. You would have twisted dogma into the flowers and grass-blades. The fact that the girl happened to be practically brainless and a Luke Gospeler would not have ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... brainless creature of brawn and muscle! You have heard no harm of him save that he was immensely wealthy! Listen. Bear that sentence in your mind and listen to me, listen while I tell you a story. A party of travelers was crossing ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... believe the former voice of God His Father; which appears to be the meaning of this temptation: "Thou hast heard," would Satan say, "a voice proclaimed in the air, that Thou wast the beloved Son of God, in whom His soul was pleased; but mayst Thou not be judged more than mad, and weaker than the brainless fool if Thou believest any such promise? Where are the signs of His love? Art Thou not cast out from comfort of all creatures? Thou art in worse case than the brute beasts, for every day they hunt for their prey, and the earth produces grass and herbs for their sustenance, so that ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... direction, heaping the ground so thick with dead that Napoleon himself could not refrain from tears. Then Friedland, the trap into which the Russians again allowed themselves to be decoyed like a flock of brainless sparrows, the masterpiece of the Emperor's consummate strategy; our left held back as in a leash, motionless, without a sign of life, while Ney was carrying the city, street by street, and destroying the bridges, then the left hurled like a thunderbolt on the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... pressed the first wind-flowers of the season between the pages where she had done her last scribbling, and these were crumpled and two petals broken, so she knew that the book had been opened carelessly and perhaps read with that same brainless laughter. ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... space the Count stood pausing on my threshold, whilst we craned our necks to contemplate him as though he had been an object for inquisitive inspection. Then a smothered laugh from the brainless La Fosse seemed to break the spell. I frowned. It was a climax of discourtesy whose impression I must at ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... cough or influenza. The degree to which this system of advertising has since been carried has rendered it a bore and a nuisance. The usual result of almost any great and original achievement is, the production of a shoal of brainless imitators, who are "neither useful ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... do not make good matches in any one sense of the word. The struggling barrister, the clerk, the curate, the brainless masher—such are their prey; and if they make richer prizes than these, still the match cannot be called good; presently there is dis-union as the clever husband finds the pretty but nonsensical wife utterly unable to follow him through the paths of ...
— How to Marry Well • Mrs. Hungerford
... household; your brother has suspended his studies for his approaching examination, and your elder sister her labours at the East End—on purpose to devote our combined intelligence to the subject. And are we to be told that we are no better than the brainless multitude who speculate on horse-racing! I am not angry, my child, I am only—(Enter ROBERT, the Page, with a paper in a postal wrapper.) Tiddler's Miscellany—ha, at last! Why didn't you bring it up before, Sir? You must have known ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... is supposed to reply by Megarian quibbles, which destroy logic, 'Not only man, but each man, and each man at each moment.' In the arguments about sight and memory there is a palpable unfairness which is worthy of the great 'brainless brothers,' Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, and may be compared with the egkekalummenos ('obvelatus') of Eubulides. For he who sees with one eye only cannot be truly said both to see and not to see; nor is memory, which is liable to forget, the immediate knowledge to ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... that face of impudence; and when I have shown it to you, I will leave the rest to your own thoughts. Meanwhile I will say thus much: The man who refuses consideration and weight to a Plenary Council, brought to a conclusion in due and orderly fashion, seems to me witless, brainless, a dullard in theology, and a fool in politics. If ever the Spirit of God has shone upon the Church, then surely is the time for the sending of divine aid, when the most manifest religiousness, ripeness of judgment, science, wisdom, dignity of all the Churches on earth have flocked ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... life save its crust? I tell you that I have been down in the depths, aye, single-handed, there in the devil's own cauldron, where creatures in the shape of men and women, the very sight of whom would turn you sick with horror, creep like spawn through life, brainless and soulless, foul things who would murder one another for the sake of a crust, ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Salmon-fishing, then, is a matter of chance, or of plodding patience. They will rise on one day at almost any fly (but the sniggler), however ill-presented to them. On a dozen other days no fly and no skill will avail to tempt them. The salmon is a brainless brute ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... of whether miracles ever occur is a question of common sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any final physical experiment. One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions" in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are asking whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous to insist that it shall be under conditions in which no two living souls ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... fatal night when he met this fair creature at a certain place of publique resort, called Marylebone Gardens, our Cyrus hath been an altered creature. Love hath mastered this brainless ambassador, and his antics afford me food for perpetual mirth. He sits now opposite to me at a table inditing a letter to his Catherine, and copying it from—what do you think?—from the 'Grand Cyrus.' 'I swear, madam, that my happiness would be to offer you this hand, ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is supreme. When we cease toadying to brainless nabobs, and quit imitating them as soon as we get the money, we will be on the road to reformation. As it is, most poor people are just itching to live as the rich do. The average servant-girl who gets married ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... brainless Robert Redmayne, brought his niece to spend her school holiday with him and I discovered in the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl a magnificent and pagan simplicity of mind, combined with a Greek loveliness of body that created in me a convulsion. From the day that we met, from ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... pathetic sight to see the old warrior driven from his capital, and forced to flee for his life beyond the Jordan! How humiliating to witness also the alienation of his subjects, and their willingness to accept a brainless youth as his successor, after all the glorious victories he had won, and the services he had rendered to the nation! David's history reveals the sorrows and burdens of all kings and rulers. Outward grandeur and power, after all, are a poor compensation ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... what they will, such trifles kill. Comrade, for one good deed of yours, Your history shall not help to fill The mouths of many brainless boors. It may be death absolves or cures The sin of life. 'Twere hazardous To assert so. If the sin endures, Say only, "God, who has judged him thus, Be ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... run in grooves. The same style of man nearly always marries the opposite type of girl. I mean that the intellectual, the clever, invariably choose the insipid brainless girl. Pretty, she may be, but it is in a doll-like way, with not a thought above her household. You would have imagined that such men would require some help-meet, in the fullest sense of the word; with a brain almost as quick as their own. But such ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... idiot. The principal thing for you is to enjoy yourself; my sweet carcass, a thing accessory. Your pleasure will be my death, and then you'll canonise me perhaps? Ah, you have the plague, and you would give it to me. Go somewhere else, you brainless priest. Ah! touch me not," said she, seeing him about to advance, "or I will stab you ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... no more so. Neither side can claim any superiority on the average, though each can in individual cases, as regards courage. Foolhardiness does not imply bravery. A prize-fighter who refused to use his guard would be looked upon as exceptionally brainless, not as exceptionally brave; yet such a case is almost exactly parallel to that of ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the nose is led, Automatons of which the world is full, Ye myriad bodies, each without a head, That dangle from a critic's brainless skull, Come, hearken to a deep discovery made, A ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... her strong point, nor was its position strengthened by her assertion (unsupported by Mrs. Markham), that she was directly descended from Queen Elizabeth. Consequently, it was trying to Mrs. Thursby—who, as every one knows, was one of the brainless Copleys of Copley—that Mrs. Alwynn, who in the lottery of marriage had drawn an honorable, should take precedence of herself. To obviate this difficulty, Mrs. Thursby, with the ingenuity of her sex, had at one time introduced Mr. and Mrs. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... now in wind-swept bleak Japan as our sore throats we muffle, We see thy senseless pudding face and irritating shuffle; As you go slopping thro' the streets of your foul-smelling city, You're far too common to be rare, too brainless to be witty. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... now carefully refutes the notion that the doctrine of justification by faith encourages Antinomianism. Liberty does not mean licence. St. Paul was quite alive to the fact that skilful opponents and brainless admirers would misrepresent his doctrine, which was also Christ's. He therefore takes great pains to show that the connection between the righteousness of Christ and the righteousness of a Christian is not arbitrary or fictitious. His argument throughout implies that man actually ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... Hank, rubbing the dust from his eyes. "See! Good God! Boys, that damn thing was running away! Hear me? It was running like hell! What are you gaping fools standing here for, looking like a passel of brainless idiots! 'Phone!" he screamed. ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... to enlargement of the cortex. Should this preponderance of the cortex over the medullary portion not occur in the human, that is, if the proportions remain like those of other animals, the brain fails to develop properly, or an entirely brainless monster is generated. The human brain, therefore, probably owes its superiority over the animal brain, to the adrenal cortex, in development anyhow. The growth of the brain cells, their number and complexity is thus controlled by ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... cried this wicked old man, banging his wooden leg against the table, 'you eye-glass idiot—you brainless puppy— I'm wrong, am I? we'll see about that, you rag-shop.' This last in allusion to Barty's picturesque garb. 'I've found out all I want from you, and I'll track her down, and put her in gaol, and hang her—hang her till she's as dead as a ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... revealed to me clearly: both removed their cloaks, and there was 'the Varens,' shining in satin and jewels,—my gifts of course,—and there was her companion in an officer's uniform; and I knew him for a young roue of a vicomte—a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely. On recognising him, the fang of the snake Jealousy was instantly broken; because at the same moment my love for Celine sank under ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... by the brainless rout ador'd Writhes inly from the bosom-probing glance As erst that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of history a dreadful epoch of military superiority. They did burn York Minster, or at least, places of the same kind. Roughly speaking, from the seventh century to the tenth, a dense tide of darkness, of chaos and brainless cruelty, poured on these islands and on the western coasts of the Continent, which well-nigh cut them off from all the white man's culture for ever. And this is the final human test; that the varied chiefs of that vague age were remembered or forgotten according to how they had ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... are the volte-faces of which a character is capable! Nicholson, to whom human nature was a book of revelations, watched with a sense almost of awe this mean, petty and brainless woman, who a moment before had been whimpering with fear, smooth out her skirts and arrange her hair as though death were not ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... pathetic sentence of his sermon, or drop into the soprano's mouth at the supreme climax of her trill. Satan himself could scarcely produce a more complete absence of devotion than is often caused by these brainless creatures. ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... evading the issue. "I suppose all New York swells do that. It's what they want me for that gets my goat." Again the knife he held was tragically upraised. "How would you like to be nursemaid to six or eight brainless little pups no bigger than rats? Not but what I like dogs. I'd like nothing better than to own a fine dog of some spirit. But those imitations! Why, before a week was out, I'd ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... closed the piano with a sigh of relief, and spent the rest of the time before two o'clock reading a rather stupid novel. After luncheon she made a call several miles off, driving herself in a light-brown cart, and played several sets of tennis, having for her partner a very mild and brainless young curate. At dinner-time she and her father met again, and when he entered the room he had two slips of orange-colored paper in ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Mogul, Some elephant from Africa, I had been, Or some strange beast from the Amazonian Queen. As buzzards, widgeons, woodcocks, and such fowl, Do gaze and wonder at the broad-faced owl, So did these brainless asses, all amazed, With admirable Nonsense talked and gazed, They knew my state (although not told by me) That I could scarcely go, they all could see, They drank of my beer, that to me was given, But gave me not a drop to make all even, ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... power most desired or appreciated is a good measure of character. The pre-eminence furnished by thew and muscle is most generally recognized; but, as men reach levels above the animal, other qualities take the lead. It is seen that the immaterial spirit wins the greater triumphs,—that the brainless giant, compared with the dwarf of trained intelligence, can accomplish little. The scale runs on into the moral qualities, until at last humanity has given its sanction to the Divine words, "Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant." The ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... would permit household bills to mount in a manner which could only bring ruin and disaster upon a minister of the gospel who throughout a protracted career of usefulness had sapped his intellectual manhood in the useless effort to support in silly idleness a family of brainless and maddening fools. Miss Alicia had heard her character, her unsuccessful physical appearance, her mind, and her pitiful efforts at table-talk, described in detail with a choice of adjective and adverb which had broken into ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique," "secret and envenomed blows," "slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility," "lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the description does not make his idol's defeat more creditable to the vanquished. As for the character of Gifford, and the earlier "Letter to Gifford," I should have to print them entire to show the state of Hazlitt's mind in ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... by a barely human lout. The lout was free—the brainless, soulless bovine lout was free in God's beautiful world—and Ross-Ellison, soldier and gentleman, lay in a stone cell, and in quarter of an hour would dangle by the neck in a pit below a platform—perhaps ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... you the greatest of boons, namely to open up the Rhine, and bring back prosperity to Frankfort, which you brainless, cowardly merchants have allowed to slip through your fingers, blaming now the Barons, now the Emperor, now the Electors; censuring everybody, in fact, except the real culprits ... yourselves. You speak of the money as a favor, ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... which now adorn the galleries of the world. I saw also their sculpture, from the rude god with four legs, a half dozen arms, several noses, and two or three rows of ears, and one little, contemptible, brainless head, up to the figures of to-day—to the marbles that genius has clad in such a personality that it seems almost impudent to touch them without ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... of me?" she said, still stinging under the angry waves of self-contempt. "What are you marrying me for? Because, divided, we are likely to cut small figures in our tin-trumpet world? Because, united, we can dominate the brainless? ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... "Be dull and soulless, like a beast of the field - a brainless animal, with listless eye, unlit by any ray of fancy, or of hope, or fear, or love, or life." And after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, it says, "Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men may laugh - drivel in folly, ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... Kewp. But the Billiken is a philosopher, and doesn't care; and the Kewp is a careless child. But I feel it, Sara; I have to confess to you that I am a prey to the 'last infirmity of noble minds.'" After a moment he added, less sadly but more irritably, "That creature, now, brainless as it is, is just a doll. And ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker |
