"Dullness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... certain limits I believe the love passion does afford such a basis. If we can imagine an artist confining himself to this single issue, relying on no finenesses outside it, then we might have a work of art which men and women, representing in other respects any degree of imagination and dullness, might all almost equally enjoy. In practice it is seldom that an artist is content to confine himself so exclusively to this issue; it is not in the nature of the imaginative temperament to limit itself in that way. But I think we have an example approximating to the supposed ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... a heavy hand upon the innkeeper's fat shoulder. "Friend," he said, impressively, "I am one not noted either for dullness or lack of courage. I do perpend that to earn these pieces of which you speak one must perform some worthy business. Tell it to me, and you and Nottingham shall see then what Middle ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... Trinity Church has for a considerable period been a troublesome, irregular, unsatisfactory thing. Years ago it was fine; there was full cathedral service in the church then; and the orchestral performances were attractive. But dullness and poorness are now their characteristics. The organ is one of the best in the town; its tones are fine and musical; it could perhaps be improved in one or two particulars; but everything in it is good as far ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... him all clearness of expression was shallowness of thought, and brightness was the essence of frivolity. He soon found another place, for some of the Chicago newspapers still set a premium upon windy dullness. ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... alternative spellings—for example, "arn't" rather than "aren't", "dulness" rather than "dullness", both "shan't" and "sha'n't"—which have been left unchanged. There are also some unusual grammatical structures in places, which probably result from the author's intention to render the translations as literally as possible. These have also ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... of the Formation of the Earth, two mighty octavo volumes, elicits the following complimentary remarks from the Athenaeum. "This work is saved from being mischievous only by the circumstance of the excessive dullness diffused over these twelve hundred pages—which will in all probability prevent their being much read.... Of no one department of science does the author appear to have a correct conception. His views are all distorted. He is false alike in his Mechanics, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... in complimentary attire might be tolerated where a crowd of seminude performers could not. The poems of Sedley and Rochester are as abundant in indelicacy as they are deficient in humour. The epigram of Sedley to "Julius" gives a more correct idea of his character than of his usual dullness. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... higher went the price of food, and lower and lower sank the hopes of her people. Their momentary joy under the influence of such events as the Morgan reception was like the result of a stimulant or narcotic, quickly over and leaving the body lethargic and dull. But this dullness had in it no thought ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... have to admit that one has hardly ever been unhappy for a long time before this war. The year my brother died, the year one went through a tragedy, the year of deadly dullness in the country—but now it isn't so much a personal matter. War and the sound of guns, and the sense of destruction and death abroad, the solitude of it, and the disappointing people! Oh, and the poor wounded—the poor, smelly, dirty wounded, whom one ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... were absent. Careful palpation showed a uniform, drum-like resistance, otherwise nothing abnormal. The percussion note over the abdomen upon light tapping (and only this could be borne) revealed no decided difference, and nowhere any dullness; upon prolonged continued auscultation, high-pitched intestinal murmurs ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... married me, because he bought me, in fact; because everything that he says and does, everything that he thinks, acts on my nerves? He exasperates me every moment by his stupidity, which you call his kindness; by his dullness, which you call his confidence, and then, above all, because he is my husband, instead of you. I feel him between us, although he does not interfere with us much. And then—-and then! No, it is, after all, too idiotic of him not to guess anything! I wish he would, at any rate, be a ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... attempted to secure more liberty for the teachers, we were warned by tales of former difficulties with the politicians, and it seemed impossible that the struggle so long the focus of attention should recede into the dullness of the achieved and allow the energy of the Board to be free ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... all are spread The ruins and the symbols of the winter that is dead. But the bleak and barren picture very shortly now will pass, For the halls of life are ready for their velvet rugs of grass; And the painters now are waiting with their magic to replace This dullness with a beauty that no mortal hand ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... about his work that afternoon with a droop to his head, and a dullness about his dark eyes, which Jim noticed with vague discomfort, and which made him wish heartily that he had not confided to the postmaster the story of Billings and the brake. He had quarreled with Gertrude—everything ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... to Johannesburg as we found it, after the 1895 boom. Even then it seemed to me that for the first time in South Africa I saw life. Cape Town, with its pathetic dullness and palpable efforts to keep up a show of business; Kimberley, with its deadly respectability—both paled in interest beside their younger sister, so light-hearted, reckless, and enterprising. Before long, in spite of gloomy reflections on the evils of gold-seeking, I fell under the ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... kept up the job of plying back and forth in the waters. Men were busy at the stern of the ships watching the wooden kites that are made so as to catch the mines by the hawser that is slung between the two steamers. The slightest sign of a ball-like piece of steel in the sea and the dullness of sweeping is relieved, for then the skipper knows that he has unhooked one of the mines. Along came a submarine, flying the white ensign of the Royal Navy. The mine-sweepers realise that these men have no arm-chair job, and admire the commander and ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... world over. Publishers run with their unsalable manuscripts, and beg Lady Barbara to have the goodness to put her name on the title, knowing by golden experience that one stroke of her pen, like the point of a galvanic wire, will turn all the dullness of the dead mass into flame. Lady Barbara is not barbarous enough to refuse so simple and complimentary a request; nay, her benevolence extends on every hand. Distressed authors, male and female, who have not ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the good woman suffered such a disillusionment. Allie, she soon discovered, was anything but a child, or rather she was an amazing and contradictory combination of child and adult. What Mrs. Ring had taken to be mental apathy, inherent dullness, was in reality caution, diffidence, the shyness ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... another law-Lord, who, it seems, once took a fancy to associate with the wits of London; but with so little success, that Foote said, 'What can he mean by coming among us? He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others.' Trying him by the test of his colloquial powers, Johnson had found him very defective. He once said to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'This man now has been ten years about town, and has made nothing of it;' meaning as a companion. He said to me, 'I never heard any thing from him in company ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... life where the outlook for the whole future of the individual is so strongly stamped. To come into contact with no stimulus and arousing agent in the home, or the neighborhood in the earliest years is to become settled into a life-long habit of inert dullness. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... how; if only he has proper skill. But it is hard even for a skillful workman "to make bricks without straw," to awaken mental effort where interest in the subject is entirely lacking. It is often claimed that if there is dullness and disgust with a study it is the fault of the teacher. As Mr. Quick says, "I would go so far as to lay it down as a rule, that whenever children are inattentive and apparently take no interest in a lesson, the teacher ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... turned his eyes toward the object, which certainly was moving slowly, as though tired, and, as the boys watched, sure enough, began to resolve itself into the shape of a dog. Here at last was something happening to break the dullness of the day. A strange dog twenty-five miles from any place in which a dog would ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... would have had the courage and honesty to tell him the truth about his new pursuit. Meantime Hardy was much pained at the change in his friend, which he saw quickly enough, and often thought over it with a sigh as he sat at his solitary tea. He set it down to his own dullness, to the number of new friends such a sociable fellow as Tom was sure to make, and who, of course, would take up more and more of his time; and, if he felt a little jealousy every now and then, put it resolutely back, struggling to think ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... aid to digestion permits dining anew. And what 's very true, tho' few people know it, Fine coffee 's the basis of every fine poet; For many a writer as windy as Boreas Has been vastly improved by the drink ever glorious. Coffee brightens the dullness of heavy philosophy, And opens the science of mighty geometry. Our law-makers, too, when the nectar imbibing, Plan wondrous reforms, quite beyond the describing; The odor of coffee they delight in inhaling, And promise the country ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... thicker and thicker, and by the continual northerly winds still higher torosses were heaped up round the vessel, and larger and larger snow masses were collected between it and the land, and on the heights along the coast. All hopes or fears of an early release were again given up, and a perceptible dullness began to make itself felt after the bustle and festrvities of the Christmas holidays. Instead there was now arranged a series of popular lectures which were held in the lower deck, and treated of the history of the North-East Passage, the first circumnavigations ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those magnificent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially built to contain, that men may be content to dwell in the humbler dullness of their own houses; and though the travellers often prayed him to show them the apartments containing the works of Mantegna, they really got to see nothing of this painter's in the Ducal Palace, except, here and there, some evanescent frescoes, which the Custode would not go beyond a si crede ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... life and its familiar or exceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, [194] youth, age, tears, joy, rest, sleep, waking—a mirror, towards which men might turn away their eyes from vanity and dullness, and see themselves therein as angels, with their daily meat and drink, even, become a kind of sacred transaction—a complementary strain or burden, applied to our every-day existence, whereby the stray snatches of music in it re-set ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the days of Money and London Assurance, the dullness of the intervening period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash of fanciful ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... could be no doubt that Sheila often sat silent for a considerable time, with her eyes fixed on her father's face when he spoke, or turning to look at some other speaker. Had Lavender now been asked if this silence had not a trifle of dullness in it, he would have replied by asking if there were dullness in the stillness and the silence of the sea. He grew to regard her calm and thoughtful look as a sort of spell; and if you had asked him what Sheila was like, he would have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... of absurdity in others, but was kindly disposed toward any one who could make life agreeable to her, meant to win Mrs. Arrowpoint by giving her an interest and attention beyond what others were probably inclined to show. But self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor, and those who are in the prime of life raise their voice and talk artificially to seniors, hastily conceiving them to be deaf and rather ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... shrapnel was bursting over the water; the patter of musketry came creeping out to sea; we are in for it now; the machine guns muttered as through chattering teeth—up to our necks in it now. But would we be out of it? No; not one of us; not for five hundred years stuffed full of dullness and routine. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... humble recognition of the providence of God in all that has made us a great nation. From our beginning as a people our course has been marked by concurrences and incidents so striking, so significant and so constant, that only superstitious dullness or intellectual blindness will place them to the ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... professional business is with the Boers exclusively. He told me that the ancient Boer families in the great region of which this village is the commercial center are falling victims to their inherited indolence and dullness in the materialistic latter-day race and struggle, and are dropping one by one into the grip of the usurer—getting hopelessly in debt—and are losing their high place and retiring to second and lower. The Boer's farm does not go to another Boer when he loses it, but to a foreigner. Some have fallen ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... great historical figure, but he was certainly not a great man. His execution remains an enduring monument not only of Philip's cruelty and perfidy but of his dullness. The King had everything to hope from Egmont and nothing to fear. Granvelle knew the man well, and, almost to the last, could not believe in the possibility of so unparalleled a blunder as that which was to make ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... fellow passengers were two officers of dragoons, several commissaries with their servants, horses, etc. After a passage of twenty-four hours, we entered the harbour of Ostend at one o'clock the following day. Ostend, once so flourishing and opulent, has long since fallen into decay; its usual dullness is however just now interrupted by the bustle of troops landing to join the allied army. Cavalry, infantry, artillery, horses, guns, stores, etc., are landed every minute. The quays are the only parts of this city which can boast of handsome ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... is nothing—but no! that is blasphemous. It is we that are nothing—if not stupid. Dullness is the universe. The grasshoppers are too faint to sing, the birds sit still on the boughs, waiting for the leaves to fan them. Children are wilted into silence and slumberous nonentity; boys do not bathe to-day—they welter, hour after hour, in the dark water ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... to my fellow-boarders, I being looked upon now as having special information owing to my supposed intimacy, although I had never entered his room since that night—on these days, I say, the table relapsed into its old-time dullness. ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... sewing up their heads. Lyman didn't tell me, but I got it pretty straight that somebody stole the pistol out of his room; and if it hadn't been for that the undertaker would have had no cause to complain of the dullness of ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... afforded me; but this was not often. I saw as little of her while living in your cottage as I had seen before, and, but for the good old lady, Mrs. Porterfield, I should probably have been even less blessed by her presence. She perceived my dullness, and feeble health, and dreaming no ill, insisted that your wife should assist in beguiling me of my weariness. She set us down frequently at chess, and loved to look on and watch ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... children have not returned, and conversation, it must be confessed, languishes. Miss L'Estrange, who is present in a cap of enormous dimensions and a temper calculated to make life hideous to her neighbors, scarcely helps to render more bearable the dullness of everything. Sir George in a corner is buttonholing Frederic and saddening him with last accounts ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... — This salutation Tabby returned with equal solemnity; and the expression of the two faces, while they continued in this attitude, would be no bad subject for a pencil like that of the incomparable Hogarth, if any such should ever appear again, in these times of dullness and degeneracy. ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... 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 the eighteenth century from imitative dullness and stupid ostentation: elegance expressed more often in perfumes, laces, and mahogany than in paint or marble. The silk-stockinged courtier accompanying his exquisitely perfect bow with a nicely worded compliment was surely as much an artist as the sculptor. Nor can one help ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... feeling Even themselves or for themselves. Dullness best solves The tease and doubt of shelling, And Chance's strange arithmetic Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling. They keep no ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... full of quick energy, it transmutes all kinds of dead matter into its own ruddy likeness, sending up the fat of the sacrifices in wreathes of smoke that aspire heavenward; and changing all the gross, heavy, earthly dullness into flame, more akin to the heaven into which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... coffee?' she asked, affecting the dullness of lethargy. She was full of small affectations, being consumed ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... 'twas someone speaking this in my ear, and turn'd my head. But 'twas really the last word I had heard from Delia, now after half an hour repeated in my brain. And as I grew aware of this, the dullness fell off me, and all became very distinct. And the muscles about my wound had stiffen'd—which was vilely painful: and the country, I saw, was a brown, barren moor, dotted with peat- ricks: and I ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... out. Accordingly nothing but the trumpery of mere penny-a-liners is brought forward, though this sometimes assumes an appearance of originality. These abortions remain on the stage only through the talent of the artists, the habit of the public to expect nothing beyond dullness and stupidity in the drama, and finally, the severe regulation which forbids any mark of disapprobation under pain of imprisonment. The best plays are translated from the French, but they are never the ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... distinguishable from the gray of the twilight. Though a single mysterious cleft a long yellow bar pointed down across the plains, paused at the horizon, and slowly lifted into the air. The mountain shadow followed it steadily up into the sky, growing and growing against the dullness of the east, until at last over against them in the heavens was the huge phantom of a mountain, infinitely greater, infinitely grander than any mountain ever seen by mortal eyes, and lifting higher and higher, commanded ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... I don't know what or where it is, but I'm ready for a start if it's a cannibal isle. Anything is better than dying of dullness here. Where are ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... and their views are confined by dirty and disagreeable objects. Within the court there is generally a noble colonnade all round, and an open corridore above, but the stairs are usually narrow, steep, and high, the want of sash-windows, the dullness of their small glass lozenges, the dusty brick floors, and the crimson hangings laced with gold, contribute to give a gloomy air to their apartments; I might add to these causes, a number of Pictures executed on melancholy subjects, antique ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... been troubled by the thought that she would never have any peace until she had paid that visit. It was by no means an agreeable one, for old Mrs. Woodward was exceedingly dull, and Helen felt that she was called upon to make war upon dullness. However, it had occurred to her to get her task out of the way at once, while she felt that she ought ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... from her youth upwards it was George Whitstable. He had been a laughing-stock to her when they were children, had been regarded as a lout when he left school, and had been her common example of rural dullness since he had become a man. He certainly was neither beautiful nor bright;—but he was a Conservative squire born of Tory parents. Nor was he rich;—having but a moderate income, sufficient to maintain a moderate country house and no more. When first there came indications ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... American phrase into English, it may be very defensible that they should translate my English phrases into American. Anyhow they often do translate them into American. In answer to the usual question about Prohibition I had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact with it, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always break it. From the printed interview it appeared that I had said, 'Prohibition! All matter of dollar ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... do not see how you can be expected to do so, for in the first place there is no even tolerable prose translation, and in the second, the Odyssey, like the Iliad, has been a school book for over two thousand five hundred years, and what more cruel revenge than this can dullness take on genius? The Iliad and Odyssey have been used as text-books for education during at least two thousand five hundred years, and yet it is only during the last forty or fifty that people have begun to see that they are by different ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... themselves face to face with problems so grave and issues so vital. There was a slight reaction towards nature and simplicity. "They may be growing wiser," said Walpole, "but the intermediate change is dullness." For nearly half a century learned men and clever women had been amusing themselves with utopian theories, a few through conviction, the majority through fashion, or egotism, or the vanity of saying new things, just as the world is doing today. The doctrines ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... the tediousness of the voyage, and the dullness of her own circle, invited Ishmael and his party to spend the evening and play whist in the ladies' cabin—forbidden ground to all gentlemen who had no ladies with them, unless indeed they should happen, as in this case, to ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... seemed to speak of the very desolation of dullness. After sweeping over the vast monotony of the lakes to come to this monotony of land, with all around a limitless horizon,—to walk, and walk, and run, but never climb, oh! it was too dreary for any but a Hollander to bear. ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... In spite of its dullness, Mrs. Lansing's house was a comfortable and secure retreat. She would have to go back to it presently, and it was desirable that she should avoid any cause of disagreement with ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... possible I should? If to raise malicious smiles at the infirmities or misfortunes of those who have never injured us be the province of wit or Humour, Heaven grant me a double Portion of Dullness— ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... have mistaken sobriety for dullness, equanimity for moroseness, disinclination to bad company for aversion to society, abhorrence of vice for uncharitableness, and piety ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... of any matter,—oftentimes the force of dullness can no farther go. You stand silent, incredulous, as over a platitude that borders on the Infinite. The man's Churchisms, Dissenterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, College Philosophies, Fashionable Literatures, are unexampled in ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... expressed himself to the same purpose concerning another law-Lord, who, it seems, once took a fancy to associate with the wits of London; but with so little success, that Foote said, 'What can he mean by coming among us? He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others[557].' Trying him by the test of his colloquial powers, Johnson had found him very defective. He once said to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'This man now has been ten years about town, and has made nothing of it;' meaning as a companion[558]. He said to me, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... in a fresh game a few moments later, and Paul went outside. He was glad to see them so interested, because he knew that otherwise the curse of dullness might fall upon them. ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Baltimore, I felt that it wuz indeed well with us. He wuz talkin ez a Dimokrat to Dimokrats; and it wuz appreciated. Strippin off all uv the disguise he hed bin a wearin for four years,—washin off, in rage and whisky, the varnish and putty with wich he hed shined up his dullness, and filled up the cracks and cavities wich hed alluz troubled him,—he stood forth ez we knowd him—Androo Johnson! How he did froth and foam! How he did lash his late associates! and how those Dimokrats who kum to Washinton with petitions for places in their pockets ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... "Dullness is so much stronger than genius because there is so much more of it, and it is better organized and more naturally cohesive inter se. So the Arctic volcano can do nothing against Arctic ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... thoroughly pure air must be emphasized from first to last. Some think that the dullness felt by many people in the early morning is due to the impure air of cities, and to the failure to open windows. A lady once said to me, "When I am in the country I always sleep out of doors. Then I have not the slightest disinclination ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... waited, he could hear a woman's fretful voice, and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy of the homecoming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on the platform by ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... You know I slept all the morning, but I'm not suffering from dullness. I'm imagining things. I'm imagining how much worse off we'd be if we didn't have flint and steel. I can always find ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that was rather critical than sentimental. Hamlet had a shrewd judgment, a lively and caustic wit, an exacting standard, and a turn for satire. He was fond of question and debate, an enemy to all illusion, impatient of dulness,[typo for dullness?] and not indisposed to alarm and bewilder it; and he had brought with him from Wittenberg a philosophy half stoical and half transcendental, with whose eccentricities he would torment the wisdom of the Court. He looked upon the machinery ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... some while now hooded the marvelous city. They had planned it to be symmetrical, its maps were orderly, near; in two dimensions, that is length and breadth, its streets met and crossed each other with regular exactitude, with all the dullness of the science of man. The city had laughed as it were and shaken itself free and in the third dimension had soared away to consort with all the careless, irregular things that know not ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... in Keith's feelings toward Johan, nothing emotional. The tenderness that was such a marked feature of his character did not come into play at all. In fact, he rather looked down on Johan, who frequently annoyed him by his dullness and his lack of personal neatness. The truth of it was that he played with Johan merely because he was the only other boy in sight, and in so far as that particular game was concerned, Johan ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... of the town. Its extreme cleanness after Mexico is remarkable. In that respect it is the Philadelphia of the republic; with wide streets, well paved; large houses of two stories, very solid and well built; magnificent churches, plenty of water, and withal a dullness which makes one feel as if the houses were rows of convents, and all the people, except beggars and a few business men, shut up in ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... for two beautiful volumes of poetry. Miss Arran remembered her with a box of very nice stationery, Mrs. Dane with some handkerchiefs, Mrs. Barrington went to the dinner at Crawford House, but the girls complained of the dullness. Lilian was so used to being sufficient for herself, so fond of reading that the day passed even if it had no ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... her head. She divined that the manse children were pitying her for her many stripes and she did not want pity. She wanted to be envied. She looked gaily about her. Her strange eyes, now that the dullness of famine was removed from them, were brilliant. She would show these youngsters what a personage ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... cowardly trick of Jobst to put those branches in the stream. Did I not go over it last night till my brain was dizzy? But still, it is but living and dying like our fathers, and I hate tameness or dullness, and it is like a fool to go back from what one ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the wretchedness of childhood Put me out of love with God. I can't believe in God's goodness; I can believe In many avenging gods. Most of all I believe In gods of bitter dullness, Cruel local ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... the stupor reaction is a remarkably set, stable state, we see in sudden episodes of elation that this is not the case, and other experiences point in the same direction. A similar observation was made on a case of typical stupor with marked reduction of activity and dullness. A rather cumbersome electrical apparatus (for the purpose of getting a good light for pupil examination) was brought to her bedside. Whereas before, she had been totally unresponsive, she suddenly wakened ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... her dullness, it was a signal from Sally that saved Andrew. She jerked up her head and turned; he looked in the same direction and saw a form like a gray ghost coming over the hills to his left, a dim shape through the rain. Gloomily Andrew watched Hal Dozier come. Gray Peter had been fresher than Sally at ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... to the rude dwellings where those people sat in stupor and in darkness after the first thrill of the new found liberty; they went from homes of refinement and culture and wealth and religion; they bore to this darkness light, to this dullness life; they carried down there in their white hands the great tree of Calvary, the cross of Christ, and planted it in the land of the magnolia and the palm. I say that the history of this Association ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 1, January, 1890 • Various
... unexpectedly burst through the clouds: her shadow alone was there,—she started, looked alarmed at me, then at the earth, as if her eyes were asking for my shadow;—all her emotions were painted so faithfully on her countenance, that I should have burst into a loud laugh, had I not felt an icy dullness ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... alimentation, which includes the process of digestion, the subsequent vital changes involved in the conversion of food into blood, and its final transformation into tissue, causes mental languor and dullness, as well as bodily exhaustion, is attested by universal experience. A torpid condition of the liver, one of the most inveterate of chronic derangements, is indicated by sullenness, melancholy, despondency, loss of interest in the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... have not his poet-touch, his dreams So full of heavenly gleams, Wrought through the folded dullness of thy bark, And all thy nature dark Stirred to slow throbbings, and the fluttering fire Of ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... without making any apparent effort to please. We say that Madame or Mademoiselle is "not in the mood to-night." A lecturer has his moods, which, apparently, he slips on and off as he would a dressing-gown, charming the people of one town by his eloquence and elegance, and disgusting another by his dullness and carelessness. We are in the habit of saying that certain men are very unequal in their performances, which is only a way of saying that they are moody, and dependent upon and controlled by moods. I think that, in any work or walk of life, a man can in ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... Woe? who, Alas? Who has contentions? Who, complaining? Who has dullness of eyes? They who linger long over wine, They who go about tasting mixed wine. Look not upon the wine when it is red, When it sparkles in the cup. At last it bites like a serpent, And stings like an adder. Your ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... sickness, and then the quiet of a coffin? It was nothing but an hourly procession to the grave, varied by rabbit-shooting. This bold breaking away from the narrow life of such a place has given me a new lease of existence. Now I can look back with surprise on the dullness of that Cornish village, and on the regularity of habits which I did not know were habits. For is not that always the case? You don't know that you are forming a habit: you take each act to be an individual ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... or invariable propriety, requires a degree of firmness and of cool attention, which does not always attend the higher gifts of the mind. Yet, difficult as nature herself seems to have reduced the task of regularity to genius, it is the supreme consolation of dullness, to seize upon those excesses, which are the overflowings of faculties they never enjoyed."[111] Are not the gifts of imagination mistaken here for the strength of passions? Doubtless, where strong passions ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... retardation, and impairs the drainage of the subjacent lung. Limitation of expansion will be found on the invaded side. The area below the foreign body will give an impaired percussion note. Breath-sounds are diminished in the area of dullness, and vocal resonance and fremitus are impaired. Rales are of great diagnostic import; the passage of air past the foreign body is accompanied by blowing, harsh breathing, and snoring; snapping rales are heard usually with greatest intensity posteriorly over the site of the foreign ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... I gave some new and sudden turn to the plot of the story, often grew interested and even excited in listening to hear what kind of a denouement I would bring about. But I am sure this was not due to dullness, for I made rapid progress in both ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... encounter. To leave off contention before it is meddled with does not command any very general admiration; it is too quiet a virtue, with no striking attitudes, and with lips which answer nothing. This is too often mistaken for dullness, and want of proper spirit. It requires discernment and superior wisdom to see a beauty in such repose and self-control, beyond the explosions of anger and retaliation. With the multitude, self-restraining meekness under provocation is a virtue ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... hand a second time, gave it a yet heartier squeeze. I was at a loss to explain this sudden friendship; for I was pretty sure this exceedingly agreeable gentleman had never seen me till that moment. How long this might have lasted I know not, had not a person in the dogana, compassionating my dullness, stepped up to me, and whispered into my ear to give the searcher a few paulos. I was a little scandalized at this proposal to bribe his Holiness's servant; but I could see no chance otherwise of having the iron gate opened. Accordingly, I got ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... filled with all the great names of haut-ton in London, and where little but names were to be found, to seek relief from the ennui that overpowered me, in a cider cellar! and have found there more food for speculation than in the vapid circles of glittering dullness I had left." ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... impulse is fighting? The positive assertion of good, the shaping of beauty, the presentment of a fruitful thought in so desirable a light that other people go down with fresh courage into the dreariness and dullness of life, with all the delight of having a new way of behaving in their minds and hearts—that's how I want you to fight! It requires the toughest sort of courage, I can tell you. But instead of showing your spirit by returning a blow, show your spirit ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of dramatic power and variety. The succession of incident, albeit grossly licentious at times, engages the interest without a moment's dullness. The main narrative, indeed, is no less entertaining than the episodes. The work became a model for story-writers of a much later period, even to the times of Fielding and Smollett. Boccaccio borrowed freely from it; at ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... garments, slip quietly into the water on the seaward side of the ship, where none of the sentries were immediately placed, the object being to guard the access to the shore more especially. Once in the water he had only to strike out quietly for the shore, trusting the dullness of the sentries and the favoring darkness of the night to enable him to ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... luxuriate in the cafe, or spend their evenings in worse places. A brief period of the morning only is given to business, the rest of the day and night to melting lassitude, smoking, and luxurious ease. Evidences of satiety, languor, and dullness, the weakened capacity for enjoyment, are sadly conspicuous, the inevitable sequence of indolence and vice. The arts and sciences seldom disturb the thoughts of such people. Here, as in many European ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... age is the same as his chronological age, he is just average, neither bright nor dull. If his mental age is much above his chronological, he is bright; if much below, dull. His degree of brightness or dullness can be measured by the number of years his mental age is above or below his chronological age. He is, mentally, so many years advanced ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... only the vaguest notion of what it is all about, but for them to join the ranks means adventure, comradeship, the open air—all fascinating things; and they hail the prospect with joy as an escape from intolerable dullness—from the monotony of the desk and the stuffy office, from the dreary round and mechanical routine of the factory bench, from the depressing environment of ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... very simple truths? Well, as simple as they seem to you, reader, you shall yet see others which surpass them in dullness and simplicity. For our course is the reverse of that of the geometricians: with them, the farther they advance, the more difficult their problems become; we, on the contrary, after having commenced with the most abstruse propositions, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... scenes are as dramatic as in the highest social world, but a story of human life; the nobility, the meanness, the pathos of it in hopelessly commonplace surroundings, where the fight is not a hand-to-hand struggle with bitter poverty or crime, but with dullness and monotony. The characters in 'All Sorts and Conditions of Men' are possibly more typical than real, but one hesitates to question either characters or situation. The "impossible story" has become true, and the vision ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... or two from the north, which is about as serious weather as the inhabitant of that favored clime ever experiences. After a night whose sleep has been broken by shrieks of the wind and the rattling of doors and windows, I wake with a dullness of head and sensitiveness of nerve that alone would be sufficient to tell me that the north wind had risen like a thief in the night, and had not, according to the manner of that class, stolen away before morning. On the contrary, he seems to be rushing around with an energy that betokens ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... to grow very impatient of remaining at school, to be flogged for things that I did not like. I longed for variety, especially now that I had not my uncle's to resort to, by way of diversifying the dullness of school with the dreariness of his country seat. I was now turned of sixteen; tall for my age, and full of idle fancies. I had a roving, inextinguishable desire to see different kinds of life, and different orders of society; and this vagrant ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... powerful gusts of wind drove it hard against the northeastern windows of Hugh Crombie's inn. But at least one apartment of the interior presented a scene of comfort and of apparent enjoyment, the more delightful from its contrast with the elemental fury that raged without. A fire, which the dullness of the evening, though a summer one, made necessary, was burning brightly on the hearth; and in front was placed a small round table, sustaining wine and glasses. One of the guests for whom these preparations had been made was Edward Walcott; the other was a shy, awkward young man, distinguished, ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her lip and lashed a weed with her quirt. "All of this is none of my doing," she added, with a dullness in her voice that may have meant either regret or resentment. "You hate my father, and you are mad because I canna side with you and hate him too. I am sorry the trouble came up, but I canna see how you expect me to go on coming to see ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... interest of influential persons. She antagonized people rather than conciliated them. He discovered at once that she had a merry side, a robust humor that was deep and hearty, like her laugh, but it slept most of the time under her own doubts and the dullness of her life. She had not what is called a "sense of humor." That is, she had no intellectual humor; no power to enjoy the absurdities of people, no relish of their pretentiousness and inconsistencies—which only depressed her. But her joviality, Fred felt, was an ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... before said, the majority of the public does not, never will, want sincerity; it is too disturbing. The commercial manager will answer: "The great public does not dislike sincerity, it only dislikes dullness." Well! Dullness is not an absolute, but a very relative term—a term likely to have a different meaning for a man who knows something about life and art from that which it has for a man who knows less. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... and womanly that they seem to reprove me if I do anything the least like play or fun. I have not had a bit of fun since Felix tried to teach his monkey to fish, that he might lazily read himself. I am quite done up with dullness" (heaving ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... a hint two days before, hoping that the dullness of his visit might be lightened by his being invited to take the car out for a spin. The statement had fallen on quite unheeding ears in Cousin Jasper's case, but had been treasured ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... should be kept in strict restraint. There are noisy, boisterous, healthy children, of course, who do not resent or even dread sharp usage. But it is not always easy to discover the sensitive child, because fear of displeasure will freeze him into a stupor of apparent dullness and stubbornness. I am always infuriated by stupid people who regret the disappearance of sharp, stern, peremptory punishments, and lament the softness of the rising generation. If punishment must be inflicted, ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... contradictions, where everything is twisted, disturbed, and abnormal, that there is a great disparity between the distribution of seats on the basis of voters and on the basis of population. The high price of provisions in the towns restricts the growth of urban population, and the dullness of the country districts appears to be favourable to the growth of large families. It is a scientific and unimpeachable fact that, if you desire to apply the principle of "one vote, one value" to the Constitution of the Transvaal, that principle can best be attained—I ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... once, he would never have desired her so fiercely. Now, for the first time in his life impassioned, he felt something mysterious and unwelcome to him begin to mingle with his desire. Above all, life without her meant dullness, lack of vitality, the swift onset of middle-age. He saw this with shrinking. He walked wearily, looking older than he was ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... scholars instead of cherishing ill feeling kindly correct whatever errors have been here committed through the dullness of my intellect in the way of ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... said against it was that the author's dread of inspiration had made it grievously dull, but it was the publisher's opinion that after a glut of sensational fiction the six-shilling public had come to regard dullness as the hall-mark of literary merit. He had no illusions as to its possible success, but, on the other hand, he knew that he could not lose any money on it, so he wrote a letter to the author inviting him to ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... foremost, a period of latency or of incubation, in which there is more or less of dullness and loss of appetite, and this glides gradually into a state of feverishness. The fever may be ushered in with chills and shivering. The nose now becomes hot and dry, the dog is restless and thirsty, and the conjunctivae of the eyes will be found to be considerably ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... wherefore, though not absolutely a Joseph, as we have already seen, yet could he not be guilty of premeditated inconstancy. He was indeed so very cold and insensible to the hints which were given him, that the lady began to complain of his dullness. When the shepherdess again came up and heard this accusation against him, she confirmed it, saying, "I do assure you, madam, he is the dullest fellow in the world. Indeed, I should almost take you for his wife, by finding you ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... Filey obtained a reputation for being 'quiet,' and the sense conveyed by those who disliked the place was that of dullness and primness. This fortunate chance has protected the little town from the vulgarizing influences of the unlettered hordes let loose upon the coast in summer-time, and we find a sea-front without the flimsy meretricious buildings of the popular resorts. Instead of imitating ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... gayly and wondered at Belton's dullness. Belton, poor fellow, was having a tough wrestle with poverty and was trying to coin something out of nothing. Now and then, at some humorous remark, he would smile a faint, sickly smile. Thus it went on until they arrived at the station. Belton ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... say frankly, that I read much and listened to much without being able to get a simple workable understanding of how I was to receive the much-talked-of baptism of power. That may quite likely have been due to my own dullness of comprehension. But whatever the cause, my failing to understand led to a rather careful study of the old Book itself until somewhat clearer light has come. And now in this convention I am anxious to put the truth as simply as I may that others may not blunder and bungle along ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... a depression all the day, A dullness for which I could not account, And a flower has died—a dog run away— Or a horse gone lame that I ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... that faint, but infinitely important sound, and the need of maintaining a semblance of weary dullness was trying Brent's soul. He thanked Heaven for ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... went into the lobby to put on my snow boots and then—as is usually the case with me—my mind won. I thought of tea, crumpets and comfort. Oliver has gone without me, he simply bursts with health and extraordinary dullness. Personally I shall continue to be delicate ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... the sensibilities of a timid, retiring child. It requires great forbearance and discrimination on the part of parents and teachers, in their endeavors to develop the latent faculties of the minds of such children, (whether this dullness is natural, or the effect of untoward circumstances,) without injuring ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... complaint now of Filippo's dullness. He soon learned all that the painter-monks could teach him, and as years passed on the prior would rub his hands in delight to think that here was an artist, one of themselves, who would soon ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... lord, at a time when nonsense, dullness, lewdness, and all manner of profaneness and immorality are daily practised on the stage, I have prevailed on my modesty to offer to your lordship's protection a piece which, if it has no merit to recommend it, has at least ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... animal life. It is this gas that is produced by burning charcoal in a confined portion of common air. Its effect upon the system is well known to every reader of our newspapers. It causes dimness of sight, weakness, dullness, a difficulty of breathing, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... only excellent Artificers for Wollen Cloth; other Nations knew nothing, or very little of it; yet now we find, by unhappy experience, they equal, if not exceed us therein: Why may we not retaliate, and out-strip them in another Mystery? Or, Why should we more scandal our selves with suggestions of Dullness and Indocility, than ...
— Proposals For Building, In Every County, A Working-Alms-House or Hospital • Richard Haines
... collecting the evidence that has floated down the ages and examining it with a new criticism. The attitude of "Pooh! Bah!" of Early Victorian times is no longer the mark of superiority. It is now, as it was then, the mark not only of ignorance but stupid dullness. The frame of mind which used to dismiss everything with the word "impossible" is now recognized not as science but ignorance. The researches of a Crookes, of a Sir Oliver Lodge, Myers, Gurney, Rochas, ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... plaything, almost before it was finished. How different the English landscape garden, where graceful sweeps and irregular masses of foliage meet the eye with unlooked-for beauties at every turn! Well do we remember how, after a few days spent in viewing the grand dullness of the Bavarian capital, we looked wearily back to the delightful visit we made at Nuremberg, with its curious old streets ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... the infancy of Chatterton, parents may be satisfied that an inaptness to learn in childhood, is far from being a prognostic of future dullness. At the age of five years, he was sent to the school of which his father had been master, and was found so incorrigibly stupid, that he was rejected by the teacher, whose name was Love, as incapable of profiting by his instruction. His mother, as most mothers ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... durability of hue. The walls of our galleries are for the most part divided between pictures whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with a heavy hand and a cold heart, secures for them the stability of dullness and the safety of mediocrity; and pictures whose reckless and experimental brilliancy, unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as evanescent as the dust of an insect's wing, and presents in its chief perfections so many subjects ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... came near to anticipating the greenwood scenes of Ivanhoe. The decking and trappings of chivalry filled him with boyish delight, and he found in the glitter and colour of the middle ages a refuge from the prosaic dullness of the eighteenth century. A visit from "a Luxembourg, a Lusignan and a Montfort" awoke in his whimsical fancy a mental image of himself in the guise of a mediaeval baron: "I never felt myself so much in The Castle of Otranto. It sounded as ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... once more sink into its accustomed dullness," said he. "Cokely went yesterday, and Tierney and the Ellisons go to-day. Don't you dread ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... possesses acres, but the landscape I; Half the charm to me it yieldeth money can not buy, Cleon harbors sloth and dullness, freshening vigor I; He in velvet, I in fustian, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... in her new thoughts, and went to bed as though she were dreaming. Grace had experienced nothing but a sense of dullness and extreme sleepiness. ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... child, from the roof-tree diurnal, A scene of distraction or dullness severe, With the longing of youth for diversion and cheer, That comes like the spring-time refreshing and vernal, Goes out on a ruinous, reckless career, Returning, if ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... Durant had wondered how on earth Mrs. Fazakerly could tolerate the Colonel; but, when he came to think of it, there was no reason why she should not go a great deal farther than that. The Colonel's dullness would not depress her, she having such an eternal spring of gaiety in herself. She might even find it "soothing," like the neighboring landscape. And as she loved her laughter, it was not improbable that she loved its cause. Then she had the inestimable advantage ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... through his father, the Archduke Philip, the lord of Burgundy and of the Netherlands, and the heir of Austria. His election as emperor made him, at the age of nineteen, the {427} greatest prince of Christendom. To his gigantic task he brought all the redeeming qualities of dullness, for his mediocrity and moderation served his peoples and his dynasty better than brilliant gifts and boundless ambition would have done. "Never," he is reported to have said in 1556, "did I aspire to universal ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... long since to the dullness of her life-partner; he could not help it and she had willfully married him in the face of as imposing a phalanx of family and friendly opposition as ever attempted to stand between a girl ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... impious school, Each sect profane, o'erthrown by his great mind, Whose best our good to Deity refined, The while they thought Death triumphed o'er his soul. Deem you that only you have thought and sense, While heaven and all its wonders, sun and earth, Scorned in your dullness, lack intelligence? Fool! what produced you? These things gave you birth: So have they mind and God. Repent; be wise! Man fights but ill with Him who rules ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... direction would be taken, or more than once it seemed to Murray that they completely retraced their steps; but after a time a feeling of dullness akin to despair came over the lad, and he resigned himself to his fate, satisfying himself that Roberts was being carefully carried, and then plodding on and on, plunging as it seemed to him in a state of torpidity or stupid sleep in which he kept on dreaming about the ship ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... the President very well, and had access to his presence when officials were kept cooling their heels in the Waiting-room. The President liked to hear the Colonel talk, his voluble ease was a refreshment after the decorous dullness of men who only talked business and government, and everlastingly expounded their notions of justice and the distribution of patronage. The Colonel was as much a lover of farming and of horses as Thomas Jefferson was. He talked to the President by the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... unusual sharpness; her self-command was giving way. Instead of helping, she had been positively an injury to Allie March; first by the sharpness of her reprimands, and then by sarcastic comments on her extreme dullness. ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... that these records are precious, precious above all price? Are there any authentic portions of them that any man can afford to despise? Is not every step in the progress of this people out of savagery into a spiritual faith, matter of the profoundest interest to every human soul? Even the dullness and ignorance and crudity of this people,—even the crookedness and blindness of their leaders and teachers, are full of instruction for us; they show us with what materials and what instruments the divine ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... of dullness, many are reflecting on the repose and abundance they enjoyed once in the Union. But there are more acts in this drama! And the bell may ring any moment for the curtain to ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... began to recede, leaving stranded seaweed in green or brown streaks, the color of which could be determined only by the dullness or vividness of its shine through the dusk. As soon as he was able, the soldier sat up, shook out his blanket and rolled himself in it. The first large stars were trembling out. He lay and smelled gunpowder mingling with the saltiness of the bay and the evening incense ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... engine, which carries the corn, the cotton, and the sugar from our rich valleys to the hungry of other lands, and brings back to us the product of their looms. Nevertheless, he who lives by the machine alone lives but half a life; while he who uses his hand to contrive and to adorn drives dullness from his path. A true artist and a true artisan are one. Hand-craft, the power to shape, to curve, to beautify, to create, gives pleasure and dignity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... describe Sandwich? I think not. Let us own the truth; descriptions of places, however nicely they may be written, are always more or less dull. Being a woman, I naturally hate dullness. Perhaps some description of Sandwich may drop out, as it were, from my report of our conversation when we first met as strangers in ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... ill in her turn, waste away, suffer much, and become even more incapable of any useful pursuit than she was before; while by the time that you have regained your normal state of health she will express to you her self-sacrificing affection only by shedding around you a kind of benignant dullness which involuntarily communicates itself both to yourself and to every one else in ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... The parishioners of Givens seldom had sight of her, and set it down to pride and contempt of her husband's origin. (He had been a weaver's son from Falkirk, who either had won his way to the Marischal College of Aberdeen by strength of will and in defiance of natural dullness, or else had started with wits but blunted them in carving his way thither.) She rarely set foot beyond the manse garden, the most of her time being spent in a roomy garret under the slates, where she spun a fine yarn and worked it into thread of the kind which is yet known as "Balgarnock thread," ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a state of restlessness and dullness, complaining of difficulty in swallowing. Mrs. Martin was uneasy lest there should be something malignant about the attack; but to Phillida the case seemed an ordinary one, not likely to prove serious. She held Tommy in her ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. Jim saw nothing but the disorder of his tossed cabin. He lay there battened down in the midst of a small devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on deck. But now and again an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip him bodily, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... strongest that binds society together, and let me depart as a sort of outcast from his family, that strangely lessened my self-confidence. The Muse, too,—the very coquette that had led me into this wilderness—deserted me, and I should have been reduced to an uncomfortable state of dullness had it not been for the conversation of strangers who chanced to pass the same way. One poor man with whom I travelled a day and a half, and whose name was Morris, afforded me most amusement. He had upon his pillion a very small, but apparently a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... who asked not a penny more than his fare; he departed with thanks; the facetious footman closed the door, told her to take a seat, and went away full of laughter, to report that the young person had brought a large library with her to enliven the dullness of her new situation. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... of dullness if I did! You'd be positively bored to tears. No, we all have our talents, and I consider my mission in life is to keep things humming and cheer you all up. I may do it at some personal ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... gallant leader," you might have thought you knew what I meant; because I meant nothing. But I do mean something; and I do want you to understand what I mean. I will, therefore, state it with total dullness, in separate paragraphs; and I ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... raised his head, rubbed his eyes, and tried to stretch his limbs, now numb with the damp dullness of the night. Potts had run to him and was asking the "matter," with dilated eyes ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera |
