"Incurious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the appointed hour, would assume her true shape, and, having appeared to her terrified lover as a fiend of hell, would vanish from him in a flash of sulphurous lightning. Raymond of Ravenswood acquiesced in the experiment, not incurious concerning the issue, though confident it would disappoint ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... rules of morality themselves have, for the first time, unfortunately for mankind, become the subject of doubt and discussion. I shall consider it as my duty to abstain from all mention of these awful events, and of these fatal controversies. But the mind of that man must indeed be incurious and indocile, who has either overlooked all these things; or reaped no instruction from ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... perfectly vigilant and absolutely impassive. But even more amazing was the voice that contradicted both these impressions, being most sweetly and delicately modulated, with a musical ring that charmed the ear as the notes of a well-sung song. The others, hearing us addressed, turned an incurious gaze upon us for a moment, and then fastened their attention anew upon ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a Chicago newspaper. Captain Will Hallam often had occasion to employ Joe, and thus Duncan had come into acquaintance with the young man's peculiar abilities for finding out things. Joe Arnold had an innocent, incurious, almost stupid countenance that suggested a chronic desire for sleep rather than any more alert characteristic. He had a dull, uninterested way of asking questions which suggested the impulse of a vacuous mind to "keep the talk going," rather ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... unfortunately, on the far side of the cellar, out of reach, and he dared not break another window. Under this which served him lay the bin of Chianti. This was better than nothing; and the princess would never miss the few bottles he purloined. Sometimes he shared a bottle with Smith, who was equally incurious. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... purpose. With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual and not incurious inspection into ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in at that window. Even the curtain could only be detected with an opera-glass from the steamer that passed twice a week. But the sweet instinct of privacy and home had had its way, and every night the little curtain that never shut out anything but the incurious moonlight or the innocent stars was drawn as regularly as the shades of a Fifth Avenue mansion. Later we learned that it was the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... Perhaps the incurious glance of the American made itself felt, for as she threw down a fresh louis d'or, she looked up and their eyes met. For an instant her expression was almost that of one who stifles an impulse to recognize another. Possibly, ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... her room, as the night wore on. She was pitifully frightened, numb. There was in the room, she dimly noted, a heavy silence that sobs had no power to shatter. Dimly, too, she seemed aware of a multitude of wide, incurious eyes which watched her from every corner, where panels snapped at times with sharp echoes. The night was well-nigh done when ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... never heard where the packet came from or what it contained. All she knew was that her stepfather had told her that it belonged to her. And the knowledge left her incurious. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... florification; if neither herb nor flower can avail, more than the touch of monarchs, against hereditary pain; if it be no better account of a pink to say it is nut-leaved, than of a nut to say it is pink-leaved; and if the modern mind, incurious respecting the journeys of wise men, has already confused, in its Bradshaw's Bible, the station of Bethlehem with that of Bethel,[48] it is certainly time to take some order with the partly false, partly useless, and partly forgotten literature of the ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... construction. If the span became too wide, they thickened the posts (the columns of Paestum are 7 ft. in diameter) and increased the strength of the beam (the architrave). Hence the vast solidity of the Doric order of the temples of Sicily and Magna Graecia. The Greek was incurious about construction qua construction. He found, in the column and the lintel, means perfectly adequate to realize his ideal of high unalterable beauty, and he was content. The Romans, who for a time were satisfied with these simple methods, became impatient of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... frolics, and puerile amusements, which do not pass without serious, perhaps contemptuous, animadversion—setting these aside it appears to me that even our best models are but ill adapted for the imitation of a rude, incurious, and unambitious people. Their senses, not their reason, should be acted on, to rouse them from their lethargy; their imaginations must be warmed; a spirit of enthusiasm must pervade and animate them before they will exchange the pleasures of indolence for those of industry. The philosophical ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... them Roy instinctively drew rein;—and there, in the midst of the shifting, drifting crowd, he sat motionless, letting the vision sink deep into his mind, while Terry investigated a promising smell, and Bishun Singh, wholly incurious, gossiped with a potter, from whose wheel emerged an endless succession of chiraghs—primitive clay lamps, with a lip for the cotton wick. His neighbour, with equal zest, was creating very ill-shapen clay animals, birds ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... poem, "The Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician," with the calm prologizing of the Hellenic goddess, by association of the "wise pharmacies" of AEsculapius, with the inquisitive sagacity of Karshish, "the not-incurious in God's handiwork." By this ordering of the poems, the reader may now enjoy, at any rate, the contrasts between three historic phases of wisdom in bodily ills: the phase presented in the dependence of the old Greek ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... the porch of things; Apt at life's lore, incurious what life meant. Dextrous of hand, she struck her lute's few strings; Ignobly ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... give them tobacco. They work for me all the same brothers." It is true there was a brother once in Arden! But we prefer the shorter word. They bear every servile mark,—levity like a child's, incurable idleness, incurious content. The insolence of the cook was a trait of his own; not so his levity, which he shared with the innocent Uncle Parker. With equal unconcern both gambolled under the shadow of the gallows, and took liberties with death that might have surprised a careless student of man's nature. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or how the gods have got out to perform their various 'stunts' on the flammantia moenia mundi, is not asked by their incurious devotees. Through Broadway the dingily glittering tide spreads itself over the sands of 'amusement.' Theatres and 'movies' are aglare. Cars shriek down the street; the Elevated train clangs and curves perilously overhead; newsboys wail the baseball news; wits cry their obscure challenges to one another, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... time that she had ever spoken of the thought which was in her mind day and night, for when she could no longer welcome her destiny, she had accepted it. Her faith, like her opinions, was child-like and uncritical—the artless product of a simple and incurious age. The strength in her had gone not into the building of knowledge, but into the making of character, and she had judged all thought as innocently as she had judged all literature, by its contribution to the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... most lives reflected hers in that their questioning was never answered. The fortunate, then, were the incurious and the hearts undisturbed by a maddening thrill. She said aloud, "The ones who never heard music." Pleydon was without a sign that she had spoken. Her emotions were very delicate, very fragile, and enormously difficult to perceive. They were like ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... maintaining the obligatory laws and apostolic usages established among them and justifying them, one against other, and sparing their blood and warding off hurt from them; and of his qualities should be that he never abide incurious of the poor and that he succour the highest and lowest of them and give them each the rights to them due, so that all bless him and are obedient to his commend. Without doubt, a King who is after this wise of his lieges is beloved and gaineth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... royal purple of the heather—all this is a consummation of pure life, a high, sensuous pleasure penetrating to the inmost soul, and of such exceeding price that to disdain its offerings or to pass incurious before them, is to live in the blindness ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... she the Queen of Drabs, Whose Head is perriwigg'd with scabs? Whose Hair hangs down incurious flakes, All curl'd and crisp'd, like crawling Snakes; The Breath of whose perfumed Locks Might choke the Devil with a Pox; Whose dainty twinings did entice The whole monopoly of Lice; Her Forehead next is to be found, Resembling much the new-plough'd ground, Furrow'd like stairs, ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... and laughed a moment with the keeper, then gave me his buxom paw in farewell. I was led through stone passages, past rows of barred cells from which peered visages of fellow prisoners, incurious and preoccupied, or truculent and reckless—men under indictment and without bail, convicts making appeal, and culprits jailed for minor offenses. Such men were to be my comrades for the future. Some were out in the corridors, pacing ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... submitted without demur to an examination of his clothing, and without any change of expression that I could perceive. The pale eyes followed my movements with a blank, incurious stare (though Stodger maintains that they did not cease for an instant regarding him), and I was glad enough to see the fellow depart, after I had privately passed word to Stodger not to lose Burke until another ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... have gone farther and to have asked what degree of relevancy a Covenant for the members of the League could be supposed to possess to a treaty concluded with a nation which for the time being was denied admission to that sodality. And as we saw, he was incurious enough not to read the narrative of what had been done by his own American colleagues even after the Havas ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... custom of transmitting to posterity the actions and manners of famous men, has not been neglected even by the present age, incurious though it be about those belonging to it, whenever any exalted and noble degree of virtue has triumphed over that false estimation of merit, and that ill-will to it, by which small and great states are equally infested. In former times, however, as there was a greater propensity ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... happiness of society with its means, is a subject which calls forth all the eloquence and sagacity of this writer. Nor is this surprising; for it might startle the most sluggish indifference—the most incurious stupidity. How does it come to pass, that with us misery is the fruit of successful labour, that with us experience does not teach caution, that with us the most munificent charity is unable to check the accumulation of evil, moral and physical, with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... the two visitors, with her head held scornfully in air, and left the men together. Mr. Aram seemed to have a most passive and incurious disposition. He could have no idea as to who his anonymous visitors might be, nor did he show ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... copper-plate; they sang some of Mendelssohn's choruses from 'St. Paul' splendidly, the Caffres rolling out soft rich bass voices, like melodious thunder. They are clever at handicrafts, and fond of geography and natural history, incapable of mathematics, quick at languages, utterly incurious about other nations, and would all rather work in the fields than learn anything but music; good boys, honest, but 'trotzig'. So much for Caffres, Fingoes, &c. The Bastaards are as clever as whites, and more docile—so the 'rector' told ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... conveyed to her innumerable impressions, each of which became a dull excitation to her jaded imagination. Somewhere within her, responsive notes were answering to the things without, forgotten and undreamed-of correspondences were being renewed; and she was aware of it in an incurious way, and her soul was troubled, but she was not equal to the mental exultation necessary to transmute and understand. So she plodded wearily on at the heels of her lord, content to wait for that which she knew, somewhere, somehow, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... what he had done at Drew's place could not have travelled before him to Wood's house; but the next day it would be sure to come, and Wood could say that he had seen Bard—alone—the previous night. It would be a sufficient shield for the name of Sally Fortune in that incurious region. ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... nobody questioned him; the train officials were civil and incurious, and went calmly about their business with all the traditional ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... incurious eye toward the place where the ball had struck, and then resumed his former attitude, with a composure that could not be disturbed by so trifling an incident. Just then Uncas glided into the circle, and seated himself at the fire, with the same ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... religion, has made them hard and incurious; it is a land of uncompromising masculinity. The softer element—thanks to the Koran—has become non-existent, and you will look in vain for the creative-feminine, for those intermediate types of ambiguous, submerged sexuality, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... had little or no sympathy; he was not so impatient of them as the Swedenborgians commonly are, and he probably acknowledged a measure of verity in the spiritistic phenomena; but he seemed rather incurious concerning them, and he must have regarded them as superfluities of naughtiness, mostly; as emanations from the hells. His powerful and penetrating intellect interested itself with all social and civil facts through his religion. He was essentially religious, but he was very consciously ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was a very irregular reader of the newspaper; he was not greedy of news, and he was incurious about events, while he disliked the way in which they were professionally dished up for human consumption. At times, however, he would pore long and earnestly over a daily paper with knitted brows and sighs. "You seem to be suffering a good deal over your paper to-day, Father!" said Barthrop ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him made that unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... incivility, became on a sudden less communicable, and thence very sad, pale, and exceedingly affected with the spleen. In his clothes and habit, which he had minded before always with more neatness and industry and expense than is usual to so great a soul, he was not now only incurious, but too negligent; and in his reception of suitors, and the necessary or casual addresses to his place, so quick and sharp and severe, that there wanted not some men (strangers to his nature and disposition) who believed him proud and ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... out into thirty, which certainly is an argument of a wit that is very much at leisure, and unable to moderate his force. That shortness which Virgil hath prudently made choice of, is in my opinion much better; for a Shepherd, who is naturally incurious, and unobserving, cannot think that tis his duty to be exact in particulars, and describe every thing with an accurate niceness: yet Roncardus hath done it, a man of most correct judgment, and, in imitation of Theocritus, hath, considering the then poverty of ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... all his incurious young life had never thought of the roof of the Palace, save as a necessary shelter from the weather, a thing of tiles and gutters, ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... slothful, incurious, destitute of knowledge and of all thirst of knowledge, insolent, and profligate. They say that in the treatment of my father I have been ungrateful and inhuman. I have stolen his property, and deserted him in his calamity. Therefore they hate and revile me. It is well; I love them for ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... slightly from his recumbent position at the sound of the opening of the door. He watched Fenn with dull, incurious eyes as the latter crossed the uncarpeted floor of the bare wooden shed, threw off his overcoat, and advanced towards the ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sportive colthood, or graze and hobble through a tranquil old age, with the active and laborious honours of a public life past, but not forgotten. Little shall be said of that smooth and narrow pool, scarce visible among the rising shrubs which belt in and shroud the grounds from the incurious wayfarer; or of such carp and tench as, having escaped the treacherous toils of the nightly plunderer, gasp and tumble on its surface, delighting to display their golden pride in the mid-day sun, before the gaze of lawful possession. Nor shall the casual reader be led carelessly and wearily ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... song aspires to scan! O Beauty, trod by proud insulting man, This boasted tyrant of thy wondrous ball, This mighty, haughty, little lord of all; This king o'er reason, but this slave to sense, Of wisdom careless, but of whim immense; Towards thee incurious, ignorant, profane, But of his own, dear, strange productions vain! Then with this champion let the field be fought, And nature's simplest arts 'gainst human wisdom brought. Let elegance and bounty here unite— There kings ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... the agony of foresight; he could not see beyond her sparkling eyes; and Claire was happy, exultantly, supremely happy, with the reckless, incurious ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome |
