"Insipidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an excellent specimen of an English woman. Pretty, without vanity or affectation; gentle, without insipidity; and simple, yet highly polished, in mariners. She has, too, a low, "sweet voice, an excellent thing in woman," and, to me, whose ears offer even a more direct road to the heart than do the eyes, is ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... as pyrotechny—that we are as blissfully ignorant of all that relates to the science of government as that of gastronomy—and have ever since our boyhood preferred the solid consistency of gingerbread to the crisp insipidity of parliament. The candidates of whom we write were no would-be senators—no sprouting Ciceros or embryo Demosthenes'—they were no aspirants for the grand honour of representing the honest and independent stocks and stones of some ancient rotten borough, or, what ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... feelings that gives rise to sentimentality, as, when the tongue is disordered, we are always trying it. The cure of that insipidity is to direct upon it the energy of an objective earnestness, a current of positive faith and love. No negative treatment, of indifference or of contempt, can avail. Sentimentality, frozen under the cutting ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... abstract nature. And if the idea of sin is incapable of being formed with respect to Him, so also is its negative, for we cannot form an idea of negation, where we cannot form an idea of presence. If for instance one could conceive of taste or flavor in a proposition of Euclid, so also might we of insipidity, but if not of the one, then not of the other. So that, in speaking of the goodness of God, it cannot be that we mean anything more than his Love, Mercifulness, and Justice, and these attributes I have shown to be expressed by other qualities of beauty, and I cannot trace any ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... morality being so insipid,' he says, 'is that their authors are not sincere; is that, being feeble echoes of one another, they could not venture to publish their own real maxims and private sentiments.'[22] One of the secrets of his own freedom from this ordinary insipidity of moralists was his freedom also ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... suppose I must try to assimilate it also, to turn it also to good, if I be able. Eulogies, dyslogies, in which one finds no features of one's own natural face, are easily dealt with; easily left unread, as stuff for lighting fires, such is the insipidity, the wearisome nonentity of pabulum like that: but here is another sort of matter! "The beautifulest piece of criticism I have read for many a day," says every one that speaks of it. May the gods forgive you!—I have purchased ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... judgment than Tom, more talent and taste than Mr. Yates. She did not like him as a man, but she must admit him to be the best actor, and on this point there were not many who differed from her. Mr. Yates, indeed, exclaimed against his tameness and insipidity; and the day came at last, when Mr. Rushworth turned to her with a black look, and said, "Do you think there is anything so very fine in all this? For the life and soul of me, I cannot admire him; and, between ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Ovid, which appeared in company with Davies's Epigrammes, Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image, Hall's Satires, and Cutwode's Caltha Poetarum; or, The Bumble Bee. The latter is a fantastic poem of 187 stanzas about a bee and a marigold, and deserved the fire rather for its insipidity than for the reasons which justified the cleansing process applied to the others, the youthful productions of men who were destined to attain celebrity in very different ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... absurdity and perversity remain the masters of this world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods. Nor is it otherwise in art; for there genuine work, seldom found and still more seldom appreciated, is again and again driven out by dullness, insipidity, and affectation. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... little, thin woman, upright even to formality in her figure, and serious even to sourness in her aspect. Her complexion was sallow, and her features small, without beauty, and naturally without expression; but a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity by giving it the strong characters of pride and ill-nature. She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas; of the few syllables which did escape her, not one fell to the share of Miss Dashwood, whom ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... divozioni, by confraternities of religious laymen. The actors were boys belonging to the brotherhoods, and the plays were intended to be edifying for youth. They are more refined than the northern religious dramas, but only too often fall into insipidity. ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... author of some of the most popular stage pieces of his day. Yet his extravaganzas have no wit but that of violence; his rhyming couplets are without polish, and decorated only by forced and often pointless puns. His sentiment had T.W. Robertson's insipidity without its freshness, and restored an element of vulgarity which his predecessor had laboured to eradicate from theatrical tradition. He could draw a "Cockney" character with some fidelity, but his dramatis ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... The insipidity of Madame de Moret soon counteracted the spell of her beauty; and although on his return from Sedan the King had appeared to be more fascinated by her extraordinary loveliness than even at the first period of their acquaintance, it was not long ere he listened with a patience very unusual to him ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Burns, too late for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by parcel that she might not have to wait. Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful simplicity: "I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday; and there's a certain insipidity in good kind folks I once enjoyed not a little. Miss Wardrobe supped here on Monday. She once named you, which kept me from falling asleep. I drank your health in a glass of ale - as the lasses ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... another species of ridicule: her shape was neither good nor bad: her countenance bore the appearance of the greatest insipidity, and her complexion was the same all over; with two little hollow eyes, adorned with white eye-lashes, as long as one's finger. With these attractions she placed herself in ambuscade to surprise unwary hearts; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... is exquisitely intelligent in spite of it. She has a way of evading, escaping, eluding, and then gives you an intoxicating hint of sudden and complete surrender. She is divinely innocent, but roguishness saves her from insipidity. Her looks? She looks as you would imagine a person might look who possessed these graces; and she is worth looking at, though every time I do it I have a rush of love to the head. When you find a girl who combines all the qualities ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... wretched jumble of inconsistencies, absurdity, and insipidity, can have been suffered ever to be performed, is a subject at once of wonder and regret. It is surprising, that Garrick never remedied the evil; a man, who had an ardent veneration for Shakspeare, and by his acting and ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... Mrs. Ward; Florinda, Mrs. Powell; Valeria, Mrs. Kemble; Lucetta, Miss Tidswell. It is not entirely worthless from a purely technical point of view, but yet very modest and mediocre. As might well be surmised, the raciness and spirit of The Rover entirely evaporate in the insipidity of emasculation. This is the last recorded performance of Mrs. Behn's brilliant comedy in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... then, make it real to others? To tell of aerial adventure one needs a new language, or, at least, a parcel of new adjectives, sparkling with bright and vivid meaning, as crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and delightful to it. For there is something ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... found in his four volumes of Travels in the East, to emblazon, with the brightest colours of the rainbow, forty volumes of ordinary adventure. We long for some repose amidst the constant repetition of dazzling objects; monotony, insipidity, ordinary life, even dulness itself, would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott says, in one of his novels—"Be assured that whenever I am particularly dull, it is not without an object;" and Lamartine would sometimes be the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... not an age of gross and open vices; manners were not flagitious, they were merely of a nauseous insipidity. Ibsen, flown with anger as with wine, could find no outrageous offences to lash, and all he could invite the age to do was to laugh at certain conventions and to reconsider some prejudicated opinions. He had to be pungent, not openly ferocious; he had to be sarcastic ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... declare that the proceedings begun against the jacquerie of Brittany shall be regarded as null and void, and that the arrested insurgents shall be set free. For repressive purposes, it dispatches a sentimental exhortation to the French people, consisting of twelve pages of literary insipidity, which Florian might have composed for his Estilles and his Nemorins.[3267]—New conflagrations, as an inevitable consequence, kindle around live coals which have been imperfectly extinguished. In the district of Saintes,[3268] M. Dupaty, counselor ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... others on the coast, and, internally, exhibit taste in their furniture and ornament. The ladies excite the author's pen into absolute rapture; their sparkling eyes and glossy hair, are, in themselves, sufficient to negative the idea of tameness or insipidity, while their sylph-like figures exhibit fresh graces at every step. This is supported by the more important qualities, of "being by far the more industrious half of the community, and performing their household duties with cheerfulness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... physical beauty may cross one's pathway only once in a lifetime—or not at all. In the latter case it is natural to doubt the absolute truth of the rumours that the thing exists. The abnormal creature seems a mere freak of nature and may chance to be angel, criminal, total insipidity, virago or enchanter, but let such an one enter a room or appear in the street, and heads must turn, eyes light and follow, souls yearn or envy, or sink under the discouragement of comparison. With the complete harmony ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... do; so that no farther trouble may be experienced than to accept the dishes that are presented, and to drink at your own time the wines which are handed round. A fashionable dinner, on the contrary, seems to presume beforehand on the silence, dulness, and insipidity of the guests, and to have provided little interruptions, like the jerks which the Chaplain gives to the Archbishop to prevent his going to sleep ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... now called casada in the British West Indies, or prepared manioc root; and axi in some other parts of this voyage is mentioned as the spice of the West Indies; probably either pimento or capsicum, and used as a condiment to relish the insipidity ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet, and that, if one is not on one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride. Such and such a formality or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against it. His face wore a sort of severe flush. He ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Insipidity, weariness, and dulness marked the commencement of the concluding week of the Home Rule Bill in the House. There was no private business on the Monday, and accordingly for nearly a quarter of an hour—it seemed infinitely longer to the little group of members ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... forms of poetry is revealed in their respective manners of going wrong. The decline of the old English poetry is shown by an increase of diffuseness and insipidity. The old Norse poetry was attacked by an evil of a different sort, the malady of false wit and over-decoration. The English poetry, when it loses strength and self-control, is prone to monotonous lamentation; the Norse poetry is tempted to ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... compliments to female beauty, with pedantic, often indecent, citations from ancient mythology, chiefly characterized this school of poetry. Martin Opitz, A.D. 1639, the founder of the first Silesian school,[1] notwithstanding the insipidity of the taste of the day, preserved the harmony of the German ballad. His most distinguished followers were Logau, celebrated for his Epigrams;[2] Paul Gerhard, who, in his fine hymns, revived the force and simplicity ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... domestic and familiar events can be expected from a private correspondence; no reflexions but such as they excite can be found there; yet whoever turns away disgusted by the insipidity with which this, and I suppose every correspondence must naturally and almost necessarily begin—will here be likely to lose some genuine pleasure, and some useful knowledge of what our heroic Milton was himself contented to ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... awkwardly contrasted with their personal absurdity and insipidity, at length provoked the serious notice of the two illustrious associates: the result was this German Dunciad; a production of which the plan was, that it should comprise an immense multitude of detached couplets, each conveying a complete ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... to tranquillity. Vivian's good-nature had induced him for some time to submit to restraint; but if, instead of weakly yielding to the fond importunity of his wife—if, instead of tolerating the insipidity of her conversation and the narrowness of her views, he had with real energy employed her capacity upon suitable objects, he might have made her attachment the solace of his life. Whoever possesses the heart of a woman, who ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... Zuloagas have been seen in New York when Archer M. Huntington invited the Spanish artist to exhibit at the Hispanic Museum. Not, however, his Lassitude, two half-nudes, nor his powerful but unpleasant Bleeding Christ. What a giant Zuloaga seems when matched against the insipidity and coarseness of modern German art. The recent art of Arthur Kampf, who is a painter of more force than distinction, a one-man show in Unter den Linden, Berlin, did not impress me; nor did the third jury-free art show ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... hearts by living like a farmer. Instead of the fierce light beating about a throne, it played lambently upon a sty. And the nation who admired, imitated. When the Regent came, and with him that coarse profligacy which has alternated with cloudy insipidity in the annals of the line, the honest part of the world, out of antipathy to the son, was driven even further into domestic sentimentality of a greasy kind, than it had gone from ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... the book, it may suffice to mention the one fact, that the story of Kronos devouring his children is explained as arising out of the existence of cannibalism in the earliest times and its abolition by king Zeus. Notwithstanding, or even by virtue of, its insipidity and of its very obvious purpose, the production had an undeserved success in Greece, and helped, in concert with the current philosophies there, to bury the dead religion. It is a remarkable indication of the expressed and conscious antagonism between religion and the new philosophy ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... that these two extraordinary men, by endeavouring to give the utmost degree of grace, have sometimes, perhaps, exceeded its boundaries, and have fallen into the most hateful of all hateful qualities, affectation. Indeed, it is the peculiar characteristic of men of genius to be afraid of coldness and insipidity, from which they think they never can be too far removed. It particularly happens to these great masters of grace and elegance. They often boldly drive on to the very verge of ridicule; the spectator is alarmed, but at the same time ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... little lacking in our English ideal of young ladies: and we must be on our guard lest any school ideals of study and bookishness should actually increase this deficiency. Any one, mistress or girl, who makes good education to be associated with dulness and boredom and insipidity is again a traitor to the cause of ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... to Thomas Davidson's memory not to be frank about him. He handled people without gloves, himself, and one has no right to retouch his photograph until its features are softened into insipidity. He had defects and excesses which he wore upon his sleeve, so that everyone could see them. They made him many enemies, and if one liked quarrelling he was an easy man to quarrel with. But his heart and mind held treasures ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... order to retain the impression he has received. It results from all this, that while we constantly distrust our guide, while we perpetually refuse the appreciation he offers to us of men and events, we still read on with interest a work which is, at least, relieved from the charge of insipidity or dulness; and indeed, if we had not derived some entertainment from its perusal, we should not have thought of bringing it under the notice of our readers. To have engaged ourselves merely in combating its errors and misrepresentations, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... the crying bad taste of their toilets over the fresh green sward; while beside them young men postured in their fashion-plate accouterments with light gloves, varnished boots, canes, the size of a thread, and single eye-glasses punctuating the insipidity of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... object of envy by others, while repining and discontented herself, she determined no longer to be the only one insensible to the blessings within her reach, but by projecting and adopting some plan of conduct better suited to her taste and feelings than the frivolous insipidity of her present life, to make at once a more spirited and more worthy use of the affluence, freedom, and power ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... your letter from Rutland. Do you know I am almost angry? Your ideas of love are narrow and pedantic; custom has done enough to make the life of one half of our species tasteless; but you would reduce them to a state of still greater insipidity than even that to which ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... a happiness also to make the acquaintance of women who are brilliant and not bad, whose innocence does not run into insipidity, who are no less queens than vassals, worthily the one, royally the other. We meet in books many single-women, but they are usually embittered by disappointment or by hope deferred,—angular, envious, busybodies in other ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... manly, intelligent and could meet men on a basis of equality. If I were president of a college, I would certainly have a Chair devoted to Psychic Mixability, or Charm of Manner. Ponderosity, profundity and insipidity may have their place, but the man with Charm of Manner keeps his capital active. His soul is fluid. I have never been in possession of enough of this Social Radium to analyze it, but I know it has the power of dissolving opposition, and melting human ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... the religious-royalist-legitimist order. The ears of all the Bourbons in the world must have been burning. Mrs. Blunt seemed to have come into personal contact with a good many of them and the marvellous insipidity of her recollections was astonishing to my inexperience. I looked at her from time to time thinking: She has seen slavery, she has seen the Commune, she knows two continents, she has seen a civil war, the glory of the Second Empire, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... The accent is just without that seeking for virile energy which too often spoils the most charming qualities. The sentiment is discreet without losing its intensity in order to attract public notice. The painting of Mme. Henriette Browne is at an equal distance from grandeur and insipidity, from power and affectation, and gathers from the just balance of her nature some effects of taste and charm of which a parvenu in art ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... was natural to one of her complexion, she preferred the convents where the greatest freedom prevailed. Odo, however, had hitherto found little to tempt him in these glimpses of forbidden fruit. The nuns, though often young and pretty, had the insipidity of women secluded from the passions and sorrows of life without being raised above them; and he preferred the frank coarseness of the Procuratessa's circle to the simpering graces ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... his imagination. His highest aim (and that only at last) is slavishly to entreat pardon from his brothers-in-law for the mere offence of marrying their sister; and he dies by an improbable accident, the same pious and respectable insipidity which he has lived,—'ne valant pas la peine qui se donne pour lui.' The prison-scenes between the Duchess and her tormentors are painful enough, if to give pain be a dramatic virtue; and she appears in them really noble; and might have appeared ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... and humor of Gottfried Keller, the living tradition of the great popular festivals, and the sap of springtime swelling the trees,—the still young art, sometimes rasping to the palate, like the hard fruits of wild pear-trees, sometimes with the sweetish insipidity of myrtles black and blue, but at least something smacking of the earth, is the work of self-taught men not cut off from the people by an archaic culture, but, with them, reading in ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... limited and unseasoned diet of the English the variety and savouriness of American food (I mean the food of the well-to-do in the large towns), which includes all the English and Scotch dishes, corrected of their insipidity, besides countless dishes French, German, and Dutch, and many native to the soil, all improved and diversified by the surprising genius for cookery which, in so few generations, the negro race has come to exhibit. I was a busy lad ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... know is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the most part; which, though it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one called Joy or Pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of a state, and ca ne laisse que de s'amuser. The only fault is its insipidity; which is apt now and then to give a sort of Ennui, which makes one form certain little wishes that signify nothing. But there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt, that has somewhat in it like Tertullian's rule of faith, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... as to be perceptible to the touch externally, and are called by the vulgar ague-cakes. As these glands are stimulated into action by the specific pungency of the fluids, which they absorb, the general cause of their quiescence seems to be the too great insipidity of the fluids of the body, co-operating perhaps at the same time with ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... in which Milton has contrived to strengthen our interest in Satan is the number and insipidity of the good angels. There are old rules as to the necessity of a supernatural machinery for an epic poem, worth some fraction of the paper on which they are written, and derived from the practice of Homer, who believed his gods and goddesses ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... in this letter about Lady Townley sufficiently shows how bad my performance of it must have been, and how absolutely in the dark I was with regard to the real style in which the part should be played. The fine lady of my day, with the unruffled insipidity of her low spirits (high spirits never came near her) and the imperturbable composure of her smooth insolence, was as unlike the rantipole, racketing high-bred woman of fashion of Sir John Vanbrugh's ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... tolerable certainty into the characters of her acquaintance. Most of the young men with whom she had hitherto associated having lived from youth to manhood amongst those fashionable assemblies where individuality is absorbed in the general mass of insipidity, she saw they were frivolous, though obsequious to her, or, at the best, warped in taste, if not in principle; and the fascinations she called forth to subdue them were suited to their objects—her beauty, her thoughtless, or her caprice. But, on the reverse, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... formed in the interstices of the cellary tissue. It sometimes agglomerates in animals whom art or nature has so predisposed, such as pigs, fowls, ortolans and snipe. In some of these animals it loses its insipidity and acquires a slight ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... wool; silences as searching as the odour of musk—as soothing as the perfume of violets. The crisp silence of the seashore when absolute calm prevails is as different from the strained, sodden, padded silence of the jungle as the savour of olives from the raw insipidity of white of egg, for the cumbersome mantle of leafage is the surest stifler of noise, the truest cherisher ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... of the fact that she had so lately eaten that noble tea, the earlier courses could hardly be expected to interest her; but the sweets to which she had been looking forward proved of a most disappointing, though painstaking, insipidity; and she was indeed glad when the ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... or nothing of all this takes place. Frivolity and insipidity are the prevailing characters of conversation; and nowhere in Europe, perhaps, does difference of fortune or station produce more unsocial and illiberal separation. Very few of those whom fortune has released from the necessity of following some laborious profession, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... animals, while the marshy basins of the French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures. That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, we like a crocodile better than a frog; we prefer a barbarism of Shakspere to an insipidity of Campistron." But above all things—such is the doctrine of this preface—do not imitate anybody—not Shakspere any more than Racine. "He who imitates a romantic poet becomes thereby a classic, and just because he imitates." In 1823 Hugo had published anonymously his first prose romance, "Han ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... a little; and instead of keeping us out of bed, it sends us there—or would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action. Macaulay, who confesses its absurdity and insipidity, says that no reader, probably, ever thought it dull. "The story, whatever its value may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no digressions, or unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every sentence ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... taste and execution can only be appreciated by the few. The actor can be certain of applause if he only thunder forth his parting reply. The comedian is sure of a shout of bravo if he puts forth an insipidity, and rubs his legs together as if replying with spirit and humor. The massive plate in the house gives many a lady the boldness to teach that in which she herself might perhaps have been instructed. Many a lady, like the Mamsell from Holstebro, dresses always in silk and a long ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... expression and native gifts of a porcelain doll. The mind and the character can be so symmetrical that they will lose all charm and all significance. They descend into simple prettiness, which is simple insipidity. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... history, however dark, there is no beautiful old tale, however tragic, which does not impart some strength and some distinction to the awakening mind. It is possible to overrate the superlative merits of insipidity as a mental and moral force in ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... his authority as a husband, to prevent my indulging in my favorite entertainments. This state of affairs continued, my dear, until you attained the age of sixteen, when you began to feel a distaste for the insipidity of a domestic life, and longed for a change.—Our positions were then precisely similar: we both were debarred from the delights of gay society, for which we so ardently longed. One obstacle, and one only, lay in our way; that obstacle ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... been struck with the slighting manner in which Sir Walter describes his heroines' charms? Edith Bellenden, we are asked to believe, was fair without insipidity; Julia Mannering, who is to Waverley what Rosalind is to Shakespeare, is hardly credited with being beautiful at all; while when it comes to his heroes Sir Walter is even more strikingly ineloquent. "A slender young man," or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... Lord Anson, related to me the following anecdote of the death of Lord Sc——. His Lordship sent to see Mr. Anson on the Monday preceding his death, and said, "You are the only friend I value in the world, I determined therefore to acquaint you, that I am tired of the insipidity of life, and intend to-morrow to leave it." Mr. Anson said, after much conversation, that he was obliged to leave town till Friday, and added, "As you profess a friendship for me, do me this last favour, I entreat you, live till I return." Lord Sc—— believed ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin |
