"Uninteresting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Gladstone says, a wonderful preference for a lord. Yet our aristocracy, from the action upon it of the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, and the political necessities of George the Third, is for the imagination a singularly modern and uninteresting one. Its splendor of station, its wealth, show, and luxury, is then what the other classes really admire in it; and this is not an elevating admiration. Such an admiration will never lift us out of our vulgarity and brutality, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... difficult to say why most travellers are uninteresting. I do not think it is because they have been to wonderful places, but because the average man has not the power to assimilate or interpret what he has seen; and they enlarge on their own sensations with such a lack of humour and proportion, that ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... William was that radiant figure, Queen Louisa, who recalls the contrast between Marie Antoinette and her uninteresting, hapless spouse. For Louisa, too, had ambition and the power of inspiring devotion, though etiquette and jealousy forbade her intervention in affairs of State;[735] otherwise the Prussian Government would have shaken off that paralysing indecision which left its people ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... lamenting the passing away of something loved and dear,—the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates. Death, change, distance, lend them a character which makes them quite another thing from the vulgar, wearisome toil of uninteresting, forced manual labour. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... it has at any rate been virtuous. The full but clear-cut lips also had their own expression on them, half serious, half comical; humour, contempt, and even pity were blended in it. Altogether Philip Caresfoot's appearance in the moment of boyish vengeance was pleasing and not uninteresting. ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... She knew by instinct that his presence would not be agreeable to us. He was not in the least an intrusive person,—on the contrary, there was a sort of mute appeal to our humanity in the very extent of his quiet inoffensiveness; but his whole atmosphere was utterly uninteresting. He was untrained in manner, awkwardly ill at ease in the table routine; and, altogether, it was so uncomfortable to make any attempt to include him in our circle that in a few days he was ignored by every one, to a degree which ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... asked as a preliminary to service.—Thrice He asked Peter, as if to be perfectly sure ere He sent him forth on a shepherd's work. All the self-denial, patience, tenderness, and delicacy of love are needed, as the Lord knew well, in dealing with men, who are naturally uninteresting, or perhaps repulsive, and hence our Lord saw the necessity that there should be love. But how could there be love to them? It was impossible to expect it; and so Christ introduced Himself, saying, ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... work it entailed on him, for she loved Dick with the whole force of her self-restrained heart. But, as usual, she kept silent. The villagers could see that she drove out in attendance on Mrs. Grant, but to them she was only an uninteresting shadow that waited on the other's splendour. They often wondered among themselves how Mrs. Grant could have a daughter as drab and uninteresting as Miss Grant; they did not realize how, like a vampire, the older woman lived upon ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... giving, seemed to turn). He threw him a piece of money, saying, as he did so, "look out, my friend, or that quarter will get you into the calaboose." Next morning it so happened that your grandfather was called to that useful, but uninteresting place, to bail out a colored servant, who was prone, occasionally, to get into scrapes, which subjected him to temporary imprisonment, when, whom should he find there, safely ensconced in one of the cells, ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... for a writer or a speaker to choose a subject which is so general or so abstract that he cannot handle it with some degree of completeness and facility. Not only will such work be difficult and distasteful to him, but it will be equally distasteful and uninteresting to his audience. No student can write good themes on such subjects as, "War," "The Power of the Press," "Race Prejudice"; nor can he argue well on propositions like, "Resolved, That wars are justifiable"; "Resolved, That the pen is mightier than the sword"; or "Resolved, ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... slight changes with us, in color, shape, or modes of use. A block of wood or stone contains, in the eye of the artistic workman, every possible grace of form and moulding; but a brick is a square, red, uninteresting fact, and the laying of them the most prosaic of all work. By common consent we expect no improvement in their use, but rather sigh for the good old times when work was honestly done and the size of the ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... turn—sheep were bleating on the one hand and a dog growling on the other. Fortunately, however, I perceived on one side a faint glimmer of light, and by its aid I was able to find another opening by way of a door. And here a by no means uninteresting picture was revealed. The wide hut, the roof of which rested on two smoke-grimed pillars, was full of people. In the centre of the floor a small fire was crackling, and the smoke, driven back by the wind from an opening in the ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... was never brought to a glorious completion by the Madigans, even though they skipped uninteresting and difficult parts, and, like the early Elizabethans, permitted no intermission between acts. It was very often laughed to death. At times it became a saturnalia of extravagant action, and it frequently ended in a free ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... have now added a few notes, observations, and conversations with natives, on the subjects which my narrative seemed to embrace; and the whole will, I hope, interest and amuse you and the other members of our family; and appear, perchance, not altogether uninteresting or uninstructive to those who are strangers ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the willow and looked out upon the plain, over which a uniform hum could be heard, the profoundly reassured activity of a sunny work-day. This made him sad and discouraged. He had a disagreeably distinct feeling that he himself was uninteresting and commonplace. The girls fell in love with others, unusual experiences existed for others; and even his sleek, pale-blond hair, his round face, his light-blue eyes seemed to cause him woe. And suddenly a very remote recollection came to him. He must ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Nevertheless, he read it carefully, and presently drawing a writing pad toward him, he began to note down excerpts from the diary. There was the story, told in temperate language and with surprising mildness, of Odette Rider's rejection of Thornton Lyne's advances. It was a curiously uninteresting record, until he came to a date following the release of Sam Stay from gaol, and here Thornton Lyne enlarged upon the subject of ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... lifeless and uninteresting scribbling appeared under my byline day after day in the Intelligencer. Not a word, not a thought of my own was left. I was not restrained from protest by the absurd threats of Le ffacase, but prudence dictated not throwing away dirty water before I got clean, and the money from the paper, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... that no flowers (other than groundsel) will flourish in my garden, owing to lack of soil or lack of sun—then the flowers must be painted on the walls. This would have its advantages, for we should waste no time over the early and uninteresting stages of the plant, but depict it at once in its full glory. And we should keep our garden up to date. When delphiniums went out of season, we should rub them out and give you chrysanthemums; and if an untimely storm ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... easy thing that many imagine to examine, read, and select from a vast number of newspapers such matter as is believed to be worth reproducing. Possibly to some it would seem to be a stupid and an uninteresting work. The Compiler, however, has found it a source of pleasure to make and arrange these selections; and the value of his work will be greatly enhanced if these volumes should prove of interest to any considerable number ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... polite inquiries for the Marquise de Chargeboeuf and other matters really uninteresting but about which politeness assumes that we are keenly interested, it dawned on Monsieur d'Hauteserre that the old gentleman had come to warn his young relatives against imprudence. He remarked that times were changed and no one could tell what ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... your means might have failed, how far you might have been ill-advised, or ill-informed, or unduly influenced, are questions, which, though not uninteresting to you, are now ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... conducted in person no fewer than twenty-three military expeditions, besides entrusting three or four others to a favorite general. It would be a wearisome task to follow out in detail these numerous and generally uninteresting campaigns, where invasion, battle, flight, siege, submission, and triumphant return succeeded one another with monotonous uniformity. The style of the court historians of Assyria does not improve as time goes on. Nothing ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... learned from David to regard in a new and more real aspect, many of those truths which he had hitherto received as true, and which yet had till then produced in him no other than a feeling of the common-place and uninteresting ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... like some strange monsters sleeping on the bosom of the water. The men were filthy and profane for the most part, and made enjoyment of nature almost impossible. Many of them were of the rudest and most uninteresting types, nomads—almost tramps. They had nothing of the epic qualities which belong to the mountaineers and natural miners of the Rocky Mountains. Many of them were loafers and ne'er-do-wells from Skagway and other ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... in a tone that seemed to waive the subject as uninteresting. "I shall work away at the first thing that offers. I suppose one gets a habit of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... appliances, as well as proper cutting tools, are on hand, and are used to set the work correctly in the machine and cut the metal at the right speed and feed. This calls for the ability to concentrate the mind upon a multitude of small details, and take pains with little, uninteresting things. ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... villa is one of the most considerable in point of size of any yet discovered at Pompeii, and is, moreover, built much according to the specific instructions for a suburban villa laid down by the Roman architect, it may not be uninteresting briefly to describe the plan of the apartments through which our ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... occupied with the important present. He and she had both of them relied on their judgment of character as regarded each other's worthiness and trustworthiness. And he was the last man in the world to be a chancellor of the exchequer. To him, money was a quite uninteresting token that had to pass through your hands. He had always had enough of it. He had always had too much of it. Even at Putney he had had too much of it. The better part of Henry Leek's two hundred pounds remained in his pockets, ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... next, of course. After eight or nine children become quite uninteresting, except to themselves. I shouldnt know my two eldest if I ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... occurred to her that I was in some way connected with Mr. Floyd, whose reputation was national, and she went on reviving reminiscences of him while we strolled about. She addressed me with such unhesitating talkativeness that I succumbed at once, and became an easy prey. What she said was quite uninteresting, besides being rambling in a degree which hindered my getting the smallest idea of her meaning; but her own enjoyment of her loquaciousness never once faltered, and she discoursed as fluently as an eighteenth-century poet, and without any more idea of the grace of finishing within a reasonable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... sympathy to the audience. His heroine speaks in character: she is never a male Stoic, flaunting in female garb, she is a genuine woman, a gentle, lovable creature broken down by misfortune. The other characters are uninteresting. Nero is an academic tyrant, Seneca an academic adviser, Poppaea is little more than a lay figure. The most that can be said for them is that they do not rant. The chorus are on the whole a fairly satisfactory imitation ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... of the largest in the north of France, was practically flattened. What little mound was left was covered with flowers. Some bricks had been collected from it and marked the grave of "An Unknown British Soldier." Even Albert, that deadly uninteresting little town, looked almost beautiful and cheerful. Flowers grew by the sides of the streets; roses were abundant in what were once back-gardens; a hut was up at the corner by the Cathedral and Daily Mails were ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... see," replied Noreen vaguely, puzzled by Ida's remark about her husband. She had seen the Civil Servant at the wedding and remembered him as a stolid, middle-aged, and apparently uninteresting individual. But the girl was still ignorant enough of life not to understand why a woman after two years of marriage should be thankful that her husband was far away from ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... whom the nunnery had been wasted, the windows had been dashed in, the doors broken down, and even the partitions betwixt the apartments, in some places, destroyed. As he thus stalked from desolation to desolation, and began to think of returning from so uninteresting a research to the chamber which he had left, he was surprised to hear the low of a cow very close to him. The sound was so unexpected at the time and place, that Roland Graeme started as if it had been the voice of a lion, and laid his hand ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... crossed the Arabian Desert a second time, and took up his residence in Mecca for the space of three years. His account of the voyage along the eastern coast of Africa, as far south as Quiloa, is brief and uninteresting; but on his return he visited Oman, of which province he gives us the first authentic account. From the Pearl Islands in the Persian Gulf, he bent his way once more across Arabia to Mecca, whence he crossed the Red Sea to the Nubian coast, and descended ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... time to time, so, by planning and systematizing, you will get rid of the drudgery part, and there will be a constant incentive present to beat your past record. You must get rid of the feeling that it is uninteresting drudgery and slavery. A woman who looks upon her work in that light is not deserving of any better fate, and she will not get much further. If you are one of these perverse individuals who resent advice; if you object to being told the truth; if you do not want to profit ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... romantic name for an uninteresting part of the township, and, conversely, Commercial Street is the uninteresting name for a romantic part. It is along a highway stigmatized by such a name that one gets the glimpses of a Constable country: glimpses of rolling meadows, of fertile groves, of cattle grazing in ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... that central place in the book of Kings which they occupied in the minds of the Jewish community after the Exile. Large sections of the old history are devoted to the religion and politics of the ten tribes, which are altogether unintelligible and uninteresting when measured by a strictly Levitical standard; and in general the whole problems and struggles of the prophetic period turn on points which had ceased to be cardinal in the life of the New Jerusalem, which was no longer called to decide ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... cooking, sewing, teaching, the care of children, and household management, woman's greater knowledge and understanding of conditions furnish her with topics that are vital to other women and often not uninteresting to men. The entry of women into occupations hitherto open only to men is bringing new experiences to many women, and is furnishing women writers with additional fields from which to draw subjects and material. Ever since the beginning of popular magazines and of special feature writing ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... fresh discussion among themselves; and, as it seemed as interminable as it was uninteresting, Reding took an opportunity to wish his host a good night, and to slip away. He never had much leaning towards the evangelical doctrine; and Freeborn and his friends, who knew what they were holding a great deal better than the run of ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... formed by the intersection of the creeks and arms of the sea. They have a uniform level, are without any stones, and present a rather monotonous and uninteresting scenery, spite of the raptures of French explorers. The creeks run up into the islands at numerous points, affording facilities for transportation by flats and boats to the buildings which are usually ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... unity has its difficulties and dangers, which must be avoided if perfection is to be attained. In harmony there may be too much identity and too little difference or variety, with the result that the whole becomes tedious and uninteresting. This is the fault of rigid symmetry and of all other simple geometrical types of composition, which, for this reason, have lost their old popularity in the decorative and pictorial arts. In balance, on ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the aesthetic demoralisation into which I now fell through having daily to deal with such a work. I gradually lost my dislike for this shallow and exceedingly uninteresting composition (a dislike I shared with many German musicians) in the growing interest which I was compelled to take in its interpretation; and thus it happened that the insipidness and affectation of the commonplace melodies ceased to concern me save from the standpoint of their capability ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... numerous notes which I received from him at this time,—some of them relating to our joint engagements in society, and others to matters now better forgotten,—I shall select a few that (as showing his haunts and habits) may not, perhaps, be uninteresting. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... all the colouring matter of the body seemed somehow to have faded out of him. Perhaps he had been bleached. As he leant over the taffrail, gazing down with open mouth and vacant stare at the water, I took a good long look at him. He interested me much—because he was so exceptionally uninteresting; a pallid, anaemic, indefinite hobbledehoy, with a high, narrow forehead, and sketchy features. He had watery, restless eyes of an insipid light blue; thin, yellow hair, almost white in its paleness; and twitching hands ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... rickety, ill-used barge-horses, are common in the neighbourhood. In parts it is very pretty, as it runs under the chalky downs, and there are a multiplicity of locks, and the turf of the sheep-walks comes up to the towing path; but in the close neighbourhood of the town the canal is straight and uninteresting; the ground is level, and there is a scattered community of small, straight-built light-brick houses, which are in themselves so ugly that they are incompatible with anything that is pretty ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... twenty miles on the English, and sixty on the French side of the water; the expence is still farther decreased by the yet lower rate of charges at the inns; and, while the ride to the French metropolis by the one route is through a most uninteresting country, with no other objects of curiosity than Amiens, Beauvais, and Abbeville; by the other it passes through a province unrivalled for its fertility and for the beauty of its landscape, and which is allowed by the French themselves to be the ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... rapidity of the current, the windings of the river, the picturesque spires of the village churches, or the change of scenery when the river pours through forests, lining each bank as the vessel slowly claws against the rapid stream, are by no means uninteresting; of course we did not arrive at Leopoldshaffen at the hour stated by the people at the office, but we did arrive late at night, and took up our quarters at a small auberge in the above village, which is not marked down in the maps, but which has post-horses and diligences to convey passengers ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... muck and mire, and still there is so much to do that we look forward to some far distant futurity, when all that we are now suffering will be over, and we may look back upon it as upon some strange yet not altogether uninteresting nightmare! ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... into my eyes, up my nose, down into my lungs. I have breathed it, and sneezed it, and swallowed it, but "il faut souffrir pour etre belle," and I do not grumble; for I am belle! For once in my life I know what it feels like to be a pretty woman. My uninteresting flax-hair is hidden. Above the lowness of my brow there towers a great white erection, giving me height and dignity, while high aloft a little cap of ancient lace and soft pink roses daintily perches. ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Nance, you are quite mistaken. Perhaps I'm bewitching— I suppose to a certain extent I am, for people always tell me so— but I'm not lovable and I'm not good. There, my dear, do let us turn from that uninteresting person— Maggie Oliphant. And so, Nancy, you are going to worship Priscilla ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... of my intention to defend humility on practical grounds. Practical grounds are uninteresting, and, moreover, on practical grounds the case for humility is overwhelming. We all know that the 'divine glory of the ego' is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever may be ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... you would be a little bit melodramatic—this is deadly uninteresting. I would have loved to ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... Harraz I discharged my camels, and endeavoured to engage a boat to convey us to Khartoum, thus to avoid the dusty and uninteresting ride of upwards of a hundred miles along its flat and melancholy banks; but there was not a vessel of any kind to be seen upon the river, except one miserable, dirty affair, for which the owner demanded fourteen hundred ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... about those broad gravel-walks; not a winding alley anywhere. Oh, for a vulgar summer-house; for some alcove, all honeysuckle and ivy! But the dahlias are splendid! Very true; only, dahlias, at the best, are such uninteresting prosy things. What poet ever wrote upon a dahlia! Surely Lady Montfort might have introduced a little more taste here, shown a little more fancy! Lady Montfort! I should like to see my lord's face if Lady Montfort took any such liberty. But ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... times better, because much simpler than in the first. But, after all, his style is so perfectly achieved that the achievement gets obvious: and when achievement gets obvious, is it not by way of becoming uninteresting? And is there not something to be said for the person who wrote that Stevenson always reminded him of a young man dressed the best he ever saw for the Burlington Arcade? {10} Stevenson's work in letters does not now take me much, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... accomplished at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. The good boys must have been a set of little snobs and prigs, and ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the morning, the last at night, and the half-hour before dinner. You can give greater attention to the views before you when you are following operations, important certainly, but mechanical from repetition, and uninteresting in themselves, than when you are engaged in some absorbing study, which probably shuts out all perception ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... politics,' said Mr. Lancaster, almost waking up now. 'That's good again. It's so very difficult to find young men nowadays, able to write, who take a genuine interest in politics. They all go off after literature and science and aesthetics, and other dry uninteresting subjects. Now, what does your average intelligent daily paper reader care, I should like to know, about literature and science and aesthetics and so forth? Well, he'll do, I've very little doubt: at any rate, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... it uninteresting to the world that an experiment should be fairly and fully made, whether freedom of discussion, unaided by power, is not sufficient for the propagation and protection of truth—whether a government conducting itself in the true spirit of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... engaged a new companion for him. He spent the nights alone in the Cathedral as calmly as if he had been in the upper cloister, quite accustomed to the grave-like silence. In order not to sleep, he read by the light of his lantern any books he could get in the Claverias, uninteresting treatises on history in which Providence played the principal role; lives of the saints, amusing from their simple credulity, bordering on the grotesque; and that family Quixote of the Lunas', that he had so often spelt out when little, and ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... average man finds life very uninteresting as it is. And I think that the reason why he finds it uninteresting is that he is always waiting for something to happen to him instead of setting to work to make things happen. For one person who dreams of earning fifty thousand pounds, a hundred people dream of being left ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... there was nothing lover-like in his attitude, and he was almost her guardian. True, he was occasionally moody and absent, but a man must retain a few of his old spots; and if he avoided somewhat the cousin whom he had once loved to melancholy, it was doubtless because she found him as uninteresting as she found all men but one, and was not at sufficient pains to conceal her indifference. And then she admitted with a laugh that in the back of her mind she had never acknowledged the possibility ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... at Largs Bay the city is barely visible, and travellers have to take train through Port Adelaide up to the city, a journey of about eight miles across the plains. These plains have been cleared of trees, and the country is bare and uninteresting. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... may say that "business woman" has a hard sound, and stands for a character precise, selfish, and uninteresting. That is not what we intend by it at all. Is a girl to be less loveable, less gentle, less charming, whenever we cease to say of her, That girl, in regard to all the ways of business, is a perfect simpleton? On ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... cramped blind alley of life to which they led. Dull stairs destined to be mounted by dull people: how many thousands of insignificant figures were going up and down such stairs all over the world at that very moment—figures as shabby and uninteresting as that of the middle-aged lady in limp black who descended Gerty's flight as ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... couple, constantly trying to get the better of each other. If so, you are mistaken. Up to six months before this story opens our married life had been ideal—for which reason I didn't open the story earlier. Ideal marriages (to any one except the contracting parties) are uninteresting affairs. It is such a pity that the good, the laudable, things ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... misunderstood paragon, whom anyone with common penetration must have recognised as such. On the contrary, we sympathise with him, especially in the big tragedy of his life, while quite admitting that to any casual acquaintance he must have appeared only a dull and uninteresting egoist. This I call clever, because it shows that Mr. LUCAS has created a real thinker, rather than striven to give him any unusual profundity of thought. An ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... profession by ties at once sad and dear, I have considered that a narration of events seen in its service—however unworthily set down, might not be uninteresting to you; and feeling assured that your prayers and kind wishes have followed us through "changing skies," as we have sped across "distant seas,"—upon our safe return, I am truly happy in being able to imitate the custom of mariners of more ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... never doubted for an instant that, as in his own case, the Saturday to Monday state revealed the real man. He, Keith, sat so lightly to the business and with so detached a mind, that he simply could not imagine how any human being could be so wedded to a thing in itself uninteresting as to sacrifice to it any immortal chances. The book trade was not a matter for high spiritual romance; it was simply the way they got their living, as honest a way as any other, taking it all round. The shop was one thing, and his father was another. In fact, so far from identifying ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... light of recent events and the use of all sorts of chemical bodies for warfare and destruction it will not be uninteresting to introduce here a few paragraphs from this remarkable ...
— James Cutbush - An American Chemist, 1788-1823 • Edgar F. Smith
... south by a barren enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under its drapeau rouge, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable commune where all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the west by the Common, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures, which make it look like a cattle-market. Beyond, as I looked round, were the Colleges, the meeting-house, the little square market-house, long vanished; the burial-ground where the dead Presidents stretched ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... from me," I said pertly. (And so indeed they were—now.) "They're too uninteresting to ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... leading Members of the club, and obtained, from M. DURAND DE LANCON, (one of the most devoted and most efficient of the members) that information—which is here submitted to the public: from a persuasion that it cannot be deemed wholly uninteresting, or out of order, even by the most violent enemies of the cause." The object of this Society of the BIBLIOPHILES must be expressed in the proper language of the country. It is "pour nourrir, relever, et ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... he lived in the country, then he came to Paris to live; for, the family fortunes having dwindled, he had to look for a position. For several years he was a clerk in the Ministry of Marine, where he turned over musty papers, in the uninteresting company of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... element of pathos arising especially from two sources. (1) Perhaps the experiences of Moses are most sorrowful. That he should now, after faithfully bringing this people to the very border of the land which they sought, be compelled to spend forty monotonous years in this bare and uninteresting desert must have been a disappointment very heavy to bear. During these wanderings he buried Miriam, his sister, and Aaron, his brother and helper. He was often complained of by the people he was trying to help, and because of it was led to sin in such a way as to cause God to ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... person's influence is needed in society who commands interest by essential rather than non-essential qualities. Then, if she is a wall-flower she is sure to have time to relieve the misery of some other wall-flower, and as there are always a good many uninteresting people at any party she will find her mission increasing upon her hands. When she has thoroughly conquered her dread of society she will have a right to reconsider the question and decide whether she can use her time to better advantage. If she retires before fighting her battle she ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... into the dust of dates. As for the philosopher under the roofs, who he was, and what was his philosophy, and how he ever came to be under the roofs at all, nobody in St. Sidwell's ever knew or ever cared to know; Miss Quincey had made him eternally uninteresting. Yet Miss Quincey's strength was in her limitations. It was the strength of unreasoning but undying conviction. Nothing could shake her belief in the supreme importance of arithmetic and the majesty of its elementary rules. ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... wasn't much to see—two iron beds, two chiffoniers, two chairs, a trunk bearing the initials "J. A. B." and a washstand. The floor was bare save for three rugs, one beside each bed and one in front of the washstand. The two windows had white muslin curtains and a couple of uninteresting pictures hung on the walls. He dropped the curtain at the door, placed his suit case on a chair and opened it. For the next few minutes he was busy distributing its contents. To do this it was necessary to light the gas in the bedroom and as it flared up, its light was ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... collateral Dutch ancestry by the Van Hook, tucked in between her non-committal family name and the Julia given her in christening, was of the ordinary slender make of American girlhood, with dull blond hair, and a dull blond complexion, which would have left her face uninteresting if it had not been for the caprice of her nose in suddenly changing from the ordinary American regularity, after getting over its bridge, and turning out distinctly 'retrousse'. This gave her profile animation and character; you could not expect a girl with that nose to be either ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... September the Astrolabe again put to sea, and after an uninteresting stay at New Guinea, in the course of which scarcely any specimens of natural history were obtained, except a few mollusca, and still less exact information regarding the customs, religion, or language of its ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... was that of Goethe and his university circle at Strasburg to whom the Systme de la Nature appeared a harmless and uninteresting book, "grau," "cimmerisch," "totenhaft," "die echte Quintessenz der Greisenheit." To these fervent young men in the youthful flush of romanticism, its sad, atheistic twilight seemed to cast a veil over the beauty of the earth and rob the heaven of stars; and they lightheardedly ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... himself with much care that its removal would be an improvement. Another point in his wood-cutting that I always admired was that, when the more amusing part of the operation—which is cutting the tree down—was over, he invariably took personally his full share of the comparatively uninteresting work of sawing up the trunk, and disposing in an orderly manner of the branches. He also took great pains to cut his trees as close to the ground as possible, so as not to sacrifice the good timber at the butt, or leave a tall or ragged stump to disfigure ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... covering of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was that season when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash. The scene surely was a common scene; the season and the hour little calculated to kindle lawless thought; it was a tame uninteresting assemblage of objects, such as would drive the imagination for refuge in serious and sober talk, to the evening fireside, and the dessert of winter fruits and wine. The effect which it produced on me was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly remembered to have seen that exact scene ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Maxime Dalahaide's. She had a good voice and a pretty enough face, but she would not have succeeded in Paris, people whispered, if Maxime had not helped her. I had spoken to him of this girl, and he had denied caring for her. She was a very ordinary, uninteresting creature, apart from her beauty, he said; but she had been friendless and in hard luck, and as he was half English himself, he had done what he could to aid a lonely and deserving young countrywoman, that ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... pages; and as, by a singular combination of circumstances, no less than three long and hazardous voyages of discovery have been successfully completed in this vessel, some account of her here may not be wholly uninteresting. The reader will be surprised to learn that she belongs to that much-abused class, the 10-gun brigs—COFFINS, as they are not infrequently designated in the service; notwithstanding which, she has proved herself, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... be thought that the details of the preceding chart and the three following charts are uninteresting, obvious, and show too many possible combinations. If this be so, then it is most necessary to include them to illustrate the conditions that are passed through and slipped back into too often in our schools, our apprenticeship and in all but the best ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... was sitting with his hands in his pockets, and with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling. The gentleman who was in the act of pleading had a huge open paper in his hand, from which he droned forth certain legal quiddities of the dullest and most uninteresting nature. He was in earnest, for there was a perpetual energy in his drone, as a droning bee might drone who was known to drone louder than other drones. But it was a continuous energy supported by perseverance, ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... unpicturesque, running chiefly between forests of birch and fir-trees, with few or no hills to vary its monotony. The journey, however, was far from uninteresting. They passed various parties of traders with their waggons going to the fair; also a group of exiles on their way to Siberia, already weary and footsore, though they had performed but a short portion of their long journey. There were woodcutters in the forests, and peasants in the few ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... uninteresting. We may picture a far-reaching waste of snow, wind-furrowed until it resembles a billowy white sea frozen motionless. The wind blows half a gale and the air is full of fine ice-crystals that sting the face viciously. The sun, lying low on the southern horizon, seems a mere ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... not, for I suppose it means I was a good deal of a humbug. All I knew of business, so far, was what Sussex Street had shown me; and if I had been perfectly candid, I should have admitted that, so far from striking me as interesting, it seemed to me absurdly, incredibly dull and uninteresting; so much so as to have a guise of unreality to me. But my letters ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... particular as you're wrong in,' returned Mrs. Fellowes, knitting away with a determinedly uninteresting air, 'and, I misdoubt me, you can't ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... party, on their journey across the mountains to Astoria, who came near betraying them into the hands of the Crows, and who remained among the tribe, marrying one of their women, and adopting their congenial habits. A few anecdotes of the subsequent fortunes of that renegade may not be uninteresting, especially as they are connected with the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the van was never intended for grande vitesse; neither is express travelling the proper method of obtaining an accurate knowledge of a new country. Thus we crawled along, making twelve or thirteen miles per diem through a most uninteresting country, the usual scene of treeless waste, but dotted over with extensive villages of mud-built houses, and the inevitable ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... with it, had not dawned on the general mind. On the other hand, Lady Louisa was right in objecting to the finale,—it has been admitted that Scott was never good at a conclusion,—and personally I have always thought George Staunton uninteresting throughout. But how much does this leave! The description of the lynching of Porteous and the matchless interview with Queen Caroline are only the very best of such a series of good things that, except just at the end, it may be said to be uninterrupted. Jeanie it is unnecessary ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... dragoman and the muker, who caused them quickly to disappear. An hour afterwards the scheikh came in person to pay his respects. We reclined on the steps of the hall; and while the men smoked and drank coffee, a conversation of a very uninteresting kind was kept up, the dragoman acting as interpreter. At length the scheikh seemed seized with the idea that we might possibly be tired with our journey. He took his leave, and offered unasked to send us ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... were uninteresting, and Grace stayed in-doors a great deal. She became quite a student, reading more than she had done since her marriage But her seclusion was always broken for the periodical visit to Winterborne's grave with Marty, which was kept up with pious strictness, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... corresponded with a boy's idea of a hero. His aggressive punctuality, his strict observance of military etiquette, his precise interpretation of orders, seemed to have as little in common with the fierce excitement of battle as the uninteresting occupations of the Presbyterian deacon, who kept a Sunday school for negroes, had with the reckless gaiety of ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... curl about his nose, and wreathe his head and face in a thick cloud. However, for all this, he neither ate nor drank, except at the very beginning, a mere morsel for form's sake, which he appeared to eat with infinite relish, but declared was perfectly uninteresting to him. ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... where the writer cannot know the exact words, or where the exact words are unimportant, or lengthy and uninteresting, the Third Person is preferable.* Thus, where Essex is asking Sir Robert Cecil that Francis Bacon may be appointed Attorney-General, the dialogue is (as it almost always is in Lord Macaulay's writings) in the First Person, ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... Turks have been more successful than the French in their military operations against the Arab tribes, it may not be altogether uninteresting to inquire by what means these inferior soldiers have ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... books of travels so uninteresting, and, in general, so shortlived, is the want of any idea of composition, or unity of effect, in the minds of their authors. Men and women seem to think that there is nothing more to do to make a book of travels, than to give a transcript of their journals, in which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... are, as a matter of fact, generally as uninteresting to the schoolboy as their story is to the public, and I shall not detain the reader with much about this period of my life. Dr. Collingwood Bruce, the father, by the way, of Mr. Justice Bruce, was then and long afterwards the most famous school master in the North of England, and under ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Simon, the last remaining son of Mattathias, this lecture properly should end; yet a rapid glance at the Jewish nation, under the rule of the Asmonean princes and the Idumaean Herod, may not be uninteresting. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... has been comparatively uninteresting from the zoologist's point of view, as we have seen so little of the rarer species of animals or of birds in exceptional plumage. We passed dozens of crab-eaters, but have seen no Ross seals nor have we been able to kill a sea leopard. To-day we see very few penguins. I'm afraid there can be ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... and who allowed her beauty to compensate him for many other things. When she failed to understand what he said to her he smiled and looked at her and forgave her at once, and when she began to grow uninteresting, he would take up his hat and go away, and so he never knew how very uninteresting she might possibly be if she were given time enough in which to demonstrate the fact. He never considered that, were he married to her, he could not take up his hat and go ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Bailey's social circle had become much larger, and there were a number of people who enjoyed inviting and meeting the pretty, wealthy young widow. But just now all these friends of hers in far-away England seemed quite unreal and, above all, quite uninteresting. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... first day after our departure from Norway House, we encamped on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. This immense body of fresh water is about three hundred miles long by about fifty broad. The shores are generally flat and uninteresting, and the water shallow; yet here and there a few pretty spots may be seen at the head of a small bay or inlet, where the ground is a little more elevated ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... and uninteresting now. But compared to the way we used to do it, it is a cinch. Just sit still and ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... next room a rough deal burial case stood upon two stools; tapers were flickering upon the floor; the fumes of burning punk freighted the air and clouded the vision; the place was clean enough, for it was perfectly bare, but it was eminently uninteresting. Close at hand stood a second burial case, an empty one, with the cover standing against the wall; a few hours more and it would find a tenant—he who was dying in rags and filth in the room adjoining. This was the native hospital ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... are prosaic and uninteresting, and it might seem impossible to invest them with any dramatic interest; but how admirably has Boz lightened up and coloured the simple incident of an attorney's clerk—a common, vulgar fellow of the lowest ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... take a great interestin reading every particular relating to the lives of notorious tyrants and great sinners; we like to know what clothes they wore, and how they swore. But the lives of great and good men and women are very uninteresting; some young ladies even, when travelling by train, prefer, as I observe, French novels inspired by Cloacina to the "Lives ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... are evident. In controverted subjects he is not obliged to discover his own views, he can detail opposite arguments forcibly and luminously, and he is allowed the use of those oratorical powers in which, after all, his great strength lay. In those subjects, on the other hand, which are uninteresting because they are familiar, he may pause or digress before the mind is weary and the attention begins to flag; the reader is carried on by easy journeys and short stages, and novelty in the speaker supplies the want of novelty ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... in beneath his coat. So dearly did he love it that he could not bear to be parted with it during church time for fear that something would happen to it. And, besides, he liked to have it with him, that he might cuddle it during the service, which to him was long and uninteresting. There would have been no trouble if the kitten had been content to remain beneath its master's coat. But, alas, when the organ struck up for the first hymn, it began to wriggle vehemently in an effort to get its head out to see where the peculiar noise came from. Rodney tried ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... "Money won't be of much use," he said; "what we want chiefly is whisky and blue beads for presents." He hired two men who had been in the Confederate army, but who had absented themselves since the proceedings had become uninteresting. These men took to me with a devotion which ended by becoming literally superstitious. I am quite sure that, while naturally intelligent, anything like a mind stored with varied knowledge was something utterly unknown to them. And as I, day by day, let fall unthinkingly this or that ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... was rather uninteresting. Owing to the dense French colonization there the natives have nearly all disappeared or become quite degenerate. We spent our time in visits to the different French planters and then sailed for Malekula, anchoring ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... National Gallery. Nay, remember the vivid delight of some fine bit of tracery round a single door or window, as in the cathedral of Dol or the house of Tristan l'Hermite at Tours; or of one of those Ionic capitals which you sometimes find built into quite an uninteresting house in Rome (there is one almost opposite St. Angelo, and another near Tor dei Specchi, Tower ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... was not until 1542, after the suppression of Crowland Abbey, to which the property belonged, that Magdalene was founded by Thomas, Baron Audley of Walden. In the first court of ivy-grown red brick is the rather uninteresting chapel, and on the side facing the entrance the hall stands between the two courts. It has some interesting portraits, including one of Samuel Pepys, and a good double staircase leading to the combination room, but more notable than anything else is the beautiful Renaissance ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... a master secondarily. In our new society where tradition plays no part, where the useful is paramount, where business asserts itself over art and beauty, where material needs are the first to be satisfied, and where the country's unclaimed riches are our chief incentive to effort, it is not uninteresting to find an analogy with the society in Italy which produced the Renaissance. Diametrically opposed in their ideals, they have a common spirit. In Italy the rebirth was of the love of art, and of classic forms, the desire to embellish—all that was inspired ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... marriage which presented itself within reach had shown a hideous flaw. The chances of roulette had not adjusted themselves to her claims; and a man of whom she knew nothing had thrust himself between her and her intentions. The conduct of those uninteresting people who managed the business of the world had been culpable just in the points most injurious to her in particular. Gwendolen Harleth, with all her beauty and conscious force, felt the close threats of humiliation: for the first time the conditions of this world seemed ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... charge of our valises, which he slung one on each side of his own saddle; we then mounted, and without loss of time got under weigh for our destination. The first six or seven miles of our journey was uninteresting enough, but when we plunged into the mountain road and found ourselves environed on each side by a thick growth of luxuriant tropical vegetation, the foliage and flowers of which bore all and more than all the hues of the rainbow, whilst gorgeous butterflies, gaudy insects, and birds of the ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... but uninteresting. Dick acknowledged that he had a faint idea of staying in Rome, but saw a friend who advised him not to. He had taken the reins and driven for a great part of the way, while Pietro had gone inside and slumbered ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... House like a burst of sudden sunshine on a gloomy plain. The long winter evenings, when there was no company, had been sorely oppressive to Vixen. Out of respect to her mother she had kept her place in the drawing-room, reading, or working at some uninteresting strip of point-lace, which she had no hope of ever finishing, though it had been promised to Mr. Scobel for his church. Captain Winstanley read the newspapers or the quarterlies, and paced the room thoughtfully at ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... fragments, such as that which Pressense has attempted with regard to Celsus; but only a few of Julian's principles were presented concerning the following subjects: (1) on God; (2) on the Hebrew, and (3) the Christian religion. A few hints however toward such a scheme, may not be uninteresting. If, as seems probable, Cyril took the statements of Julian in the order in which they stood in the now lost work, the plan of Julian's work may have been ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... prince and princess with tastes and dispositions such as these compelled to close up their lovely home, to bid adieu to all their friends, and to take up their residence in the dullest, most uninteresting and provincial of cities, situated in the least picturesque portion of the empire; where the only society consists of bureaucrats of the most starchy description, with no ideas beyond their office, or of impoverished landowners, ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... posture-master might have envied, and certainly would not have surpassed. They seemed to sink into the earth, and then slowly and supernaturally to emerge. The bishop had been at college with the cardinal and intimate with him, though they now met for the first time since his secession—a not uninteresting rencounter. The bishop was high-church, and would not himself have made a bad cardinal, being polished and plausible, well-lettered, yet quite a man of the world. He was fond of society, and justified his taste in this respect by the flattering belief that ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... barely delaying his marriage long enough to write me that he was bringing home a bride. She was young, hardly more than a child, indeed, and marvellously beautiful"—Keith moved impatiently; he found these family details tedious and uninteresting—"a radiant soulless creature, whose only law was her own selfish enjoyment, and whose coming brought pain and bitterness to La Glorieuse. These were her rooms. She chose them because of the rose garden, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... river we explored a part of the city where the buildings are of a different character from those we saw yesterday. Nofuhl considers them the dwellings of the rich. In shape they are like bricks set on end, all very similar, uninteresting, ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... Patty, a bit uninteresting. She tried hard to understand the queer things they read or recited, but it seemed to her a continuous repetition of sound without sense. She was willing to admit her own stupidity, and noting the rapt expressions on ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... the witnesses before the Military Commission, a few remarks may not be uninteresting. It has been observed by the reader who has carefully perused the foregoing statement, that there were two distinct elements which made up the great conspiracy, viz: The Copperheads, or Sons of Liberty, and Knights of the Golden Circle, and the rebel emissaries both in ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... uninteresting length of highway with grim satisfaction. It was the inaccessibility and general lack of popular attractions which had led him to select Nepaug as a summering place. Mosquitoes and sand-fleas abounded; but one need not say "good-morning" to mosquitoes and sand-fleas, it is true. ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... basilica horizontally on the level of the second story. After the custom of anointing the newly baptized in the consignatorium was abandoned, it became the chapel of S. Nicolo, then of S. Mary Magdalene, and the original use was quite forgotten. The campanile is of the fifteenth century and uninteresting. ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... however, by no means be supposed that because the surface of the valley above the head of the lake is flat and level, that it is on that account monotonous and uninteresting. Indeed, it is quite the reverse. It forms one of the richest and most enchanting landscapes that can be conceived. It is abundantly shaded with trees, some planted in avenues along the roadside, some bearing fruit in orchards and gardens, and some standing in picturesque ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... Sound, which spreads its broad expanse between the coasts of Denmark and Sweden, and washes many a beautiful group of islands belonging to one or the other of these countries. The background of the picture alone is uninteresting, as there is no chain of mountains to form a horizon, and the eye wanders over the ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... old Abbe Faber, one of the vicars of the parish, is sure that twice out of three times he will find no penitent before his confessional, and has only to hear, for the most part of the time, the uninteresting confession of some good women. But he is conscientious, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, at seven o'clock precisely, he betakes himself regularly to the chapel of St. John, only to make a short prayer and return should ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... before him but days of patient and very uninteresting labor. He was heartily sick of weeding; even riding Duke before the cultivator had lost its charms, and a great pile of wood lay in the Squire's yard which he knew he would be set to piling up in the shed. Strawberry-picking would soon follow the asparagus cultivation, then haying, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... enthusiasm and success, and with all the resources of wide and varied knowledge; but the affluence and ingenuity of his thoughts indisposed him, as it indisposes many other able men, to the prosaic and uninteresting work of calling these thoughts into question, and cross-examining himself upon their grounds and tenableness. He tried too much; the multiplicity of his intellectual interests was too much for him, and he often thought that he was explaining when he was but weaving ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... little quay while my father and the crew were hoisting sail. For a moment I questioned if I should not be happier in the bow of the Curlew, than tramping half a score of miles over rough uninteresting moorland on the chance of capturing a seal; but in the end I was satisfied in keeping to the plan arranged by my companions. I waited only to see the boat bend over in the fresh breeze as she sailed outward to the ships; ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... is a pity that I know so little about it all as to be unable to explain to you his many expedients. Folk call him a wizard, for he produces so much. Nevertheless, personally I find what he does uninteresting." ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of the prolix and needlessly minute subdivision of the original translation into a multitude of chapters; which change was necessary to accommodate this interesting original document to our plan of arrangement; and except in a few rare instances, where uninteresting controversial argumentations have been somewhat abridged, and even these chiefly because the original translator left the sense obscure or unintelligible, from ignorance of the language ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... number of human consumers or producers; but he interests nobody but the economist and the statistician, who take the heap of sand as a whole into consideration, without troubling themselves about the uninteresting uniformity of the individual grains. The crowd counts only as a massive elementary force—why? because its constituent parts are individually insignificant: they are all like each other, and we add them up like the molecules of water in a river, gauging them by the fathom ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be ever airing at the fire. You must consider these doors as open as the woods so long as your are in this neighbourhood. I have some things I should like to show you that you might not find wholly uninteresting—a Raphael, a Rembrandt (so reputed), and several Venetians—not much, in faith, but regarding which I should value ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... soon at work, but drawing from uninteresting plaster casts of scroll-work in the lower classes of the School of Design for Women was not so pleasant as spontaneous picture-making on her slate had been. In Weston, too, she had been a prodigy; her gift for drawing was little less than miraculous ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... contain much that is prosy and uninteresting, may well be left till after we have read the odes, sonnets, and short descriptive poems that have made him famous. As showing a certain heroic cast of Wordsworth's mind, it is interesting to learn that the greater part of his work, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... many advantages. In spite of the numerical preponderance of books published in Germany, it is doubtful if the German reader has quite such a catholic feast before him as the reader of French. There is a mass of German fiction probably as uninteresting to a foreigner as popular English and American romance. And German compared with French is an unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with a hideous and blinding lettering that ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... skull-capped. There was an Italian mother sitting on the curb, her feet in the gutter, smiling down at the baby that was hungrily suckling at her milk-heavy breast. And so on, and so on. Just the ordinary, uninteresting things Maggie saw around the block. There was not a single pretty picture ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... January, 1834; and I well recollect his first essay at addressing it. It was upon the discussion of a legal question. He was evidently very nervous when he rose, for the colour quite deserted his cheek. His manner was cold, dry, and formal, and sufficiently uninteresting, and uninviting. We were all, however, soon struck by the book-like precision of his language, the clearness and closeness of his reasoning, and the extent of his legal knowledge. He spoke for about ten minutes; and, having risen amidst a half-suppressed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... "blue-stockings"; that is to say, possessing brains, she had felt the necessity of using them. Solomon Appleyard, widower, a sensible old gentleman, prospering in the printing business, and seeing no necessity for a woman regarding herself as nothing but a doll, a somewhat uninteresting plaything the newness once worn off, thankfully encouraged her. Miss Appleyard had returned from Girton wise in many things, but not in knowledge of the world, which knowledge, too early acquired, does not always make for ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome |
