"Unthinking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... place as quiet as a sepulchre to contemplate with patient eyes the short victory of sleep, the consoler. Yet he was only a child of time, a lonely relic of a devoured and forgotten generation. He stood, still strong, as ever unthinking; a ready man with a vast empty past and with no future, with his childlike impulses and his man's passions already dead within his tattooed breast. The men who could understand his silence were gone—those men who knew how to exist beyond the pale of life and ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... had been torn across and tossed aside as if in petulance or disapproval. Lastly, as I cruised about that empty chamber, I espied some papers written upon with pencil on a table near the window. An unthinking curiosity led me to take one up. It bore a copy of verses, very roughly metred in the original Spanish, and which I may ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... say, or imply, that corporal punishment, or stern treatment, necessarily leads to such unfortunate results. It is merely to indicate some of the possible dangers and drawbacks. With sturdy, primitive natures, an occasional beating is a matter of little moment; while for unthinking, commonplace minds, and undeveloped, unsensitive souls, the habit of obedience and docile respect for authority, in any and all forms, may be an excellent thing. A wolf cannot be trained in the same way ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... to give Mother Beckett a faint hint of hope. But I dared not run the risk. If Paul Herter proved to be mistaken, it would be for her like losing her son a second time, and the dear one's strength might not be equal to the strain. After thinking and unthinking all night, I decided to keep silent until our two men returned from the British front. Then, perhaps, I might tell Brian of the message from Doctor Paul, and ask his opinion about speaking to Father Beckett. As for myself, I resolved not to make any confession, unless it were certain ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Lily was sent for, not only because the old man cared to see her, but to make Grace feel the outsider that she was. She made desperate efforts to conquer the hated language, but her accent was atrocious. Anthony would correct her suavely, and Lily would laugh in childish, unthinking mirth. She ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... unthinking children point to him in utter scorn, Call him slave and dasaputra, of a slave ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... been much animadverted upon by unthinking persons. I have shown that according to the code of morality, that is in vogue among people whose Christianity and civilisation are unquestionable, a lie may sometimes be honourable. However casuists may argue, the world is agreed that a lie for saving life ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... when rich men won't have art, and poor men can't, there is, nevertheless, some unthinking craving for it, some restless feeling in men's minds of something lacking somewhere, which has made many benevolent people seek for the possibility of ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... Sioux Indian. Of course, not all the Irish, even of the wretchedly poor, are thus unskilled and helpless, but a deplorably large class is; and it is this class whose awkwardness and utter ignorance are too often made the theme of unthinking levity and ridicule when the poor exile from home and kindled lands in New York and undertakes housework or anything else for a living. The "awkwardness," which means only inability to do what one has never even seen ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... his hand, turned. Stephen Hampton sprang at her, dropping his drink. And Albert, the prognathous attendant, released Colonel Hampton and leaped at the woman with the pistol, with the unthinking promptness of a dog whose master ...
— Dearest • Henry Beam Piper
... fool, this thick-skulled hero, This blunt, unthinking instrument of death, With plain dull virtue has outgone my wit. Pleasure forsook my earliest infancy; The luxury of others robbed my cradle, And ravished thence the promise of a man. Cast out from nature, ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... we are not so reckless of our true interest, so blind to utter helplessness—not to say so devoid of humanity, as to entertain the hostile designs, or to cherish the fiendish passions, which it seems have been, by the unthinking, so ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... comrades, readers of this ditty, If heart ye have, on me have pity. Go not unthinking on your way, Content to sing, content to play, While I and mumps sit here alone In an unending, drear 'At home.' Put wits to work, think out some way To cheer the captive's lonely day, Forget yourself, ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... men upon leaving prison have been led away by old evil companions. Others have found no place to stay and no work open for them because a cold, unthinking public had called them "jail birds." Mrs. Booth wanted these men to have a chance. Today a man who belongs to the league can, upon leaving prison, be directed to the nearest Hope Hall. There he can stay in comfortable quarters until ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... his mind instantly transferred to himself, for having stooped to be even for a moment their familiar companion. "These are the associates, Amy"—it was thus he communed with himself—"to which thy cruel levity—thine unthinking and most unmerited falsehood, has condemned him of whom his friends once hoped far other things, and who now scorns himself, as he will be scorned by others, for the baseness he stoops to for the love of thee! But I will not leave the pursuit of thee, once the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... rascal Kermode hated Andrew the blacksmith. "He hates him," I said, "I do verily believe, for his good honest face, his manly outspoken tongue, his courage, and his power of arm, but most of all he hates him since Andrew, years ago as an innocent and unthinking lad, ran after him in the village street and handed him a reminder of some money which ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... while all the earth To the god's pregnant footing thrilled within. Or whiles, beside the sobbing stream, he breathed, In his clutched pipe unformed and wizard strains Divine yet brutal; which the forest heard, And thou, with awe; and far upon the plain The unthinking ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the doorway for a long interval, Bill holding her close to him, and she blissfully contented, careless and unthinking of the future, so filled was she with ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... into her eyes and not see in them what fools would call insanity, and what I know is a knowledge of God above and Christ and the world beyond. 'God has afflicted her,' so this simple-minded native, whom many men in their unthinking moments would call a canting, naked kanaka, says; but God has not afflicted her. He has blessed her, for in her eyes there is that which tells me better than all the deadly-dull sermons of the highly cultured and fashionable cleric, who patters about the Higher Life, or the ...
— Susani - 1901 • Louis Becke
... of a picture of the city of Prague that hangs in a Bohemian friend's parlor, here in New York. I stood looking at it one day, and noticed in the foreground cannon that pointed in over the city. I spoke of it, unthinking, and said to my host that they should be trained, if against an enemy, the other way. The man's eye flashed fire. "Ha!" he cried, "here, yes!" When I think of that, I do not ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... skin, in broken lines of thought between her brows, and of restrained endurance about her firmly-closed lips. She had the air of a woman who has never allowed herself to be worsted by the minor miseries of life; and in India the minor miseries multiply exceedingly. Unthinking observers stigmatised her face as harsh and unprepossessing; but it was softened and illumined by a glow of genuine welcome ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... made you share the shame and failure which I feel to-night are always to be mine. I was born to be of the minority. Please don't give another thought to me or my play. Go your own way. Get back to the plays that please people. Be happy. You have the right to be happy, and I am a selfish, unthinking criminal whom you would better forget. Don't waste another dollar or another moment on my play—it is madness. I am overwhelmed with my debt to you, but I shall repay ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... to wonder, to embellish, to hover with a sneer, or a tear, as the humor happens, over a probable enormity, is the devil's own pleasure, and to a taste properly matured, said to be very delectable. It is in this manner that unthinking fathers have amused themselves and their children with stories of an animal which on close acquaintance they would treat with ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... miserable as "Hark! from the tombs." It was all one dreary expectation of something uncomfortable. It was, in short, "religion." You'd got to have it some time; that John believed. But it lay in his unthinking mind to put off the "Hark! from the tombs" enjoyment as long as possible. He experienced a kind of delightful wickedness in indulging his dislike of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... his poems, the life of half a day. Let the person of a gentleman of his parts be never so contemptible, his inward man is ten times more ridiculous; it being impossible that his outward form, though it be that of a downright monkey, should differ so much from human shape, as his unthinking, immaterial part does from human understanding." Thus began the hostility between Pope and Dennis, which, though it was suspended for a short time, never was appeased. Pope seems, at first, to have attacked him wantonly; but, though he always professed to despise him, he discovers, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Tommy ... Tommy wasn't in the least like his father when he came racing home from school, hair tousled, books dangling from a strap. Tommy would raid the pantry with unthinking zest, invite other boys in to look at the Westerns on TV, and trade black eyes for marbles with ...
— The Calm Man • Frank Belknap Long
... unthinking shopkeepers in this town had not been utterly destitute of common sense, they would have made some proposal to the Parliament, with a petition to the purpose I have mentioned; promising to improve the "cloths ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... service was ended I sought the church-yard, in which I had sported in my unthinking days of boyhood. Several of the modest brown stones, on which were recorded in Dutch the names and virtues of the patriarchs, had disappeared, and had been succeeded by others of white marble, with urns and wreaths, ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... work; and at last a long sleep so that she might be fresh for such another round of delight. So went the days. Yet all through them she found amusement, laughed now and then, and proved the heroism as well as the unthinking servility of the ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... holding his finger without reading it. No wonder that the public felt sure that she could just as well discover secrets which no one knows and be aware of far-distant happenings. It is only one step from this to the belief in a prophetic foresight of what is to come. For most unthinking people, mind-reading leads in this fashion over to the whole world of mysticism. In sharp contrast to such vagaries, the critical observers like the judge and the minister insisted that there was no trace of such prophetic gifts or of such telepathic wonders to be found, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... can find me a job where I can earn as much as I do right here, I'll take it, but until then, I must live, and I must help to support my family." Meanwhile these street merchants are creating an erroneous impression in the minds of the unthinking, but ever sympathetic public, leading it to believe that begging is all that the blind can do; and so, when asked to employ a blind person, even in the smallest capacity, people mention the blind of the street, and say they will ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... friends. A rebate on the charges for loading grain through an elevator or the mere fact that letting the elevator have it saved the bother of writing a letter—these were excellent inducements to the unthinking farmer, and when added to this was the element of personal acquaintance with the buyer, ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... been unusually well that day, and on her face now filling out once more into its old soft oval, bloomed again a look of warm life and youth. Unsuspecting, unthinking Sir Adrian obeyed. It was a dim, close night, and the blush-roses nodded palely into the room from the outer darkness as he raised the sash. There was no moon, no stars shone in the mist hung sky; there was no light to be seen anywhere except one faint ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... ludicrous methods and vulgar ineptitude of the Salvation Army, still the Church was making no effort to provide the sensible, thinking, educated people of England with an equivalent as suitable to their requirements as the Salvation Army was to the requirements of the foolish, the hysterical, the unthinking people who played the tambourines and brayed on the tuneless trombones. Thus it is that one man says to another nowadays, when he has got nothing better to talk about, "Are you a man of intelligence, or do you ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... has been the motive. On the other hand, the painter with no artistic impulse who makes a laboriously commonplace picture of some ordinary or pretentious subject, has equally failed as an artist, however much the skilfulness of his representations may gain him reputation with the unthinking. ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... eligible for the sacred rite. With that rationalism which religious sects are so skilful in applying to some unimportant point of ritual, and so careful not to apply to vital questions of dogma, the Baptists reasonably argue that to baptise an unthinking infant, and, by an external rite which has no significance except as the symbol of an internal decision, declare him a Christian, is nothing more than an idolatrous mummery. Wait till the child is of age to choose for him or herself, to understand ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... inwardness of my feelings; for the memories of all my youth and of the many Beasts that I had seen to peer across the Light, did come upwards in my mind in that moment; so that I did give back a little, unthinking of what I did; but having upon me the sudden imagining of that which might come ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... exceedingly knowing; whilst during so many Ages, they employ'd themselves almost continually in it: And tho' now adays this noble Art be for the most part, left to be exercis'd amongst us, by People of grosser and unthinking Souls; yet there is no Science whatever, which contains a vaster Compass of Knowledge, infinitely more useful and beneficial to Mankind, than the fruitless and empty Notions of the greatest part of Speculatists; counted ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... retort the frown of others; to wrestle with the anxiety of the heart, and to depend on the caprice of the excited nerves. It is something to feel one part of the drama of disgrace is over, and that I may wait unmolested in my den until, for one time only, I am again the butt of the unthinking and the monster of the crowd. My lord, I have now done! To you, whom the law deems the prisoner's counsel,—to you, gentlemen of the jury, to whom it has delegated his fate,—I leave ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... glass is filled, my pipe is lit, My den is all a cosy glow; And snug before the fire I sit, And wait to FEEL the old year go. I dedicate to solemn thought Amid my too-unthinking days, This sober moment, sadly fraught With much of blame, with ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... was really planning: we were only talking.... I believe in the Pinkerton press, and the other absurd presses. They have the unthinking rightness of the fool. Of course they have. Because the happenings of the world are caused by people—the mass of people—and the Pinkerton press knows them and represents them. Intellectual people are always thinking above the heads of the ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... woman who loved him, and who brought almost the only ray of sunlight into his life, we can only wonder and be silent. Entirely different are his Drapier's Letters, a model of political harangue and of popular argument, which roused an unthinking English public and did much benefit to Ireland by preventing the politicians' plan of debasing the Irish coinage. Swift's poems, though vigorous and original (like Defoe's, of the same period), are generally satirical, often coarse, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... what the microbe theory is to some modern scientists. The tsgya live in the earth, in the water, in the air, in the foliage of trees, in decaying wood, or wherever else insects lodge, and as they are constantly being crushed, burned or otherwise destroyed through the unthinking carelessness of the human race, they are continually actuated by a spirit of revenge. To accomplish their vengeance, according to the doctors, they "establish towns" under the skin of their victims, thus producing an irritation which results ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... of loneliness and isolation grew upon him—a sort of dumb hatred of all these unthinking stolid beasts of burden who were bending their backs daily to their stupid tasks, trampling each other to death, too, in their own mad sordid scramble ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... MANNERS are not out of print, An honest tongue may drop a harmless hint. Stop not, unthinking, every friend you meet, To spin your wordy fabric in the street; While you are emptying your colloquial pack, The fiend Lumbago jumps upon his back. Nor cloud his features with the unwelcome tale ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... She's at it yet, Her knee-joints flail-like go: Unthinking man! it is to let Her mother kiss ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... Wilhelm's projects on the matter, and dismissing them as moonshine. [Dubourgay Despatches and the Answers to them (more than once).] To a wise much-meditative House-Mastiff, can that be pleasant, from an unthinking dizened creature of the Ape species? The troubles of Mecklenburg, and discrepancies thereupon, are capable of becoming a SECOND source ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a day. Let the person of a gentleman of his parts be never so contemptible, his inward man is ten times more ridiculous; it being impossible that his outward form, though it be that of downright monkey, should differ so much from human shape as his unthinking, immaterial part does from human understanding." Thus began the hostility between Pope and Dennis, which, though it was suspended for a short time, never was appeased. Pope seems, at first, to have attacked him wantonly; but though he always professed to despise him, he discovers, ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... the glorious uncertainty of golf that makes it the game it is. The fact that James and Peter, lying side by side in the same bunker, had played respectively one and six shots, might have induced an unthinking observer to fancy the chances of the former. And no doubt, had he not taken seven strokes to extricate himself from the pit, while his opponent, by some act of God, contrived to get out in two, James's chances might have been extremely rosy. As it was, the two men staggered out on ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... Me too once unthinking Nature, —Whence Love's timeless mockery took me,— Fashion'd so divine a creature, Yea, and like a beast forsook me. I forgave, but tell the measure Of her crime ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... the unthinking to the statement that all affairs are directed has been the bane of the world since the days of the Egyptian papyri and the origin of superstition. So long as men firmly believe that everything is fixed ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... possession of greater inconstancy and liberty of action; for it is certainly more inconstant and greater folly to render null and void one's own decrees and resolutions, than those of others. Do you, O conscript fathers, imitate the unthinking multitude; and do you, who should be an example to others, prefer to transgress by the example of others, rather than that others should act rightly by yours, provided only I do not imitate the tribunes, nor allow myself to be declared consul, contrary ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... physician requires me to do so. The knowledge of, and the experience in diseases, which I possess, enable me to understand better than other men the causes that produce them, and to give, as I should give, to the unthinking, a warning of danger. And this ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... the Repeal agitation in Ireland, and the Anti-corn-law agitation in England? Why, we say this—that we sincerely regret the mischief which the one has done, and is doing, in Ireland, and the other in England, among their ignorant and unthinking dupes; but with no degree of alarm for the stability of the Government, or the maintenance of public tranquillity and order. Ministers are perfectly competent to deal with both the one and the other of these two conspiracies, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... own creed for himself, or—for paganism is almost never dogmatic—accepts the outward cultus with everybody else, and speculates at his leisure on the nature of the deity. The great bulk of the uneducated are naturally content to accept the old stories and superstitions with unthinking credulity. It is enough to know that one must pray to Zeus for rain, and to Hermes for luck in a slippery business bargain. There are a few philosophers who, along with perfectly correct outward observance, teach privately that the old Olympian system ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... is to teach that there is a difference between men and men. To be sure, it will have been seen that I was not myself, having for a quarter year been subjected to a series of nervous shocks, and having had my mind contaminated, moreover, by being brought into daily contact with this unthinking American equality in the person of Cousin Egbert, who, I make bold to assert, had never for one instant since his doubtless obscure birth considered himself the superior ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... with a dull, fuzzy, useless mind, you will realize that an unthinking man might as well have been a monkey, with fur instead of trousers, and consequent freedom from ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... convenient shape some common errors concerning popularity as a test of merit in a book. He seems to think, for instance, that the love of the marvellous and impossible in fiction, which is shown not only by "the unthinking multitude clamoring about the book counters" for fiction of that sort, but by the "literary elect" also, is proof of some principle in human nature which ought to be respected as well as tolerated. He seems to believe that the ebullition of this passion forms a sufficient ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... back to their cars with a sort of pang. What grotesque irony that men like these, who in times when war was man's normal business might have fought their way through, must now, with all the diseased and hopeless bodies encumbering the earth, be cut off by a mere wad of unthinking lead! ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... war-worn heart than that he should have induced the enemy of other days to pay this highest of all tributes to his honesty and worth. He had convinced his enemy of his rectitude, and what greater deed than this! I confess it made my ears tingle with shame when I used to hear unthinking scoundrels, egged on by others who should have known better, shout "Barrymore!" at Mr O'Brien in their attempts to hold him up to public odium for an act which might easily have been made the most benign in his life, as it certainly was one of the ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... son.' 'Nay,' rejoined Master Ciappelletto, 'call it not a light matter, for that the Lord's Day is greatly to be honoured, seeing that on such a day our Lord rose from the dead.' Then said the friar, 'Well, hast thou done aught else?' 'Ay, sir,' answered Master Ciappelletto; 'once, unthinking what I did, I spat in the church of God.' Thereupon the friar fell a-smiling, and said, 'My son, that is no thing to be recked of; we who are of the clergy, we spit there all day long.' 'And you do very ill,' rejoined Master Ciappelletto; 'for that there is nought which ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... not in a situation to wish to appear before her envious brothers and sisters-in-law. Her eyes were so swollen with crying that she could hardly see; and her tears had stained those Imperial robes which the unthinking and inconsiderate no doubt believed a certain preservative against sorrow and affliction. At nine o'clock, however, another aide-de-camp of her husband presented himself, and gave her the choice either to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... eye. The coarseness has passed away—the rudeness is no longer seen: there is a refinement in the pleasures. But if you take the life led by the young men of our country—strong, athletic, healthy men—it is still the life of the flesh: the unthinking, and the unprincipled life in which there is as yet no higher life developed. It is a life which, in spite of its refinement, the Bible condemns as the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... is not possible to all of us. The upheavals in religious beliefs which this century has seen reach even emotional women and unthinking girls. We cannot believe a thing simply because we should like to believe it. Without this one article of faith, I believe happiness to be impossible, but we need not fail in our duty. A noble woman ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... boughs. The hickory trees flung out a few yellow flags from the ends of their twigs, but the forests wore a tattered and dishevelled look, and the withered leaves that lay in dried heaps upon the frozen ground, driven hither and thither by every gust of the north wind, gave the unthinking heart a throb of foreboding. Yet the glad summer labor of those same leaves was finished according to the law that governed them, and the fruit was theirs and the seed for the coming year. No breeze had been strong enough to shake them from the tree till they were ready to forsake ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... up in the full blaze of the fire-light. "I confess to nothing," he said. "My strong point hasn't been my piety, I own to that. I'm not much of a hot gospeller. I can't call to mind any works of unusual virtue perpetrated by me in unthinking moments. I'll go even so far as this: I'll acknowledge there are times when, if I let myself off the chain, I'd astonish all Timber Town; for there lurks somewhere inside my anatomy a demon which, let loose, ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... molested Polly in the least. It was only that in her usual unthinking fashion she flung herself into the way of temptation. Farther down Broadway than she had ever been before, Polly stopped for a moment to look more closely at a group of girls. Most of them were several years older than herself. They were standing close together near a closed door, and yet ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... gloomy granite gorge overlooking the river. Deep canyons attract like high mountains; the deeper they are, the more surely are we drawn into them. On foot, of course, there is no danger whatever, and, with ordinary precautions, but little on animals. In comfortable tourist faith, unthinking, unfearing, down go men, women, and children on whatever is offered, horse, mule, or burro, as if saying with Jean Paul, "fear nothing but fear"—not without reason, for these canyon trails down the stairways of the gods are ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... spoken with the eloquence of this empty space! The men exchanged no words; the solitude of the cabin, instead of drawing them together, seemed to isolate each one in selfish distrust of the others. Even the unthinking garrulity of Union Mills and the Judge was checked. A moment later, when the Left Bower entered the cabin, his ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... raging to Sir Plume repairs, And bids her beau demand the precious hairs. Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain, And the nice conduct of a clouded case, With earnest eyes, and round unthinking face, He first the snuff-box opened, then ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... otherwise punished on this occasion: But, from the end of June 1553, to the end of November of the same year, the court sat daily, and every day four, five, or six were tried and condemned, who were all punished according to their sentences next day. The unthinking people styled Alvarado a Nero, who could thus condemn so many of a day, yet amused himself afterwards with the attorney-general in vain and light discourses, as if those whom he condemned had been so many capons or turkies to be served up at his table. In the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... temporarily clouded through infection or suffering, he may be reacting to a delusion, an obsession, a fixed idea of disability, a terrifying fear. Sometimes he persistently refuses food, and gives no reason for it. The unthinking nurse is tried, puzzled, and irritated. In other ways, perhaps, the patient seems quite normal. But, after all, the explanation is very simple. He probably is as confident that the food is poisoned as you are that it is as it should be. No arguing would convince him, for, to his mind, ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... proposal was for a while opposed, by the more ardent and unthinking part of the company, yet it was at length adopted by the whole; and having made arrangements to carry it into effect, the meeting broke up, and all retired to ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... limit the authority of the government and thereby make it responsible to the people as Hamilton argued in The Federalist. That this could not have been the real object is evident to any one who has carefully studied the situation. The unthinking reader may accept Hamilton's contention that the system of checks and balances was incorporated in the Constitution to make the government the servant and agent of the people; but the careful student of history can not be so easily misled. He knows ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... Not in the cheek, eye, or voice, clearly; for it was "despite" all these that he would make the discovery,—they are obstacles, entirely outside of the success. It is necessarily, then, in the "presence," in which the unthinking desert would have smiled unsuspecting, but in which "the shrewd observer might espy" a good deal that was ominous of trouble. Now it is obvious that the writer intended to refer "therein" to the cheek, eye, and voice, a reference from which he barred himself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... very interesting fragments, intended to find a provisional place in the plan of the "Great Instauration." To his friend Toby Matthews, at Florence, he sent in manuscript the great attack on the old teachers of knowledge, which is perhaps the most brilliant, and also the most insolently unjust and unthinking piece of rhetoric ever ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... their homes and assembled in council to declare the position of women before the world, bringing to national and international view the injustice and the folly of the barriers which ignorance has created and tradition fostered and preserved through the unthinking ages until they came to be held not only as a part of the natural laws and rights of man but as the immutable decrees of Divinity itself.... If woman alone had suffered under these mistaken traditions, if she could have borne the evil by herself, it would have been less pitiful, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... humble, tired, quiet man, filled to the brim with a sudden belief in just life as it is lived by a few hundred million humans. Five years later word came to Green Valley that this same man was a much loved pastor somewhere in the mountains. And Green Valley, perennially young, unthinking, joyous Green Valley, laughed incredulously as a sweet-hearted but wrongly educated child always laughs at a true fairy ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... all the repressing influences of her childhood, healthy and happy, she met the claims of the new state with a splendid and unthinking passion. To yield herself generously and supremely was the only natural thing; she had no dread and no regret. From the old life she brought to this hour only an instinctive reticence, so that Mabel never had the long ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... roofs, and shining spires (Uneasy feats of high desires) Let the unthinking many croud, That dare be covetous, and proud; In golden bondage let them wait, And barter happiness for state: But oh! my Chloe when thy swain Desires to see a court again; May Heav'n around his destin'd head ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... Arcola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Eyiau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig, Champaubert, and Montmirail? These all are the deeds of Chance, of happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, of the eyeless, brutal, dark, unthinking force resident in masses of men. This is Tolstoi's conception of the man who is to the Aryan race what Hannibal is to the Semitic—its crowning ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... before Hilary Term, and I wish your deliberate judgment on that. The other may be flimsy and superficial. And if you have not burnt your returned letter pray re-send it me as a monumental token of my stupidity. 'Twas a little unthinking of you to touch upon a sore subject. Why, by dabbling in those accursed Annuals I have become a by-word of infamy all over the kingdom. I have sicken'd decent women for asking me to write in Albums. There be 'dark ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Sydney, was first settled, the natives soon began to bring in their fish and barter it for bread or salted meat; and this proving a great convenience to the settlers, the traffic was very much encouraged by them. There were, however, some among the convicts so unthinking or so depraved, as wantonly to destroy a canoe belonging to a fine young man, a native, who had left it at a little distance from the settlement, as he thought, out of the way of observation, while he went with some fish he had to sell. His rage at finding his canoe destroyed ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... were not, however, the expressions of sober purpose, really and honestly entertained. They were the wild and unthinking threats and denunciations which are prompted in such cases by the frenzy of helpless and impotent rage. It is not at all probable that she had any serious intention of attempting such desperate measures as she threatened; for if ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... step by step. Often, too, the use of medicines that, if persisted in, will prove beneficial and curative, will, for a considerable time, arouse in the system very disagreeable sensations, and many times this leads unthinking persons to become frightened or discouraged, and to quit the treatment best adapted to their cases if only faithfully carried out. In many forms of womb disease, their are organic lesions or changes, that can be repaired only by a gradual process, just as an external wound ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... not really governed at all, in the sense in which government came to be understood in subsequent years. Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic, conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative; throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the court favourite and the trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an enormous ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... important was the Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River and Lake Erie, begun in 1817. This new idea received the same scornful attention from the unthinking as "Fulton's Folly." By many it was called "Clinton's Ditch," after Governor DeWitt Clinton, to whose foresight we are indebted for the building of this much-used waterway. The scoffers shook their heads and said: "Clinton will bankrupt the State"; ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... our wise ancestors have decreed terrible punishments. According to the laws of the Ultonians, those who offend in this respect are burned alive in the place of the burnings, and over their ashes are thrown the three throws of dishonour. And well I know that these laws ofttimes to the unthinking and to those who judge by their affections merely, seem harsh and unnatural. Yea truly, were I not high King, I could weep, seeing gentle youths and maidens, and men and women, whom the singing of Angus Ogue's birds have made mad, led away by my ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... first a story of war: of war—for so her founders believed—with the adversary of mankind himself; war with savage tribes and potent forest commonwealths; war with the encroaching powers of heresy and of England. Her brave, unthinking people were stamped with the soldier's virtues and the soldier's faults; and in their leaders were displayed, on a grand and novel stage, the energies, aspirations, and passions which belong ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... trifling sea, to be cheered during our stay at the latter place by doleful predictions of an early drowning. And this from a seafaring community. It knew all about boats; it knew nothing about canoes; and yet the unthinking might have been influenced by the advice of these men simply because they had been brought up on the water. The point is obvious. Do not attempt a thing unless you are sure of yourself; but do not relinquish it merely because some one else ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... lift this vast army of poverty-stricken women who now crowd our cities, above the temptation, the necessity, to sell themselves in marriage or out, for bread and shelter." "Women," she told them, "must be educated out of their unthinking acceptance of financial dependence on man into mental and economic independence. Girls like boys must be educated to some lucrative employment. Women like men must have an equal ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... boldest thinker may have his moments of languor and discouragement, when he feels as if he could willingly exchange faiths with the old beldame crossing herself at the cathedral-door,—nay, that, if he could drop all coherent thought, and lie in the flowery meadow with the brown-eyed solemnly unthinking cattle, looking up to the sky, and all their simple consciousness staining itself blue, then down to the grass, and life turning to a mere greenness, blended with confused scents of herbs,—no individual mind-movement such as men are teased with, but the great calm cattle-sense ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... Grey Friars might still often seem what their predecessors had been, and might thus retain a powerful influence over the unthinking crowd, and to sheer worldlings appear as heretofore to represent a troublesome memento of unexciting religious obligations; ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... be if strict, unthinking, unhesitating obedience were not exacted from every man and officer in the service to the commands of his superior officers? Why, on the day of battle the army or navy would be a mere squabbling mob, worse ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... the virtues of a weak people, and they will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable; they are to the full as compatible with the highest graces and most lofty features of the heart and intellect, as any of those opposite so called heroisms which we are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolize the name .... Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we not feel for victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open bearing of the strong? . . . That there may be no mistake in the essayist's ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... was in the reactions of the issue upon Canadian politics that Laurier met with his real difficulties. He could not, by tactics of procrastination or evasion, keep the question out of the domestic field; the era of abject, passive and unthinking colonialism was beginning to pass; and the spirit of nationalism was stirring the sluggish waters of Canadian politics. Sir Wilfrid had to face the issue and make the best of it. He handled the question with consummate adroitness and judgment; ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... dressed, their garments being composed of a very supple, dark kind of skin and hair, which was so thickly smeared over with fat and red ochre, that if any one attempted to hold them, it left a tell-tale mark of red fat all over their unthinking admirers. The following day they wanted to accompany us, but I would not permit this, and they departed; at least, we departed, and with us came two men, who would take no denial, or notice of my injunction, but kept creeping up after us every now and ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... precise moment when Hurry committed this act of unthinking cruelty, the canoe of Judith was within a hundred feet of the spot from which the Ark had so lately moved. Her own course has been described, and it has now become our office to follow that of her father and his companions. The shriek announced the effects of the random shot ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... to murder us by giving what the most ignorant, unthinking, unpatriotic, self-seeking people in the country have asked for, and swears that because ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... eighteen or twenty years old when he commenced the building of it. If this is true, his extreme youth goes far to palliate some of the wrongs which he perpetrated—wrongs which would have been far more inexcusable if committed with the deliberate purpose of middle life, than if prompted by the unthinking impulses ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... be regarded by gentlemen of name and coat armour. But Sir Hew being dead, and buried with his fathers, the matter may be broached as among friends and persons of honour. The ground of our dispute, as ye know, was an unthinking scoff of Sir Hew's, he being my own third cousin by the mother's side, Anderson of Ettrick Hall having intermarried, about the time of the Solemn League and Covenant, with Anderson of Tushielaw, both of which houses are connected with the Halberts of Dinniewuddie ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... dove," that his charm consists. Often, as in verse after verse of The Weeper, it has an unearthly delicacy and witchery which only Blake, in a few snatches, has ever equalled; while at other times the poet seems to invent, in the most casual and unthinking fashion, new metrical effects and new jewelries of diction which the greatest lyric poets since—Coleridge, Shelley, Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne—have rather deliberately imitated than spontaneously recovered. Yet to all this charm there is no small drawback. The very maddest ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... That won't be necessary, Mr. Jordan. Eight hundred thousand, give or take a few paltry thousand, is close enough. Eight hundred thousand endless, lonely revolutions about an unthinking, uncaring, ungrateful world is quite enough. Quite enough, Mr. Jordan. Now sir; (squinting over his glasses) what do you think is the proper action to be taken in the matter of retrieving this historic satellite from its orbit so that it may be preserved as a living memorial ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy
... every one should perpetually cherish in his thoughts, will banish from us all that secret heaviness of heart which unthinking men are subject to when they lie under no real affliction, all that anguish which we may feel from any evil that actually oppresses us, to which I may likewise add those little cracklings of mirth and folly, that are apter ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... ringing ears, the brightness of the eyes was quenched, her hands relaxed, her head sank low, lower, never again to look on this man undismayed, heart free, unafraid—never again to look into this man's eyes with the unthinking, unbelieving tranquillity born of the most ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... other reading matter, they explained to their husbands or fathers that The Ladies' Home Journal was a necessity—they did not feel that they could do without it. The very quality for which the magazine had been held up to ridicule by the unknowing and unthinking had become, with hundreds of thousands of women, its source of power and the bulwark of ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... years ago that he came to Uvea (said little Nofo, as we sat side by side on a derelict spar and watched the sun go down into the lagoon)—years and years and years ago, when I was an unthinking child and knew naught of men nor their crooked hearts. He was a chief, of wild and strange appearance, with a black beard half covering his piglike face; a thin, bent, elderly chief, with hairy hands, and a head on which there was nothing at all, and teeth so loose in his mouth that at night he ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... refusal, for she had all the strong, though sometimes unthinking, sense of duty of ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... pressure of his strong man's hand on her dainty fingers; she liked to feel the gentle way he was stroking her smooth arm with that delicate white palm of his. It gave her a certain immediate and unthinking pleasure to sit still by his side and know he was full of her. Then suddenly, with a start, she remembered her duty: she was a married woman, and she OUGHT NOT to do it. Quickly, with a startled air, she withdrew her hand. Bertram ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... an interval of unthinking pain, Ephraim perceived that if he had come under a mistaken belief, he had at least come at the right moment; if the bond of her marriage held, the bond of her delusion was broken; she had detected some fraud. His hope, dazed by one blow, now began to look through ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... had fix'd the wedding-day, The morning that must wed them both; But Stephen to another maid Had sworn another oath; And, with this other maid, to church Unthinking Stephen went— Poor Martha! on that woeful day A pang of pitiless dismay Into her soul was sent; A fire was kindled in her breast, Which might not burn itself ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... through the morasses, the debates are often unduly prolonged and the chairman's summing-up luxuriantly prolix. How many politicians of note in London have been raked fore and aft in that little schoolroom! What measures and enactments, plausible to the unthinking metropolitans, have been cut and slashed there, while the conscious moon, gleaming in at the window, strove vainly to disperse the loquacious throng! Listen to the chairman's modest remarks: "I do not wish," he says, "to embarrass the Government, but...." ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Washington, however, was generally treated with marked consideration whenever he applied for Pullman car reservations. He was sometimes criticised, not only by members of his own race, but by the unthinking of the white race who accused him of thus seeking "social equality" with the ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... still awaited their reply. This little Madelon, to whom the golden gates had been opened, though ever so slightly—to whom the divine, lying all about her and within her, had been revealed, though ever so dimly—could never be quite the same as the little Madelon who, careless and unthinking, had strayed into the great church that summer morning six months ago; but the child herself was as yet hardly conscious of this, and neither, we may be sure, was M. Linders, as with renewed cheerfulness, and spirits, and chatter, she danced along by his side under ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... air and gait have nothing of the clown in them. Take away his jacket and trousers, and you have as spruce a fellow as ever came from dancing-school or college. He is the exact picture of his mother, and the most perfect contrast to the sturdy legs, squat figure, and broad, unthinking, sheepish face of the father that can be imagined. You must confess that his appearance here is a pretty strong proof of the father's assertions. The money given for these clothes could not possibly have been honestly acquired. It is to be presumed that they were bought or stolen, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... the order of succession had been established. Probably, like many other antiquated customs, it had been originally the result of despotism on the part of men in power, and of stupid acquiescence on the part of an unthinking people. ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... respects worse off, than the race was ten or fifteen thousand years ago. We have lost much of the freedom that was ours before the rise of governments and ruling classes; we have gained much—not so much as the ignorant and the unthinking and the uneducated imagine, but still much. In the end we which means the masses of us—will gain infinitely. But gain or loss has not been in so-called morality. There is not a virtue that has not existed from time ages before record. Not a vice which is shallowly called "effete" ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... have been sharpened by migration. To carry a pack and peddle is better than to work for a Ph. D., save for the social usufruct and the eclat of the unthinking. We learn by indirection and not when we say: "Go to! Now watch us take a college course and enlarge our phrenological organs." Our knobs come from knocks, and not from the gentle massage of hired tutors. Selling subscription-books, maps, sewing-machines or Mason and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... The unthinking comment on this rise in the cost of shelter is usually condemnation of greedy landlords and soulless capitalists; but is that the ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... of material progress were developed chiefly through a merciless competition out of all harmony with Christian idealism, and at variance with every great system of ethics. Even to-day in the West unthinking millions imagine some divine connection between military power and Christian belief, and utterances are made in our pulpits implying divine justification for political robberies, and heavenly inspiration ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... and America—is sending over a hundred and fifty thousand human beings to drunkards' graves and to a drunkard's eternity, and which is costing civilized Christendom every year over a thousand million of dollars. He proved to be a complete master of that shallow sophistry which generally carries the unthinking multitudes; and none knew better than he how to appeal to the selfish instincts of those whom he was addressing. He demonstrated to them, as they thought conclusively, that the Temperance Act would ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... cried, the instant her eye was put to the glass. "I even see his head above the stones. How unthinking ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... apathy with which the vulgar gaze on scenes of this nature, and how seldom, unless when their sympathies are called forth by some striking and extraordinary circumstance, the crowd evince any interest deeper than that of callous, unthinking bustle, and brutal curiosity. They laugh, jest, quarrel, and push each other to and fro, with the same unfeeling indifference as if they were assembled for some holiday sport, or to see an idle procession. Occasionally, however, this demeanour, so natural to the degraded populace of a large ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... relegated to the library of things not worth the time to know, to the list of bulky poetic failures. Its author blossomed and fruited marvelously early; so early and with such unlooked-for fruit that the unthinking world, which first received him with exaggerated honor, presently assailed him with undue dispraise. 'Festus' is not mere solemn and verbose commonplace. Here and there it has passages of great force and even of high beauty. The author's whole heart ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... well: there is the capability of greatness: there may be faults in the petty details, but the whole will compel admiration, and not weary in the survey. This other makes me yawn. Better choose the bold, the frank, the generous, with all his faults; he may be rash, unthinking, wasting the powers whose force he knows not; but the capabilities of amendment are within him. What say you ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... consequence, we come to feel how easily any soul may be perverted, or rendered hard or dull; in one word, how easily it may be degraded; then it follows that we look with new eyes on many things, many customs, many influences which the unthinking hardly notice, or notice ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... both discomfort and inquietude. Nowhere else in India did I feel so foreign, so alien. To be of cool Christian traditions and an Occidental, an inquisitive sightseer among these fervent pilgrims intent upon their pious duties and rapt in exaltation and unthinking inflexible belief, was in itself disconcerting, almost to the point of shame; while the pilgrims were so remarkably of a different world, a different era, ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... Church must determine. We already know how to reach the heathen, the unbookish, the unthinking—but how reach the educated—the science-bitten? It is useless to deny that the brightest, biggest minds are outside the Church—indifferentists or downright opponents of it. I am not willing to believe that God meant men like ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... now. In the country of Sidney and Milton, the metropolis is a den of wickedness, and a sty of sensuality; in the country of Lady Russell, the custom of English peeresses, of selling their daughters to the highest bidder, is made the theme and jest of fashionable novels by unthinking children who would stare at the idea of sending them to a Turkish slave-dealer, though the circumstances of the bargain are there less degrading, as the will and thoughts of the person sold are not so degraded by it, and it is not done in defiance of an acknowledged law of right ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli |
