"Characterless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you never could make an Irishman respect an Englishman! He points to some unhappy Kildare, the sole relic of a noble house, whose four uncles were slaughtered in cold blood—that is the only word for this kind of execution, slaughtered—and he, left alone, a boy, grows up characterless and kills an archbishop. Every impetuous, impatient act is dragged before the prejudiced mind. But when Mr. Froude is painting Sir Walter and Spenser, blind no longer, he says: 'I regret—it is very sad to think—that such ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... constructed to utilise a space whence the performance could not otherwise be seen, and was generally occupied by actresses, etc.], where she could not be seen by the public. The husband met with no sympathy from the public; he had always been a characterless and sterile writer, had published only two books, written in a diametrically opposite spirit, flatly contradicting one another. As long as he was able to go out he had dyed his red hair black. He was an insignificant man in every way, and ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... lifted and open, in praise for the victory. Fresh, unperplexed, it is the image of man as he springs first from the sleep of nature; his white light taking no colour from any one-sided experience, characterless, so far as character involves subjection to ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... paintings of Raphael and Guido Reni. Nor do we find in him any of those new metrical effects, those sublime inventions in prosody, with which the great masters astonish us. Blank verse is a test of poets in this respect, and Shelley's blank verse is limp and characterless. Those triumphs, again, which consist in the beauty of complicated wholes, were never his. He is supreme, indeed, in simple outbursts where there is no question of form, but in efforts of longer breath, where architecture is required, he too often sprawls ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... I shook myself mentally, and looked up smiling at my Mining Engineer, who was truly a man worth knowing and a most pleasant gentleman besides, and went to dinner with him determined that if I must look characterless I would not be characterless, nor make my companion long ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... the Jewish girl, Mirah. She has been spoken of as characterless; to us it seems as if few characters of more exquisite loveliness have ever been portrayed. From her first appearance robed in her meek despair, through all her subsequent relations with Deronda, her brother, and Gwendolen, there is the same delicate purity, the ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... with many, he thought worse of Tom Helmer than he yet deserved. He was a characterless fool, a trifler, a poetic babbler, a good-for-nothing good sort of fellow; that was the worst that as yet was true of him; and better things might with equal truth have been said of him, had there been any one that loved him ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... some old people are characterless; running in all directions, appearing as though a finely-woven cloth had left its impress upon the face, revealing a life aimless and idle, or distracted by a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... visit Mariana had pictured Solomin to herself as quite different. At first sight he had struck her as undefined, characterless. She had seen many such fair, lean, sinewy men in her day, but the more she watched him, the longer she listened to him, the stronger grew her feeling of confidence in him—for it was confidence he inspired her with. This calm, not exactly clumsy, but ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... ventilate, puzzles to propound, remarks to make. A man who has no religion may yet have a great deal to say about religion; and there are people who like far better to hear themselves talking than to listen to any speaker, however wise. No mouth is more voluble than that of a characterless man of feeling. ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... constitutional king, and notwithstanding his having endangered his life and his honor in order to save his sovereign. Such was the hatred with which high-minded men of strict principle were at that period viewed, while at the same time a negotiation was carried on with Dumouriez,[5] a characterless Jacobin intriguant, who had succeeded Lafayette in the ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks |
