"Sober-minded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... daughter. You did no more than to throw out the general idea, but I feel quite confident this occurred in Paris. I confess I thought the notion evidently chimerical, and as such spoke of it in my family. I always set you down as a sober-minded, common-sense sort of a fellow, and thought it a high flight for a painter to make to go off on the wings of the lightning. We may be mistaken, but you will remember that the priority of the invention was a question early started, and my impressions were the same much nearer ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... to exert all his energies. This was no other than a dream of his mother, Theresa. An angel appeared to her; she besought him to make her Nicolo a great violin player; he gave her a token of consent;—and the effect which this dream had upon all concerned, we sober-minded people can have no idea of. Young Paganini redoubled his perseverance. In his eighth year, under the superintendence of his father, he had written a sonata, which, however, along with many other juvenile productions, he lately destroyed; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... rusted sword or pointless shaft, there a tool of rude construction, and superseded by later improvements (and preserved, perhaps, to make us more grateful for them);—which of two things will a sober-minded man,—who, from his childhood upward had been fed, clothed, armed, and furnished with the means of instruction from this very magazine,- -think the fitter plan? Will he insist that the rust is not rust, or that it is a rust sui generis, intentionally formed on the steel for some mysterious ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of the former volumes in these two "Rover Boys Series," Dick, Tom and Sam Rover will need no special introduction. For the benefit of others, however, let me state that the sober-minded and determined Dick was the oldest of the three, with the fun-loving Tom coming next and sturdy Sam being the youngest. They were the sons of one Anderson Rover, who, when not traveling, made his home at Valley Brook Farm, in ...
— The Rover Boys at Colby Hall - or The Struggles of the Young Cadets • Arthur M. Winfield
... few exceedingly sober-minded mathematicians, who are impatient of any terminology in their favourite science but the academic, and who object to the elusive x and y appearing under any other names, will have wished that various problems had been presented in a less popular ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... take boys and girls long to find out that realization is not always equal to anticipation. Especially is this so with thoughtful, sober-minded boys like the ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... a long-sighted and sober-minded man that lays out money on a complex yet safe speculation, or lays it by for an evil day. That is a People having political wisdom which denies itself some present indulgence for a future good. It had been pleasanter, for some at least of the People, to have spent in eating ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... society, who possess it one year and want it another; but in our villages and smaller towns it hits very nearly the right medium for forming a premium on steady industry and character, and for securing that at least the mass of those who possess it should be sober-minded men, with a stake in the general welfare. In running over the histories of the various voters in one of our smaller towns, I found that nearly one-half of the whole had, like my old comrade at Conon ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... only twenty-eight! a girl is afraid of being criticised for taking a man ten or twelve years older than she is, because it isn't the custom of the province; but I have heard that in other places they don't think about that; on the other hand, they prefer to give a young girl, for her support, a sober-minded man and one whose courage has been put to the test, rather than a young fellow who may go wrong, and turn out to be a bad lot instead of the nice boy he is supposed to be. And then, too, years don't always make age. That depends on a man's health and strength. When a ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... two opposed great masters of the old Greek thought, alike:—the "World of Ideas," existent only because, and in so far as, they are known, as Plato conceived; the "creative, incorruptible, informing mind," supposed by Aristotle, so sober-minded, yet as regards this matter left something of a mystic after all. Might not this entire material world, the very scene around him, the immemorial rocks, the firm marble, the olive-gardens, the falling water, be themselves but reflections in, or a creation of, that ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... who had been taking time, and might therefore be supposed to have given the matter her weightier consideration, "it is, in fact, just what one might expect. He has always been so steady and sober-minded. It is n't as if he had had a greater variety of interests and more social inclination and—wilder, you know. He was entirely devoted to his mother; and he has n't the resources and flexibility to make so complete ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... surely be amiss with Mr. Hooper's intellects," observed her husband, the physician of the village. "But the strangest part of the affair is the effect of this vagary even on a sober-minded man like myself. The black veil, though it covers only our pastor's face, throws its influence over his whole person and makes him ghost-like from head to foot. Do you not feel ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of that drive through the cheering streets of London was deemed conclusive and during that afternoon and the next morning the crowds increased and the excitement grew until sober-minded observers who had seen the celebrations of the Queen's Jubilee and the Diamond Jubilee and knew something of the millions then gathered together were dismayed at the prospect of the massed multitudes of Coronation day. It ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... remarkable agreement with the first to Timothy in both subject-matter and style. With the exception of what relates to widows and the demeanor of women in the public assemblies, it contains the same general precepts, with additional exhortations that young men be sober-minded, and that the Cretan Christians obey magistrates and be meek and gentle in their deportment. With these counsels the apostle interweaves, as in the first epistle to Timothy, exhortations to Titus of a personal character, and ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... an abomination to which no gentleman can lend his countenance. They are a shabby and mangy compromise for mustachios, and are principally sported by the genus of clerks, who, having strong hirsute predilections, small salaries, and sober-minded masters, hang a tassel on the chin instead of a vallance ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... and, do what we would, we could never make him go to school. This used to trouble his father and me dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much in the world as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and sober-minded as they were." At school, he "excelled only in spelling"; outside of school he was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn, mischievous and prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity afforded. "Often his father would start him off to school," his ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... all the Conservative journals. There seems to be an intensity of exasperation, arising from the ancient prejudice against poets. A poet treating of politics! Let him keep to rhymes, and leave the serious business of life to us practical men, sober-minded men—men not led away by our imaginations—men not moved to absurdities by sentiment—solid, sensible, moderate men! Let him play with capricious hand on the chords which are resonant to his will; but let him not mistake his frivolous accomplishment for the power to play ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... was no impulsive Italian, but a sober-minded Englishman of sturdy good sense, and Ambrose was reasonable enough to listen and only drop in a few groats which he ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... newspapers, it is true, prove that the national unity so loudly acclaimed was no empty word; moreover, they show conclusively that grumblers and half-hearted enthusiasts were not lacking. It would probably be more correct to describe them as "sober-minded patriots." These elements had, however, to use a colloquialism, ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... documents the authorities differ and probably will always differ. Dr. Neale's enthusiasm carried him so far that he was persuaded and sought to persuade others of the existence of liturgical quotations in the writings of St. Paul. This hypothesis is at the present time generally rejected by sober-minded scholars. Perhaps "the personal equation" enters equally into the conclusions of those who assign a very late origin to the liturgies, pushing them along as far as the sixth or seventh century. If one happens to have a rooted dislike for ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... who, desponding of this aid, despond therefore of the object itself.—Incitement to individual exertion.—Reference to the sublimest Example.—Imputation of extravagant hope.—Repelled; first, by a full acknowledgment how much the hopes of sober-minded projectors of improvement are limited by what they see of the disorder in the essential constitution of our nature; and next, by a plain statement, in a series of particulars, of what they nevertheless judge it rational to expect ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... among the best known things in the gossiping history of English Letters. But the coxcombry of Harvey and the felicitous impertinence of Nash have sometimes diverted attention from the actual state of the case. William Webbe (a very sober-minded person with taste enough to admire the "new poet," as he calls Spenser) makes elaborate attempts not merely at hexameters, which, though only a curiosity, are a possible curiosity in English, but at ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... or lending the smaller houses to tenants or retainers—it would seem not unlikely to lawyers or students of the law, possibly their own men of business. This is no mere theory or guesswork. There has been too much conjecture about the early history of Gray's Inn, and the sober-minded topographer is warned off at the outset by a number of inconsistent assertions as to the early existence here of a school of law. Dugdale tells us that the manor was granted to the Priory of Shene in the reign of Henry VII., and after the dissolution it was ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... he is passing along with the even flight of a sober-minded crow, and you are quietly admiring the salmon lining of his wings, he shoots rattling into the air, and, as you stare after him, drops back as suddenly as he rose. He does this apparently because the spirit moves him, as a boy slings a stone at the sky, ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser |
