"Uncritical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... isolation of secrecy in a world amiable in unsuspectingness frightened her. To fling away her secret, to conform, to be unrebellious, uncritical, submissive, became an impatient desire; and the task did not appear so difficult since Miss Dale's arrival. Endearments had been rare, more formal; living bodily untroubled and unashamed, and, as she phrased it, having no one to care for her, she turned insensibly in the direction where ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... knew herself morbid and hard to please. If she had not been so, to be Rodney's wife would surely have been enough; it would have satisfied all her nature. Why didn't it? Was it perhaps really because, though she loved him, it was not with the uncritical devotion of the early days? She had for so many years now seen clearly, through and behind his charm, his weakness, his vanities, his scorching ambitions and jealousies, his petulant angers, his dependence on praise and admiration. She had no jealousy ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... enchantment for me, a golden haze of memory. I was allowed a freedom there I was allowed nowhere else, I was petted and made much of, and I used to spend most of my time in sauntering about, just looking, watching, scrutinising things, with the hard and uncritical observation of childhood. When I got to the place, I was surprised to find that I knew well the look of the house I went to see, though I had not ever entered it. Two neat, contented, slightly absurd old maiden ladies had lived there, who used to ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had quite good theatrical performances. Very early I recall a thespian named Thoman, who was supported by a Julia Pelby. They vastly pleased an uncritical audience. I was doorkeeper, notwithstanding that Thoman doubted if I was "hefty" enough. "Little Lotta" Crabtree was charming. Her mother traveled with her. Between performances she played with her dolls. She danced gracefully ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... reputation which these discreditable performances have gained for M. Figuier among an uncritical public is such as to justify us in devoting a few paragraphs to a book [13] which, on its own merits, is unworthy of any notice whatever. "The To-morrow of Death"—if one were to put his trust in the translator's prefatory ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... operation for uprooting the Church establishment in Ireland by the power of the Nonconformists' antipathy to publicly establishing or endowing religious worship, is not by lending a hand straight away to the operation, and Hebraising,—that is, in this case, taking an uncritical interpretation of certain Bible words as our absolute rule of conduct,—with the Nonconformists. If may be very well for born [211] Hebraisers, like Mr. Spurgeon, to Hebraise; but for Liberal statesmen to Hebraise ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... and better methods, which, caught on the rising wave of interest in medical teaching at Bologna, and preserved by his own energy as a writer in the first original systematic treatise written since the time of Galen, created for him in subsequent uncritical times the reputation of being the Restorer of the practice of anatomizing the human body, the first one to demonstrate and teach such knowledge since the time of the Ptolemaic anatomists, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... the Auntiaunte Forme of Monies," and the like: deeds, bills, letters, inscriptions, proclamations, accounts of churches and other buildings, collected by Rowley for his patron, Canynge: many of which this singularly uncritical historian incorporated in his "History of Bristol," published some twenty years later. He also imparted to Barrett two Rowleian poems, "The Parliament of Sprites," and "The Battle of Hastings" (in two quite different versions). In September, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... brooding pinkness when he talked to her, her so very parted lips, considering her pretty teeth, her so very parted eyelids, considering her pretty eyes, all of which might have been those of some waxen image of uncritical faith, cooled the heat of his helplessness very much as if he were laying his head on a tense silk pillow. She had, it was true, forms of speech, familiar watchwords, that affected him as small scratchy perforations of the ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... atmosphere. It is the exact mirror of the author's mind and character. It is fresh, simple, fluent, vigorous, flexible, never dazzling away attention from what it represents by the intrusion of verbal felicities which are pleasing apart from the vivid conceptions they attempt to convey. The uncritical reader is unconscious of its excellence because it is so excellent,—that is, because it is so entirely subordinate to the matter which it is the instrument of expressing. At times, however, the singular interest of the things described must impress the dullest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Braddon's idea. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Maxwell), born in 1837, published her first novel, The Trail of the Serpent, in 1860. She has written a large number of sensational works of fiction, very popular with an uncritical class of readers. Perhaps her best-known book is Lady Audley's Secret (1862). It would be well for the student to refer to the scenes in Guy Mannering which Stevenson calls the ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... truth and life to him, not a mere subject for strife and debate. It was far otherwise with the Arians. On one side their doctrine was a mass of presumptuous theorizing, supported by alternate scraps of obsolete traditionalism and uncritical text-mongering; on the other it was a lifeless system of spiritual pride and hard unlovingness. Therefore Arianism perished. So too every system, whether of science or theology, must likewise perish which presumes like Arianism to discover in the feeble ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... construed into the statement that there has been any general "degeneration of the race." It maybe added that the notion that the golden age lay in the past, and that our own age is degenerate is not confined to a few biometricians of to-day; it has commended itself to uncritical minds in all ages, even the greatest, as far back as we can go. Montesquieu referred to this common notion (and attempted to explain it) in his Pensees Diverses: "Men have such a bad opinion of themselves," he adds, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... that SCALIGER [Footnote: Praef. i x LIB. POET. ct 1. vi. p. 338] hath boldly pronounced, the conduct of it to be vicious; and HEINSIUS had no other way to evade the charge, than by recurring to the forced and uncritical expedient of a licentious transposition The truth is, they were both in one common error, that the Poet's purpose had been to write a criticism of the Art of Poetry at large, and not, as is here shewn of the ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... here use it. The history of astronomy presents the records of some rather perplexing observations, not confirmed by later researches, but yet not easily to be explained away or accounted for. Such observations Humboldt described as belonging to the myths of an uncritical period; and it is in that sense that I employ the term 'astronomical myth' in this essay. I propose briefly to describe and comment on some of the more interesting of these observations, which, in whatever sense they are to be interpreted, will be found to afford ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... one of the most prominent of his characteristics as a historian. Uncritical and often inconsistent as he is, his mistakes are not due to partisanship, for he is extraordinarily cosmopolitan. The Germans he dislikes as unchivalrous; but though his life lay in the period of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, and though he describes ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... Leila Yorke's public beyond. Mr. Potter was a less satisfactory reader; he regarded his wife's books as goods for sale, and his comments were, 'That should go all right. That's done it,' which attitude, though commercially helpful, was less really satisfying to the creator than Clare's uncritical absorption in the characters and the story. Clare was, in fact, the public, while Mr. Potter was ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... not present itself in that light. To them it is the breath of life. Like other honorable men they are faithful to their bread; and by authentic tradition the common man, in whose disciplined preconceptions the kept classes are his indispensable betters, is also imbued with the uncritical faith that the invested wealth which enables these betters tracelessly to consume a due share of the yearly product is an addition to the ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Provincial Letter) that 'after having written my letter I read the works of Fathers Barry and Binet.' If such a man as Pascal could be so grossly unfair as to write a criticism on works which he had not read, what can be expected from the non-judicial and uncritical public which ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... marvellous play of dramatic as well as of spiritual faculty, are in evidence. Keble and Pusey were busying themselves with the historical aspects of the question. Pusey began the Library of the Fathers, the most elaborate literary monument of the movement. Nothing could be more amazing than the uncritical quality of the whole performance. The first check to the movement came in 1838, when the Bishop of Oxford animadverted upon the Tracts. Newman professed his willingness to stop them. The Bishop did not insist. Newman's own thought moved rapidly onward in the only course ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... be named several native Peruvian writers who made use of the language of their conquerors; as Don Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui, whose Relacion de Antiguedades de Piru is a precious document, though composed in very uncritical Spanish; as Don Luis Inca, whose Relacion, prepared in Spanish, seems now to be lost, but is referred to, with praise, by some of the older writers; and, above all others, Inca Garcillasso de la Vega, whose vivid and attractive style, and numerous historical writings place ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... reflections suggest is that the uncritical application of biological principles to social progress results in an insuperable contradiction. The factors which determine the survival of physical organism, if applied as rules for the furtherance of social progress, appear to conflict with all that social progress means. A sense ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... orators Demosthenes and Tully, that from the one, nothing may be taken away, to the other nothing may be added[13]." After such eulogy, the description of Lyly by another writer as "alter Tullius anglorum" will not seem strange. These praises were not the extravagances of a few uncritical admirers; they echo the verdict of the age. Lyly's enthronement was of short duration—a matter of some ten years—but, while it lasted, he reigned supreme. Such literary idolatries are by no means uncommon, and often hold their ground for a considerable period. Beside the vogue of Waller, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... volumes of collective biography, which mainly supplied arbitrarily compiled, if extended, catalogues of names. To each name were attached brief annotations, which occasionally offered a fact or a date, but commonly consisted of a few sentences of grotesque, uncritical eulogy. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... called the antimythic position, that rationalist condescension and derogation of all myth and all religion that was never far from the surface during the Romantic era. Holbach was and is a reminder that the Romantic affirmation of myth was never easy, uncritical, or unopposed. Any new endorsement of myth had to be made in the teeth of Holbach and the other skeptics. The very vigor of the Holbachian critique of myth impelled the Romantics to think more deeply and defend more ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... nay post-Renaissance, not Mediaeval in character. We must, of course, abstain from "reading back" Chaucer or even Boccaccio into Benoit or into his probable plagiarist Guido de Columnis; but there is nothing uncritical or wrong in "reading forward" from these to the later writers. The hedge-rose is there, which will develop into, and serve as a support for, the hybrid perpetual—a term which could itself be developed in application, after the fashion of a mediaeval moralitas. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... of uncritical generosity which credits every animal, like Brer Rabbit—who, by the way, was the hare—with human qualities. The other extreme is that of thinking of the animal as if it were an automatic machine, in the working of which there is no place or use for mind. Both these extremes ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... uncritical state that afternoon. When he said, "Let's go and see the wart-hog," she thought no one ever had had so quick a flow of good ideas as he; and when he explained that sugar and not buns was the talisman of popularity among the animals, she marvelled ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... mediaeval standpoint the course of human life from the origin of the world to the year A.D. 1146. His work on the Apocalypse and his impression of the Last Judgment are a fitting close to the whole. He is uncritical in the use of his materials, but conveys a distinct impression of his habits of thought; and something of the brooding calm of a mediaeval monastery invests the work. In the following year he started on the crusade of Konrad III, his ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... to enjoy the supper, the room rang with laughter and screamed witticisms. A popular feature of the entertainment was the mottoes, flat scalloped candies of pink and white sugar, whose printed messages caused endless merriment among these uncritical young persons. "Do You Love Me?"; "I Am A Flirt"; "Don't Kiss Me"; "Oh, You Smarty," said the mottoes insinuatingly, and the revellers read them aloud, exchanged them, secreted them, and even devoured them, ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... caissons at the first uncritical glance looked like junk, but a second look revealed the error. Their metal work was battered and their paint chipped off, but the wheels and running-gear and the long gray barrels were clean ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... kind-hearted, uncritical, undiscerning, such fits of silence, even of gloom, were natural enough in a man whose life was spent largely in the service of the sick and suffering among humanity. He was probably worried over some difficult case, Sir Richard concluded, when he found the younger ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... that not only shall he be apprised of the moment of his death, but that the box shall always be full of money. Still later biographers improved the account further, declaring that Xavier promised Vellio that the strong box should always contain money sufficient for all his needs. In that warm and uncritical atmosphere this and other legends grew rapidly, obedient to much the same laws which govern the evolution of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... was not uncritical also of Cicely at times, but to-night she was so relieved to see how Sir Reginald's temper improved under her smiles and half shy glances, that she let her stay up later than usual. Then when she and the girl went up to bed, she ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... point of view it will therefore be seen that we could not have read Mr George Moore's wonderfully uncritical and misdirected diatribe against Stevenson in The Daily Chronicle of 24th April 1897, without amusement, if not without laughter—indeed, we confess we may here quote Shakespeare's words, we "laughed ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... the humour of "Don Quixote" by an infusion of cockney flippancy and facetiousness, as Motteux's operators did, is not merely an impertinence like larding a sirloin of prize beef, but an absolute falsification of the spirit of the book, and it is a proof of the uncritical way in which "Don Quixote" is generally read that this worse than worthless translation—worthless as failing to represent, worse than worthless as misrepresenting—should have been ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the air, and Nick Dormer was at the other end, seated much at his ease and with a certain privileged appearance of having been there often before, though Sherringham knew he had not. He looked uncritical and very young, as rosy as a school-boy on a half-holiday. It was past five o'clock in the day, but Mrs. Rooth was not dressed; there was, however, no want of finish in her elegant attitude—the same relaxed grandeur (she seemed to let you understand) for which she used ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... connection is significant of a very definite attitude toward books,—an attitude not uncritical, since it is love of the best only, but an attitude which implies more intimacy and receptivity than the purely critical temper makes possible; an attitude, moreover, which expects and invites something more than instruction or entertainment,—both valuable, wholesome, and necessary, ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... agree to the necessity of independent judgment on the part of adults may demur at the idea of placing similar responsibility upon children. Are not children normally uncritical and imitative or passive? they say. And if we teach them to judge and criticise freely, are they not very likely to develop priggishness that will result in immodesty and disrespect for others? "Memory," says John Henry Newman, "is one of the first developed of the mental faculties; a boy's business, ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... Othello killed his wife, probably within twenty-four hours, certainly within a few days, of the consummation of his marriage, contradicts the impression produced by the play on all uncritical readers and spectators. It is also in flat contradiction with a large number of time-indications in the play itself. It is needless to mention more than a few. (a) Bianca complains that Cassio has kept away from her for ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... shine through it all the expectation of the coming King. And I venture to say that, however grateful we may be to modern investigation for light upon these other points to which I have referred, the ignorant reader that reads Jesus Christ into all the Old Testament may be very uncritical and mistaken in regard to details, but he has got hold of the root of the matter, and is nearer to the apprehension of the essence and spirit and purpose of the ancient Revelation than the most learned critic who does not see that it is the preparation ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... having too good a time to wonder long. Too good a time to remember whether or not it was in the baronial spirit. She was entirely uncritical when, the time for good nights finally at hand, Mr. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... the other form of mental healing, has such a variety of forms that it is practically impossible to describe a typical one. Faith in some power, or, what amounts to the same thing, the uncritical reception of suggestions concerning the cure, is the common ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... agreed with this and started out to be an artist. He had no money, nor means of earning any, but he managed to secure some desultory instruction, and this, added to his native talent, enabled him to begin to paint portraits for which uncritical persons were willing to pay. But it was a hard road, and none was more conscious of his deficiencies than himself. He knew that he needed training, and finally started for England with a purse of four hundred ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... Shaw and Chesterton disagree; yet they are both men who, in some way, attempt to be reformers. Shaw proceeds by satire and contempt; Chesterton proceeds by originality and good nature, except on the question of divorce, which makes him very angry, and, as I have said, uncritical. Shaw chastises the world and is angry; Chesterton laughs, and, in a genial way, asks what is wrong; and, having found out, attempts to put things right. Shaw would rather have a new sort of world with ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... appeared that in the version then in circulation in France, the original meaning had been garbled, distorted, and completely metamorphosed. But no one thought of verifying the text. Books were rare and minds uncritical. This deliberately falsified prophecy was accepted as the pure word of Merlin and numerous copies of ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the place to speak, except to say that they must by their nature be tentative and experimental. The radical mind is to-day one of the most dangerous elements in society, just because all the world over men are very ready to be influenced and are eager for change and are uncritical. Cleveland in an essay entitled Can Democracy be Efficient? exhibits a type of thinking about political questions that ought to appeal to all practical thinkers. It is his method rather than, in this connection, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... admiration. Both his foes and his friends, it seems to us, do him a good deal of injustice. The former, carried away by that sense of unlikeness which lies at the bottom of most of the prejudices of uncritical men, denounce him out of hand because he is not as they are. A good many of these foes, of course, are not actually men of honour themselves; some of them, in fact, belong to sects and professions—for example, that of intellectual Socialist and that of member of Congress—in ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... eagerness of the chase after the literary facts of the origin of the Old Testament, we forget that it is a unity, that it is a divine unity, that it is a progressive revelation, and that 'the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy' then I venture to say that the most uncritical, old-fashioned reader of the Old Testament that found Jesus Christ in the Song of Solomon, and in the details of the Tabernacle, and in all the minutiae of worship and sacrifice, was nearer to the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... delight, the delight which a butterfly must feel among the flowers or that of a child playing in the fields under the warm sun; it is a delight wholly physical,—pure sensation. A quick taking of the breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate and uncritical, are the only expression we can find at that instant for what we feel: as when an abrupt turn of the road spreads out before us a landscape of which we had not dreamed, or we enter for the first time the presence of the Apollo Belvedere. We know ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... and time may be deployed about them, conceived to contain all things, and to supply them with their respective places and dates. This gives us the cosmos of classical physics. But this system involves the uncritical notion of light and matter travelling through media previously existing, and being carried down, like a boat drifting down stream, by a flowing time which has a pace of its own, and imposes it on all existence. In reality, each "clock" ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... scholastics were often uncritical. They were too intent on building up and buttressing their system on the broad human or religious foundations which they had chosen for it. They nursed the comfortable conviction that whatever their thought contained was eternal and objective truth, a copy ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... a novel of so elevated a spirit, yet of such strong interest, unartificial, and uncritical, that it is obviously a fulfillment of Mr. Harrison's intention to ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... listened to this nonsense with the smile of a silent woman who has borne a child that can talk. Moya had often noticed how uncritical she was of Christine's ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... as a poet. It is true that his style remained diffuse and his ear faulty, but his countrymen, then as now uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blemishes of his verse, and thought only of his vibrant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil, his prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first general collection of his poems, and here were to be found ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the cathedral city of the same name, and unaware of the existence of such a place as Canterbury in New Zealand, or that the name, if not exactly a fraud, is calculated to mislead. Doubtless it is the mint sauce that satisfies the uncritical palate. Just as the boy who, when asked after a treat of oysters how he liked them, said with gusto, "The oysters was good, but the vinegar and pepper ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... stuff is a common conception, though not as common as it used to be. If this teacher had had more brains, it would have been a lie. The word idled is the hopeless part of this criticism, or rather of this uncritical remark. To ask this kind of a man, who plays all the "choice gems from celebrated composers" literally, always literally, and always with the loud pedal, who plays all hymns, wrong notes, right notes, games, people, and jokes literally, and with the loud pedal, who will die literally and ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... naturally enforced in presence of a document of this nature. It would have been as uncritical to neglect it as to employ it without discernment. Luke has had under his eyes originals which we no longer possess. He is less an evangelist than a biographer of Jesus, a "harmonizer," a corrector after the manner of Marcion and Tatian. But he is a biographer of the first century, a divine ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... with warring impulses that Somerset slowly diminished in Paula's estimate; slowly as the moon wanes, but as certainly. Charlotte's own love was of a clinging, uncritical sort, and though the shadowy intelligence of Somerset's doings weighed down her soul with regret, it seemed to make not the least difference in ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... was to create, and not to criticise. And, had he set himself to do so, there is no warrant that his success would have been great. In many ways he was still in bondage to the mediaval, and wholly uncritical, tradition. One classic, we may almost say, was as good to him as another. He seems to have placed Ovid on a line with Virgil; and the company in his House of Fame is undeniably mixed. His judgments have the healthy instinct of the consummate artist. They do ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... man. Yet my old creed enacted an affirmative result of this historical inquiry, as a test of one's spiritual state, and ordered me to think harshly of men like Marcus Aurelius and Lessing, because they did not adopt the conclusion which the professedly uncritical have established. It possessed me with a general gloom concerning Mohammedans and Pagans, and involved the whole course of history and prospects of futurity in a painful darkness from which ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... however, and in Ibsen's early childhood, an event occurred which was unique in the history of Norwegian literature, and the consequences of which were far-reaching. As is often the case in countries where the art of verse is as yet little exercised, there grew up about 1830 a warm and general, but uncritical, delight in poetry. This instinct was presently satisfied by the effusion of a vast quantity of metrical writing, most of it very bad, and was exasperated by a violent personal feud which for a while interested all educated persons in Norway to a far greater degree than any other intellectual ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... appealing to the latent primitive in each of us, it offers us a perpetual temptation to fall back into something below our best possible. The impulsive mind is inevitably conservative; always at the mercy of memorized images. Hence its delighted self-yielding to traditional symbols, its uncritical emotionalism, its easy slip-back into traditional and even archaic and self-contradictory beliefs: the way in which it pops out and enjoys itself at a service of the hearty congregational sort, or may even lead its unresisting owner to ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... interest and good temper made her not an outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... all this time of trial—an uncontrollable emotion, but he would not let his mind speculate about the grief and attitude of his family, forcibly interposing a veil between himself and them. Tired out at length, he let his reverie merge into mere uncritical perception. He was conscious of afternoon sunshine, of a great stretch of sky, with a continent of white cloud containing big blue lakes; his eye took in the expanse of sea, glistening, streaked, patched, lined, and shaded, with the pier in ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... for it apparently gratuitous, but fiercely strong. I wish to trace my ancestors a thousand years, if I trace them by gallowses. It is not love, not pride, not admiration; it is an expansion of the identity, intimately pleasing, and wholly uncritical; I can expend myself in the person of an inglorious ancestor with perfect comfort; or a disgraced, if I could find one. I suppose, perhaps, it is more to me who am childless, and refrain with a certain shock from looking forwards. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... character than is generally supposed, but it is that very resemblance which makes their differences the more incomprehensible to each other; just as in politics, theology, or that most disputatious of all things disputable, metaphysics, the nearer the reasoners approach each other in points that to an uncritical bystander seem the most important, the more sure they are to start off in opposite directions upon reaching ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of accounting for something not unfamiliar in his voice and bearing. A man of average stature, with a vast black beard, and guileless blue eyes, set off by a powerful Armagh accent. Evidently unobservant, uncritical, and utterly destitute of devil in any form, it seemed that the Spirit of the Bog had followed him into the bush, preserving his noxious innocence and all-round ineptitude in their pristine integrity. Naturally, he had taken a slight local ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... as I have described that I began my first book, but it was not a story-book, and I had no idea that it would ever become a printed book at all. It was merely a free-and-easy record of personal adventure and every-day life, written, like all else that I penned, solely for the uncritical eye of that long-suffering ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... accompanied the words was not a pleasant one, but the girl returned it with an uncritical fervour ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Goethe-Litteratur."[67] Springer cites at some length the liberal opinions of Molire, La Bruyre, Wieland, Heine and others concerning the literary appropriation of another's thought. He then proceeds to quote Goethe's equally generous views on the subject, and adds the uncritical fling that if Goethe robbed Sterne, it was an honor to Sterne, again to his literary fame. Near the end of his paper, Springer arrives at the question in hand and states positively that these maxims, with their miscellaneous companions, ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... "Pelasgic" of Europe.[16] The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg will have it allied to the Maya, the old Norse or Scandinavian, the ancient Coptic, and what not. Rafinesque and Jegor von Sivors[17] have made vocabularies of it, but the former in so uncritical, and the latter in so superficial a manner, that they are worse ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... her steadily, with unchanging, lit-up eyes. She was a strange creature to him. But she had no power over him. She flushed, and was irritated. Yet she glanced again and again at his dark, living face, curiously, as if she despised him. She despised his uncritical, unironical nature, it had nothing for her. Yet it angered her as if she were jealous. He watched her with deferential interest as he would watch a stoat playing. But he himself was not implicated. He ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... well as uncritical censure, belongs to the past; but the play remains, a singular exercise of "poetic energy," a confession, ex animo, of "the burthen of the mystery, ... the heavy and the weary weight ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshipped by these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the crusades was revived in this quest of the holy grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of pagan authors ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... before us, was cluttered with a hundred odds and ends that collect in a deserted house—a ladder, a stiff, rusted bridle, a coil of frayed rope, a kettle, a dozen sheets of the Gazette, empty bottles, dusty crockery and broken chairs. He surveyed them all with a bland, uncritical glance. From his manner he might have been surrounded by brilliant company. From his conversation he might have been in a ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... natural, innate love for the gorgeous, the splendid, the profuse, and showy; minds ambitious of, and accustomed to, rule, and impatient of control; minds already glazed over with the influence of the lying assertion, proved to their uncritical, passionate judgment by all the sophistical arguments of which their religious and political guides were capable, that slavery is the very best possible condition for the black man, and the relation of master the only true and natural one for the white. I say, I do not wonder at the Southern ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... generalized and wholesale attacks upon all that Freudism stood for regardless of whether, in certain principles, it was right or wrong. This some have actually done. Although this method is not in my opinion fair or scientific, yet, so reckless and so uncritical have been many of the Freudians, and the foremost Freudians at that, in their declarations and conclusions, that I can readily see how one may be prompted to resort to unmitigated ridicule and general condemnation of the entire system, the standpoints and the conclusions ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... his prospective son-in-law a promise that in twelve months' time he would return. During that interval correspondence went on apace not only between the affianced lovers, but between M. Forestier and Ingres, the former taking affectionate and not uncritical interest in the other's projects. For Ingres was before all things a projector, anticipating by decades the achievements of his later years. The glow of enthusiasm, the fever of creativeness were at its height. Italy possessed Ingres' entire being ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... let anything go. All religion begins, it seems to me, by an outburst of moral force, an attempt to simplify, to get a principle; and then the people who don't understand it begin to make it technical and defined; uncritical minds begin to attribute all sorts of vague wonders to it—things unattested, natural exaggerations, excited statements, impossible claims; and then these take traditional shape and the poor steed gets hung with all sorts ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... much to be deplored that Signor Margiotta has largely and approvingly cited the testimony of two of these witnesses who are most open to condemnation, and that he has himself exercised an imperfect and uncritical censorship over papers which have come into his hands. From first to last all documents ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... on primitive instincts that lie beneath it. Of course, in asserting the importance of these "supersensuous" values the religionist does not mean that they are beyond the reach of human appraisal or unrelated by their nature to the rest of our understanding. By the intuitive he does not mean the uncritical nor by the supersensuous the supernatural in the old and discredited sense of an arbitrary and miraculous revelation. Mysticism is not superstition, nor are the insights of the poet the whimsies of the mere impressionist. But he insists that the humanist, in his ordinary definition of experience, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Pico's birth—the appearance of a circular flame which suddenly vanished away, on the wall of the chamber where she lay. He remained two years at Bologna; and then, with an inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst for knowledge, the strange, confused, uncritical learning of that age, passed through the principal schools of Italy and France, penetrating, as he thought, into the secrets of all ancient philosophies, and many eastern languages. And with this flood of erudition came the generous hope, so often disabused, of reconciling ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... and the fatherless, Uncle William had a full winter. He was not a model housekeeper at best, and ten o'clock of winter mornings often found him with breakfast dishes unwashed and the floor unswept. Andy, coming in for his daily visit, would cast an uncritical eye at the frying-pan, and seat himself comfortably by the stove. It did not occur to either of them, as Uncle William pottered about, finishing the dishes, that Andy should take a hand. Andy had women ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... crude and uncritical. In proportion as men learnt to reflect upon their experience, it was bound to be modified, and to submit to reactionary influences. Such was the case at the very beginning of philosophical and scientific enquiry—and such was the case also at the opening of the "modern" era. ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... before the Court, and received with unexampled enthusiasm. His profession, so far as he had any, was that of a copyist of music, and his musical taste and facile talents had at last brought him an uncritical recognition. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... that there was an interval of twelve days between the date of Fare Thee Well and A Sketch; that the composition of the latter belongs to a later episode in the separation drama; and that for some reasons connected with the proceedings between the parties, a pathetic if not uncritical resignation had given place to the extremity of exasperation—to hatred and fury and revenge. It follows that either poem, in respect of composition and of publication, must be judged on its own merits. Contemporary critics, while they were all but unanimous in holding up ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... waiter greeted us, and led us to one of a number of very small tables covered with linen which impressed even Frank's uncritical eyes with its mussiness. With a feeling of having inadvertently entered a den of thieves, I wished myself out of it but lacked the courage to rise and when the man returned and placed upon the table two glasses and a strange looking bottle ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... the case—if the life drawn is harmonious, the picture must be the work of a single epoch—for it is not in the nature of early uncritical times that later poets should adhere, or even try to adhere, to the minute details of law, custom, opinion, dress, weapons, houses, and so on, as presented in earlier lays or sagas on the same set of subjects. Even less ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... surpassed all other American historians of his time in output on Spanish-American history. Coronado is the climax of his many volumes. Its fault is being too worshipful of everything Spanish and too uncritical. A little essay on Coronado in Haniel Long's Pinon Country goes a good way to put this ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... result of a long transmission of ancestral inanity. He read the depths of your character, divined your little foibles and vanities, and very likely passed his supercilious judgment upon you, seeming all the while the personification of uncritical humility. ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the reading of the "Ancient Mariner"; whereupon he took up the tale, and carried it on to the end. He had some facility in reading with expression, and his few affectations—for it must be confessed he was not free of such faults—were not of a nature to strike uncritical hearers. When he had finished, he looked up, and his eye chancing to light upon Margaret first, he saw that her cheek was quite pale, and her eyes overspread with the film, not of coming tears, but ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... Queen Elizabeth was on a visit to Cambridge, a scholar delivered before her an oration, in which he exalted the antiquity of his own university at the expense of that of the University of Oxford. The University of Oxford was roused to arms. In that uncritical age any antiquarian weapon which the fury of academical patriotism could supply was eagerly grasped, and the reputation of the great antiquary Camden is somewhat compromised with regard to an interpolation in Asser's Life of Alfred, which formed the chief documentary support of the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... this was more or less in the nature of an experiment; for Royds, who took infinite pains over these entertainments, had arranged a long program with the object of bringing to light any possible talent. The result of this was that even the uncritical had to confess that most of the performers would have [Page 87] been less out of place among the audience. So much dramatic ability, however, was shown that Barne was entrusted with the work of producing ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... biometricians' tables; but had they married ten years sooner, a child born when the parents were thirty might rank as the tenth child, and would be so reckoned by the biometricians. One does not need to be a biologist to perceive that conclusions based upon assumptions so uncritical are worth nothing at all, and it is tempting to suggest that the biometricians are so called, on a principle long famous, because they ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... America, it was joined by a more important paper, the Daily News, which set itself the task of controverting the Times. Moreover the Daily News was all the more influential in that it was not uncritical of the North, yet consistently, throughout the war, expressed sympathy for the cause and principles behind the efforts of the Northern Government. Selling for a low price, twopence-halfpenny, the Daily News, like the Westminster ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... one of us, it seems to me, travels this road: After a period of early veneration, which is awakened in us by tradition and by the earliest literary impressions of youth, there comes, as a reaction against an uncritical overestimate, and under the influence of changed ideals of art, a defection from Schiller, which parades itself in a one-sided and unhistorical emphasis of his weak points. Then gradually this negative attitude corrects itself ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... interest being felt in that direction.[1] It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited to prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale, than that either of Euphues or of the Arcadia, which, though an uncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly's, is practically only a whelp of the same litter. Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has its place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper and valuable place too. But it ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Rachel's filial devotion was diverted from that of her conjugal duties, it unconsciously assumed another aspect in his eyes. But not for worlds would he have put into words the annoyance he could not help feeling, and Rachel was entirely unconscious of his attitude. The devoted, uncritical affection for her father which had grown up with her life was in her mind so absolutely taken for granted as one of the foundations of existence, that it did not even occur to her that Rendel might ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... do not want to make any railing accusations against life; it is—to my taste—neither very sad nor very horrible. At times it is distinctly amusing. Indeed, I know nothing in the same line that can quite compare with it. But there is a difference between general appreciation and uncritical acceptance. At times I ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... State, and not the "general State," that he subjects to criticism, that he does not investigate the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation, and consequently lays down conditions which are only explicable from an uncritical confusion of political emancipation with ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the doctrine of matter is the outcome of uncritical acceptance of space and time as external conditions for natural existence. By this I do not mean that any doubt should be thrown on facts of space and time as ingredients in nature. What I do mean is 'the unconscious presupposition of space and time as being that within which nature is set.' ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead |
