"Imbecile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... find evidence of the power of the personal structure to react upon the sexual elements, that is not open to serious objection." Some of the cases of apparent inheritance he regards as coincidence of effect. Thus "the fact that a drunkard will often have imbecile children, although his offspring previous to his taking to drink were healthy," is an "instance of simultaneous action," and not of true inheritance. "The alcohol pervades his tissues, and, of course, affects the germinal matter in the sexual elements as much as it does that in his own ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... of attendants too small and not sufficiently paid. Also that it might be desirable to erect, in connection with them, detached buildings of a simple and inexpensive character for the reception of imbecile ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... thing is that where the people are held heroic in their victory over the nobility, power is called murderous in its duel with the people. If it succumbs after its appeal to force, power is then called imbecile. The present government is attempting to save itself by two laws from the same evil Charles X. tried to escape by two ordinances; is it not a bitter derision? Is craft permissible in the hands of power against craft? may it kill those who seek to ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... to protract the conversation, "is a vivid sort of imbecile suffering from vacuous complexities. An hour alone in a room with her would drive even a philosopher to madness. She's one of the kind of people given to inappropriate silences. She reminds me of an emotion undergoing ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... have wives, nor houses, until they could have them as splendid as jewelled Mrs. Potiphar, and her palace, thirty feet front. Where were their heads and their hearts, and their arms? How looks this craven despondency, before the stern virtues of the ages we call dark? When a man is so voluntarily imbecile as to regret he is not rich, if that is what he wants, before he has struck a blow for wealth; or so dastardly as to renounce the prospect of love, because sitting sighing, in velvet dressing-gown and slippers, he does not see his way clear ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... them utter desolation, smouldering hearth-stones and fields crimsoned with blood. At length they retired of their own accord, dragging after them twenty thousand captives. During a period of twenty-seven years, under the imbecile reign of Frederic, the very heart of Europe was twelve times scourged by the inroads of these savages. No tongue can tell the woes which were inflicted upon humanity. Existence, to the masses of the people, in that day, must indeed have been a curse. Ground to the very lowest ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... city which I shall not name. The opera had been judged superannuated and had been "improved." A young composer had written a new score in which he inserted here and there such bits of Gluck as he thought worthy of being preserved. A costly and magnificently imbecile luxuriousness set off the whole piece. I may be pardoned the cruel adjective when I say that in the scene of Hate, so deeply inspired, and which takes place in a sort of cave, they relegated the chorus to the wings ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... imbecile, and Stratton grasped now his friend's object in bringing them face to face. It was to show him how little so mindless a creature ought to influence the future of two people's lives, and to consult with him as to what ought to ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... old overcoat and took a lantern. He went out from the side door. He shrank from the wet and roaring night. Such weather had a nervous effect on him: too much moisture everywhere made him feel almost imbecile. Unwilling, he went through it all. A dog barked violently at him. He peered in all the buildings. At last, as he opened the upper door of a sort of intermediate barn, he heard a grinding noise, ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... he, it was, positively!" cried he in horror, "and I, blind and imbecile wretch, have not recognized him, have not recognized him, and have ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... said, gazing at his wife in a manner that might well have justified the black sheep's thought, "screwed," "I—I— business kept me in the office very late, and then—" He cast an imbecile glance at the bundle. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... favorite maxims was, "The truest wisdom is a resolute determination." His life, beyond most others, vividly showed what a powerful and unscrupulous will could accomplish. He threw his whole force of body and mind direct upon his work. Imbecile rulers and the nations they governed went down before him in succession. He was told that the Alps stood in the way of his armies. "There shall be no Alps," he said, and the road across the Simplon was constructed, through ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... happiness, he yet was able for twelve hours at a time to shut his impending bride in the remotest cupboard of his mind, nor heed her sighs. But there was an older love than Elizabeth Schuyler: a ragged poverty-stricken creature by this, cowering before dangers within and without, raving mad at times, imbecile at others, filling her shattered body with patent nostrums, yet throughout her long course of futilities and absurdities making a desperate attempt to shade the battered lamp of liberty from the fatal draught. Her name was the United States of America, and never was there a more satiric ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... crying: "Comme je voudrais, celui-la, le transporter sur ma toile!" For a moment Cezanne contemplated the picture in terrified amazement, then exclaimed: "Dites, monsieur Vollard, c'est effrayant, la vie!" Useless to blame the particular imbecile: it was the world in which such things were possible that filled him with dismay. I stretch my hand towards a copy of the Burlington Magazine and come plumb on the following by the present Director ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... to the post office at Kulanche the other day showing 'em off, each one in a red shawl; and sneering at people with only one. And this imbecile Homer ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... Kellermann and Desaix; he dared not curse Bonaparte, who might owe him millions. This alternative of millions to be earned and present ruin staring him in the face, deprived the purveyor of most of his faculties: he became nearly imbecile for several days; the man had so abused his health by excesses that when the thunderbolt fell upon him he had no strength to resist. The payment of his bills against the Exchequer gave him some hopes for the future, but, in spite of all efforts to ingratiate himself, Napoleon's hatred ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... is at stake, and when we are opposed by a remorseless foe which would gladly ruin us irretrievably? There is no halting half-way. It was these endless scruples which interfered with the prevention of the war under the imbecile or traitorous Buchanan; it is lingering scruple and timidity which still inspires in thousands of cowardly hearts a dislike to face the grim danger and ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... the world possessed this despotic imbecile to form a senate? His action in this can only be accounted for in the light that it was one of those unpremeditated whims of a narrow-minded faddist. One naturally wonders what the newly created senators ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... he called "The Crime against Kansas"; and the excuses for the crime he denominated the apology tyrannical, the apology imbecile, the apology absurd, and the apology infamous. "Tyranny, imbecility, absurdity, and infamy," he continued, "all unite to dance, like the weird ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... de Montcornet's house? If you object, let us consider that nothing has been said. But I don't fancy that the women are so much in question as a poor devil that Lucien pilloried in his newspaper; he is begging for mercy and peace. The Baron du Chatelet is imbecile enough to take the thing seriously. The Marquise d'Espard, Mme. de Bargeton, and Mme. de Montcornet's set have taken up the Heron's cause; and I have undertaken to reconcile Petrarch and his Laura—Mme. de Bargeton ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... write with the imbecile idea of rendering those preparations abortive. No, I am not so mad. My sole view is to explain the motive of my conduct in a particular instance, and to obviate the accusation of treachery which may be laid ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... Slow to discover its mistakes, was not wholly imbecile; it learned in time to respect the fists of Jim o' Mill End, and now hated him quite heartily for the restraint imposed. But Jim derives little satisfaction from his triumph; Chisley conquered him by stupid submission. His physical superiority won him nothing but immunity ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... servant returned with a polite apology: "Miss Vanstone's kind love, and she begs to be excused—she's prompting Mr. Clare." She prompted him to such purpose that he actually got through his part. The performances of the other gentlemen were obtrusively imbecile. Frank was just one degree better—he was modestly incapable; and he gained by comparison. "Thanks to Miss Vanstone," observed the manager, who had heard the prompting. "She pulled him through. We ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... person's lifetime, yet in scarcely nine of these—nine little troubled lifetimes—what incredible things had occurred in this island of ours! How did it all come about? "Not assuredly," Valeria remarked with sudden malice, "by taking things as they stood, and making the best of them with imbecile impatience. If everyone had done that, what sort of an England should I have had stretching before my eyes at ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... and melancholy countenance, and apparently miserable condition. I observed that no one took any notice of him; and that he was allowed to wander about the great straggling workhouse, among the insane, the idiotic, and the imbecile, without the slightest attention being paid to his going and coming; in short, he lived the wretched life of a ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... are, for a collegian! Ingrate! good-for-nothing! vagabond! I began to think you were not coming. Where have you been, imbecile? How dare you delay, as if you had no interest in the matter, when the salt of the earth is melting for you, and the ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... for this the Law was administered and the prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, devise flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... service, I felt ill before I went to bed, and awoke in the morning with a headache, which increased along with other signs of perturbation of the system, until I thought it better to send for Dr Duncan. I have not yet got so imbecile as to suppose that a history of the following six weeks would be interesting to my readers—for during so long did I suffer from low fever; and more weeks passed during which I was unable to meet my flock. Thanks to the care of Mr Brownrigg, a clever young man in priest's orders, who was living at ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... with great respect. She was a woman very pure and very honest. Alas, the poor soul! To-day her hair is white as the snow, and they tell me she is mad. So much the better for her if she know nothing; but I fear the mad and the imbecile know all and see all, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... hilt of the sabre standing upright between his legs. The white plume, the coppery tint of his broad face, the blue-black of the moustaches under the curved beak, the mass of gold on sleeves and breast, the high shining boots with enormous spurs, the working nostrils, the imbecile and domineering stare of the glorious victor of Rio Seco had in them something ominous and incredible; the exaggeration of a cruel caricature, the fatuity of solemn masquerading, the atrocious grotesqueness of some military idol of Aztec conception ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... some seconds with a foolish solemnity, with the pasteboard proboscis still between his fingers, looking at it, while the sun and the clouds and the wooded hills looked down upon this imbecile scene. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... looked up like animals when they hear a cry. Halliday hung motionless, an almost imbecile smile flickering palely on his face. The girl only stared at him with a black look in which flared an unfathomable hell of knowledge, and a certain impotence. She was ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... place? There must be an equestrienne in the programme. If she found herself taken back again to finish her time after this illness or whatever it was, then she should be more than grateful, but as for paying salaries to employes who did not work, why, did people consider him an imbecile? ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... to think of his hotel. It was imbecile not to remember the name of your own hotel—even when your own particular material and immaterial cosmos had been telescoped like a toy train in the last three hours. The Rossiter was all that he ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... sharpness about her. She was amused once because I told her she was like an acidulated drop, half sweet and half sour. "Oh! any stupid woman can be sweet," she said, "it's often another name for imbecile." ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... with the years, I, an old man of seventy, shall be found dreaming dreams just as impossible and childish as those I am dreaming now. I shall be dreaming of some lovely Maria who loves me, the toothless old man, as she might love a Mazeppa; of some imbecile son who, through some extraordinary chance, has suddenly become a minister of state; of my suddenly receiving a windfall of a million of roubles. I am sure that there exists no human being, no human age, to whom or to which that gracious, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... men in power at Paris had as yet shown no organizing capacity. The administration of the War Department by "papa" Pache had been a masterpiece of imbecile knavery which infuriated Dumouriez and his half-starving troops. We have heard much of the blunders of British Ministers in this war; but even at their worst they never sank to the depths revealed in ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... life, as they certainly are the foundation of his moral character. An inert and weak soul, which never overflows in passions, has no physiognomy at all; and want of expression is the leading characteristic of the countenance of the imbecile. The original features which nature gave him continue unaltered; the face is smooth, for no soul has played upon it; the eyebrows retain a perfect arch, for no wild passion has distorted them; the whole form retains its roundness, for the fat ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... is just the thing: 'obey, obey.' Well, I will. I will be a stick, a dolt. I will be as unlike what God intended me to be as possible. I will be just what your father and Aunt Hester and you want me to be. I will let them think for me and save my soul. I am too much an imbecile to attempt to work out my own salvation. No, Elizabeth, I will not play ball any more. I can imagine the horrified commotion it caused among the angels when they looked down and saw me pitching. When I get back to school I shall look up the four ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... said my imbecile, conspiratorially. 'They said it was Kent. But Kentish men are such liars one ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... not the slightest effect in restoring peace to the minds of unscientific Frenchmen. M. Lalande's study was crowded with anxious persons who came to inquire about his memoir. Certain devout folk, 'as ignorant as they were imbecile,' says a contemporary journal, begged the Archbishop of Paris to appoint forty hours' prayer to avert the danger and prevent the terrible deluge. For this was the particular form most men agreed that the danger ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness, I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think I have some genius: as if genius and assurance were the same thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve laughter. I say thus much to you, knowing that you will not make a bad use of it. But it is a fact too true that, if I had only depended on mortal things, both myself and my wife must ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... extreme, and I lost the power of will. Fright had made me imbecile, and I rushed about the crest of the rock like a crazy man. All this time the enraged brute drew nearer; his paws touch the base of the rock; he is in the act of drawing his dripping limbs out of ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... character, who sustained them in their career, and exercised a fortifying influence on their views of public duty; whilst, on the contrary, he had still oftener seen men of great and generous instincts transformed into vulgar self-seekers, by contact with women of narrow natures, devoted to an imbecile love of pleasure, and from whose minds the grand motive of Duty was ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... truly unfortunate cases which, so far as present knowledge goes, cannot be guarded against. Eunice, age 31, mentally 2, is a low-grade imbecile. There is not in the whole family, for generations back, a single case of feeble-mindedness, nor of disease that would undermine the nervous organization. Close scrutiny does not reveal a single assignable cause. She came, as an accident, to ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... their country, they have disdained too much the advice of wise counsillors. With eyes fixed upon their established purpose, they trample under foot every obstacle; and every man who differs from their opinion is but a traitor or an imbecile: hence their lack of moderation, tact and prudence, and their excess of obstinacy and violence. To select one example among a thousand, what marvellous results would have been attained by an entente cordiale between two men ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... for wholeness, a demand that man shall come up to the highest standard; and there is an inherent protest or contempt for preventable deficiency. Nature too demands that man be ever at the top of his condition. The giant's strength with the imbecile's brain will not be characteristic of ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... the prisoner had undergone a woful change during his confinement. Had his own wife seen him at that moment it is doubtful whether she would have recognized her lord. Could it be possible that that frail, tottering, wasted form, and that blanched, sunken-eyed, imbecile-looking countenance were all that were left of the once formidable Robert Gourlay? The sight was one which might have moved his bitterest enemy to tears. His clothing, a world too wide for so shrunken a tenant, hung sloppy and slovenly about him, and it was remarked by a spectator that he had aged ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... picking the Bible to pieces when there was so much positive work for them to do, seemed to me as melancholy as if they had spent themselves upon theology. To waste a Sunday morning in ridiculing such stories as that of Jonah was surely as imbecile as to waste it in proving their ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... for a tete-a-tete. Of these opportunities I have availed myself to the fullest possible extent. And with what result, you will naturally ask? With the result, my dear, of making this man absolutely mad about me. He has become an utter imbecile. C'est tout dit. His incoherent raving would only bore you, so, like the kindhearted little person I am, I spare you this infliction. Suffice it to say that he is mine body and soul. I say nothing about his fortune, because that naturally goes ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... absurd imbecile, with his fine boots and plumes, and tragedy airs. He was not to be pitied, for he recovered health, he found a fortune, he won his Marie. His sufferings were nothing; there was no fatal blight on him, ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... which she had suffered so many lessons; for which she had sat feeling like a mean-spirited imbecile with Sissy's impertinent finger under her wrist, while all outdoors was calling to her; for which she had forborne often and often during the week, only to be more thoroughly bullied on Saturdays. Yet she tore it across and recklessly ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... of Delaware, has been arrested by the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate, for his denunciation of Lincoln as an "imbecile." And a Philadelphia editor has been imprisoned for alleged "sympathy with secessionists." These ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... course, talked to him. And do you know what he said to me? 'What have we to do with Balkan intrigues? We must simply extirpate the scoundrels.' Extirpate is all very well—but what then? The imbecile! I screamed at him, 'But you must spiritualize—don't you ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... five, for we were not very like the rest of the world. We wanted something unexpected, funny, ready for everything, something, in short, which it would be almost impossible to find. We had tried many without success, girls who had held the tiller, imbecile boatwomen who always preferred wine that intoxicates to water which flows and carries the yawls. We kept them for one Sunday, and then got rid of them ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... drunk. I remember. Imbecile! Why did he go to-day? Are there not six other days in this cursed week? Who is there to drum? Nobody. Nobody knows how in Paradise. Seigneur, Dieu! the ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... o'clock. The taxi ought to be here. (He takes two tickets from his pocket, looks at them, and puts them back. Then he commences to pace nervously up and down the room, muttering to himself)—Fool! Idiot! Imbecile! (He is not, so that you could notice it, any of these things. He is a very handsome man of forty. There is the blast of an auto-horn outside. He makes an angry gesture.) Too late! That's the taxi. (But he stands uncertainly in the middle of the floor. There is a loud pounding ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... "Imbecile!" replied his neighbor. "It's Prince Villardo whom we saw last night in the play!" And the alcalde, in the character of giant-slayer, rose accordingly in the ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... ten pupils, it appears that not one had the usual command of muscular motion,—the languid body obeyed not the service of the imbecile will. Some could walk and use their limbs and hands in simple motions; others could make only make slight use of their muscles; and two were without any power ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... off from every possibility of using his mind; never teach him anything, never allow him to look at a book or a picture, keep him shut off from everything that might tend to open his mind, tell him nothing, bring him up as a mere animal, and soon he will lose all his powers of mind, and become an imbecile. But, on the other hand, teach him, train him, educate him, let his mind have full scope and exercise, and his mental powers will grow and increase a hundred-fold, for strength of mind, like strength of ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton
... she covered him up again, but she felt her laugh to be a trifle hysterical. She hated the doctor to think her an imbecile, yet for some reason her identification of the man with the creature of her dream now struck her as extremely funny. She wanted to laugh and laugh; it took all her resolution to restrain herself.... Of course, the whole ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... her face changed; the muscles loosened, the flesh sagged, the widened, swollen mouth hung open; only the broad beautiful forehead, the beautiful calm eyebrows were the same; the face, sallow white, half imbecile, was a mask flung aside. She couldn't bear to look at it; it wasn't her mother's face; her mother had died already under the morphia. She had a shock every time she came in ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... us all in disaster. Let me cut the wretched history as short as I can. At first money was plentiful enough, and luck in that direction seemed to border on the marvelous. To give you an instance your father—imbecile that he was—swore he would test it in your own interests. He hunted round till he found the most hair-brained, wildcat company ever floated for the purpose of robbing moneyed fools, and invested ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Palmerston's recent treaty; but quite ineffectually. They had for their only ally, Lord Granville at Paris, and nothing can exceed the contempt with which the Palmerstonians treat this little knot of dissentients, at least the two elder ones, who (they say) are become quite imbecile, and they wonder Lord Granville does not resign. Palmerston, in fact, appears to exercise an absolute despotism at the Foreign Office, and deals with all our vast and complicated questions of diplomacy according to his own views and opinions, without the slightest control, and scarcely any interference ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... teach the little fellow a very noisy and truculent vocalization of the ursine type, which Archie, who was a great favorite with his host, eagerly imitated, Briscoe appearing throughout the duet at the pitiable disadvantage of the adult imbecile disporting ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... of mankind, when I have wanted to shake hands with Virtue, I have found her shivering in a loft, persecuted by calumny, half-starving on a income or a salary of fifteen hundred francs a year, and regarded as crazy, or eccentric, or imbecile. ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... to understand; but then she is strong-minded, which perhaps accounts for her seeing farther into this millstone than I can. She tells me, not unfrequently, that I am weak-minded. She even goes the length at times of calling me imbecile; but she is a dear good affectionate woman, and I have no sympathy with the insolent remark I once overheard made by an acquaintance of mine, to the effect that it was a pity Mrs Bingley had not been born with a man's hat and trousers ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... single and certainly the sufficient tribute of a great poet, and a great master of the purest and the noblest English, to the most monstrous and preposterous taste or fashion of his time. As the product of an eccentric imbecile it would be no less curious than Stanihurst's Virgil: as the work of Cyril Tourneur it is indeed "a miracle instead of wit." For it cannot be too often repeated that in mere style, in commanding power and purity ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... troops; she fed the little, fat scamps to repletion, and the green lawn was dotted with squirrels all busily burying peanuts for future consumption. A brilliant peacock appeared, picking his way towards them, followed by a covey of imbecile peafowl. She fed them until ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... the Blood, by the Censer and the Seal, by the Book and the Sword, by the Rag and the Gold, by the Sound and the Colour, if thou does but return once into that hovel of elegies where eunuchs find ugly women for imbecile sultans, I'll curse thee; I'll rave at thee; I'll make thee fast from roguery and ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... individual who broke in upon her was that animated piece of ragged door-mat, Toozle. This imbecile little dog was not possessed of much delicacy of feeling. Having been absent on a private excursion of his own into the mountain when the schooner arrived, he only became aware of the return of his lost, loved, and deeply-regretted mistress, ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... "Oh, they were imbecile!" added Lady Garnett; "try the Moselle, my dear, and leave that terrible sweet stuff to Mary. Yes, I was glad to come away from Lucerne. Everything is very bad now except my Constant's vol-au-vent, which you don't ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... blame no man for honestly advocating any policy which he thinks will aid the Union cause. But the country was never more disgusted than it is at present, with men who use politics as a mere trade by which to live. The infamy which has attached to the miserable and imbecile Buchanan, that type of degraded, pettifogging diplomacy, is rapidly extending to his whole tribe—and their name is legion. It is significant that a bank, whose notes bore as vignette a portrait of the ex-honorable ex-President, has ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Also—He doesn't realize it himself, but I'm not prim enough to suit him. He imagines he's liberal—that's a common failing among men. But a woman who is natural shocks them, and they are taken in and pleased by one who poses as more innocent and impossible than any human being not perfectly imbecile could remain in a world that conceals nothing.... I despise Grant—I like him, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... that's out of nature. We all Have been patriots, yet each house must always keep one. 'T were imbecile hewing out roads to a wall. And when Italy's made, for what end is it done If we have not ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... week of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading—and he had launched something that would disorganise the entire fabric that held their contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together. 'Felt like an imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... how I have spent the years of my life! like an imbecile! But you—if you take me, I shall go mad—I shall love you like a tigress! I shall implore you to invent any way that will enable me to realize life! Oh, if you take me, how madly I shall love you! I fancy myself ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... curl upward at the corners in a quaint smile. Hardyman's last imbecile question had opened her eyes to the true state of the case. Still, Tommie's future was in this strange gentleman's hands; she felt bound to consider that. And, moreover, it was no everyday event, in Isabel's experience, to fascinate a famous personage, who was also a magnificent ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... reached the island of Malta, where my wife lived to be over seventy. Travel, hardships, and danger seemed to agree with her. She never spoke any language but her own, and as she was of a quiet disposition, and took no interest in the things she saw, she generally passed as an imbecile. But she was the first Chinese woman who ever ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... turn to Lady Barton's motives, I feel it my duty to explain the exact truth to Luttrell. When last, my dear Tedcastle, Molly was invited to meet the Rossmeres, she behaved so badly and flirted so outrageously with his withered lordship, that he became perfectly imbecile toward the close of the entertainment, and his poor old wife was reduced almost to the verge of tears. I blushed for her; I ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... each individual became an individual member of the whole, perfect in his place, and capable of supplying what another might chance to need; as the man of education might be puny in stature and deficient of a strong arm; the man of strong arm deficient in education; the imbecile man might be a superior woodman—the man of intellect an inferior one:—so that, as before remarked, each of these qualities, being essential to perfect the whole, each one of course was called upon to exercise his peculiar talent, and take his position on an equality with his ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... that the case was a hopeless one. And when one night we picked him up out of the Union Ditch, a begrimed and weather-worn drunkard, a hopeless debtor, a self-confessed spendthrift, and a half-conscious, maudlin imbecile, we knew that the end had come. The wife he had abandoned had in turn deserted him; the woman he had misled had already realized her folly, and left him with her reproaches; the associates of his reckless life, who had used and abused him, had found him no longer of service, or even ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... and the imbecile cowardice of his subjects had enabled the Fellatahs to establish themselves in Yarriba, to entrench themselves in its fortified towns, and to obtain the recognition of their independence, until they became sufficiently strong to assume an absolute sovereignty ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... remained an entire blank. Imbecile, vacant, drivelling—she appeared almost unconscious of former existence; and of those subjects which formerly engrossed her attention, and excited her feelings, there were scarcely any on which she now evinced any emotion. Even the name of her lover was almost powerless on her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... remembered, had objected to Welles's appointment to a Cabinet position when Lincoln suggested it to him in their consultation at Springfield before the inauguration) declared that "It is worse than a fault, it is a crime, to keep that old imbecile at the head of the Navy Department." And another critic expressed the uncomplimentary opinion that "If Lincoln would send old Welles back to Hartford, it would be better for the Navy and for ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... men looked at her at that with a sudden imbecile despair, at which she laughed and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... who met Edward reeling by the roadside, was sometimes startled to hear the fragments of classical lore, or wild bursts of half-remembered poetry, mixing strangely with the imbecile merriment of intoxication. But when he stopped to gaze, there was no further mark on his face or in his eye by which he could be distinguished from the loathsome and ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Kai-Khosrau, who was saved by Piran, a kind-hearted nobleman, and given into the care of a goatherd. When Afrasiyab learned of his existence he summoned him to his presence, but the youth, instructed by Piran, assumed the manners of an imbecile, and was accordingly freed by Afrasiyab, who feared ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in the dark. And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too. She would marry somebody else. His very soul writhed. The tenacity of that Feraud, the awful persistence of that imbecile brute came to him with the tremendous force of a relentless fatality. General D'Hubert trembled as he put down the empty water ewer. "He will have me," he thought. General D'Hubert was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He had in his dry mouth the faint, ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... large black capitals and display type to do justice to the biggest sensation that had come in its way for years, and the appearance of the paper created the most profound amazement throughout the town and district. Gable was described as a cunning scoundrel whose affectations of almost imbecile simplicity might easily have deceived intelligences less keen than those at the service of the Mercury, and neither Messrs. Billson and Hogan nor Master Mathieson hinted that their assailants were anything less than grown men of the largest ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... faces like an idiot. She was obliged to explain to her, to repeat two or three times things that Germinie had always grasped on the merest hint. She asked herself, when she saw how slow and torpid she was, if somebody had not exchanged her maid for another.—"Why, you're getting to be a perfect imbecile!" she would sometimes say to her testily. She remembered the time when Germinie was so useful about finding dates, writing an address on a card, telling her what day they had put in the wood or broached the cask of wine,—all of which were things that her old brain could not remember. Now Germinie ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... possibility of talking the Chinese into reason. Such a chimera, still surviving the multiform experience we have had, augurs ruin to the total enterprise. It is not absolutely impossible that even Yeh, or any imbecile governor armed with the same obstinacy and brutal arrogance, might, under the terrors of an armament such as he will have to face, simulate a submission that was far from his thoughts. We ourselves found in the year 1846, when in fidelity to our engagements we gave back the important ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... with great emotion, and had tears in their eyes when they thanked the Queen for her confidence and support. Lord Aberdeen means to have an interview with Lord Palmerston, and says that when he (Lord A.) came into office, Lord Palmerston and the Chronicle assailed him most bitterly as an imbecile Minister, a traitor to his country, etc., etc. He means now to show Lord P. the contrast by declaring his readiness to assist him in every way he can by his advice, that he would at all times speak to him as if he was his colleague if he ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... were not the banners of Csar. Some vigorous hand was demanded at this moment, or else the funeral knell of Rome was on the point of sounding. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that, had the imbecile Carinus (the brother of Numerian) succeeded to the command of the Roman armies at this time, or any other than Dioclesian, the empire of the west would have fallen to pieces within the ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the richest and most extravagant plebeian amongst us. He, unhappily, minds danger and oppression as little as he minds money, so long as he has a spectacle and a sensation, and it is this ruthless imbecile who will have lace curtains to the steamboat berth into which he gets with his pantaloons on, and out of which he may be blown by an exploding boiler at any moment; it is he who will have for supper that overgrown and shapeless dinner in the lower saloon, and will not let any ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... to Nicetas, (p. 444,) Andronicus despised the imbecile Isaac too much to fear him; he was arrested by the officious zeal of Stephen, the instrument of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... should no longer be excepted in the laws against tramps and vagrants. Constitutional amendments proposing women's suffrage were defeated this year (1895) in no less than nine States. Connecticut passed a law that no man or woman should marry who was epileptic or imbecile, if the wife be under forty-five, and another State for the first time awards divorce to the husband for cruelty or indignities suffered at the hands of the wife, while another State still repeals altogether its law permitting divorces for cruelty ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... sadder spectacle of artistic debauchery than a London theatre; the overfed inhabitants of the villa in the stalls hoping for gross excitement to assist them through their hesitating digestions; an ignorant mob in the pit and gallery forgetting the miseries of life in imbecile stories reeking of the sentimentality of the back stairs. Were other ages as coarse and common as ours? It is difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than those that applaud Mr ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Idiots and imbecile persons likewise afford good evidence that laughter or smiling primarily expresses mere happiness or joy. Dr. Crichton Browne, to whom, as on so many other occasions, I am indebted for the results of his wide experience, informs me that with idiots laughter ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... Jeanne had not understood when she was spoken to of the Church and the Pope, that she had refused to obey the Church Militant because she believed the Church Militant to be Messire Cauchon and his assessors. In short, it was necessary to represent her as almost an imbecile. In ecclesiastical procedure this expedient was frequently adopted. And there was yet another reason, a very strong one, for passing her off as an innocent, a damsel devoid of intelligence. This second ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... victim for the altar; rescuing from death only to sacrifice him with more bloody rites and a crueller spirit of immolation. The words of his mother, wrung from the agony of a parent's love, rang in my ears; the look of the father—that of imbecile despair—was imprinted on my mind; the hour was fast on the wing; all hope had perished; and before me was the unfortunate youth, handsome, elegant, and interesting, even in the writhings of the master-fiend, suffering a death which was to be, in effect, repeated in another and a crueller ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... abroad—you took my own daughter, John Merrick, and left me at home!—you've lugged your three nieces to the mountains and carried them to the seashore. You even encouraged them to enlist in an unseemly campaign to elect that young imbecile, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... "Romish priest," how good so ever he might chance to be. Against her own inclination, but from the advice of her new friend, she occasionally received her sisters and a few former acquaintances. They went away commiserating her condition, as being semi-imbecile, semi-lunatic. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... Kins, and when a Kin messenger brought intelligence of this event to Genghis, the Mongol ruler turned toward the south, spat upon the ground, and said, "I thought that your sovereigns were of the race of the gods, but do you suppose that I am going to do homage to such an imbecile as that?" The affront rankled in the mind of Chonghei, and while Genghis was engaged with Hia, he sent troops to attack the Mongol outposts. Chonghei thus placed himself in the wrong, and gave Genghis justification for declaring that the Kins and not he began the war. The reputation ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... better suited in a reformatory than in a school of this standing. Utterly depraved, vicious and idle, with marked criminal instincts. In intellect verges on the imbecile. Unless there is a marked improvement next term, I cannot ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... lacking to our family stores, the idea of julep was dismissed as a vain dream, and its place supplied by iced Congress water, a liquid which my cousin characterized, in a hasty aside to me, as being a drink fit only for imbecile infants of a ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a little tired, sat looking into the fire. Her attitude encouraged reverie; dream linked into dream till at last the chain of dreams was broken by the entrance of the pink waiter bringing in our dinner. In the afternoon I had called him an imbecile, which made him very angry, and he had explained that he was not an imbecile, but if I hurried him he lost his head altogether. Of course one is sorry for speaking rudely to a waiter; it is a shocking thing to do, and nothing but the appearance ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... adopted the ditty and made it his own, so far as eternally singing it could do so, and his comrades had found it not unpleasant; for the voice of Billy was youthful, and had a melodious smoothness that atoned for much in the way of imbecile ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... following his movements for some time; but the Camorra stepped in. They are foolish people, those Camorristi—foolish and ignorant. They punish for very trifling offences, and they do not make sufficient warning of their punishments. Then they are quite imbecile in the way ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... and self-justifications, he was pouring a flood of broken phrases at her. She caught unintelligible references to narrow laws and the imbecile English, to impositions binding only upon the fools.... And then ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... are insane; one of them at least is supposed to be affected by Lumawig, the Igorot god, and is said, when he hallooes, as he does at times, to be calling to Lumawig. Bontoc pueblo has a young woman and a girl of five or six years of age who are imbecile. Those four people are practically incapacitated from earning a living, and are cared for by their immediate relatives. There are two adult deaf and dumb men in Bontoc pueblo, but ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... But if you, sir, if you would tell him how great the chances are against him, if you who know would tell him how foolish he is not to be content with what he has, he would listen. He says to me, 'Bah! you are a woman'; and he is so red and fierce; he is imbecile with the sight of the money, but he will listen to a grand gentleman like you. He thinks to win more and more, and he thinks to buy another third from old Carbut. Is it not foolish? It is so ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... had something to think about—I've been a fool, Bella; the commonest, most easily gulled kind of imbecile!" ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... this, Jack seemed for a time completely overwhelmed, and sat listening to Louie with a sort of imbecile smile. Her allusion to Miss Phillips evidently troubled him, and, as to her coming to Quebec, he did not know what to say. Louie twitted him for some time longer, but at length he got her away into a corner, where ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... inquiries, and she answered that she had been thirty years there, and had one son living with her, and he was an imbecile. ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... rich; for that was not all: he owned near Orleans a property leased for six thousand francs a year. He owned, besides, the house I now live in, where we lived together; and I, fool, sot, imbecile, stupid animal that I was, used to pay the rent every ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... variously rated as a genius, an imbecile and a fool. Let us grant that he was not brilliant. Let us rate him as an imbecile, and then let us try to account for his having brought into the palace every ingenious toy and every wonderful and useful invention and discovery of the past twenty or thirty years ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland |
