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More "Asinine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bilk, Each morn the patient quaff'd a frothy bowl Of asinine new milk, Robbing a shaggy suckling of a foal Which got proportionably spare and skinny— Meanwhile the neighbors cried "Poor Mary Ann! She can't get over it! she never can!" When lo! to prove each prophet was a ninny The one that died was the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... a recommendation," he answered, "and may be as far away as—any other engagement—of mine, that is." And in saying it poor Stuyvesant realized it was an asinine thing. So, alack, did she! An instant agone she was biting her pretty red lips for letting the word escape her, but his fatuity gave her all the advantage in spite of herself. It was the play ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... to the far end of the mantel, and began, figuratively, to kick himself. He had often declared that a man in love was the biggest mule on earth, and now here he was, the king of them all, a genuine descendant of Balaam's mount with all his asinine qualities, but lacking ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... to-night. Willie." Tush! "A French Widow of eighteen, unencumbered," and so forth and so on. Rot, bally rot; and here he was on the way to join them! "Will the lady who sang from Madame Angot communicate with gentleman who leaned out of the window? J.H. Burgomaster Club." Positively asinine! The man opposite folded the paper and stuffed it into his pocket, and its disappearance ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... which Katherine showed me because it touched her, was the production of an effusive idiot. I don't trust sentimentalists; they seldom have much honesty or justice. Katherine Liddell is a little soft too, but she is by no means so asinine as the others I have had. Wait, however—wait till some man takes her fancy; that is the divining-rod to show where the springs ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... I'm a joke," he said, with a melancholy grin; "they always expect me to say something asinine, and get ready to laugh before I speak. What ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... original thoughts were delivered in a crude state—imperfect, obscure, half developed, and not producible to a popular audience. He was aware of this himself; and, though he claims everywhere the faculty of profound intuition into human nature, yet with equal candor he accuses himself of asinine stupidity, dulness, and want of talent. He was a disproportioned intellect, and so far a monster: and he must be added to the long list of original-minded men who have been looked down upon with pity ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... that he had acted like a petulant child. To have shown his hand so openly, simply because the Barone had beaten him in the race for the motor-boat! And Nora would understand that he was weak and without backbone. Harrigan himself must have reasoned out the cause for such asinine plays as he had executed in the game of checkers. How many times had the old man called out to him to wake up and move? In spirit he had been across the lake, a spirit in Hades. He was not only a fool, but a coward likewise. He ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... footing for the metaphysical theology of St. Thomas Aquinas and the schoolmen. In England, Milton was of opinion that the youth of the universities were, even so late as his time, still presented with an "asinine feast of sow-thistles." These retrogressions in school and university serve to show how exceedingly difficult it is to contrive any system of education, middle or upper, which will work itself when the contrivers ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... giggled. "Look here," said Dick, "if we stand here till midnight discussing Major Campbell's age we won't get home to tea, and then Aunt Mary will send out a search party, and we'll look pretty asinine. Long John's getting baity, he'll bolt in a minute. Take the reins, Mollie. Don't eat all the strawberries, and tell Aunt Mary that cherry jam is my ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... burro, cuddy^, ladino [U.S.]; reindeer; camel, dromedary, llama, elephant; carrier pigeon. [object used for carrying] pallet, brace, cart, dolley; support &c 215; fork lift. carriage &c (vehicle) 272; ship &c 273. Adj. equine, asinine. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... like you, heard of the hex of the white feather. I have traced it down to several families, but none could tell me anything about it that was factual. Half of the stupid fools made up stories as they went along—some concocting the biggest bunch of asinine tales that I've ever heard. But you, Peter, are a descendant of the Scheinbergers. I know for a fact that Otto Scheinberger practiced the white feather hex and passed the power on down to your father. From there it stopped. However, there must be some record of it in your family. You are in possession ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson
... are so many mistakes made by other people that affect nobody but themselves that Don Quixote might tire of tilting at them. The more asinine the speaker the louder is his bray, and the more surely do we encounter him in social and domestic haunts. To dispute with him is to strengthen the stakes, and twist harder the cords of his belief in himself. In recognizing the truth, so ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... noticed," he remarked affably, "that under Allan's most asinine speeches there usually lurks a substratum of truth. Are you really going to write a serious ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and pushed on at a pace which suited none of my company, human or asinine. We had got ahead about a mile, when shouts from behind opened a scene perfectly ludicrous. There was the little mule trotting up the road at most unusual speed, impelled by my friend's shouts and the big stones with which he was pelting the miserable beast. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... owners of the soil; with far greater reason we in the far East might shout, "China for the Chinese", "Japan for the Japanese". I will quote Mr. T. S. Sutton, English Secretary of the Chinese-American League of Justice, on this point. "The most asinine whine in the world," he says, "is that of 'America for the Americans' or 'China for the Chinese', etc. It is the hissing slogan of greed, fear, envy, selfishness, ignorance and prejudice. No man, no human being who calls himself a man, no ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... veritable luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among intellectual imbeciles, but rather among men whose misunderstandings and mistakes amuse by their refinement—or one will have to pay dearly for it!—"He praises me, THEREFORE he acknowledges me to be right"—this asinine method of inference spoils half of the life of us recluses, for it brings the asses into our ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... it were not for such hypocritical and asinine legislation as this, we might forget the history of New England witchcraft, and the hanging of Quakers in sight of the spot where this law was enacted as an improvement on a still worse, but practically ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... ingenious coquetry so as to make around the legs patterns which make them look as if they were wearing open-worked stockings. When they are white, the end of the tail and the mane are dyed with henna. Of course this is only in the case of thorough-bred animals, of the aristocracy of the asinine race, and is not indulged in with the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this page in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and anserine unchristian names, because I had these fancies running through my head. I don't care much for your abuse. The question is not, what it is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he actually does think about, in the dark, and when he is alone, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... study and experiment and to inquire by themselves after those things which are lacking to the dignity of wisdom; while the crowd of students are not moved to any worthy undertaking, and grow so languid and asinine over these ill translations, that they lose utterly their time and study and expense. They are held, indeed, by appearances alone; for they do not care what they know, but what they seem to know to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... are made of. So our fathers believed. So we supposed in childhood. Since then it has become the literary fashion to oppose this idea. The writers would have us think of joy not as a supernal hinge, but as a pottle of hay, hung by a crafty creator before humanity's asinine nose. The donkey is thus constantly incited to unrewarded efforts. And when he arrives at the journey's end he is either defrauded of the hay outright, or he dislikes it, or it ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... I've pitched whole games and never walked a man! And I can—but what's the use? I can't drive the cows up from pasture, it seems, without losing all the milk. And I can make a little, gray-eyed girl out here in the sagebrush look upon me with pitying contempt for my asinine ignorance. Hang it, why does a fellow have to learn fresh lessons for everything he undertakes? Why can't there be a universal course that fits one for ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... between the past and the present, between his new dignity and his old irresponsibility. He tried—at first with boisterous familiarity, then with ponderous condescension—to draw his friends out. What would Eleanor think of them—the idiots! And what would she think of him, for having such asinine friends? He hoped Mort was showing his brains to her! He mentally cursed Hastings because he did not produce his jokes; as for Brown, he was a kid. "I oughtn't to have asked him! What will Eleanor think of him!" He was thankful when dessert came and the boys stopped their fatuous ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... belongs to the male—to any or all males, irrespective of species. That is feminine which belongs to the female, to any or all females, irrespective of species. That is ovine, bovine, feline, canine, equine or asinine which belongs to that ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... his power to those who resemble him only in his vices; advantage is taken of the loyalty of Englishmen to make them meanly submissive; their piety is turned into persecution, their courage into useless and obstinate contention; they are plundered because they are ready to pay, and soothed into asinine stupidity because they are full of virtuous patience. If England must perish at last, so let it be; that event is in the hands of God; we must dry up our tears and submit. But, that England should perish swindling and stealing; that it should perish ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... trying to me. Personages of enormous importance used to drop in—and reveal themselves as rather asinine. At the best of times they sat dimly opposite to me, discomposed me, and disappeared. Sometimes they stared me down. That night there ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... forebodings inspired by t-d Number 1's attitude, they were completely annihilated by the thrilling joy which I experienced on losing sight of the accursed section and its asinine inhabitants—by the indisputable and authentic thrill of going somewhere and nowhere, under the miraculous auspices of someone and no one—of being yanked from the putrescent banalities of an official non-existence into a high ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... this case he did not take the trouble to go through the process of verification at all; and it would not be without a parallel in the history of the human mind, if our imaginary physiologist now maintained that he was acquainted with asinine circulation a priori. ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... course of time,—I do not, O Sakra, indulge in grief. These things have an end. These bodies that creatures have, O chief of celestials, are all transitory. For that reason, O Sakra, I do not grieve (for this asinine form of mine). Nor is this form due to any fault of mine. The animating principle and the body come into existence together, in consequence of their own nature. They grow together, and meet with destruction together. Having obtained this form ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... appreciation is my glorious gratuity. In my proud, humble way,—a shepherd-king,—I was lord of a little vale in the solitary Crimea; but you have now given me the crown of India. But on trying it on my head, I found it fell down on my ears, notwithstanding their asinine length—for it's only such ears ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... into a digression that might have been unseasonable in any cause less weighty than one, having for its object to deliver his honored name from a load of the most brutal malignity. Never more, we hope and venture to believe, will any thoughtless biographer impute to Shakspeare the asinine doggerel with which the uncritical blundering of his earliest biographer has caused his name to be dishonored. We now resume the thread of our biography. The stream of history is centuries in working itself clear of any calumny with which ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... all, he was in the midst. Such perceptions made occasions—well, occasions for fairly wondering if it mightn't be best just to consent, luxuriously, to be the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and yet keeping in it was of the two things the more asinine. He was glad there was no male witness; it was a circle of petticoats; he shouldn't have liked a man to see him. He only had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke Strett, the great master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of Milly as in commerce with, and whose renewed intervention ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... affection; that his silence and reserve were owing to the deep interest he felt in the issue of that interview; that his visits to Captain Wilson's were solely on business; that he scarcely saw his daughter Jane at any one of them; and a thousand other things. What a stupid, asinine creature is a lover, before the ice is broken, and what an eloquent, inspired animal, after the explosion! A lover may retire to his closet, and spoil a whole ream of paper with "raven locks," and "eyes' liquid azure," and "sweet girls," &c. Such an epicure creature as Natty ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... he professes to understand. At any rate, they have mine. My knowledge of the Kempton Course dates back at least fifty years. To be sure, it was not at that time a racecourse, but was mostly ploughed fields and thickets. But if the anserous and asinine mooncalves, whose high priest is Mr. JEREMY, suppose that that fact in any way weakens the authority with which I may claim to speak on the subject, I can only assure them, that they prove themselves fit inmates for the various asylums from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... and proved not to have been into her mistress's room. The charade mania was not strong enough to make them venture upon disturbing Mrs. Frederick Langford, and to their great vexation, Martin departed bearing no commission for the asinine decorations. ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... disadvantage. Returning she would find his name, and smile. Most discreetly! He should have waited a few hours in order to drive home the utter inconsequence with which he regarded the incident. What an asinine blunder! She would think he considered himself particularly favored. She would think he was reacting with the most inept intimacy to a ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Parmalee, with sudden gravity. "And he had asses' ears. I'm afraid this mess we're all in shows that we did an asinine thing in coming down here after the doubloons. What is wealth compared to ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... the asses belonging to the place were driven in from pasture—four or five hundred in all; and such a show of curious asinine specimens as I never before beheld. A Dervish, who was with us in Quarantine, at Adana, has just arrived. He had lost his teskere (passport), and on issuing forth purified, was cast into prison. Finally he found some one who knew him, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... presence of this other young man, selected over his head, to make him understand that one may not draw near beauty with impunity, even though one may be very certain—telling his own heart—that love is undreamed of. He wondered whether he might not be afflicted with asinine pride. ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... little monster in my eyes, who ought to have been sent out of the way at once of all companions capable of abandon and enjoyment; and, as to the "father" she quoted from, I could imagine him as the embodiment of asinine wisdom, so to speak—the quintessence of the practical, which so often, I observe, inclines ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... the harp of Orpheus was not more charming. I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks and stubs, from the infinite desire of such a happy nurture, than we have now to hale and drag our choicest and hopefulest wits to that asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles which is commonly set before them, as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... the tail of a depending rope, that unhappy lunatic dangled between earth and sky. He had been the first to cut the tether; and, having severed it below his grasp, had held on while the others cut loose, taking even the asinine precaution to loop the end twice round his wrist. Of course the upward surge of the balloon had heaved him off his feet, and his muddled instinct did the rest. Clutching now with both hands, he was borne aloft like a lamb ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... largest, the moose is certainly the most ungraceful of the deer family. His head is long, out of all proportion; so, too, are his legs; while his neck is short in an inverse ratio. His ears are nearly a foot in length, asinine, broad, and slouching; his eyes are small; and his muzzle square, with a deep sulcus in the middle, which gives it the appearance of being bifid. The upper lip overhangs the under by several inches, and is highly prehensile. A long tuft of coarse hair grows out of ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... intimate that he sought such social recognition among whites here"; and in conclusion this editorial said: "The South only pities the daughter that she should have allowed herself to be used by a father whose sensibilities and ideas of the proprieties are so dulled by his asinine qualities that he could not see ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... Cardinal once observed to his chief of police, "Je te verrai souffle d'abord," so I reply to those who wish me to reveal the secret of my success. Mr. J. knows it not, and no single member of the imbecile, anserous, asinine, cow-hocked, spavin-brained, venomous, hugger-mugger purveyors of puddling balderdash who follow him has the least conception of my glorious system. But I am willing to teach, though I have nothing to learn. For six halfpenny stamps those ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... anything they themselves do not do, and continually comment thereon. Ordinarily when a man of my type quits drinking the fact is accepted after the probationary period has passed, and no further comment is made on it. Not so with the asinine contingent. They have the same patter to prattle unceasingly about it. They have the same comment, the same bromides to get off, the same sneers to sneer and the same jeers to jeer. If there was no other reason—and there are a hundred—why ...
— The Old Game - A Retrospect after Three and a Half Years on the Water-wagon • Samuel G. Blythe
... be building his hopes on a false foundation. The bear had no notion of going off as it had come—it had other designs altogether; and, after shuffling about over the stones—now and then uttering the same asinine snort that had first called attention to it— it marched straight forward to the cliff, just under the spot where Karl was seated. Then, rearing its body erect, and placing its fore-paws against the rock, it looked up into the face ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... to feel that only a very small minority of those who read this is destined to enliven our thoroughfares with such grotesque images as is furnished by the plate for 1945. The confidently asinine demeanour of this youth is hardly relieved by the absurdity of a watch suspended by a chain from the crown of his hat. That society protested against this aspect of idiocy is evinced by the harmonious costume for 1950, in which ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in men, made as they ought to be, is called a mouth, was in him not entitled to the name; it being a vulgar gash, with a pair of very thick lips, extending across two dumpling cheeks, and nearly uniting a brace of tremendous asinine ears. These altogether formed something like a half-decayed turnip stuck upon a mop-stick. Let the reader only imagine to himself a figure of this sort, constantly opening the slit that I have above described, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... exaggerated elegance. Each was leaning on a cue, his elbow crooked in as near an imitation of Giddy's position as the stick's length would permit. The figure was curved so that it stuck out behind and before; the expression on each face was as asinine as its owner's knowledge of the comic-weekly swell could make it; the little finger of the free hand was extravagantly bent. The players themselves walked with a mincing step about the table. And: "My deah fellah, what a pretty ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... with the family of a wig-maker named Keller, and gave lessons to his two daughters. He fell in love with the younger. That might have been well enough. But the girl elected to become a nun, and Haydn, either of his free and particularly asinine will, or through persuasion, married the elder, Anne Marie, on November 26, 1760. He was fully aware that his master, Count Morzin, would keep no married man in his employ, so that his act was doubly foolish. However, as it happened, that did not so much matter. Morzin had to rid himself of such ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... no excuse. He knew he had been idiotic now, for he could see indications that Indians were closing in on him from every side; but, worse than that, he knew that he had added to his idiocy a performance that was simply asinine: he had lost his temper and said an outrageous thing to Ray, and some of the men had heard it. From earliest dawn the lieutenant had been out with the pickets eagerly scanning the surrounding country. Indians, of course, were not to be seen. They kept ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... the boys giggled. "Look here," said Dick, "if we stand here till midnight discussing Major Campbell's age we won't get home to tea, and then Aunt Mary will send out a search party, and we'll look pretty asinine. Long John's getting baity, he'll bolt in a minute. Take the reins, Mollie. Don't eat all the strawberries, and tell Aunt Mary that cherry jam is my fancy. ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... right. I'm so thankful for the way everything has turned out, I'd give her half my fortune. That would be asinine, of course; but I shall settle a thousand a year on her for life, and give her a wedding present of a cheque for twenty thousand, I think. Should you say that would be ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... de natura, depraved," continued R——, "and possess virtue and vice only in proportional masses to the size of the brain and body, they can surely exhibit a pound or two of wisdom to eighteen stone of folly; and if they must be asinine, may cover their actions with ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... "You're done for if you leave like this. I—I was a brute to propose such an asinine thing, but having done so I am bound to see you out of the difficulty. Come into the adjoining room—there is nobody there at present—and we will empty our pockets together and find this lost article if we can. I may have pocketed it myself, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... of my History, during the thirty years which I have devoted to it, this frightful literature of witchcraft passed to and fro repeatedly through my hands. First I exhausted the manuals of the Inquisition, the asinine foolings of the Dominicans. (Scourges, Hammers, Ant-hills, Floggings, Lanterns, &c., are the titles of their books.) Next, I read the Parliamentarists, the lay judges who despised the monks they succeeded, but were every whit as foolish themselves. One word further would I say ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... Midas-eared Mammonism, which indeed at bottom all pure Mammonisms are, what better can you expect? No better;—if not this, then something other equally disastrous, if not still more disastrous. Mammonisms, grown asinine, have to become human again, and rational; they have, on the whole, to cease to be Mammonisms, were it even on compulsion, and pressure of the hemp round their neck!—My friends of the Working Aristocracy, there are now a great many things ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... him as a sacrifice to their insulted divinity. By a stratagem of the wife of Hermes, the hermit is rescued and the bestiality of Satyros exposed. In no way disconcerted, Satyros leaves the throng with flouts at their asinine attachment to their conventional morality as opposed to the free life inculcated by nature. Goethe's later comment on this remarkable production is that it was "a document of the godlike insolence of our youth," and certainly no document could bring more vividly before us ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... all very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this page in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and anserine unchristian names, because I had these fancies running through my head. I don't care much for your abuse. The question is not, what it is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he actually does think about, in the dark, and when he is alone, and his whole ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... no offence, I assure you," said Cleek, more asinine than ever, as Zuilika, having picked up the piece and looked at it, disclaimed all knowledge of it, and laid it on the edge of the table without any further interest in it or him. "Just to show, you know, that I—er—couldn't ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... more than he might have discounted, of course; he had been a fool to expect anything else of her, he was enjoying only his just deserts both for having dared to believe that the good in human nature (and particularly in woman's nature) would respond to decent treatment, and for having acted on that asinine theory. ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... is why I have not finished it till now. How awful it is! I must rewrite it! It's impossible to leave it, for it is in a devil of a mess. My God! if the public likes my works as little as I do those of other people which I am reading, what an ass I am! There is something asinine about our writing.... ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... very sure myself—further than that he wants to buy my patents, which I have no intention of selling, and I want to rent his mines, which he has no intention of renting. Rather asinine, going to see him! Still, as he insists——" There was an eagerness in Derby's face inconsistent with the shrugging ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... The commander's eyes were dangerous. "An asinine statement like that isn't even worth listening to! Get ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Greek theme-making and versifying, and that dreary toiling amid obsolete subtleties of scholastic Logic and Metaphysics, which he had denounced in a previous passage, and which had made University Education, he says, nothing better than "an asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles." Instead of these he would have studies useful in themselves and delightful to ingenuous young minds. Things rather than Words; the Facts of Nature and of Life; Real Science of every possible kind: this, together with a persistent ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... was in this state of mind, Cameron was like vinegar on a raw wound to him. Cameron's joyousness, born of indifference, passed for assurance based, as Raymond believed, on his asinine conceit. ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... any civilized nation to permit the slaughter of the wild birds that protect its crops, its fruits and its forests from the insect hordes, is worse than folly. It is sheer orneryness and idiocy. People who are either so lazy or asinine as to permit the slaughter of their best friends deserve to have their crops destroyed and their forests ravaged. They deserve to pay twenty cents a pound for their cotton when the boll weevil has cut ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... door-bell, ask for her, throw a meal-sack over her head, and whip his waiting horses to a gallop. No, he must beat the tall grasses before the old homestead until such time as she chose to walk abroad alone. Really, when you came to think of it, it was an asinine sort of proposition. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... racket, did a thoroughly asinine thing. Drawing in his breath and holding his coat in front of him, he prepared to make a dash through the wide smear of embers, to the hilltop; where, presumably, Lad was still tied. But, before he could take the first step, the Mistress ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... But during the Carnival all mankind, womankind and childkind think it unbecoming not to play the fool. The modern donkey pokes its head out of the lion's skin of old Rome, and brays out the absurdest of asinine roundelays. Conceive twenty thousand grown people in a long street, at the windows, on the footways, and in carriages, amused day after day for several hours in pelting and being pelted with handfuls of mock or ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
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