"Mindless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... concrete ethical question. For instance, to show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but appeal "to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree." He repeats, in effect, Plato's argument about the life of the oyster, having pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it your good? Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is expected to answer instinctively, No! It is an argumentum ad hominem (and there can be no other kind of argument ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... yearly appreciating in value, mindless of the large acreage annually added to the supply. This is largely due to the fact that they are bought up and held for speculative purposes. However, there are still many farms in the hands of first purchasers ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... befallen the race as that which all who look may now behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation. Science, whom erstwhile we thought a very Angel of God, pointing to that great barrier of Law, and proclaiming to the restless sea of changing doubt, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further, and here shall thy proud ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... battle in a sponge of ways and channels, fought out of sight of sky or sun under the electric glare, fought out in a vast confusion by multitudes untrained in arms, led chiefly by acclamation, multitudes dulled by mindless labour and enervated by the tradition of two hundred years of servile security against multitudes demoralised by lives of venial privilege and sensual indulgence. They had no artillery, no differentiation into this force or ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... this operation must needs appear to be what we call mechanical. The more unvarying the Will, the more unvarying must be this expression thereof; so that, if the former be absolutely self-consistent, the latter cannot fail to be as reasonably interpreted by the theory of mindless necessity, as by that of ubiquitous intention. Such being, as it appears to me, the pure logic of the matter, the proof of organic evolution amounts to nothing more than the proof of a natural process. What mode of ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... Eumenes? do not think that the late appearances of God to you have been altogether for yourselves; 'He has surely seen the affliction of your brethren, and heard their cry by reason of their task masters.' For to believe otherwise is not only to be mindless of his ways, but altogether deaf. If you have ears to hear, this is the way in which you will certainly be called upon; for if, while there is no stock of liberty no sanctuary of the afflicted, it be a common object to behold a people casting themselves out of the pan of ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... trees, helpless, but most powerful, under all his mentality. He is a tree-soul, and his gods are not human. His instinct still is to nail skulls and trophies to the sacred tree, deep in the forest. The tree of life and death, tree of good and evil, tree of abstraction and of immense, mindless life; tree of everything except ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... unstintingly, and had been proud to discover that in many of the subjects which interested him the most deeply, he had found May Webster a ready pupil; and when she differed from him she held her own with such merry defiance, that it gave her an added charm in his eyes. And now this mindless, fox-hunting squire was to carry her off, and life at Rudham would sink into one dead level of dulness. Thus it happened that he came home ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... once her attention was riveted on an object up the street. Around a bend a few hundred yards away a huge wild devil of a thing swung unsteadily, recklessly, almost striking the curb and lamp-post; and then, righting itself, it came on with a rush—a mindless destroyer. Now on one side of the street, now in the middle, now on the other side; gliding along through the twilight, barely to be seen, creeping nearer and nearer through the shadows, now ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... Eye and found a way to communicate with it through his mind. He learned that radiation was fuel for the creatures' lives. And then they issued their terrible ultimatum: Explode a series of atom bombs to supply them with radiation or they would turn the world's population into mindless robots. ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... for the unshared sigh, If in my fear of lapse or fall, Close I have clung to Christ through all, Mindless how rough the road might lie, Sure ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... fork, his napkin. He was getting the whole geography of his cover into his consciousness. He sat erect and inscrutable, remote-seeming Bertie watched the static figure of the blind man, the delicate tactile discernment of the large, ruddy hands, and the curious mindless silence of the brow, above the scar. With difficulty he looked away, and without knowing what he did, picked up a little crystal bowl of violets from the table, and held them ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... mindless games are very well, my friend; But ours to-night marks, not improbably, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... race as that which all who look may now behold, advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation.'[32] ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... Gusterson realized that he and his guides were becoming part of a general movement of people, a flow as mindless as that of blood corpuscles through the veins, yet at the same time dimly purposeful—at least there was the feeling that it was at the behest of a ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... York. No emotional experience would leave a blur on her radiant youth, because love for her is a sensation, not a sentiment. By indirect and cumulative touches the novelist evokes for us her image. Truly a lovely apparition, almost mindless, with great sympathetic eyes and a sweet mouth. She exists, does Undine. She is not the barren fruit of a satirical pen. Foreigners, both men and women, puzzle over her freedom, chilliness, and commercial horse-sense. She doesn't long intrigue their curiosity, her ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... She hasn't one," snapped Lady Martin. "She is one of those mindless, soulless women who are simply parasites, clinging to men for what they can get—a home, money, position—and give nothing in return because ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... punctually at the performance, in which he must be funny—all these can produce a poetic "picture," although they cannot be composed like a painting. Most still deny that, and for that reason recognize, for example, in the "Twilight" and similar pictures nothing but a mindless confusion of strange performances. Others believe, incorrectly, that these kinds of "ideal" pictures are possible in painting (for example, the Futurist ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... and were watching the struggle with interest, but there was no warning from them. Whatever called Kaydessa into such mindless and will-less answer did not touch the animals. And neither Apache felt it. So perhaps only Kaydessa's people were subject to it, as she had thought. How far away was that machine? Not too near, for otherwise the coyotes would have traced the man or ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... inclined to leave her alone when he saw in his fancy the clean, simple, mindless, honest life that her fanciful girlhood would settle down into as time should go on. But when in the figure of the woodman there was painted visibly on the dusky sky that end for her which he had foreseen, he was not indifferent to it; he resented it; he was stirred to ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... or another had left off human shape. Some had been transformed against their will, that they might do no more harm to their fellow-men. Some were changed through the pity of the gods, that they might share the simple life of Pan, mindless of mortal cares, glad in rain and sunshine, and always close to ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... that scrutiny furnish, on which any one of the foregoing three assumptions could be planted? Nature, according to his picturing, is base and cruel: what is the inference to be drawn regarding its Author? If Nature be 'red in tooth and claw,' who is responsible? On a Mindless nature Mr. Martineau pours the full torrent of his gorgeous invective; but could the 'assumption' of 'an Eternal Mind'—even of a Beneficent Eternal Mind—render the world objectively a whit less mean and ugly than it is? Not an iota. It is ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the feast, The crumpled cushions and the broken wreathes, Lie scattered in yon shadowy court, whose stones Through the warm hours drink up the staining wine. The bridal oxen in their well-filled stalls Sleep, mindless of the happy weight they drew. The torch is charred; the garlands at the door, So gay at morning with their bright festoons, Hang limp and withered; and the joyous flutes Are empty of all sound. Only my brain Holds now in it's remote unsleeping depths The echo of the tender hymenaeos And memory of ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... they give the time, that Nature meant For peaceful sleep and meditative snores, To ceaseless din and mindless merriment And waste of ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... bludgeoning, but it would be racial suicide to attempt it. In the split moment of realization he would kill every human being on Earth. There would be nobody left to operate on his brain, to make him a mindless, powerless idiot for the rest of time. For any period of time, he corrected himself. His ...
— The Mightiest Man • Patrick Fahy
... did I not deserve "Most grateful thanks in smoking incense paid? "Mindless, nor thanks, nor incense yielded he; "And sudden anger in my bosom rag'd. "Irk'd at the slight, I instantly provide "That future times with less contempt behave: "And 'gainst them both my raging bosom burns. "Now pass'd they ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... other modern country has even attempted such a moral and mental solidarity as Germany has achieved. And good ideals need, just as much as bad ones, systematic inculcation, continual open expression and restatement. Mute, mindless, or demented nations are dangerous and doomed nations. The great political conceptions that are needed to establish the peace of the world must become the common property of the mass of intelligent adults if they are to hold against the political scoundrel, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... vaunting youth is almost mindless of the presence of that fond Nelly whose warm sisterly affection measures itself hopefully against the proud associations of your growing years,—and whose deep, loving eye, half suffused with its native tenderness, seems longing ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... determined upon an ingenious little trick. He was certain that Dawes possessed tobacco; the thing was to find it upon him. Now, Rufus Dawes, holding aloof, as was his custom, from the majority of his companions, had made one friend—if so mindless and battered an old wreck could be called a friend—Blind Mooney. Perhaps this oddly-assorted friendship was brought about by two causes—one, that Mooney was the only man on the island who knew more of the horrors of convictism than the leader of the Ring; the other, that Mooney ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... till at last, unutterably mournful as it was, Mary felt it a relief when he ceased to be capable of watching the progress of it himself: his misery at least was over. Thereafter he slipped into perfect mindlessness, happy and harmless, but hopelessly mindless and vacant. Meantime, Lady Louisa Moor made a very brilliant marriage to a marquis, the eldest son of a duke, the account of which Mary Brunton read in the newspapers while watching her brother's face with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... simple, primitive and crude. Only, upon contact with the white man, some of this has been obliged to wear off a little. They have had to become adaptive, to assume a little polish, as it were. But at heart, after these many years of contact, they are still simple. They are mindless, gentle, squatting bare backed in the shade, chewing, spitting, betel nut. Chewing as the ox chews, thinking as the ox thinks. Gentle brown men and women, touching the edge of the most refined civilization ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... when you shall have heard the impiety, Which of such passing goodness was the meed, Woman take warning from this perfidy, And let none make a lover's word her creed. Mindless that God does all things hear and see, The lover, eager his desires to speed, Heaps promises and vows, aye prompt to swear, Which afterwards all winds disperse ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... heralding the rising land-wind, all was still and breathless. One could not help asking oneself how long this scene had existed as we now beheld it? Was it designed for thousands of years to be viewed only by savages, mindless as the birds or fishes that frequented its waters? Had it always existed thus, or been growing during centuries under the hand of Nature, until it should be adapted to the habitation of civilized man? And was that period ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... increase that nourishment as his strength increases. Give him interest in his future; light a star for him to fix his eyes on. So that, when he steps out of hospital, you shall not have to begin to train one who for months, perhaps years, has been living, mindless and will-less, the life of ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... replied, "since the mindless do not suffer. But if such is the case, how do you account for what you and poor Savage saw that night in the Town of the Child? It was not altogether a phantasy, for the dress you described was the same we saw her wearing at the Feast of ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... this country, we applaud your creativity and your worldwide success and we support your freedom of expression but you do have a responsibility to assess the impact of your work and to understand the damage that comes from the incessant, repetitive, mindless violence and irresponsible conduct that permeates our media ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... recognised. I think the very cowboy in the farmyard—a broad-shouldered lad, with a good-natured mindless face, and prodigious wooden shoes like clumsy canoes—even the cowboy knows that I am to be Madame Lenoble of Cotenoir. Cotenoir is the Windsor Castle of this district; Beaubocage is only Frogmore. Yes, dear, the bond is signed ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... bushing round About her glowd, oft stooping to support Each Flour of slender stalk, whose head though gay Carnation, Purple, Azure, or spect with Gold, Hung drooping unsustaind, them she upstaies 430 Gently with Mirtle band, mindless the while, Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour, From her best prop so farr, and storm so nigh. Neerer he drew, and many a walk travers'd Of stateliest Covert, Cedar, Pine, or Palme, Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen Among ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... and objectless love. All sensuous and verbal images may breed after their own kind in an empty brain; but these fantasies are often supported and directed by sexual longings and vaguely luxurious thoughts. An Oriental Paradise, with its delicate but mindless aestheticism, is above everything a garden for love. To brood on such an Elysium is a likely prelude and fertile preparation for romantic passion. When the passion takes form it calls fancy back ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Yusuf recovered, he thought of his pages and his people and his homestead and his family and he cried to Al-Hayfa, "Wallahi, I have sinned with a great sin when I left my suite in the desert; and Satan garred me forget them and the wine made me mindless of them and banished from my thought my folk and my home. And now 'tis my desire to fare and look upon my pages and to forgather with Yahya my cousin, the son of the King's sister and greet them and dismiss them to their homesteads, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... be my heart, up somewhere near my mouth, that I hear," said the boy with a short mindless laugh. "Maybe I am going to pieces. If I am ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... lunatic had been placed in the vacant cage on his left, a poor mindless wretch, who cried out to all who visited the prison, that he had become a Muhammadan, vainly hoping thereby to meet with some small pity from the worshippers of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate. The ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... mindless of harm, as the playful breeze rustled the long blades of the la-i (dracaena) leaves, hanging like a bundle of green swords from her waist; and as they twirled and fluttered in the air, revealed the soft, rounded form, whose charm filled ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... calm, the glowing light elysian. Sweet were red-mouthed plenty mindless grown of pain. Sweeter yet behold—a sore-bewildering vision! Idly took we thought, and ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... quick glance. He found she had not expected him so early and knew she saw at once how harassed he was. He insisted on sitting down to breakfast with them and, after Jerry had gone out, went over the house in a mindless way, into all the rooms, to give himself something to do. Also there seemed to be a propriety in it, a fittingness in presenting himself to his own walls and accepting their silent recognition. Then, hearing Charlotte upstairs, he went back into the kitchen, as straight ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... and, for an irrational moment, he hated everything that was blue that should have been green, everything sweet that should have been vicious, everything intelligent that should have been mindless. ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... lives when grief, as it were, congeals the mind by arresting all its functions, and any chance impression made at such moments is retained by a frost-bound memory. Schmucke heard his companion with such a fixed, mindless stare, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... could be made towards a sounder view of the theory of descent until people came to understand what the late Mr. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection amounted to, and how it was that it ever came to be propounded. Until the mindless theory of Charles Darwinian natural selection was finally discredited, and a mindful theory of evolution was substituted in its place, neither Mr. Tylor's experiments nor my own theories could stand much chance of being attended to. I therefore devoted ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... office and had invited him to help in directing the intellectual part of that great enterprise, the part that in a way was not without appeal to the imagination, he felt that he might gradually have accustomed himself to it; but to be put into the mindless routine of the workingman, to be set about menial tasks which a mere muscular machine could perform better than he—what ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... the crude argument closes with the cry: "The wars for my money." There is irony in this suggestion of the mercantile value of war on the lips of a spokesman of paupers. It is solely the impulsive mindless patriot who strains after ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... of the texts of the law with the voice of a cultivated modern gentleman; and, let it be said, with a modern gentleman's design to wed a wife in honour. All means were to be tried. His eye burned on his prize, mindless of what she was dragged through, if there was resistance, or whether by the hair of her head or her skirts, or how she was obtained. His interpretation of the law was for the powers of earth, and other plans were to propitiate the powers under the earth, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... train, With joy the new-shorn Flock he hears Come bleating homeward o'er the russet plain; While slow, with languid neck, the weary Steers Th' inverted ploughshare drag along, Mindless of the Shepherd's song; Then, round his smiling Household-Gods, surveys A numerous, menial Group, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... went towards the door, Alice followed me. The house agent sat in helpless amazement. He filled me with a sense of nausea. He seemed so gross, so mindless. ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... the mother to place before all else the interests of the hairless, toothless and, apparently, mindless little creature that she clasps to her breast? The very existence of society depends upon her having the feeling that prompts her to do it. Is it rational to favor one's neighbor, to be proud of one's native town, which may be a poor sort of a town? ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... had all the concentrated brilliancy of an epigram. Whether or not it would hold water did not bother him. The story of Eris was Barry Annan at his easiest and most persuasive. There was the characteristic and ungodly skill in it, the subtle partnership with a mindless public that seduces to mental speculation; the reassuring caress as reward for intellectual penetration; that inborn cleverness that makes the reader see, applaud, or pity him or herself in the sympathetic role of a plaything of ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Naples, attract different natures. Florence has passionate devotees, who are insensible to the artistic grace of Venice or the stately quiet of Versailles. In Cairo one experiences an exquisite bien être, a mindless, ambitionless contentment which, without being languor, soothes the nerves and tempts to indolent lotus-eating. Like a great hive, Rome depends on the memories that circle around her, storing, like bees, the centuries with their honey. Each of these cities must therefore leave ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... jackal in India delivers them gratis to his customers all night, and sometimes gets shot for them, and always deserves it—so there were no cadences and fiorituri, the trite, turgid, and feeble expletives of song, the skim-milk with which mindless musicians and mindless writers quench fire, wash out colour, and ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... injury. But, Bruce, if that evil green moon blazes on for twenty-four hours more, the brain powers of Earth's millions will be forever shattered. So weakened will they be by then that recovery will be impossible even with the rays shut off, and the entire planet will be populated only by mindless imbeciles, readily available material for the myriads of monstrous hybrids that the invaders will ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... our emotions and complicated trains of thought. Thus Schwammerdam apparently credits the snail with remorse for the commission of excesses. Others go to the other extreme and make animals hardly more than mindless automata. We are warned, therefore, by our very mode of study, to be cautious, not too absolutely sure of our results, nor indignant at others who may take a very different view. And yet by moving cautiously and accepting only what seems fairly clear ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... within the water glows, With thee the coloured shadow comes and goes, Its empty being on thyself relies; 40 Step thou aside, and the frail charmer dies. Still o'er the fountain's watery gleam he stood, Mindless of sleep, and negligent of food; Still viewed his face, and languished as he viewed. At length he raised his head, and thus began To vent his griefs, and tell the woods his pain. 'You trees,' says ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Shades the brown woods or tints the sunset streams, The country doctor in the foreground seems, Whose ancient sulky down the village lanes Dragged, like a war-car, captive ills and pains. I could not paint the scenery of my song, Mindless of one who looked thereon so long; Who, night and day, on duty's lonely round, Made friends o' the woods and rocks, and knew the sound Of each small brook, and what the hillside trees Said to the winds that touched their leafy keys; Who saw so keenly and so well could paint The village-folk, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... disillusion with Nature. It was as though a beautiful, tender, and fondly loved mother had turned murderously on her children, had wounded them nearly to death, had then tried to woo them to her breast again. The loveliness of her, the mindless, heartless, soulless loveliness, as of a maniac tamed, mocked at their agonies, mocked with her gentle indifference, mocked with her self-satisfied placidity, mocked with her serenity and her peace. For them she was dead—dead like those whom ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... unutterable folly of freedom, and control the breeding of human flesh as we control the output of beef and of mutton. Then the face of the world will alter. Millions of money is annually spent in order that mindless humanity, congenital lunatics and madmen, may be fed and housed and kept alive. Their existences are to themselves less pleasurable than that of the beasts, they are a source of agony to those who have borne them; but they live to old age and devour tons of good food, while wholesome intellects ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... would never live to reach the court. The papers had been whipping up a lot of anti-robe feeling, you could feel it behind the angry voices, see it in the narrowed eyes and clenched fists. The crowd was slowly changing into a mob, a mindless mob as yet, but capable of turning ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... ignorance which characterises the conduct of modern institutes of education reduces us all to one mindless level, reproducing ad nauseam what is known as 'average citizens.' This nation is already crawling with them; art, religion, letters, government, business, human ideals remain embryonic because the 'average citizen' can conceive ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... were unable to deal with them, and frequently the military forces of the several States were ordered out for the protection of life and property; but in most cases the soldiers fraternized with the leagues, ran away, or were easily defeated. The cruel and mindless mobs had always the hypocritical sympathy and encouragement of the newspapers and the politicians, for both feared their power and courted their favor. The judges, dependent for their offices not only on "the labor vote," but, to ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... to yellow, The oracles kill him in print, But he turns not a hair, for the fellow Is hopeless at taking a hint; Apparently free from suspicion And mindless of what it all means, He careers on the road to perdition, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various |
