"Tameness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... troops thus gallant BRUNSWICK spoke; 'Shall we with tameness bear the Gallic yoke! 'Will ye, O Veterans, inur'd to pains 'And toils of War, drag ignominious chains? 'Turn and behold! behold where hostile bands 'Seize on your properties, lay waste your lands, 'Your daughters, wives, snatch'd forcibly away, 'Slaves to proud Gallia's sons, ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... some cases has sufficed; hardly any animal is more difficult to tame than the young of the wild rabbit; scarcely any animal is tamer than the young of the tame rabbit; but I can hardly suppose that domestic rabbits have often been selected for tameness alone; so that we must attribute at least the greater part of the inherited change from extreme wildness to extreme tameness, to habit and ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... was always careful to avoid injuring them or giving them any unnecessary alarm. He could not, of course, take up a fish in his hand, any more than a chicken will submit to handling; but as to the comparative tameness of the two, the fish is more approachable than the chicken. That they knew and expected the diver at the usual hour was a conclusion impossible to deny, as also that they grew into familiarity with him, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... the public themselves. Does he lack the dramatic faculty, is he wanting in elocutionary skill, is his deliver dull, are his features inexpressive, is his manner tedious, are his readings marked only by their general tameness and mediocrity, be sure of this, he will speedily find himself talking only to empty benches, his enterprise will cease and determine, his name will no longer prove an attraction. Abortive adventures of this kind have in our own time ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... been told that the moment the French side was quitted all was barren and worthless; I found, however, on the contrary, that the mountain-scenery greatly increased in sublimity the nearer we advanced towards Roncesvalles, and on our return that which had looked well on our way had dwindled into tameness in comparison with what we had left. Our driver, in the true spirit of his country, laboured to convince us that even the Basque on the Spanish side was inferior to that on the French—a fact we were not in a condition ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... may, in certain respects, be described as the Old, tamed down; but in productions of genius, tameness is not generally considered a merit. The loss incurred by the prohibition of an unrestricted freedom of satire the new comic writers endeavoured to compensate by a mixture of earnestness borrowed from tragedy, both in the form of representation and the general structure, and also in the impressions ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... of Mendelssohn was distinctly feminine, and it follows that his music should be played by men and not by women, otherwise we get a suggestion of softness and tameness that is apt to pall. Man, like Deity, creates ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... good Protestants met in Saint George's-Fields, at the summons of Lord George Gordon, and marching to Westminster, insulted the Lords and Commons, who all bore it with great tameness. At night the outrages began by the demolition of the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... in flowers—"just fair scatted up wi' geranniums and the rest o' them:" offering to take the expedition by the nearest way to the treasures, and especially insisting on the number and beauty and tameness of the pheasants, till Mr. Byles was charmed and was himself surprised at the ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... and even in what purport to be pictures of actual life we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. Whether from lack of power or an inconquerable reserve, the author's touches have often an effect of tameness. The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... into a laugh. "Crevecoeur," he said, "thy tameness hath made a lordly dame of thy Countess; but that is no affair of mine. Give a seat to yonder simple girl, to whom, so far from feeling enmity, I design the highest grace and honour.—Sit down, mistress, and tell us at your leisure what fiend possessed ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Reve and her rather too fervid love would not get in the way of Storri's dinners at the Harleys'. For a time he should go there but once a week. When despair had chilled Dorothy to tameness he would go oftener. Just then he must give her terrors opportunity to do ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... has now been described, varying from grandeur to tameness, from fertility to barrenness, from extreme beauty to extreme ugliness, but always possessing, at least, the recommendation of being new, the wanderers in the Bush are delighted to range. There is a charm to enterprising spirits in the ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... alms are thrown from the windows, and happen to fall on the ground, they immediately help with the light and begin to look for what has fallen; that they stop of their own accord before the windows from which they know they are used to receive alms; and that with all their tameness on these occasions, so that they are more like lambs than dogs, they are lions in the hospital, keeping guard ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... son to become a gentleman. Lear screams: "To have a thousand with red burning spirits. Come hissing in upon 'em,"—while Edgar shrieks that the foul fiend bites his back. At this the fool remarks that one can not believe "in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath." Then Lear imagines he is judging his daughters. "Sit thou here, most learned justicer," says he, addressing the naked Edgar; "Thou, sapient ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... mine eyes; and I have heard your scorns With so much scoffing, and so much shame, As each strive which is greater: But, believe me, I suck'd not in this patience with my milk. Do not presume, because you see me young, Or cast despights on my profession For the civility and tameness of it. A good man bears a contumely worse Than he would do an injury. Proceed not To my offence: wrong is not still successful, Indeed it is not: I would approach your Kins-woman With all respect, done to your ...
— Beggars Bush - From the Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... dearest or darling, and he hated to address her as Emily, so finally he began with the word dear. It looked odd, standing by itself, and rather silly, but he made it do. It was the first love letter he had ever written, and he was conscious of its tameness; he felt that he should say all sorts of vehement things, how he thought of her every minute of the day and how he longed to kiss her beautiful hands and how he trembled at the thought of her red lips, but some inexplicable modesty prevented him; and instead he told her of ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... make her complaint to the king; but she was told that it would be all in vain, because so spiritless and faineant was he that he not only neglected to avenge affronts put upon others, but endured with a reprehensible tameness those which were offered to himself, insomuch that whoso had any ill-humour to vent, took occasion to vex or mortify him. The lady, hearing this report, despaired of redress, and by way of alleviation of her grief determined ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... passages—waifs and strays of shrewd observation, description and character analysis,—is in the main ill-conceived, ill-constructed, and unreal. The two authors have sacrificed their individualities in a mistaken effort to follow the fashion's lead, resulting in a most ineffective compound of tameness and sensationalism. Amazing adventures are undergone by each heroine before she is one-and-twenty. Angels of innocence, they are doomed to have their existences crushed out by the heartless conduct of man, Blanche expiring of dismay almost as soon as she is led ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... minstrel fire. O happy tribe of choristers! no interruption mars The concert of your harmony, nor ever harshly jars A string of all your harping, nor of your voices trill Notes that are weak for tameness, that ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... hot blood cooled he lost faith in even this sacrifice. Could anything change the leopard West into the tameness and serenity of the ox? "No," he decided, "nothing but death will do that. This generation, these fierce and bloody hearts, must die; only in that way can the tradition of violence be overcome and a new ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... world we are even more inconsistent, accepting with tameness the most astonishing theories and opinions. Whole circles will go on assuring each other how clever Miss So-and-So is, or, how beautiful they think someone else. Not because these good people are any cleverer, or more attractive ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... everywhere abound in the neat, well-kept gardens, that surround the dwellings of the wealthier inhabitants, with the broad, bright, blue inland sea that forms the foreground to the picture, give to it such a lively and agreeable character, that it takes from it all appearance of tameness ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... name brought on a crisis in which I brought up much blood; and it is singular that the physician who attended me—a grave gentleman, with a wig—considered that this was of service to me. I know it frightened me heartily, and prepared me for a visit from Master Frank, which I endured with a tameness he would not have experienced, had the usual current of blood flowed in my veins. But sickness and the lancet make one very tolerant of sermonizing.—At last, in consideration of being relieved from his accursed presence, and the sound of his infernally calm voice, I slowly and reluctantly ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... never witnessed; and, which, though the modern muse may imagine, she generally fails in attempting to pourtray, from the violent desire to be smooth and tuneful, forgetting that smoothness and tunefulness are nearly synonymous with tameness and unmeaningness. ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... necessarily diminish their influence. Salazar even set out for Spain, to solicit the government for the president, Nuno de Guzman; but was shipwrecked on the coast near Coatzacualco, and had to return to Mexico. Estrada died soon after being superseded, which he owed more to his own tameness than to any right the members of the court could found on his majestys orders, which left the government entirely with him, without saying any thing of the association of Guzman; who yet usurped the sole government to himself as president. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... whole of this is quite comprehensible. It is a discourse against all those who confound virtue with tameness and smug ease, and who regard as virtuous only that which promotes security and tends to ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the new stone by the pitcher was the toad, staring full at him with topaz eyes. He lay still this time and did not move, for the animal showed no intention of spitting, and he was puzzled by its tameness. ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... by preference, should be of local interest. As the doctor himself delighted in surprises of a terrifying or horrifying nature, it was unlikely that his inventions in that direction would be characterized by tameness. He would not, when hard pressed on a dull day, allow a fastidious care of even his own reputation to impede the development of one of his surprises. If the town of Bellevue was to stagnate mentally, it would not be the fault of George F. ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... island, and that the goats had multiplied in such a manner as even to become a nuisance: they added, that far from giving any trouble to capture them, they followed the few inhabitants that were left with a sort of obstinacy, and became even troublesome by their tameness. The celebrated traveller Dr. Clarke gives a very curious account of a goat, which was trained to exhibit ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... chargeable with a Design to degrade the Dignity of our nature by comparing Men with Beasts. Let me just observe that I have mentiond only the more excellent Properties that are to [be] found among Quadrupeds. Had I suggested an Idea of the Vanity of the Ape the Tameness of the Ox or the stupid Servility of the Ass I might ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... I do, Maggie. You must remember that Jack was not a Stamboul dog. He belonged to Pera, where Europeans live, so there is a strong probability that his unusual tameness and beauty won other friends for him when we ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing |
