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Undirected   Listen
adjective
Undirected  adj.  
1.
Not directed; not guided; left without direction.
2.
Not addressed; not superscribed, as a letter.
3.
Misdirected; misled; led astray. (R.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Undirected" Quotes from Famous Books



... Operate Blindly. Moved, therefore, partly by necessity and partly by curiosity, the material world has been and is being continually modified by the ingenuity of man. Undirected, however, Nature's forces act blindly; hence, produce mainly such qualities in organic life as endurance, or adaptation to local soil and climatic conditions. In the animal and vegetable kingdoms the universal demand of Nature is to perpetuate their species—"to produce ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst

... is employed merely as a literary device for rendering the subject more available to the child; and third, by suggestions for practical activities that may be carried out in hours of work or play, in such a way as to direct into useful channels energy which when left undirected is apt to express itself in trivial if not in anti-social forms. No part of a book is more significant to the child than the illustrations. In preparing the illustrations for this series as great pains have been taken ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp

... earth. And as the money poured in, his government and mastery increased, and his mind was the more satisfied. It is so that men make little kingdoms for themselves, and an international power undarkened by diplomacy, undirected by parliaments. ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson

... freedom is over, and for that long winter she is chained again. But her heart is true to old England. And when she can go east, she is so happy! and when she must go west, she is so sad! Eastward she does go! Southward she does go! True to the instinct which sends us all home, she tracks undirected and without a sail fifteen hundred miles of that sea, without a beacon, which separates her from her own. And so goes a dismal year. "Perhaps another spring they will come and find me out, and fix things below. It is getting dreadfully damp down there; and I cannot keep the guns bright and the floors ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale

... ascertaining the particular order of the occurrence of each one of the phenomena of nature, the most scientific proceeding can be no more than an improved form of that which was primitively pursued by the human understanding, while undirected by science. When mankind first formed the idea of studying phenomena according to a stricter and surer method than that which they had in the first instance spontaneously adopted, they did not, conformably to the well-meant but impracticable precept of Descartes, set ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... in dreams confusion reigns, and illogical connections occur gives plausibility to the theory which Sir Arthur Mitchell and other scientific men hold, that our dream-thinking is uncontrolled and undirected by the will. The will—the inhibiting and guiding power—finds rest and refreshment in sleep, while the mind, like a barque without rudder or compass, drifts aimlessly upon an uncharted sea. But curiously enough, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller

... call them. There is the centrifugal, the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency, flying from the centre, working with little forethought straight before it, in the development of every thought and fancy; throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected imagination; delighting in brightness and colour, in beautiful material, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in philosophy, even in architecture and its subordinate crafts. In the social and political order it rejoices in the freest action of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... jump to his hand without a motion on his part. It lay loosely in his limp fingers, unaimed and undirected. ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine

... young, and very go-ahead—abandoned the main building that day to the undirected labours of the workmen they were supposed to control, and turned to on the shanty as soon as they realized what it was to be used for with a joyous energy that delighted the twins. They swept and they garnished. They cleaned the dust off the windows and the rust off the stove. ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

... this switching was new! and at its third repetition he turned his head in surprise, but was no more heeded than were the bluffs and flowers where he was taking his own undirected choice of way. He carried her over ground she knew by heart—Corncliff Mesa, Crowheart Butte, Westfall's Crossing, Upper Canyon; open land and woodland, pines and sage-brush, all silent and grave and lustrous in the sunshine. Once and again a ranchman greeted ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister

... He would not make a good head of a governmental department. The result is, so far as our Commission is concerned, a state of confusion and uncertainty with a definite loss and delay through effort being undirected." ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing

... curse Selwyn staggered across the road, and roughly elbowing his way through the crowd, found a solitary policeman, hindered by willing undirected hands, digging in the wreckage as best he could, while a couple of women sobbed hysterically and ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... item in the bill. At any rate, we made it too hot for the 'snipers' to show their heads, which was certainly worth fifty men to the assaulting brigades. This method of preparing an attack by a great volume of unaimed—not undirected—rifle fire is worthy of the closest attention. I have only once before noticed its employment, and that was when Sir Bindon Blood attacked and took the Tanga Pass. Then, as now, it was ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill

... gulph—Not slower did her mounting soul return to earth, for—Ah! her treasure and her heart was there. The squalls rattled amongst the sails, which were quickly taken down; the wind would then die away, and the wild undirected waves rushed on every side with a tremendous roar. In a little vessel in the midst of such a storm she was not dismayed; ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft

... amount subscribed for missionary work far off. We believe it to be a most delusive and deluding test. It deceives the giver, it deceives the inquirer. We should prefer to inquire the number of hearers or inquirers brought to the Church by the undirected effort of the Church members, or the number of Church members who go out to teach or preach in their neighbourhood, or perhaps best of all, the number of little Christian congregations which as a body are actively engaged in evangelising their neighbours. ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen

... eagerly in the evening to the vocal exercises. French Janin struggled to perform his part, but mostly Harry Baggs boomed out his Ahs! undirected. The other had been without his white powder for three days; his shredlike muscles twitched continually and at times he was unable to ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... no longer morose and undirected. He had a purpose in life, and the purpose filled him with cold determination. He was going to find the robot-operated car—or whatever ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett

... the heroine—her young life-struggle is part and parcel of that universal stir and uprising among the women of to-day; so much of it blind and undirected; so much wasted and lost in reaction; so much in lines of true long-needed social evolution. This girl's share in it will be differently judged by different readers. Many of our young college women will sympathize with it ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... children occupy the street. For four or five months in the year they make life hideous, especially on Sunday, by noise and exhibition of vandalism that would disgrace the savages of any age or nation. The police acknowledge themselves powerless to prevent it. It is simply the exercise of undirected faculty which might be turned to account, but which has only noise, confusion, and street warfare for its opportunity ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various

... can the latter mode of worship have on the moral conduct of a rational being? He bends to power; he adores a dark cloud, which may open a bright prospect to him, or burst in angry, lawless fury on his devoted head, he knows not why. And, supposing that the Deity acts from the vague impulse of an undirected will, man must also follow his own, or act according to rules, deduced from principles which he disclaims as irreverent. Into this dilemma have both enthusiasts and cooler thinkers fallen, when they laboured to free men from ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... the other hand, are we to blindly follow the impulses of emotion which lead us to jump at a conclusion, support it with what reason we can, but reach it in any event. Emotion is the source of Social power, but power unrestrained and undirected is dangerous. Energy created by the sight of distress must be controlled by reason or it will not relieve distress. And by reason I do not mean Social syllogisms, of whose premises we are always uncertain, ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams

... that matter, when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the Prince's undirected thought was not a little symptomatic, since, though the turn of the season had come and the flush of the streets begun to fade, the possibilities of faces, on the August afternoon, were still one of the notes of the scene. ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... exhibited—displays before our eyes a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor—a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar—and nothing else—when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose—he gives to it a downright daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its actions; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone—we feel the discord of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... country in its smaller communities as in the larger centers, such as it is, is the product of undirected uncoordinated efforts of special interest groups. A general classification of the types of rural organizations may be made, first, into political, including the incorporated village, towns, townships, counties, ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt

... almost helpless without her guidance; they were apt to do anything—anything at all—or to catch anything. The more she thought about her having left these irresponsible harebrains unprotected and undirected for three days, the less she was able to account for her action. It seemed to her that she must have been a little flighty; but, shaking her head grimly, she decided that flightiness was not a good excuse. And she made up her mind that if, upon her arrival, she found poor little neglected ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington

... know, the very arrows of love when directed with subtle intent against the hunter's heart in man; and they are scarcely less powerful to kindle his ardor when undirected and without purpose, or, as in this case, of a purpose ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... man of superior ability to find himself thrown upon the world without some regular employment. The restlessness inherent in genius being thus left undirected by any permanent influence, frames for itself occupations out of accidents. Moral integrity sometimes falls a prey to this want of fixed pursuits; and the man who receives his direction in active life from the fortuitous ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... an undirected youth and an undisciplined manhood explain Marcus Clarke's failure to render to his adopted country the service which, as a distinctly gifted writer of the realist school, he seemed well fitted to ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... most certainly is that of reaction. The hard external code and needless restrictions of Methodism should be regarded with reference to what Wesley saw in the years he spent in that abode of talent undirected and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... when the big caduceus set into the sidewalk snapped him back to awareness of where he'd traveled. His undirected feet had led him much too far uptown, following old habits. This was the Medical Lobby building, where he'd spent more than enough time, including three weeks in custody before they stripped him of all ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey



Words linked to "Undirected" :   directionless, planless, rudderless, aimless, purposeless, adrift



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