"Unreflecting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would have been beyond the power of even Dr. Channing to pronounce such a eulogy upon them. We say, then, that he knew better when he asserted that we have degraded them into brutes. He spoke, not from his better knowledge and his conscience, but from blind, unreflecting passion. For he knew—if he knew any thing—that the blacks have been elevated and improved by their contact with the whites of this enlightened portion ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... churches; that what is called the State can be separated from what is called the Church; the plea of infallibility and of authority soon becomes ridiculous—a mere fiction of political or fashionable quackery to impose upon the uneducated or the unreflecting. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... unable to agree in the main with Newman's views, he had a fixed notion that he was the strong man—the master spirit—among them. And another consideration. The passion of love has a danger for very sensitive, reserved, and concentrated minds unknown to creatures of more volatile, expansive, and unreflecting disposition. Reckage knew well that he was himself too selfish a man to let affection for any one creature come between his soul and its God. There was no self-discipline required in his case when a choice had to be made between a human ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... unevenness of inflection would have rendered it futile, but the voice was sharp and ringing, and the fashion in which the horseman flung up his arm commanding. It was, also, tactful, for some of those who heard it had been drilled into unreflecting obedience, and there is in the native American the respect for a duly accredited leader, which discipline has further impressed upon the Teuton. Still, those who watched from the window felt that this was the crisis, and tightened their numbed fingers on the rifles, knowing that if the horseman ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... and its armies, not in their inner history but with sole regard to the task which they imposed upon Lincoln and the North. But at this parting of the ways a tribute is due to the two men, pre-eminent among many devoted people, who, in their soldier-like and unreflecting loyalty to their cause, gave to it a lustre in which, so far as they can be judged, neither its statesmen nor its spiritual guides ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... successful strategist. He was a friend of St. Paul, and was determined that the plan should not succeed if it was possible for him to prevent it. He never calculated chances or hesitated at responsibilities, but would undertake any desperate measure to carry a point with the same unreflecting dash and heedlessness of danger that he would plunge his horse into a herd of buffalo, shooting right and left, trusting to luck to extricate him. It happened that Joe was chairman of the committee on enrolled bills of the council, and all bills had to pass through his hands for enrollment ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... intelligence. It would be too convenient for ambitious pretenders, to have blind and fearless attachment ever ready at their command. It is often the case with popular feeling, that the multitude, army or people, ignorant, unreflecting, and short-sighted, become too frequently, from generous impulse, the instruments and dupes of individual selfishness, much more perverse and more indifferent to their fate than that of which the wealthy and enlightened orders are so readily accused. ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... had felt for his protector, and his own ignorance of, and exemption from, all the worst practices of that unhappy criminal. But still, when, with the knowledge he had now acquired, the man looked calmly back, his cheek burned with remorseful shame at his unreflecting companionship in a life of subterfuge and equivocation, the true nature of which, the boy (so circumstanced as we have shown him) might be forgiven for not at that time comprehending. Two advantages resulted, however, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... voluntary zeal, they started forth with an ardor which outstripped the wishes of those who had injured them by doubting whether it might not be necessary to have recourse to compulsion. They have in all things reposed an enduring, but not an unreflecting confidence. That confidence demands a full return, and fixes a responsibility on the ministers entire and undivided. The people stands acquitted, if the war is not carried on in a manner suited to its objects. If the public honor is tarnished, if the public safety suffers any ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the mind of a king may be biased, and his perseverance in his designs may be shaken—beside which a king is not immortal; but an aristocratic body is too numerous to be led astray by the blandishments of intrigue, and yet not numerous enough to yield readily to the intoxicating influence of unreflecting passion: it has the energy of a firm and enlightened individual, added to the power which ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... also told by the newspapers, are "exposed to the designs of socialistic leaders, and liable to embrace their dangerous schemes." Hence, it is to be inferred, of course, that timely measures should be instituted to "guard the unreflecting against socialistic theories ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... and kind not to obey in a great crisis the unreflecting impulse of the moment. Besides, his life was already in the agony of what to him was death. He said, with a despairing look at his protectress which cut her to the heart, "I trust myself to you—I am but the stubble ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... trace of the existence of a culpable intimacy. This calumny must be classed among those with which malice delights to blacken the characters of men more brilliant than their fellows, and which are so readily adopted by the light-minded and unreflecting. I freely declare that did I entertain the smallest doubt with regard to this odious charge, of the existence of which I was well aware before Napoleon spoke to me on the subject, I would candidly avow it. He is no more: and let his memory be accompanied only by that, be ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... clay which now you wear, shall assume despotic empire. And when you quit the present narrow scene, ye shall wear a form congenial to your vices. The fierce and lawless shall assume the figure of the unrelenting wolf. The unreflecting tyrant, that raised a mistaken fame from scenes of devastation and war, shall spurn the ground, a haughty and indignant horse; and in that form, shall learn, by dear experience, what were the sufferings and ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... me!' he murmured humbly, leaning forwards towards the girl with eyes which deprecated her displeasure. 'I am very far indeed from attributing weakness to you. It was only the natural, unreflecting impulse; one finds it so difficult to associate you, even as merely a reader, with such ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... of "Chance," which was once the stronghold of Atheism, is now all but abandoned by speculative thinkers, and exists only, if at all, in the vague beliefs of uneducated and unreflecting men. This result has been brought about, not so much by the Metaphysical or even the Theological considerations which were urged against the theory, as by the steady advance of Science, and the slow but progressive growth of a belief in "law" and "order" as existing ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... crowd state and the domination of crowds is equivalent to the barbarian state, or to a return to it. It is by the acquisition of a solidly constituted collective spirit that the race frees itself to a greater and greater extent from the unreflecting power of crowds, and emerges from the barbarian state. The only important classification to be made of heterogeneous crowds, apart from that based on racial considerations, is to separate them into ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... available capital for productive enterprises. They might as well have burned a building or sunk a vessel of that value. It is urged that "labor was employed and paid." Quite true; but tell me, thou resounding ministerial vacuum, thou unreflecting editorial parrot, where is its product? What has society to show for the expenditure of this energy? A hole in its working capital—a hiatus in its larder caused by employing and sustaining labor, not to produce but to destroy. Prodigality on the part of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... curiously. The faint cries of the gulls overhead seemed borne downward with a note of mocking derision. Charles Turold stepped back from the door with an uneasy look at the cormorant, as though fearing to detect in its unreflecting beadiness of glance some humanly cynical enjoyment at his loss of self-control. The wave of feeling had spent itself. Not thus was victory to be won. He paused to consider, then tried the knocker again. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... them, for every day of distress throughout the year 1789, an exact idea may be formed of the anxieties that Bailly experienced from the morning after his installation as mayor. I deceive myself; to complete the picture we ought also to record the unreflecting and inconsiderate actions of a multitude of people whose destiny appeared to be, to meddle with every thing and to spoil every thing. I will not resist the wish to show one of these self-important men, starving (or very nearly so) the city ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... melancholy or dread, so perfect was the day chosen for our excursion; and yet I never think of that part of our passage in which we threaded the islands lying north of Staffa without a gentle shade of sadness mingling with my recollections. But that the sage Johnson, the romantic Campbell, and the unreflecting parrot all indorse these emotions as instinctive, I should feel bound in honor (honor to the landscape) to ascribe them to that occasional thrill of homesickness which I have known take possession of me in the crowded streets of London or Edinburgh as well as here, making me inwardly exclaim, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... away by it, glitter and confusion and glare of color, inconsistency or absence of thought, forced expression, evil choice of subject, over accumulation of materials, whether in painting or literature, the shallow and unreflecting nothingness of the English schools of art, the strained and disgusting horrors of the French, the distorted feverishness of the German:—pretence, over decoration, over division of parts in architecture, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... apparently insensible to anything like a humane feeling, he was yet popular with the masses of his subjects, and no small share of that popularity has descended to our time, in which he is admired by the unreflecting because of the boldness and dash of his actions and on account of the consequences of those actions, so that he is commonly known as "bluff King Hal," a title that speaks more as to the general estimate of his character than would a whole ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his own generation; he had been on terms with them, even in opposition to their own father, of complicity and familiarity: they had no authority over him, and he had no respect for them. Richard was the feudal prince, beyond comparison the boldest, the most unreflecting, the most passionate, the most ruffianly, the most heroic adventurer of the middle ages, hungering after movement and action, possessed of a craving spirit for displaying his strength, and doing his pleasure ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... dangers of his enterprise. He does not study the map of the country he has to traverse. He does not measure the bias of the ground, the rising knolls and the descending slopes that are before him. He obeys a blind and unreflecting impulse. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... affected by human and unscriptural methods, after they have experienced some new sensations, they proclaim to the world that now they have found the light which they could never find in the Lutheran Church! And thus not a few of our simple-minded and unreflecting people are led to depart from the ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... to be carried away by those gusts of prejudice and passion that sweep periodically through the community. There is a contagion in these things that it is hard to resist, and so much that to-day passes for thought is not thought at all, but merely the automatic, unreflecting acceptance of wild theories that are enunciated with so much force that they seem to be almost axioms. Your study of history will show you that the world has always been subject to these waves of emotion, that are sometimes religious, sometimes political, and seem for the time to carry everything ...
— Morals in Trade and Commerce • Frank B. Anderson
... to membership, "he who rejects the establishment of what we believe to be a divine revelation, he who would disturb the peace of the quiet, and by doubtful disputations unhinge the minds of the simple and unreflecting, and endeavour to turn the unwary out of the way of peace and rational subordination, can have no seat among the members of this institution." The first sentence in this declaration gives food for ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... sometimes the facts of the case are irrecoverable, though falsehood may be apparent; and still more because few men will be disposed to degrade themselves by assuming a secondary and ministerial office in hanging upon the errors of any man. Pope was a great favourite with Dr. Johnson, both as an unreflecting Tory, who travelled the whole road to Jacobitism—thus far resembling the Doctor himself; secondly, as one who complimented himself whilst yet a young man, and even whilst wearing a masque—complimented him ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... drunken tailor's family could not afford me complete occupation for my leisure hours, I began to find myself insensibly drawn by Campion's unreflecting enthusiasm into all kinds of small duties connected with Barbara's Building. Before I could realise that I had consented, I discovered myself in charge of an evening class of villainous-looking and uncleanly youths who assembled ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... disposition to self-blame. Julien's melancholy blue eyes had, unknown to himself, exerted a magnetic influence on Reine's dark, liquid orbs, and, without endeavoring to analyze the sympathy that drew her toward a nature refined and tender even to weakness, without asking herself where this unreflecting instinct might lead her, she was conscious of a growing sentiment toward him, which was not very ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... fairness with regard to our male kindred might have found condonation in his even more than chivalrous appreciation of our womankind. But it has been otherwise. So we are forced to try conclusions with him in the arena of his own selection—unreflecting spokesman that he is of British colonialism, which, we grieve to learn through Mr. Froude's pages, has, like the Bourbon family, not only forgotten nothing, but, unfortunately for its own peace, learnt ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... in another work,—"From several hints obliquely thrown out by friends as well as enemies, this man appears to have been a very wicked person, of a cast and character very uncommon in those unreflecting times." "There certainly was something very extraordinary about the man, which, amidst the feodal and knightly habits in which young persons of his high rank were then bred, prompted him to speculate, however unhappily, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Where novelty was the only passport, and where kindness was the short-lived offspring of curiosity? Unhappy men! to have struck on such inhospitable shores, amidst a race so unapprized of all social, all relative ties, as to confer favours only where they may be expected in return, unconscious, or unreflecting that every ...
— Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793) • Frances Burney
... with a laugh; Chloe wakes; All the enchantment scatters off like chaff; The cord is loosened and the spell breaks. Rosalind Resolves that to-night she will be kind to her lover, Unreflecting, warm and kind. Celia tells the lessons over, Counting on her fingers—one and two ... Ribbon and shoe, Skirts, flowers, song, dancing, laughter, eyes ... Through the whole catalogue of formal gallantry And studious coquetries, Counting to ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... than introspective, his experiences since his first meeting with Felicity were teaching him by hard blows the rudiments of his own psychology. Had he been unmoral, he would have remained unscrupulous and unreflecting, but the claims of right would not down. He saw the better way and approved it, but followed the worse, and his knowledge of this inconsistency was gall and bitterness to his soul. He was as genuinely repentant as it is possible for a healthy man to be while the taste of life is still ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... theories—assertions, opinions, beliefs, accumulated, no one knows how, {18} and accepted as settled judgments.[8] We do not escape philosophy by refusing to think. Some kind of theory of life is implied in such words, 'soul,' 'duty,' 'freedom,' 'power,' 'God,' which the unreflecting mind is daily using. It is useless to say we can dispense with philosophy, for that is simply to content ourselves with bad philosophy. 'To ignore the progress and development in the history of Philosophy,' says T. H. Green,[9] 'is ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... and within the next few years the American Navy began to arise again from its ashes. The obligation incurred in exchange for this concession, however, although it resembled that in the Japanese treaty, was probably an unreflecting act of good nature for, if it meant anything, it was an entangling engagement such as the vast majority of Americans were still determined ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... keeps down the strong, and spreads itself like oil upon the boiling sea of human passion? We have a notion of our own, that all this is the work of an individual of the female sex; and, indeed, even the most unconscious and unreflecting would appear to assign to that individual her true position and authority, in naming her the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... and perhaps rather humble pacific landsmen in their presence; and neither respect, nor a sense of humiliation, are feelings easily combined with a familiar fondness towards those who inspire. them. But the boyish frolics, the exulting high spirits, the unreflecting mirth of a sailor, when enjoying himself on shore, temper the more formidable points of his character. There was nothing like these in this man's face; on the contrary, a surly and even savage scowl appeared to darken features ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... for the proceedings here gave him a legitimate grievance, and would have enabled him to claim double credit for success, and exemption from any blame or discredit from failure; but temper, uncontrollable and unreflecting, hurried him into the irretrievable follies he committed, and he is now without any alternative but that of renewing the Radical connexion from which a short time ago he evinced a disposition to keep aloof, and he has nothing left for it but to accept ...
— 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
... those who are induced artfully to draw dispositions of a malignant, treacherous, or sanguinary nature, in the semblance of merciful habits, for the mere purpose of acquiring the popularity of that applause to which this divine attribute must ever entitle it's amiable possessors, are idolized by the unreflecting crowd, as the sincerest friends of the very virtue to which they are, in truth, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And feel that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think, Till Love and Fame to ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... eating and drinking." There was no open vice in all this, so that any awful temptation to crime should come down upon him, and startle him out of his mode of thinking and living; half the people about him did much the same, as far as their lives were patent to his unreflecting observation. But most of his associates had their duties to do, and did them with a heart and a will, in the hours when he was not in their company. Yes! I call them duties, though some of them might be ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... intellectual vigor to be expected in a community which has done away with the spur of economic competition. Will men in such a world become lazy and apathetic? Will they cease to think? Will those who do think find themselves confronted with an even more impenetrable wall of unreflecting conservatism than that which confronts them at present? These are important questions; for it is ultimately to science that mankind must look for their success in ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... is not necessarily a sacrifice, but if necessary the sacrifice must be made. The world envies the lot of those who sit upon thrones. But the seat is not without its thorns. It seems all summer with them. But upon whom burst more storms, or charged with redder fury? They seem to the unreflecting mind to be the only independent—while they are the slaves of all. The prosperous citizen may link himself and his children when and with whom he likes, and none may gainsay him. He has but to look to himself and his merest whim. The royal ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... cast in a nobler mould than those of the ignorant and unreflecting, and is instinct with a diviner life,—who loves truth more than rest, and the peace of Heaven rather than the peace of Eden,—to whom a loftier being brings severer cares,—who knows that man does not live by pleasure or content alone, but by the presence of the power of God,—must cast ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... completeness—physically, mentally, and spiritually. First, physically. The fact is noticeable that short men often marry tall women, and tall men marry short women. Nervous men marry women who are opposites to them in temperament. This is not a happen so, for that which so often to the unreflecting mind seems unnatural and absurd, to the thinking soul appears as an evidence of God's provident care. Second, mentally. Man desires in his wife that which he lacks. A bookish man seldom desires a wife ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... common passengers had been thrown in a place of safety, with the sort of unreflecting instinct with which we take care of our limbs when in danger. This timely precaution permitted each to work with a zeal that found no drawback in personal interest, and the effect was in proportion. A hundred hands were busy, and nearly as many throbbing hearts lent their impulses to ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... classed under two heads. For firstly, he has shown an unusual delicacy of analysis in eliciting the "firstborn affinities that fit our new existence to existing things;"—in tracing the first impact of impressions which are destined to give the mind its earliest ply, or even, in unreflecting natures, to determine the permanent modes of thought. And, secondly, from the halo of pure and vivid emotions with which our childish years are surrounded, and the close connexion of this emotion with external ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... may be said to be an exception to this assertion. See Botanic Garden, P. I. Cant. I. l. 278. Note. Hence, from the necessity of our nature, we may be supposed to have a right to kill those creatures, which we want to eat, or which want to eat us. But to destroy even insects wantonly shews an unreflecting mind ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Carolinian seems also to have declined. It was out of the question for a man of Mr. Webster's temperament and habits of thought, to think for a moment of supporting Jackson, a candidate on the ground of military glory and unreflecting popular enthusiasm. Mr. Adams, as the representative of New England, and as a conservative and trained statesman, was the natural and proper candidate to receive the aid of Mr. Webster. But here party feelings and traditions stepped in. The ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... to feel injured on the common ground of fathers, and to pursue his System by plotting. Lady Blandish had revived his jealousy of the creature who menaced it, and jealousy of a System is unreflecting and vindictive ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... still more important strife with the cabinet of Great Britain, to repel the principle of taxation without representation. This principle once admitted, the crown could tax the Americans to any amount whatever it pleased. Many unreflecting people could not appreciate ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... being but yourself could be so generous—sure never a being but yourself could be so absurd! I remember when you were a boy you wished to make your fine new whip a present to old Aunt Peggy, merely because she admired it; and now, with like unreflecting and inappropriate liberality, you would resign your beloved to a smoke-dried young sophister, who cares not one of the hairs which it is his occupation to split, for all the daughters of Eve. I in love with your Lilias—your Green Mantle—your unknown enchantress!—why I scarce saw her ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... much courage, to elevate us by its example and to inspire us with new hope, ere we turn again to tread the toilsome mazes of the world? Let the acknowledgments of all those who with no unworthy or unreflecting spirit have traced these paths, reply; or rather let the answer embody itself in the words of a poet, who, while expressing his own sense of the merits of Sydney, has but given a suitable expression to sentiments which find ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... ascribe it, in short, to blank ignorance in the child; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been instilled into him! Has such an unfolder of the mysteries of nature, though he may have forgotten his former self, ever noticed the early, obstinate, and unappeasable inquisitiveness of children ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... life, he grew cold at the idea of his situation had his father then shown himself what Sumner thought him to be — unfit for his post. That the private secretary was unfit for his — trifling though it were — was proved by his unreflecting confidence in his father. It never entered his mind that his father might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet in a subsequent knowledge of statesmen and diplomats extending over several generations, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... objectionable on other accounts. It is incompatible with the tranquility of society; their apparent exemption from want and care and servitude to business, excites impracticable hopes in the minds of those who are even more ignorant and unreflecting—and their locomotive habits fit them for a dangerous agency in schemes, wild and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... in my heart to wish for you, my dear friend—that you could take life with a little of the unreflecting simplicity of those who accept—what the moment offers without troubling themselves as to the why and the wherefore. You bow to those high powers who, for instance, have caused you to be banished from Berlin; then submit yourself to those still ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... easy now to see the pernicious influence which your doctrine about the sovereign rights of individuals must have upon the unreflecting masses who accept it as sound sense, and particularly upon those of them who vote at ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing. I have pointed out again and again that the influence of the theatre in England is growing so great that whilst private conduct, religion, law, science, politics, and morals ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... age which saw great phenomena of ascetic philosophy and practice. Each school or tendency developed its own mores to treat the problems of life in its own way. An ascetic policy never is a primary product of the "ways" in which unreflecting men meet the facts of life. It is reflective and derived. It is a secondary stage of faith built on experience and reflection. It is, therefore, dogmatic. It must be sustained by faith in the fundamental pessimistic conviction. It never can be verified by experience. It ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... would gladly have hidden herself away somewhere in the dark from every eye; her overwhelming concern was for the pain she knew she was going to cause one who had always cherished her with faultless tenderness,—tenderness which it had become her nature to repay with a child's unreflecting devotion. ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... Mississippi and subsequent enforced retirement conspired also to swell the general gloom; for, although thinking military men could realize from the first that the position into which the fleet was forced was so essentially false that it could not be maintained, the unreflecting multitude saw only the conversion into repulse and disaster of a substantial success, of a conquest as apparently real as it was actually phantasmal. In the West, Grant was so stripped of troops that he feared the possibility of the Union forces being obliged to withdraw behind the Ohio, as ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... spiritual life, the master of methods and slave of things, and therefore the conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, the undoubting, the child with the muscles of a man, the European stripped bare, and shown for what he is, a predatory, unreflecting, naif, precociously accomplished brute. ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... in the heart of the press there was danger, and from far away Gilbert saw clearly enough, through the cloud of light and colour, the lifeless tones that are like nothing else of nature, the deadly unreflecting paleness of frightened faces, and the cries of women hurt and in terror came rising over the heads of the multitude. He sat still and looked before him as if his sight could distinguish the features of one or another at that distance, and he felt icy cold when he thought ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... (if it be proper to call them such) and the oligarchy were responsible for the ruptures at that period, and certainly not the general public. In fact, it is doubtful whether the general public are ever in favour of breaking the peace. A minority may be, but they are the noisy and unreflecting section. There is a wide difference between the Napoleonic wars and that which was waged against the civilized world by the German Kaiser and his military myrmidons, who have acted throughout like wild beasts. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... speculative thought, of the educated classes of Greek society. Turning to the writings of the philosophers, we may therefore reasonably expect that, instead of the dim, undefined, and nebulous form in which the religious sentiment revealed itself amongst the unreflecting portions of the Greek populations, we shall find their theological ideas distinctly and articulately expressed, and that we shall consequently be able to determine their religious opinions with ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... return to my kingdom I have undergone great indignities from this unreflecting people. One Canova, a sculptor at Rome, visited Paris in the name of the Pope, and in quality of his envoy, and insisted on the cession of those statues and pictures which were brought into France ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... best means they knew, says Q. Curtius, to escape that mortal numbness, was not to stop, but to force themselves to keep marching, or else to light great fires at intervals. Charles XII, a great warrior alike rash and unreflecting, in 1707 penetrated into Russia and persisted in his determination of marching to Moscow despite the wise advice given him to retire into Poland. The winter was so severe and the cold so intense that the Swedes and Russians could scarcely hold their arms. He saw part of his army perish ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... now made to labor on a farm; but having a great antipathy to work, when about fifteen years of age, feeling a great inclination to roam, and like too many unreflecting youths of that age, a great fondness for the sea, he in opposition to the friendly counsel of his parents, privately left them and entered on board the United States sloop-of-war, Hornet, and was in the action when she captured ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... reasonable submission to a state of things which appeared fundamentally unreasonable, in this conviction that the bad could not be bettered by reforms of detail, there was more danger to society than in the crass indifference of the selfish and the unreflecting. When the natural leaders of society avow that they despair of the future, fatalism spreads like a contagious blight among the rank and file, until even discontent is numbed into silence. Nor does the evil end here. The idealists pay for ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... in their naivete, they are unspoiled and unreflecting. They are children, and lacking in well-defined personality. They have no knowledge of anything beyond the customs and superstitions of the simple folk about them. Their religion, which is so continually before us, furnishing ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... of turbulent, coarse, unthinking life seemed at the moment not merely normal but wholesome and admirable by force of contrast with the morbid, unnatural, and useless scenes through which he had just passed. Better to be a burly, unreflecting truckman than a troubled, unresting soul like Anthony Clarke, "Yes, and better for Viola Lambert to be the wife of one of these rude animal types, suffering a life of physical hardship, than to continue the sport of a man who, having lost the true values out of his own life, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... their way, but from different causes. Lord Gartley was uneasy at finding Hester in such a position—led into it by her unreflecting sympathies, no doubt, so unbefitting the present century of the world's history! He had gathered from the looks and words of the following remnants of the crowd that she had been involved in some street-quarrel—trying to atone ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... say that his adulatory manner was originally adopted under strong promptings of self-interest, and that his absurdly over-acted deference to persons from whom he expects no patronage is the unreflecting persistence of habit—just as those who live with the deaf ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... instinct. When nature is thus personified, where there is no sense of its unity and no capacity to rise in faith to a living God above nature, the result is a multitude of divinities of higher and lower rank. Myths respecting them are the spontaneous invention of unreflecting and uncritical, but imaginative, peoples. Thus they serve to indicate the range of ideas, and the moral spirit of those who originate and give credence ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... performs the principal character, are traced with equal distinctness. The silly old mother, obstinate from age as well as bigotry; the modest and sensible Cleante; his brother-in-law, Orgon, prepared to be a dupe by prepossession and self-opinion; Damis, impetuous and unreflecting; Mariane, gentle and patient; with the hasty and petulant sallies of Dorine, who ridicules the family she serves with affection; are all faithfully drawn, and contribute their own share on the effect of the piece, while they assist ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... men, too, have been at the trouble to re-cross the awful interval between us and the invisible, for purposes apparently still less important—so trivial, indeed, that for the present I had rather not mention them, lest I should expose their memories to the ridicule of the unreflecting. I shall now proceed to my narrative, with the repeated assurance, that the reader will no where find in it a single syllable that is not most ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Captain Elliot had taken, many believed that it would be quite impossible for the English government to put forward any demand upon the government of China. The ten million dollars, according to these large-hearted and unreflecting moralists, would have to be sacrificed by the people of England in the cause of humanity, to which they had given so much by emancipating the slaves, and the revenue of India should, for the future, be poorer by the amount ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Story-Telling). Between the two works, however, there is a striking contrast, which has often been pointed out. While the Italian author represents his gentlemen and ladies as selfishly fleeing from the misery of a frightful plague in Florence to a charming villa and a holiday of unreflecting pleasure, the gaiety of Chaucer's pilgrims rests on a basis of serious purpose, however conventional it ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... opens the eyes of the blind, and shuts them for those who have very good sight; teaches the dumb to speak, and those who are very loquacious to be silent. When the rosy and naked little boy makes his appearance with his quiver, all is joy and unreflecting happiness; when he is at home with his mamma, alas! the world is all in shadow. The woodcocks, in like manner, are amiable, eloquent, and engaging as long as the fumes of love affect their brain; but when these ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... society will quickly point out the speculative tenets of theology as their most fruitful source. The intoxication of enthusiasm and the frenzy of fanaticism concur in overpowering reason, and by rendering men blind and unreflecting, convert them into enemies both of themselves and the rest of the world. It is impossible for the worshippers of a tyrannical, partial, and cruel God to practise the duties of justice and philanthropy. As soon as the priests have succeeded in stifling within us the commands ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... artfulness might lead. It shams dead, says the popular idiom, which recks little of weighing the value of its term; it simulates death, scientific language repeats, happy to find some gleams of reason in the insect. What truth is there in this unanimous statement, which in the one case is too unreflecting and in the other too much inclined ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... justified to-day, that the discovery of the telescope which had played so great a part in the preparation of his crime might serve as a clue to an enquiry; and he threw it into the clock-case, where, as luck would have it, it interrupted the swing of the pendulum. This unreflecting action, one of those which every criminal inevitably commits, was to betray him twenty years later. Just now, the blows which I struck to force the door of the drawing-room released the pendulum. The clock was set going, struck eight o'clock ... and I possessed ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... approve, and I am sure no Christian can, of the system which has lately been pursued in the large sea-port cities of Spain, and which the Bible Society has been supposed to sanction, notwithstanding the most unreflecting person could easily foresee that such a line of conduct could produce nothing in the end but obloquy ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... detail, and, if detail were everything, it would be a great part. With powdered hair, she is beautiful and a great lady; as the domesticated princess, she has all the virtues, and honesty itself, in her face and in her movements; she gives herself with a kind of really unreflecting thoughtfulness to every sentiment which is half her emotion. If such a woman could exist, and she could not, she would be that, precisely that. But just as we are beginning to believe, not only in her but in the play itself, in comes the spying lady's maid, or the ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... only by remaining in port. Let it not, therefore, be inferred, from the possible, though temporary, effect of a "fleet in being," that speed is the chief of all factors in the battleship. This plausible, superficial notion, too easily accepted in these days of hurry and of unreflecting dependence upon machinery as the all in all, threatens much harm to the future efficiency of the navy. Not speed, but power of offensive action, is the dominant factor in war. The decisive preponderant element of great land forces has ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... (Feb. 11, 1773) contains the following striking sentences, written when the intellect was impressed with the solemnity of that solemn change which comes alike to the unreflecting and to the heart ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... point the leader felt more than a little anxious. These two decisions, with all their restraint, had in them something infectious, and she feared lest some young people, not holding themselves perfectly in hand, might be moved to sentimental and unreflecting declaration. ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... excitements of party contests, there was real affection and respect for Washington on the part of those who were politically opposed to him; but this act, so much like defiance of the popular will as expressed by the house of representatives, in the eyes of the unreflecting, seemed, for the moment, to extinguish every lingering spark of affection in the bosom of his old friends, now ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... he thought it would do about as much good to set a chaplain over his dogs and horses. And the fact is, that a mind stupefied and animalized by every bad influence from the hour of birth, spending the whole of every week-day in unreflecting toil, cannot be done much with by a few hours on Sunday. The teachers of Sunday-schools among the manufacturing population of England, and among plantation-hands in our country, could perhaps testify to the same result, there and here. Yet some striking ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a future of forty sous in his pocket when his old comrade du Tillet chanced to meet him, the little gains that he was to get out of the affair seemed an Eldorado. His friendship, his devotion, to du Tillet, increased by unreflecting gratitude and stimulated by the wants of a libertine and vagabond life, led him to say amen to everything. Having sold his honor, he saw it risked with so much caution that he ended by attaching himself to his old comrade as a dog to his master. Claparon ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... Grandmothers, in all Families of affluent Fortune, who, tho' they may have none of Lady Davers's Insolence, will be apt to feel one of her Fears,—-that the Example of a Gentleman so amiable as Mr. B—- may be follow'd, by the Jackies, their Sons, with too blind and unreflecting a Readiness. Nor does the Answer of that Gentleman to his Sister's Reproach come quite up to the Point they will rest on. For, tho' indeed it is true, all the World wou'd acquit the best Gentleman in it, if ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... correspondent aversion and contempt. The towns would not suffer their passage; the hamlets were unwilling to serve them even with fire and water. They were filled at once with shame and rage; one officer killed himself, unable to bear it; in the unreflecting minds of the soldiers, hate sprung up for the rest of Italy, and especially Rome, which will make them admirable tools of tyranny ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... unthinking, unheeding, undiscerning[obs3]; inadvertent; mindless, regardless, respectless[obs3], listless &c. (indifferent) 866; blind, deaf; bird- witted; hand over head; cursory, percursory[obs3]; giddy-brained, scatter- brained, hare-brained; unreflective, unreflecting[obs3], ecervele [French]; offhand; dizzy, muzzy[obs3], brainsick[obs3]; giddy, giddy as a goose; wild, harum-scarum, rantipole[obs3], highflying; heedless , careless &c. (neglectful) 460. inconsiderate, thoughtless. absent, abstracted, distrait; absentminded, lost; lost in thought, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... rather than a product of habituation. It is, in substance, not something that can be learned and unlearned. From one generation to another, the allegiance may shift from one nationality to another, but the fact of unreflecting allegiance at large remains. And it all argues also that no sensible change has taken effect in the hereditary endowment of the race, at least in this respect, during the period known by record or by secure inference,—say, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... pomp was thought necessary.... The external dignity of the ministers of religion was accompanied by a still greater change in its discipline.... Many of the Jewish and Pagan proselytes ... languished in the absence of ceremonies which were naturally adapted to the taste of the unreflecting multitude, while the insolent infidel haughtily insisted upon the inanity of a religion which was not manifested by an external symbol or decoration. In order to accommodate Christianity to these prejudices, a number ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... to profitable employment where we should be at all times welcome, if the unaccountable pride of parents did not shut us out by refusing to have us so taught that we could enter them. The prejudice against female labor begins with parents; and the unreflecting vanity and rashness of youth give it a fatal hold on us. My parents have never entertained it. They have taught us that there is more to be proud of in being dependent solely on our own exertions than in living ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... grand. The immense fields of ice rising out of the ocean clashing against each other, and then plunging into the deep with a violence which no language can describe, and with a noise like the discharge of a thousand cannon, was a sight which must have filled the most unreflecting mind ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... "you are too reckless of money, too extravagant and unreflecting. Six months ago, you told me, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... the present system of government and industry they hope to have the workingmen conclude that the Socialist Party alone can save mankind from complete ruin. This, then, is the way in which "scientific" Socialism leads unreflecting laborers to believe that the contemplated state would be the most perfect institution under heaven, replete with countless blessings and free from ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... approaches to their enemy in hope to force him to retreat, until once within the compass of his fell swoop they fall victims to their temerity. I have often watched a cat act thus. Whatever explanation may be received, the fact cannot be questioned, and is ever attributed by the unreflecting, to some diabolic spell cast upon them by the animal. They have the same strange susceptibility to the influence of certain sounds as the vipers, in which lies the secret of snake charming. Most of the Indian magicians were familiar with this singularity. They employed it with telling effect to ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... bowing, the extreme unction in the voice, the business man's importance, the strut of the cock, the swagger of the bad actor, the long hair of the poet, the Salvation bonnet, the blue shirt of the Socialist: against all these, and a hundred examples of the swagger of unreflecting life, did a little brass knocker in Gray's Inn warn me the other evening. I had knocked as no one should who is not a postman, with somewhat of a flourish. I had plainly said, in its metallic reverberations, that I was somebody. As I left my friends, I felt the knocker looking ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... Faculty in them which shows them the different properties, relations, and dependencies of things, and not by their Appetite, which only can tell what will at the present please, or offend them; not what will, upon the whole, procure to them the most pleasure, or uneasiness; yet such appears to be the unreflecting Nature of the generality of Mankind, and such their fondness of present pleasure, as either not to consider this Truth, or when they do so, to be induc'd (in consequence thereof) to obey the most manifest dictates of Reason, or Natural Light, which will lay ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... for pleasure; a man-about-town's life suited him. He went his genial, unreflecting, costly way in Vienna, Paris, London. He loved exclusively those towns, and boasted that he was as much at home in one as in another. He combined exuberant vitality with fastidiousness of palate, and devoted both ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... voice, and was prolonged until the thrill produced in the listener became almost painful in its intensity. Again I ask, why did this world-famous singer perform this passage always in the same way? Unreflecting people may reply vaguely that it was because the artist "sang with expression." But what constitutes "expression" in singing? No great artist—no matter what the vehicle or medium through which his art finds manifestation—does anything at random. ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... arms to show herself. 'See! What I am, my father was; and my sister is; and my brother is. I have worked for sister and brother these many years—hard, Mr. Copperfield—all day. I must live. I do no harm. If there are people so unreflecting or so cruel, as to make a jest of me, what is left for me to do but to make a jest of myself, them, and everything? If I do so, for the time, whose fault is ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... temple and city of Jehovah above the sky, considering the former as miniature types of the latter. This mode of thought was originally learned by philosophical Rabbins from the Platonic doctrine of ideas, without doubt, and was entertained figuratively, spiritually; but in the unreflecting, popular mind the Hebraic views to which it gave rise were soon grossly materialized and located. They also derived the same conception from God's command to Moses when he was about to ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... But that cheerful, unreflecting youth of mankind, that naive Homeric time, was short in spite of Schiller, who, in the very essay referred to, included Euripides, Virgil, and Horace among the sentimental, and Shakespeare among the naive, poets—a ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... jests by which respectable Englishmen often hint that the bravery, the capacity, and the genius of Irishmen are of little service to the Empire, and that their value is more than counterbalanced by the ill results of Irish discontent and sedition, conceal from unreflecting minds the extent to which every part of the United Kingdom has severally contributed to the fortune and power of the country. Irish labourers, Irish soldiers, Irish generals, and Irish statesmen have assuredly rendered ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... presents us with a most interesting view of the daily life of the primitive Christians in a great commercial city. It furnishes conclusive evidence that the Apostolic Church of Corinth was not the paragon of excellence which the ardent and unreflecting have often pictured in their imaginations, but a community compassed with infirmities, and certainly not elevated, in point of spiritual worth, above some of the more healthy Christian congregations ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... but not immense, Born destitute of feeling and of sense. No power he but o'er his brain desired— How not to suffer it to be inspired. Ideas unto him were all unknown, Proud of the words which, only, were his own. So unreflecting, so confused his mind, Torpid in error, indolently blind, A fever Heaven, to quicken him, applied, But, rather than revive, the ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... two or three others, very beautiful, cold women, on whose faces he had caught a glimpse of a rapacious expression—an obstinate desire to snatch from life more than it could give, and these were capricious, unreflecting, domineering, unintelligent women not in their first youth, and when Gurov grew cold to them their beauty excited his hatred, and the lace on their linen seemed to him ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... officers is an obstacle to their own advancement. If the present foreign officers are compelled to abandon their situations an explanation must be given of the cause, and public indignation must inevitably fall on the unreflecting heads of the prejudiced or selfish ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... most lives is spent in mechanical, unreflecting repetition of daily duties and pleasures. We are all apt to live on the surface, and it requires an effort, which we are too indolent to make except under the impulse of some arresting motive, to descend into the depths of our own souls, and there to face the solemn facts of our own personality. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... such an age with very few votaries? Some, doubtless, will always be found, who, disgusted with the profligacy with which they are surrounded, are led only the more rapidly to a life of rectitude and duty by such vice; but how many are they amidst the crowd of sensual and unreflecting? Perhaps one in twenty. The great mass pass quietly by on the other side; they do not say there is no God, but they live altogether without God in the world. In vain are efforts made to reclaim the vicious, to bring up their children in the way they should ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... spirit of confidence. To the timid, the world is full of mystery manipulated and controlled by forces and powers beyond their ken to comprehend. But knowledge convinces us that there is no mystery in civilization. The railroad, the steamship, and the practical projects that loom so large to the unreflecting, are but the result of the application of thought to things. The mechanical powers and forces of Nature are open secrets for all who will undertake to unravel the mystery. And so it is with essential and moral principles. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... that Creation as spoken of by the sacred writer means some particular thing, or even if the mass of uneducated or unreflecting people assume it and you follow them, I grant at once that the narrative can be readily ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... task, one requiring an extraordinary amount of time, patience, and care, of restoring the dismembered collections, and replacing the fragments which were then isolated in so brutal a manner by these zealous but unreflecting manipulators of historical documents. It must be recognised, moreover, that the mutilations due to revolutionary activity and the pre-revolutionary collectors are insignificant in comparison with those which are the result of accident and the destructive work of time. But ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... of fancy, were treasures which gilded her cell and enriched her heart. She passed, it is true, some melancholy hours; but even that melancholy had its charms, and was more rich in enjoyment than the most mirthful moments through which the unreflecting flutter. M. Roland continued a very constant and kind correspondence with Jane, but she was not a little wounded by the philosophic resignation with which he submitted to her father's stern refusal. In the course of five or six ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... danger, and rendered the supposed emissary for its destruction so odious that he was driven from a Massachusetts hall where he attempted to lecture. But bodies in motion will overcome bodies at rest, and the unreflecting too often are led by captivating names far ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... instinctive sagacity, he had decided to carry unloaded. That's how he ascended the Patusan river. Nothing could have been more prosaic and more unsafe, more extravagantly casual, more lonely. Strange, this fatality that would cast the complexion of a flight upon all his acts, of impulsive unreflecting desertion of a jump ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... women whom he had met, he had certainly loved her the most sincerely, with an absolute love, unreflecting, passionate and half-mad. She was not dissolute but merely turbulent, independent and impatient of restraint. Too poor to be married, too proud to be a courtesan, too rebellious to accept the humiliations ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... Testament, the increasing importance given to the family of the Blessed Virgin, the multiplication of legendary subjects, and all the variety of adventitious, unmeaning, or merely ornamental accessories, strike us just in proportion as a learned theology replaced the unreflecting, undoubting piety of an ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... bulk of easy-going, unreflecting people have no idea what an amount of mischief and misery the habit of using these ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... remembrance of former levity, Lord Kilmarnock remarked, that not only was Providence wise and righteous, but to him, gracious; and that he regarded it as an unspeakable mercy to his soul, that he had not fallen at the battle of Culloden, impenitent and unreflecting; for that, if the Rebellion had been successful, he should have gone on in his errors, without ever entertaining any serious thought of amendment. "Often," added the contrite and chastened man, "have I made use of these words of ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... and steadfastly adhered to, yet this is weak argument of its truth to whoever considers what a vast number of prejudices and false opinions are everywhere embraced with the utmost tenaciousness, by the unreflecting (which are the far greater) part of mankind. There was a time when the antipodes and motion of the earth were looked upon as monstrous absurdities even by men of learning: and if it be considered what a small proportion they bear to the rest ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... by all our senses, but by the senses of all other sentient beings, real or possible; nothing, say these thinkers, would remain. For of what nature, they ask, could be the residuum? and by what token could it manifest its presence? To the unreflecting its existence seems to rest on the evidence of the senses. But to the senses nothing is apparent except the sensations. We know, indeed, that these sensations are bound together by some law; they do not come together at random, but according to a systematic order, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... folks term the main chance. When after some expenditure in the purchase of plant and material, and no little labour, the couple of beehives that formed the original stock of a project for the harvesting of the nectar which had hitherto gone to waste or been disposed of by unreflecting birds, had increased to a dozen, and honey of pleasant and varying flavour flowed from the separator at frequent intervals, hopes ran high of the earning of a modest profit from one of the cleanest, nicest, most entertaining ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... disembodied. They talk with that straightforward and simple kind of innocency which makes strange and impressive the dialogue of Maeterlinck's earlier plays. Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw the subject-matter of his art "with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting eyes—and he preserved the innocence of good art in an age of reasons and purposes." He had no theory except of his art; no "ideas" and no "problems"; he did not wish to change anything or to reform anything; but he saw all his people pass by as before a window, and he heard their ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... reading-lamp, making more brilliant the rich coloring of his complexion and the gleam of his shining hair. There was daylight, too, but it was north light, and the winter days were dull. Also the walls of the room were a deep, unreflecting red, and his eyes were getting old. The outlines of that vast bed blending into the luxuriant background, the whole focusing to the striking central figure, remain in my mind to-day—a picture of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... them being, who out of the manifoldness of his creative thought let them pass into life, has not cast them off, but is with them, in them, still. A portion of his Spirit, though unconscious and unreflecting, is theirs. What else but the Spirit of God could guide the crane and the stork across pathless seas to their winter retreats, and back again to their summer haunts? What else could reveal to the petrel the coming storm? What but the Spirit of God could so geometrize ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... the district, and is an advertisement of the kind of spiritual instruction which it needs and gets. Not many large heads sit in the pews; narrowness, unreflecting earnestness, and healthy desires are imprinted upon the faces upturned towards his clear and level delivery. He is never exactly vapid, and he never soars. His theology is full of British beer; but the common-sense of his points and illustrations relative to morals and piety is a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... silence regarding his past), and the fact that she never knew this until he had given his life in his country's service. It was then too late to reap comfort in her supreme sorrow from the knowledge of his uprightness both to herself and to the wretched woman who had caused her unreflecting flight on ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... remarkable, therefore, that the ancient Hebrew institutions show in so many points the influence of Egyptian ideas and customs. What is remarkable is the dissimilarity. To the unreflecting nothing may seem more natural than that a people, in turning their back upon a land where they had been long oppressed, should discard its ideas and institutions. But the student of history, the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... viz., common jurymen one shilling for each trial, and, in the sheriffs' court, fourpence. What was so pernicious in Athens is perfectly harmless in England; it was the large member of the dicasts which made the mischief, and not the system of payment itself, as unreflecting writers have ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of my younger Readers may ask HOW a woman in Flatland can make herself invisible. This ought, I think, to be apparent without any explanation. However, a few words will make it clear to the most unreflecting. ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... upon. Sometimes in private he seemed to be hypersensitive as to whether in any particular he was misleading those who trusted him; he was scrupulously anxious that they should not be carried away by unreflecting enthusiasm, or by personal devotion to himself. About the only criticism of his leadership that was ever made directly to himself by one of the rank and file in Ulster was that it erred on the side of patience and caution; and this criticism elicited the sharpest reproof he was ever heard ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill |
