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Unsatisfying   Listen
adjective
Unsatisfying  adj.  See satisfying.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Unsatisfying" Quotes from Famous Books



... crucial test which he has not taken into his calculations. The soreness of the wrench from home is still fresh, and there is no settled or regular work to occupy the mind, while the hardships are exactly of the kind that have not been anticipated, and are most harassing, though unsatisfying to the imagination, and all this when the health is adapting itself to a new climate, and the spirits are least in time, so that the temper is in the most likely condition to feel and resent any apparent slight or unexpected employment. No one knows how many high hopes have sunk, how many ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... over things has come to that point. There are some people who should be willing to—no, not willing, who should want to do things without any pay. The world needs them. Most people are best off in the struggle for bread, but the few who see how—unsatisfying that end is, should be willing ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... for on the title-page he read the name of his mother as the author. Her thoughts were continually upon her lost son, and in her mind's eye she often traced his downward career. She imagined him worn and weary, his days spent in unsatisfying folly; and his moments of reflection embittered by remorse; unconsciously, in writing this little book she had drawn from her own feelings and addressed one in this situation. She pointed to him the falseness of the world, and bade him judge of the fidelity of the picture by his own experience; ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell

... is the fashion to speak in that way. We learn, in our school books, all about the folly of ambition, and the unsatisfying nature of political greatness. But even if the attainment must disappoint, there is interest and excitement in the pursuit. And, if you will allow me to say so, it is not so in your case, and to me the disappointment seems even ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson

... round. There does not seem to be any one special shrine with a central figure for us to see; perhaps there is one, but it is not shown to foreigners. It is all vague and rather meaningless, and the carving and decoration are unsatisfying. After a while, as there does not seem to be anything more forthcoming, we drop a few coins into a bowl held out to us and prepare to go. Just as we reach the door another strange being in a peaked cap appears with tiny cups of clear amber-coloured tea on a tray, and holds them out to us. The little ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... hour slipped by until, when evening was upon us, the clouds drew together, and thunder, with a continuous low rumble, began to rock from sky to sky. Fitful showers of rain, odorous and heavy, but unsatisfying, fell, and birds and beasts of the woodlands came slinking in to our streets and courtyards. Ever since the sky first darkened our own animals had become strangely familiar, and now here were these wild things of the woods slinking in for companionship, ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... But still it will be knowledge only which they give us; knowledge not put for us into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty, and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for us, and therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain while, unsatisfying, wearying. ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... Unionism of married women is not sex. Only the most insignificant fraction of the gallantries of married people produce any of the conventional results; and plays occupied wholly with the conventional results are therefore utterly unsatisfying as sex plays, however interesting they may be as plays of intrigue and ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw

... unrestrained passion, to the gluttony of every appetite; who lounged away their day in cool marble halls, or leaned half drunken from the cushioned seats of the amphitheatre, while the sands of the arena were reddened with human blood to give them a holiday. Look at them there. They passed their unsatisfying hours in idle jest, wreathed themselves with freshly plucked, but swiftly fading flowers, drowned their senses from moment to moment, still deeper in the spiced and maddening wines, gave unbridled freedom to their lust; and then, at close of day, in the splendor of the sinking sun, went ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman

... still more over a poet mainly of fancy like Tasso, in the fact that their subject, that of the meaning and destiny of human life, is one in itself of profound and absorbing interest to all thinking men and women. Even if their treatment of it be in some parts and for some people unsatisfying or irritating they at least have started with that advantage. A dangerous advantage because, as we have seen in Milton's case and might also see in Dante's, tempting them to go outside the pure business of their art; but still in itself an advantage. Milton was probably also right in feeling ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... in God get what it wants. Prison fare is what it receives in the other service. The unsatisfying character of all sin; it cloys, and yet leaves one hungry. It is 'that which satisfieth not.' 'Broken ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... Another restless, unsatisfying day and a lonely evening dragged by. Texas and Pat she had not seen for a week. Even Abe had not been near her since her father left. To-morrow, she told herself, she would find them at their work and demand ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... tendency crossed, if not warped, by the fatalistic Calvinism which was drummed into him by father, mother, and nurse in his tender years, is taken fully into account; then (2) the peculiar action on such a nature of the unsatisfying and, on the whole, distracting effect of the bohemian and hail-fellow-well-met sort of ideal to which he yielded, and which has to be charged with much; and (3) the conflict in him of a keenly social animus with a very strong egotistical effusiveness, fed by ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... within is hushed. She rises and goes forth like one who is prepared for any trial—who is endued with strength by a mighty though unseen power, and sustained by a love which has none of the imperfect and unsatisfying elements that must always mingle with the purest earthly affection. Meek, confiding, and gentle as ever, she is yet not the same. She meets reproach even from the High Priest himself with calmness. She returns to her ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... the unsatisfying statement. "I can do nothing without his Excellency's instructions, and he has gone ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy

... that followed he made his responses firmly, his eyes calling so clearly to hers that she answered with an almost hypnotized gaze. His look seemed to seal the promise of his words. In spite of all that was strange and secret and unsatisfying about him, she had no regrets. Love was worth everything, and she could but believe that he loved her. This strong conviction went with the girl to the vestry, and made it easier to turn away when his name—his real name, which she, though his wife, was ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... mingling, to any great extent, in its joys and responsibilities. My ideal life would be to work, study and teach, but as no opportunities for doing so have been presented to me, and having had no home of my own, I have been obliged to work on in my one-sided way, unsatisfying ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams

... matters helped any by the fact that Bertram was hungry. Bertram's luncheon had been meager and unsatisfying. That the kitchen down-stairs still remained in silent, spotless order instead of being astir with the sounds and smells of a good dinner (as it should have been) did not improve his temper. Where Billy was ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... each generation die and leave ghosts, he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them. On that theory they would have grown innumerable some Eight Hundred Thousand Years hence, and it was no great wonder to see four at once. But the jest was unsatisfying, and I was thinking of these figures all the morning, until Weena's rescue drove them out of my head. I associated them in some indefinite way with the white animal I had startled in my first passionate search for the Time Machine. But Weena was ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... goats that have been sacrificed during this Sohrai we have had plenty of meat to eat lately and yet I don't feel as if I had had any." "That is so," answered her daughter-in-law; "fowls' and pig's flesh is very unsatisfying." "Then what are we to do?" rejoined the old woman, "I don't know unless you do for the father of your grandchild." When he heard this Chandrai shivered with fright and hid himself further under the rice shelf, for he saw that the two women must ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas

... lifted up to a holy and blessed communion with God, and thus enabled to render to God's law an obedience of love "in the spirit and not in the letter." They were oppressed with a painful sense of the empty and unsatisfying nature of every thing earthly; but they have found in Christ and his glorious service an all-sufficient portion. In a word, they are assured that the gospel is from God, because it meets all their wants as sinners. They ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... Hobbema was a poor colourist. True, he used little besides grays and a peculiar green, which seemed especially to please him; but since that colouring belonged to the subjects he chose, one cannot complain on the ground that what he did was unsatisfying. For lack of knowledge about him we can think of him as a man of moods, sad, desolate ones at that; because his work is too extreme and uniform in its character for us to believe his method ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon

... question, and brought out a world of unsatisfying conjecture. Various men were mentioned as possibilities, but one by one they were discarded as not being eligible. No one but young Hillyer had been intimate with Flint Buckner; no one had really had a quarrel with him; he had affronted every man who had tried ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain

... passion is yet happy, and the disenchantment of reality has not set in. The constant putting forth of strength and longing, called suspense, is surely, to the human soul, as fragrance to the flower that breathes it forth. We soon leave the brilliant, unsatisfying colours of tulips and coreopsis, but we turn again and again to drink in the sweetness of orange-blossoms or volkameria-flowers compared separately, each in its own land, to a betrothed bride, full of love, made fair by the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... appetite of the soul. And this might be enough to convince you, that your souls are quite out of course, and altogether wandered from the way of happiness because they are poured out on such a multiplicity of insufficient, unsatisfying things, every one of which is narrow, limited and empty, and the combination and concurrence of all being a thing either impossible or improbable to be attained. But we may conceive that men's affections put themselves into three great heads of created things, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... physical form. But the different nature of the material — the fact that a character is not a presentation to sense, but a rationalistic synthesis of successive acts and feelings, not combinable into any image — makes such a description much more unsatisfying in this case than in that of material forms. We cannot understand exactly how these summations and cancellings take place when we are not dealing with a visible object. And we may even feel that there is a wholeness and inwardness about ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... that he had never worked with a more unsatisfying team mate. Not that Klusky did not pull, he evidently did his best, but he never spoke, while the other grew ever conscious of the beady, glittering eyes boring into his back. At camp, the Jew watched him furtively, sullenly, till he grew to feel oppressed, as with ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach

... underneath a large tree. He seemed to have been trying to carve his name; for a large E and half of an N were there. But he was tired of that; and a book he had brought with him seemed to have proved equally unsatisfying; for it was lying closed at his feet. He seemed very much surprised at seeing Arthur; but all he said, when he came near was: "Well?" Arthur did not quite know what to say himself, but he asked ...
— Left at Home - or, The Heart's Resting Place • Mary L. Code

... before, and now I felt like one to whom a friend has made some sorrowing confession of crime long past, and who has basely deserted him in consequence. The old memories of Jo. Dunfer, his fragmentary revelation, and the unsatisfying explanatory note by the headstone, came back with singular distinctness. I wondered what had become of Jo., and—I turned sharply round and asked my prisoner. He was intently watching his cattle, and without withdrawing ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce

... A queer, hectic, unsatisfying life it must be, Rachael thought, saying good-bye to her guest a day or two later. Dressing, rouging, lacing, pinning on her outrageously expensive hats, jerking on her extravagant white gloves, drinking, rushing, screaming with laughter, screaming with anger, Billy ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... know my nature" she said, her large dark eyes looking at him reproachfully, "'tis like coming home. Even the gay songsters methinks love to know their nests await them; one's life spent in the cold glitter of triumphs and conquests would be most unsatisfying, unless one knew of one heart, one's home to rest at even; one other nature akin to ones own to share one's inner higher life, that to the world ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny

... the cosmic law, which aims to raise the sex-instinct from the incomplete and unsatisfying plane of physical contact, to that of spiritual union—a wide gulf seemingly; but who would not strive to bridge it, did he but realize what spiritual union with the Beloved ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... under the many variable conditions, be the most economical of installation or the most efficient of operation. The dominant feature of the task is an endeavor to find a compromise between efficiency and capital outlay. The result is a series of choices between unsatisfying alternatives, a number of which are usually found to have been wrong upon further extension ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover

... forth other tragedies nearer us. In everything we find a kind of dim mirror of ourselves. Sterne, if placed in a desert, said he would love a tree; and I can fancy such a love would not be altogether unsatisfying. Love of trees and plants is safe. You do not run risk in your affections. They are my children, silent and beautiful, untouched by any passion, unpolluted by evil tempers; for me they leaf and flower themselves. In ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... attempting to listen till they have done. When they are exhausted, you apply to the tube again. No answer is obtainable. You get mad, and become sarcastic; only being sarcastic when you are not sure that anybody is at the other end to hear you is unsatisfying. ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... cosmopolitan feelings which inspired him—the feelings of most old soldiers of fortune. They start probably with some vague notions of seeking honour and glory, but, finding the objects at which they aim thoroughly unsatisfying, they in most cases become intensely selfish, and think only how they can make themselves most comfortable under any circumstances in which they are placed, or how they can secure the largest amount of plunder. This was the last time I saw Colonel ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston

... the unsuccessful dramatist has his moments. I knew a young man who married somebody else's mother, and was allowed by her fourteen gardeners to amuse himself sometimes by rolling the tennis-court. It was an unsatisfying life; and when rash acquaintances asked him what he did he used to say that he was reading for the Bar. Now he says he is writing a play—and we look round the spacious lawns and terraces and marvel at the run his last ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various

... fortune and seeming happiness, not to shock them too much by the contrast between the delicate enjoyments of the life he now leads among the wealthy and refined, and that bald existence of theirs in his old home? A life, agitated, exigent, unsatisfying! That is what this letter really discloses, below so attractive a surface. As his gift expands so does that incurable restlessness one supposed but the humour natural to a promising youth who had still everything ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater

... phrase to express her. She was always breaking rules, whispering asides, intimating signals. She became at times an embodiment for Ann Veronica of all that made the suffrage movement defective and unsatisfying. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... not alone in her restlessness. It is curious to note what diverse causes produce the same effects. Cora Arthur was restless, very restless. The fruit of her labor was in her hands, but it was vapid, tasteless, unsatisfying. What her soul clamored for, was the opera, the contact of kindred spirits, the rush and whirl, the smoke and champagne, and giddiness of the city; the card-won gold, and painted folly that made the be-all and end-all of life ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch

... people on earth who have carried the doctrine of incarnation (Avatar) to such excess of imaginings as to create such abundantly grotesque and fanciful appearances of their many divinities. Normally, then, the Mohammedan faith, at its very core, must be unsatisfying and even repulsive to the tropical Hindu mind. It was brought here at the point of the sword; and, for centuries, it was the faith of a ruling power whose custom was to tax heavily all people who did not conform, outwardly at least, to the ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... Sergeant picked up little by little in the woods, small as it was and unsatisfying to his youthful impatience, sufficed to sustain his hopes. The constant meeting after work-hours with slinking bohunks who always avoided him, convinced him that something within the law was afoot, and ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan

... his honour is almost more painful. "D—— it," he says to himself on such rare occasions, "I will pay that fellow;" and yet, as he says it, he knows that he never will pay even that fellow. It is a comfortless unsatisfying trade, that of ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... future. At the Gold Exchange Bank the weary accountants were making ineffective efforts to complete Thursday's business. That toilful midnight, at the close of the last great passion-day of the bullion-worshippers, will be ever memorable for its anxieties and unsatisfying anguish. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... backed me good and true, and if the T'other Governor had took me down correct (I says under my mark), I should have been worth money at the present time, instead of having a barge-load of bad names chucked at me, and being forced to eat my words, which is a unsatisfying sort of food wotever a man's appetite! And when you mention the middle of the night, T'otherest Governor,' growled Mr Riderhood, winding up his monotonous summary of his wrongs, 'throw your eye on this here bundle under my arm, and bear in mind ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... does not know George Eliot would do well to begin with The Mill on the Floss, her finest work, which is full of humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an analysis of soul in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpassed. Yet the end is cruel and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own religious creed. Next read Adam Bede, one of the saddest books in all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most humorous characters in ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... our Lord Himself we have the consummate human life clothed in the wondrous humility of His appointed work. The life of lives! and yet was ever any life so utterly free from the tawdry pride that makes our poor achievements so wretched and unsatisfying. You say He cut Himself off from all that men are proud of. Not so. He gave up house and home, but he carried about with Him always the devotion of the people, the mystery of unknown power and the consciousness of great work and influence, the very things that have always ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser

... he worked with unabated ardor, but his work soon grew unsatisfying. The inspiring nature of his surroundings seemed to stimulate him to higher effort and loftier work, which should call into play the imaginative faculties and in which the brain would be free to weave its own creations. Stronger within him grew the desire to write a novel which ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour



Words linked to "Unsatisfying" :   unsatisfactory, disappointing



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