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Brainless   /brˈeɪnlɪs/   Listen
Brainless

adjective
1.
Not using intelligence.  Synonym: headless.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Brainless" Quotes from Famous Books



... place in the comedy, and begins to play his brainless but important part. He, the disconsolate Morelove, and the brilliant Lady Betty all meet at dinner with Sir Charles and Lady Easy. Of course the hero makes an unsuccessful attempt to regain the good graces of his inamorata, and, of course, the coxcomb carries on a violent flirtation ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... devotedly the vital principles of our democracy;—can be so dazzled by the false glitter of a title, that they deliberately choose to mate themselves (and their riches,) with such sorry specimens of lordliness; such brainless, nerveless bundles of selfishness, is something ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... McClellan's army is disgusted with McNapoleon, and speaks with contempt of the reckless waste of men, of material, etc. He calls it cruel, brainless, and uses a great many ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski

... powerful caste in this country were permitted, in defiance of law, to have press-gangs formed for the purpose of kidnapping respectable seamen into a service that was made at that time a barbarous despotism by a set of brainless whipper-snappers who gained their rank by backstair intrigue with a shameless aristocracy! All that kind of villainy has been wiped out; and the men of the Royal Navy are now treated like human beings; and they do their work not a whit less courageously and well than they did ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman

... dishes of sparklin' jelly things on the counter, that the girl said warn't much use—gone in no time; they were just meant to dress up the box. I called 'em brainless candies—just silly an' expensive, an' if you look around you'll find women can match 'em. An' along with 'em you can put the candied violets an' sugared rose leaves that only make a man out of pocket an' ain't a ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett

... pampas in the extreme north of the Argentine Republic, where Bolivia, the Argentine, Paraguay and Brazil unite, was the place of sacrifice. Thousands of acres, white with the bones of those whom the monsters had engulfed. Brainless, devoid of intelligence, sightless, because even the sense had not become differentiated in them, yet by some infernal instinct the Earth Giants had become aware that this was their ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... sentence, denouncing him in such terms as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique," "secret and envenomed blows," "slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility," "lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the description does not make his idol's defeat more creditable to the vanquished. As for the character of Gifford, and the earlier "Letter to Gifford," I should have to print them entire to ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... He is just one of those brainless fellows like myself, who would rather be out here, suffering, choking, dying by inches, than be at home surrounded by all the comforts that a home gives a man. Didn't say what ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert • Jessie Graham Flower

... your organization, as you call it—pouf!" said the Russian scornfully. "Carnes, a brainless fool who does only as you tell him, a few half-wits in the Bureau of Standards, some of them already in my pay, and one renegade girl. She shall learn what it means to betray ...
— The Great Drought • Sterner St. Paul Meek

... stroke with the blow-pipe which I held in my left hand, and then, springing in upon him, I dealt him so tremendous a blow with my heavy, knotted, hard-wood club that his skull crashed under it like an egg-shell, and he fell a brainless ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... new skull. Almost I fancy at times that there is life lurking in the eyeless sockets, where the red firelight from the pitch-weighted logs plays in grewsome flashes; and I fancy, too, that in the brainless cavities of the skull there must still be some of the old passion, stirred into spirit life by the very madness of this night. A hundred times I have been sorry that I kept the thing, but never ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood

... were enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive,—to be fitted with a colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaides might not keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to ramble brainless in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal, perceptions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have often cost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out of a man, fret, wear, worry him,—to be irritable is the conditional tax laid of old ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... chateau. We are living a simple and brainless life. No field-days, of course, and for this relief much thanks. We don't know in the least what is happening. Troops come and troops go, and guns go by during the night, and Red Cross waggons go hither and thither, and ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson

... us in acknowledging, the leaders of the Southern rebellion to possess, only enhance the magnitude of their offense, and serve to illustrate with greater force the enormity of their purposes. That a brainless fanatic like Lord George Gordon, or the Neapolitan fisherman, Massaniello, should stir up tremendous agitation, may be matter for critical study, but is hardly a subject of wonder. But that men gifted with exalted ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... fast becoming habitual, and now, at twenty-six, Edith St. Claire was pronounced by the world the most strikingly beautiful woman of her age. Poets had sung of her charms, artists had transferred them to canvas; brainless beaux, who would as soon rave about a married woman as a single one, provided it were the fashion so to do, had stamped them upon their hearts; envious females had picked them all to pieces, declaring her too tall, too ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... are not becoming from any one, and certainly not from me. Besides," she added, a little bitterly, at the thought of such a brainless, frivolous girl as Addie Marchmont enchaining a man like Harcourt, "people do not get their ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... he said to himself. "That imbecile, that brainless viper to whom I am tied, has actually confided in her. And she and Scarlett are in love with each other, and the suspense is wearing ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... navy, once powerful, was now reduced to a small number of ships, few of them in condition for service. Its army, once the strongest in Europe, was now but a handful of poorly equipped and half-drilled men. Its finances were in a state of frightful disorganization. The government of a brainless king, a dissolute queen, and an incapable favorite had brought Spain into a condition in which she dared not raise a hand to ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris

... truth to say that he had not had far more champagne than was good for him. Also, the general of Monaco had brought a pack of cards with him, and was spoiling the harmony by trying to induce Prince Ping Pong Pang to find the lady. And the brainless laugh of the ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse

... of idlers and listen to stuffy stories from stuffier individuals? Do you think that stale tobacco smoke, and the idiotically reiterated click of billiard balls, and the vacant stare of the fashionably brainless, and the meaningless exchange of banalities with the intellectually aimless ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers

... man; Wonder of men he is; the player can And bookseller prove true, if they could know Only one drop, that drives in such a flow. Are they not learned beasts, the better far Their drossy exhalations a star Their brainless admirations may render; For learning in the wise sort is but lender Of men's prime notion's doctrine; their own way Of all skills' perceptible forms a key Forging to wealth, and honour-soothed sense, Never exploring truth or consequence, Informing any virtue or good life; And therefore Player, ...
— English Satires • Various

... you?" he said lightly. "When we danced and made love at the Grafton Galleries." She flushed a little, but did not lower her eyes. "Such a serious girl you were too, Margaret; I wonder how you ever put up with a brainless sort of ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... single rap, and then two more in quick succession. There was no answer. He knocked again in precisely the same manner, and then a footstep sounded from within, and the door was flung open. "Fools!" growled Shluker in greeting, as they stepped inside and the door was closed again. "A pair of brainless fools!" ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard

... asses and the brainless women belonging to a certain West End set, sir," said Kerry savagely. "They go in for every monstrosity from Buenos Ayres, Port Said and Pekin. They get up dances that would make a wooden horse blush. They eat hashish and they smoke opium. They inject morphine, ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... of disastrous dames; Will none set pen to paper for poor me? Canst write a bitter satire? Brainless people Do call them libels. Darest ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker

... courageous, but they were neither more interesting nor less bigoted. Gay young men dazzled by operettas and races, they played lansquenet and baccarat, staked large fortunes on horses and cards, and cultivated all the pleasures enchanting to brainless fools. After a year's experience, Des Esseintes felt an overpowering weariness of this company whose debaucheries seemed to him so unrefined, facile and indiscriminate without any ardent reactions or excitement ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... the brainless speech of a fool,— The lives travelling dark fears, And as a boy throws pebbles in a ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie

... wish to cause my death, you ecclesiastical idiot. The principal thing for you is to enjoy yourself; my sweet carcass, a thing accessory. Your pleasure will be my death, and then you'll canonise me perhaps? Ah, you have the plague, and you would give it to me. Go somewhere else, you brainless priest. Ah! touch me not," said she, seeing him about to advance, "or I will stab ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... nature that is the ghastly part of the matter. If it would hate me, I could bear it. If it would attack me, if it would try to do me some dreadful harm, I should become a man again. I should be braced to fight against it. But this gentleness, this abominable solicitude, this brainless worship of an idiot, persistent, sickly, horribly physical, I cannot endure. What does it want of me? What would it demand of me? It nestles to me. It leans against me. I feel its touch, like the touch of a feather, trembling about my heart, as if it sought to number my pulsations, to find out the ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... for you are justified in requiring that all who know you should worship but one goddess, as the Jews do but one god. But I entreat you do not again compare yourself to the brainless Cyprian dame. You may be allowed to do so, so far as your grace is concerned; but who ever saw an Aphrodite philosophizing and reading serious books? I have disturbed you in grave studies no doubt; what is the book you are rolling up, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... money-monger; in whose profession all serious subjects are concluded. But he that shuns trifles must shun the world; out of whose reverend heaps of substance and austerity I can and will ere long single or tumble out as brainless and passionate fooleries as ever panted in the bosom of the most ridiculous lover. Accept it, therefore, good Madam, though as a trifle, yet as a serious argument of my affection; for to be thought thankful for all free and honourable favours is a great sum of that riches ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... at this merry jest, and they quickly followed his lead, as brainless sheep will follow the one that scrambles through a gap. Soon they were all joyously stamping and dancing in what had so lately been a pellucid pool. The water-lilies and blue forget-me-nots were trodden down, the fish that had their homes under the mossy stones in terror fled away. Only ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... indulge in day dreams which she well knew would never be realised. The romances she wove herself were even more marvellous than those she read in her favourite penny novelettes; but, unlike the printed tales, her romance never culminated in marriage. Poor brainless, silly, pitiful Miss Greeb; she would have made a good wife and a fond mother, but by some irony of fate she was destined to be neither; and the comedy of her husband-hunting youth was now changing into the lonely tragedy of disappointed spinsterhood. She ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume

... any, even fanciful, reason for such a supposition; upon which the comment of some foolish critic is," The sharpness of the satire is said to have stung the man so much that he never forgave it. "We have heard of the sting in the tail atoning for the brainless head; but in this doggerel the tail is surely as stingless as the head is brainless. For, 1st, Ten in the Hundred could be no reproach in Shakspeare's time, any more than to call a man Three-and-a-half-per-cent. in this present year, 1838; except, indeed, amongst those foolish persons who ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... buttons, stuck up behind, and a whiskey-faced coachman half-asleep in a great hammercloth, be sure it belongs to some snob who has not a sentence of good English in his head. Yes! perhaps a soap-chandler, an oil-dealer, or a candy-maker. Brainless people always creep into plush-always! People of taste and learning, like me, only are entitled to liveries and crests." This Madame says, inviting her guests to take seats at her banquet-table, at the head of which she stands, the Judge on her right, Mr. Soloman on her ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... camp-bedstead sweating and funking. The events of the day made him seem safe, but he felt that he would not be really safe for ages and ages. Throughout the night he was going over the list of his idiotic mistakes, upbraiding himself, cursing himself for a hundred acts of brainless folly. The plan had been sound enough: it was the accomplishment of the plan that had ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... boats. You can hang some of them. But you can't touch me with the law. 'Tis me that's a crippled creature of circumstance, too weak to raise a hand against any man—a feather blown about by the windy contention of men strong in their back an' brainless in their heads." ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... King with a hollow head could chatter words, which had no sense, and laugh in a brainless manner at senseless things. That part of the ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum

... at a loss. He did not begin to grasp what she meant. To him she was just "fickle woman" always changing her mind. He had, all his life, generalized about woman; he had never known a woman who was not rather vapid, rather brainless; he had the same idea of women as Professor Kraill had ventilated in his lectures—that they were the vehicles of the race, living for the race but getting all the fun they could out of the preliminary canter, since the race was a rather strenuous, rather joyless ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... the whole debatable question of her character. According to the professed champions of that character, this conduct was a tissue of such dastardly imbecility, such heartless irresolution, and such brainless inconsistency as forever to dispose of her time-honored claim to the credit of intelligence and courage. It is certain that just three months and six days after the murder of her husband she became the wife of her husband's murderer. On February 11th ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... Lord, yes. There are millions of kind people in the world. It's possible to be kind and at the same time not entirely brainless." ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair

... over bars, exchanging that brainless but well-willed talk by which men of his sort come to know men. He sat beside roped rings to witness the best muscle of the world—and not the worst brain—revive in ten thousand men the primeval brute. He frolicked with trifling painters, bookless poets, apprentice journalists, and the ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin

... outrage on the Negro, at the expense of innocent childhood, a brainless fabrication from start ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett

... had that brainless idea, they would do their utmost to hide it, and conceal their cards, so as to catch you afterwards.... But it was ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... hazardous tricks, is an interesting and modest knave; Scapin directly the reverse. He had no cause to boast so much of his tricks: they are so stupidly planned that in justice they ought not to have succeeded. Even supposing the two old men to be obtuse and brainless in the extreme, we can hardly conceive how they could so easily fall into such a clumsy and obvious snare as he lays for them. It is also disgustingly improbable that Zerbinette, who as a gipsy ought to have known how to conceal knavish tricks, should run out into the street ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... did not even care for the ten thousand pounds, that I loved you, and had been engaged to you, and that you had discarded me. That was the straw too many, and forthwith, Miss Blanche departed from Trevellian House, bag and baggage, and I hear she is about to marry the eldest son of Lord Haxton, a brainless idiot, not half as good-looking as I am. There is conceit for you! But you know I was always rather vain of my looks, and I do believe that the greatest terror poverty holds for me is the knowing that I must wear seedy hats and threadbare coats, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes

... skull of a rebel," said Jonathan, with marked emphasis on the word, "blown by the wind from a spike on the bridge above us. I don't know whose brainless head it may be, but it'll do for my collection." And he tossed it carelessly into the bottom of ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... have compared me to many obnoxious things, but never till tonight have I been called a crocodile. Possibly Mr. Randolph has been reading of the crocodiles recently dissected at Paris. It has been discovered that they are almost brainless, and, being without reason, are probably animated by a violent instinct of destruction. I believe, however, that the power of their ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... years, he thought. Alas! and alas! Before two years were gone, poor Lord Sandston was lying one foggy November morning on Hampstead Heath, with a bullet through his heart. Shot down at the commencement of a noble and useful career by a brainless gambler—a man who did all things ill, save billiards and pistol-shooting; his beauty and his strength hurried to corruption, and his wealth to the senseless DEBAUCHEE who hounded on his murderer to insult him. But ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... upon the back porch, hulling strawberries and watching with absent amusement the tireless efforts of Jane to induce a very fat and entirely brainless pup to shake hands. It had been a busy day, for owing to the absence of the free and independent "Saturday Help" Esther had insisted upon helping Aunt Amy in the kitchen. Now the Saturday pies and cakes were accomplished and ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... fool—a vain, drivelling, brainless idiot? Widow. No, no. Mel. What am I then—worse than all these? Why, I am a peasant! What has a peasant to do with love? Vain revolutions, why lavish your cruelty on the great? Oh that we—we, the hewers of wood and drawers of water—had been swept away, so that the proud might learn what the ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... a riot. To be a shop-girl seems the highest ambition. To have dress and hair and expression a frowsy and pitiful copy of the latest Fifth Avenue ridiculousness, to flirt with shop-boys as feeble-minded and brainless as themselves, and to marry as quickly as possible, are the aims of all. Then come more wretched, thriftless, ill-managed homes, and their natural results in drunken husbands and vicious children; and so the round goes on, the circle ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... you permit this thing in pantaloons and whiskers, this brainless, un-ideaed cub, whom a thousand years will not suffice to lick into a bear, longer to impose upon your good-natures? If so, we shall conclude you have lost all of that spirit so characteristic of ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... "I see nothing horrible about that. The rykors are but brainless flesh. They neither see, nor feel, nor hear. They can scarce move but for us. If we did not bring them food they would starve to death. They are less deserving of thought than our leather. All that ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... designated the members of the Indian Civil Service by lesser mortals, such as army officers—who in return are contemptuously termed "brainless military ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... indefinable and so real. But he comforted himself by the thought that his elder son was not wholly wasting time as so many of the country squires were doing round about, absorbed in work that a brainless yeoman could do with better success. Ralph at least was occupied with grave matters, in Cromwell's service and the King's, and entrusted with high secrets the issue of which both temporal and eternal it was hard to predict. And, no doubt, the ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson

... in an embarrassing position," said Tobermory, whose tone and attitude certainly did not suggest a shred of embarrassment. "When your inclusion in this house-party was suggested Sir Wilfrid protested that you were the most brainless woman of his acquaintance, and that there was a wide distinction between hospitality and the care of the feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-power was the precise quality which had earned ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki

... many of them Jane's contemporaries at Oxford and Cambridge, were hurried across the Channel into Life, for which they had been prepared by a course of lectures on the Dangers of Paris. There also went the confidential secretaries, the clerks and shorthand typists, in their hundreds; degreeless, brainless beings, but wise in ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay

... the years of her sojourn at Tunbridge Wells. They had little in common beyond the fellow-feeling that binds those in bondage. Miss Pringle was also a companion. Her task mistress, Mrs. Hubbard, was in Nora's opinion, about as stolidly brainless as a woman could well be. Miss Pringle was always lauding her kindness. But then Miss Pringle had been a companion to various rich women for thirty years. Nora had her own ideas as to the value of the opinions of any woman who had been ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett

... that it was not worth a second thought, but this did not prevent him from thinking of it again and again. What manner of undertaker could hope to obtain business by giving away foolish handbills in the street? Really, the whole thing had the air of a brainless practical joke, yet his intellectual fairness forced him to admit that as far as the man who had given him the bill was concerned, brainlessness was out of the question, and joking improbable. There had been depths in those little bright eyes which his glance had not been able ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... The brainless families of representative men, must of course monopolise attention, if all the rest went to eternal perdition, and what does it matter how vexedly a fellow tugs his moustache over the insipid drawl of some ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera

... visited the city he was careful to go round by the gates of Bethlehem Hospital, in Moorfields, over which stood Caius Gabriel Cibber's figures of Raving and Melancholy Madness: Colley Cibber's 'brazen, brainless brothers,' as Pope called them, ignorant, possibly from their having become so begrimed with London smoke, that they were really carved in stone. Roubiliac highly esteemed these statues. Though in idea evidently borrowed from Michael Angelo, they were yet strictly realistic ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... mob rule. The anonymous author of The Saints fears "Their frantic pray'r [is] a mere Decoy for Mob" (p. 4) and the author[4] of The Methodist and Mimic claims that Whitefield's preaching sends "the Brainless Mob a gadding" (p. 15). Evan Lloyd is the one anti-Methodist satirist who ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd

... the speculative delusions of a depraved intellect have moved him to invent them. Viewed in this light, they are really of some importance—and deserve to be exhibited in a short abstract; much more indeed than many a brainless product of fantastic philosophers who swell our journals with false subtilties; for a coherent delusion of the senses is always a more remarkable phenomenon than a delusion of the intellect; inasmuch as the grounds of this latter ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... indeed, With Ben, as hitherto. Age had come upon him. He dragged one foot as in paralysis. The critics bayed against the old lion, now, And called him arrogant. "My brain," he said, "Is yet unhurt although, set round with pain, It cannot long hold out." He never stooped, Never once pandered to that brainless hour. His coat was thread-bare. Weeks had passed of late Without his voice resounding in ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... to those walls where Folly holds her throne, And laughs to think Monroe would take her down, Where o'er the gates, by his famed father's hand, Great Cibber's brazen brainless brothers stand, One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye. The cave of Poverty and Poetry. Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, Emblem of music caused by emptiness. Hence bards, like Proteus long ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... told you, you brainless slob, to leave Hanlon alone, and by Jupiter, I mean it! Cut it out! One more stunt, and you go into irons, then back to Sime for an interview with His Highness. You go back next trip anyway. I'm done ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans

... politics. 365 Hell is the pattern of all commonwealths: Lucifer was the first republican. Will you hear Merlin's prophecy, how three [posts?] 'In one brainless skull, when the whitethorn is full, Shall sail round the world, and come back again: 370 Shall sail round the world in a brainless skull, And come back again when the moon is at full:'— When, in spite of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... the son of the king's cabinetmaker, and was sent to Rome at the royal charge while yet a youth. He came to England during the Protectorate, or during the first years of the Restoration. Besides the famous statues of Melancholy and Raving Madness ("great Cibber's brazen brainless brothers"), now at South Kensington, Cibber produced the bas-reliefs round the monument on Fish Street Hill. The several kings of England and the Sir Thomas Gresham executed by him for the Royal Exchange were destroyed with the building itself ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... from the ideas and tendencies of his times and not a sweeper of the chords that stir in human nature the heroic or the pathetic, it is none the less uncritical to rank this Spaniard as a brainless technician. Everything is relative, and the scale on which Fortuny worked was as true a medium for the exhibition of his genius as a museum panorama. Let us not be misled by the worship of the elephantine. It is characteristic of his temperament that the big battle piece he was commissioned ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... will move a further doubt, And as for York's part allege an elder right: O brainless heads that so run in and out! When length of time a state hath firmly pight, And good accord hath put all strife to flight, Were it not better such titles still to sleep Than all a realm about ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... enough to invent a medicine against the female sex.... They try to cure every sort of disease, and it never occurs to them that more people die of women than of disease.... Sly, stingy, cruel, brainless.... The mother-in-law torments the bride and the bride makes things square by swindling the husband... and there's no ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov

... not make good matches in any one sense of the word. The struggling barrister, the clerk, the curate, the brainless masher—such are their prey; and if they make richer prizes than these, still the match cannot be called good; presently there is dis-union as the clever husband finds the pretty but nonsensical wife utterly unable to follow him through the paths ...
— How to Marry Well • Mrs. Hungerford

... boy having betted on his brother's riding, as though he had the Bank of England at his back. Indeed, save that the lad had the hereditary Royallieu instinct of extravagance, and, with a half thoughtless, half willful improvidence, piled debts and difficulties on this rather brainless and boyish head, he had much more to depend on than his elder; old Lord Royallieu doted on him, spoilt him, and denied him nothing, though himself a stern, austere, passionate man, made irascible by ill health, and, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... to thunder I had an idea of how much she knows," he muttered. "Did I act like a brainless idiot when I was—was that ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames

... young men who were said to have met at a noted hotel or on change, when one accosted the other by the question, "Who did you marry?" "Ah," said he, "I married fifty thousand dollars. I forget her other name." Such men, however, are exceptions to the rule. There are brainless creatures called men, who will marry a pretty face, though the heart and brain be uncultured, provided there be associated with her sufficient of this world's goods to gratify a mercenary ambition; but the majority, both of men and women, wisely prefer to marry ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... in the book of the world's destinies that Germany was bound to win. It was not only, as we are too ready at the first glance to believe, the megalomania of an autocrat drunk with vanity, the gross vanity of some brainless buffoon; it was not the warlike impulses, the blind infatuation and egoism of a feudal caste; it was not even the impatient and deliberately fanned envy and covetousness of a too prolific race close-cramped on a dreary and ungrateful soil: it was none of these ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck

... their parts, learned a lesson they have not since forgotten or ever ceased to practise, and combining their hosts of slaves, lashed them onward to scare this stranger, Freedom, from the earth, even as in our times of intelligence they have done, and will do; and the brainless slaves, so lashed, shouted and went forward to the murderous work which rivetted their own fetters, even as in our time they have done, and will again do ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various

... wind-swept bleak Japan as our sore throats we muffle, We see thy senseless pudding face and irritating shuffle; As you go slopping thro' the streets of your foul-smelling city, You're far too common to be rare, too brainless to be witty. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various

... a more disturbing mob, Whose crop is filled with discord and contempt, On which they daily feed, I ne'er have sized. 'Twere well to laws enact to hold in curb These brainless cubs who wield a pricking quill And words indite with vitriol for an ink, Which burns the meaning into quiv'ring brain And leaveth scars which time can ne'er efface. A son of Erin in official place Did eulogize my effort at the club; And I, elated, loaned it to the press For ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)

... shot every time—A man pays in money, or in jewels or in disgrace, or in regret and remorse—and he has to calculate beforehand to what extent that which he desires is worth the price which will become due—It is a brainless idiot who does not calculate, or who laments when he has to stump up. I admit women are of supreme interest to me, and their companionship and affection—bought or otherwise—are necessary to my existence—So I resignedly discharged my debt ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn

... cosmopolitan, and therefore undistinguished. As we passed slowly through the crowded streets—for the National Pilgrimage was but now arriving—we saw endless rows of shops and booths sheltering beneath tall white blank houses, as correct and as expressionless as a brainless, well-bred man. Here and there we passed a great hotel. The crowd about our wheels was almost as cosmopolitan as a Roman crowd. It was largely French, as that is largely Italian; but the Spaniards were there, vivid-faced men and women, severe Britons, ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson

... their cloaks, and there was 'the Varens,' shining in satin and jewels,—my gifts of course,—and there was her companion in an officer's uniform; and I knew him for a young roue of a vicomte—a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely. On recognising him, the fang of the snake Jealousy was instantly broken; because at the same moment my love for Celine ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... my wife has a lover. I am a philosopher. For a noble wife, who had made me happy in her love, I might perhaps feel and act differently. I, however, married a heartless fool, and it would have been mad folly to risk my life with a brainless fop for ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach

... trifle coarse—not to be spoken of in the same day with you, dearest; but still a decidedly handsome creature. And she took remarkably well. She was a very lively girl, "never ran mute," Sir George used to say. Sir George was very fond of her. She amused him, poor girl, with her rather brainless rattle.' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... Dulness," in three cantos,—an imitation, in manner, of Goldsmith's "Double Transformation." The title is happy. The decline of Miss Harriet Simper from bellehood to an autumnal marriage, in Canto III., is more tiresome than the progress of Tom Brainless from the plough-tail to the pulpit, in Canto I. The Reverend Mr. Brainless, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... the old law, "Thou shalt not kill; whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of judgment: but I say unto you" of the new law, saith Christ, "that whosoever is angry with his neighbour, shall be in danger of judgment; and whosoever shall say unto his neighbour, 'Raca,' that is to say, brainless," or any other like word of rebuking, "shall be in danger of council; and whosoever shall say unto his neighbour, 'Fool,' shall be in danger of hell-fire." This card was made and spoken by Christ, as appeareth in the fifth chapter ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer

... would have been all right, only for that big stiff, Bunk Lander. He threatened to punch me up, and I knew he was just the sort of a brainless fellow to do it. Only for his interference, Barville would have taken the game, and we'd ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott

... to me entirely vapid and brainless; at other times you say or do things which suggest that there are possibilities in you; that, properly stimulated and encouraged, you might overcome the handicap of large private means and do something worthwhile. ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse

... that you are doing right. Did honour always command what was easiest for a man to do? Again, what was it? He had but a few moments left to live, and in a lifetime he had served honour scrupulously. What if it were but a myth, but a legend of fools, a destroying idol worshipped by brave and brainless visionaries, who had more courage than intelligence, more desire to do right than discernment to sift right from wrong? Pity that so many daring, honest men should have been spitted on rapiers, cloven with sabres, ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... where, as usual save on Sunday morning, Ada consumed her strong tea and heavily buttered toast; the state of her health—she had frequent ailments, more or less genuine, such as afflict the indolent and brainless type of woman—made it necessary for her to repose till a late hour. Peachey did not often lose self-control, though sorely tried; the one occasion that unchained his wrath was when Ada's heedlessness or ill-temper affected the well-being of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... gave expression to while he was yet only King of Scotland, his opinions underwent a sudden change when he saw an opportunity of strengthening his hold upon the English people, and of providing for the penniless followers who accompanied him to his new kingdom. Unfortunately a brainless plot, the "Bye Plot," as it is called, organised to capture the king and to force him to yield to the demands of the conspirators, afforded the more bigoted officials a splendid chance of inducing James to continue the former policy of ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... journeying from here to Hades, I am also, nat-u-rally, a prodid- Gious favorite with all the pretty ladies. I know nothing, but say a mighty deal; My elevated nose, likewise, comes handy; I stalk around, my great importance feel— In short, I'm a brainless little dandy. ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn

... Nick was a brainless block, While those who've seen him waving His bright sharp razor, o'er scap'd chins, Declare he was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various

... cried. "You brainless creature of brawn and muscle! You have heard no harm of him save that he was immensely wealthy! Listen. Bear that sentence in your mind and listen to me, listen while I tell you a story. A party of travelers was crossing ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... a higher order and exercise of power than to strike out in a way and with a stock entirely new. And so the absorbing, quickening, creative efficacy of Shakespeare's genius is best seen in this, that, taking the Drama as it came to his hand, a thing of unsouled forms and lack-lustre eyes, all brainless and meaningless, he at once put a spirit into it, tempered its elements in the proportions of truth, informed its shapes with grace and virtue, and made it all alive, a breathing, speaking, operative power. ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... evening to confirm the doubt in Tommy's mind. Spirits were not very high at the mess just then. Nearly all the women had left for the Hills, and the increasing heat was beginning to make life a burden. The younger officers did their best to be cheerful, and one of them, Bertie Oakes, a merry, brainless youngster, even proposed an impromptu dance to enliven the proceedings. But he did not find many supporters. Men were tired after the polo. Colonel Mansfield and Major Burton were deeply engrossed with some news that had been brought by Barnes of the Police, and ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... wealth and fashion she may see one of her masterpieces in the dress-making art, torn into shreds under the clumsy heel of a Cabinet Minister, or a Duchess may speak unkindly in her hearing of her latest devices in floral decoration. Or, some brainless nincompoop may, in his ignorance of her profession, cast aspersions on the general character and behaviour of all who keep shops. And it may be that friends, after a prolonged period of non-payment, will desert her, and speak ill of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various

... Straight, perpendicular, vertical, plumb, erect, upright. Strange, singular, peculiar, odd, queer, quaint, outlandish. Strong, stout, robust, sturdy, stalwart, powerful. Stupid, dull, obtuse, stolid, doltish, sluggish, brainless, bovine. Succeed, prosper, thrive, flourish, triumph. Succession, sequence, series. Supernatural, preternatural, superhuman, miraculous. Suppose, surmise, conjecture, presume, imagine, fancy, guess, think, believe. Surprise, astonish, amaze, astound. Swearing, cursing, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... shades of the second floor were illumined: she was up there. Doing what? Sharply then he realized what a partial life she led, the decayed middle-class associates of the boarding-house, tired, brainless, and full of small talk, the lonesome evenings, the long days. He became more agitated, and climbed the stoop, unlocked his way into the house, went up the dim, soft, red-cushioned stairs, past the milky gas-globe in the narrow hall, and knocked ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim

... attracted by it; at any rate, in his letters there are to be found frequent expressions of antipathy to Chopin's music, which seemed to him" mannered "(see letter to Moscheles of February 7, 1835). But even the heartless and brainless critic of the Musical World whose nonsense I quoted in Chapter XXXI. admits that Chopin was generally esteemed by the "professed classical musicians," and that the name of the admirers of the master's compositions was legion. To the early popularity ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... behind the council hall; she knew nothing of Dolores's last-minute decision that had taken them with her. She knew nothing as to who or how many were left in the camp; but she knew, she had terrible and ever-present proof in that moaning, groping, brainless thing that was Sancho, that her mistress had shown a leaning toward the strangers at the expense of her own people, and that she herself might expect no mercy if ever caught. And with the low animal cunning that served ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... you do it? do it quick!" The Slacker's skull is very thick. It never penetrates the gray, What Uncle Sammy, has to say. "I want you NOW!" Oh, what a Mutt. The words fall on a brainless nut. ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian

... think of a magter deprived of his symbiote," she said. "If his system can stand the shock, I imagine there will be nothing left except a brainless hulk. This is one series of experiments I don't care to witness. I rest secure in the knowledge that the Nyjorders will find ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... from a daub of yellow mud, to the great works which now adorn the galleries of the world. I saw also their sculpture, from the rude god with four legs, a half dozen arms, several noses, and two or three rows of ears, and one little, contemptible, brainless head, up to the figures of to-day—to the marbles that genius has clad in such a personality that it seems almost impudent to touch them ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll

... a little space the Count stood pausing on my threshold, whilst we craned our necks to contemplate him as though he had been an object for inquisitive inspection. Then a smothered laugh from the brainless La Fosse seemed to break the spell. I frowned. It was a climax of discourtesy whose impression I must ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini

... in the Court of old," saith Father, "but it doth seem me we were scantly so brainless of old time as this. I shall send a letter to my cousin of Oxenford touching Walter. He must not be suffered to ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt

... voice! We are a people yet, Tho' all men else their nobler dreams forget, Confused by brainless mobs and lawless powers; Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set His Briton in blown seas and storming showers, We have a voice with which to pay the debt Of boundless love and reverence and regret To those great men who fought and kept it ours. And keep it ours, O God, from brute control; ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... Salmon-fishing, then, is a matter of chance, or of plodding patience. They will rise on one day at almost any fly (but the sniggler), however ill-presented to them. On a dozen other days no fly and no skill will avail to tempt them. The salmon is a brainless brute and ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang

... might be well for you to keep a civil tongue in your head. I overheard what you said to those men in the cabin. So you are going to take care of me, are you?" There was a touch of steel in the low voice. "Now listen, you brainless meddler. Joe Kirby knows exactly what he is doing when he plays any game. I had nothing to do with Beaucaire's death, but those stakes are mine. I hold them, and I will kill any man who ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish

... was not literary herself. She was better than a poetess, she was a poem. The publisher always threw in a few realities, and some beautiful brainless creature would generally be found the nucleus of a crowd, while Clio in spectacles languished in a corner. Winifred Glamorys, however, was reputed to have a tongue that matched her eye; paralleling with whimsies and epigrams its freakish fires and witcheries, and, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... ever less head in a brainless world?' said Johns. 'Here, simple Nocky, I'll do it.' He leapt off, and with much puffing climbed the post, striking a match when he reached the top, and moving the light along the arm, the lad standing ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy

... that humble, initial figure. I confess to a love of loaves and fishes. A nice French loaf, and a delicious salmon in the suburbs of green peas—who wouldn't be a politician about that time? I have run for office—and at least half a dozen times. But, bless you, I never caught it. Some big, burly, brainless cur of a fellow was always ahead of me. Very queer in politics—the less the head the more one gets ahead. A head is little or nothing; but face, cheek, assurance—such is much; is every thing. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various

... to be near her. To this very day an attack of indigestion will always recreate her image in my mind. Another was a thin, sallow girl, but with magnificent eyes, I met one afternoon in the South Kensington Museum. She was a brainless, vixenish girl, but the memory of her eyes would always draw me back to her. More than two- thirds of our time together we spent in violent quarrels; and all my hopes of eternity I would have given to make her my companion for life. But for Luck, in the shape of a well-to-do cab proprietor, as great ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... blooded horse one meets, Or clever mare he passes, He finds in all the city streets A score of brainless asses. ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... and all things go wrong, The women have leaped from "their spheres," And, instead of fixed stars, shoot as comets along, And are setting the world by the ears! In courses erratic they're wheeling through space, In brainless ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage



Words linked to "Brainless" :   unintelligent, stupid, headless



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