"Bungler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and doubt. But instead, his friend Eliphaz hectors his pain by saying, in stately fashion, "Thy words have upholden him that was failing, and thou hast strengthened the feeble knees; but now it has come upon thee, and thou faintest." Shame, Eliphaz! What a bungler! A child had known better. What ails you? Do you not know this man needs tenderness, and not lectures and disquisitions in moralities? Can you not see his heart is breaking, and his eyes turn to you as if he were watching for the coming ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... when civility demanded it; and perhaps she was right, for who would care to look at me when Carrie was by? Then Carrie played, and I knew her exquisite touch would demand instant admiration. I was a mere bungler, a beginner beside her; she even sang a charming little chanson. No wonder Mrs. Thorne was delighted to secure such an accomplished person for her children's governess. The three little girls came in by-and-by—shy, awkward children, with their mother's black eyes, but without ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... wholesale disapprobation of living writers, so common and convenient, what does it do but injure all reverence for parents and teachers, when the young find out that the poet, who, as they were told, was a bungler and a charlatan, somehow continues to touch the purest and noblest nerves of their souls, and that the author who was said to be dangerous and unchristian, somehow makes them more dutiful, more earnest, more industrious, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... that he can use me to this end. For I tell you, friends," and the Doctor struck the table near him a mighty blow with his fist by way of emphasis, "that God can use no man who feels his own importance, and is inclined to take all the glory to himself. He is simply a weak-minded bungler, who gets into the way and frustrates whatever designs God might otherwise have worked ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... discovered in his room. More quick work! The amateur's method had been very simple. He knew that the loan had been made and the bonds sent to the bank. So he forged a check, certified it himself, and collected the securities. Of course, he was a bungler and took a ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... and it rests with me To say what kernel lies within its shell; It shall contain a man, a woman, a child, A dozen men and women if I will. So far the gods and I run neck and neck, Nay, so far I can beat them at their trade; I am no bungler—all the men I make Are straight limbed fellows, each magnificent In the perfection of his manly grace; I make no crook-backs; all my men are gods, My women, goddesses, in outward form. But there's my tether—I can go so far, And go no farther—at that point I stop, To curse the bonds that hold ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... will appreciate my culinary efforts. It is really discouraging, sir, after I have exhausted my skill in preparing a dish, to see the gentlemen devour it with as much unconcern as though it had been cooked by a mere bungler in ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... the privilege of bettering out condition if we have the brain and the industry to do it. Energy and intelligence come to the front, and have the right to be there. A skillful workman gets double the pay of a bungler, and deserves it. Of course there will always be rich and poor, and sick and sound, and I don't see how that can be changed. But no door is shut against ability, black or white. Before the year 2400 we shall have a chrome-yellow president and a black-and-tan secretary of the treasury. ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... cartridges, and was waiting for my new stock to arrive from England. If that were correct, they must get near enough to attack us with assegais. They are more dangerous so. I remembered what an old Boer had said to me at Buluwayo: "The Zulu with his assegai is an enemy to be feared; with a gun, he is a bungler." ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... last few weeks, and I like him. But the man who now writes the survey of foreign literature in the "Westminster Review" might have just read my book: this he cannot have done, or else he is a thorough bungler; for he (1) understands me only as representing the personal God (apparently the one in the clouds, as you once expressed it, a-straddle, riding) and leaving out everything besides; (2) that the last twenty-seven chapters of the book of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... A bungler even in its disgusting trade, And botching, patching, leaving still behind Something of which its masters are afraid, States to be curbed and thoughts to be confined, Conspiracy or congress to be made, Cobbling ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... easy as "playing upon this pipe," for which Hamlet gives Guildenstern such lucid directions. But this intelligent Me, who steps forward as the senior partner in our dual personality, turns out to be a terrible bungler. He misses those glancing hits which the hard-featured young professional person calls "carroms," and insists on pocketing his own ball instead of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... pretty hard, at first sight, to bring into a sermon all the Circles of the Globe and all the frightful terms of Astronomy; but I will assure you, Sir, it is to be done! because it has been. But not by every bungler and ordinary text-divider; but by a man of great cunning ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... then, that the coup was not premeditated. But why, why, had he let her escape so easily? If only he had been a little quicker about following her, and had not wasted time looking for Higgs! She had had time to get clear away; and he, bungler that he was, had thought it of little consequence, and had afterwards stood poring over a catalogue in the hall, having decided that her morals were no business of his. Ass that he ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... pulque. He claps 'em on the bar, eyes you a heap sooperior like he's askin' you to note what a acc'rate, high- grade barkeep he is, an' then raisin' his hand, he slats the pulque off his fingers into the two glasses. If he spatters a drop on the bar, it shows he's a bungler, onfit for his high p'sition, an' oughter be out on the hills tendin' goats instead of ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Mr. Conne. "I like the way you say it when you're mad. So that's why you didn't get off the ship in time last night, eh?" he added, with a touch of severity. "Watch slow! Bah! You're a bungler, Doc! First you let your watch get you into a tight place, then you let it give ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... against him, for Lord Etherington was elder hand. But how can fortune's favour secure any one who is not true to himself?—By an infraction of the laws of the game, which could only have been expected from the veriest bungler that ever touched a card, Lord Etherington called a point without showing it, and, by the ordinary rule, Mowbray was entitled to count his own—and in the course of that and the next hand, gained the game and swept the stakes. Lord Etherington showed chagrin and displeasure, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... shriek to him that he was a fool and a bungler; that throats were not to be cut in that fashion, with hackings and sawing at the gullet. Knew the clumsy fumbler nothing of big blood-vessels?... but he ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... find the cheating bungler," thought Richard, "who slighted that little shoe in making, I'd pile fortune upon him for the balance of his life. And to think I owe my Dorothy ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... that he had no talent for concealment; that he was a sad bungler in the management of any business which was not open and above-board. This impertinent, disagreeable little coxcomb of a New Yorker, without a warning sound to announce his coming, had suddenly stepped between him and Stumpy, who held the hidden treasure ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... from Plymouth last year, with her masts rolling about until her shrouds were like iron bars on one side and hanging in festoons upon the other? The meanest sloop that ever sailed out of France would have overmatched her, and then it would be on me, and not on this Devonport bungler, that a court-martial ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... readily extracted. Sweet acorns are selected. To get at their contents the acorns are carried to a convenient tree where a limb has been broken off, driven into a suitable crevice, split open, and the outer hull removed. Truly the California Woodpecker is no idler or bungler, nor is he a free-booter, like the noisy, roystering Jay. He makes an honest living, and provides for the evil day which comes ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... was a genius! Yes, what did I tell you? Your very words imply a comparison as you say them. For I?—what am I? A miserable bungler, a wretched dilettant—or have you another word for it? Oh, never mind—don't be afraid to say it!—I'm not sensitive tonight. I can bear to hear your real opinion of me; for it could not possibly be lower than my own. Let us get at ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... every fox and marten that he had caught. All known methods to catch or kill the animal were resorted to, but with the cunning that its prehistoric ancestors had handed down to it, it avoided every pitfall. The fox is a poor bungler compared with the wolverine. The result of all this was that Richard Gray had no fur in the spring with which to pay his debt ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... said the other, 'that you are, as I have told you already, a bungler and murderer, for is not my brother dead of your bleeding, and you ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... everything as if Perry were the guilty man. He would work with that idea always in mind. In the meantime he would go with Braceway as long as the Braceway theories seemed to have any foundation at all. He did not want to run the risk of being shown up as a bungler. He was anxious to be "in on" anything ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... taken in connection with the others, only supply us with a standard in the nature of this Being himself by which most of his acts are exhibited to us as those of a criminal madman. If he had been blind, he had not sin; but if we maintain that he can see, then his sin remains. Habitually a bungler as he is, and callous when not actively cruel, we are forced to regard him, when he seems to exhibit benevolence, as not divinely benevolent, but merely weak and capricious, like a boy who fondles a kitten and the next moment sets a dog at it, and not only does his moral character fall from him bit ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... interesting antiquarian inquiries respecting Caesar's ford at Kingston, and Maxims for an Angler, by a Bungler. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... these poisonous medicines from the system and get the Sexual Organs into proper condition to admit of a restorative treatment; and in still others the effect of our usually quick and thorough-going remedies were delayed and interfered with by the ignorance or botchwork of some quack or bungler, or the well-meant but stupid doctoring of some "family physician" who thinks himself competent to ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... first musician, for sincere truth instead of empty flattery. I want to find out from you if my boy has such genuine talent that you can make a really good musician of him." "Naturally, I was called on to play," says Moscheles, in his "Autobiography," "and I was bungler enough to do it with some conceit. My mother having decked me out in my Sunday best, I played my best piece, Beethoven's 'Sonata Pathetique.' But what was my astonishment on finding that I was neither interrupted by bravos nor overwhelmed by praise! ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... that she did not seem to tire of him: and he would often wonder what this lovely myth, so skilled and potent in arts wherein he was the merest bungler, could find to care for in Jurgen. For now they lived together like any other humdrum married couple, and their occasional exchange of endearments was as much a matter of course as their meals, and ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... swallowed up in the abyss of waters; wherein I had perished unseen, unpitied, without wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality, and none had said, Quantum mutatus ab illo! Not that I am ashamed of the anatomy of my parts, or can accuse nature for playing the bungler in any part of me, or my own vicious life for contracting any shameful disease upon me, whereby I might not call myself as wholesome a morsel for the ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... his official career and perhaps his life hung in the balance. To fail of arresting the desperado was to brand himself a bungler and to expose himself to the contempt of other sure-shot ruffians. However, having faced death many times in the desert and on the range, he advanced steadily, apparently undisturbed by ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... galleries, comparatively few people will ever see them. But if you are an artist in conversation, everyone who comes in contact with you will see your life-picture, which you have been painting ever since you began to talk. Everyone knows whether you are an artist or a bungler. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... a bungler. Leave it to me. I will find Lagardere for you and deal with him as he deserves ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... try to make up for Anna-Felicitas's shortcomings by a double zeal, a double willingness and cheerfulness. Anna-Felicitas was a born dreamer, a born bungler with her hands and feet. She not only never from first to last succeeded in filling the thirty hot-water bottles, which were her care, in thirty minutes, which was her duty, but every time she met a pail standing about she knocked against it and it ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... see how you meant to set about it' sighed John. 'But you know, Morris, you always were such a bungler.' ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... enjoying the stare of hostlers and stable-boys as I managed my horses knowingly down the steep street of Hempstead; when, just at the skirts of the village, one of the traces of my leader came loose. I pulled up; and as the animal was restive and my servant a bungler, I called for assistance to the robustious master of a snug ale-house, who stood at his door with a tankard in his hand. He came readily to assist me, followed by his wife, with her bosom half open, a child in her arms, and two more at her heels. I stared for ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... I'll not let thee go. I'm but a rude bungler in these women-ways, and I've said or done somewhat that wounds thee sorely, and I'll not let thee go till 't is all outsaid and I have once more cleared myself of at least willful ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... that tinker, Dobson? I would not trust such a bungler to shoe a goat. No, no; none but uncle Tom Thumper shall shoe ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... a thousand times more useful, Sally. I don't pretend to compare with you in the useful arts, and I am only a bungler in ornamental ones. Sally, I feel like a useless little creature. If I could go round as you can, and do business, and make bargains, and push ahead in the world, I should feel that I was good for something; but somehow ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... he indignantly exclaimed, advancing towards her with a threatening air. "What? Surely you must know! Your mother has destroyed your regard for the poor bungler. Here I stand! Have I kept my promise, yes or no? Have I become a monster, a venomous serpent? Do not look at me so again, do not! It will do no good; to you or me. I will not allow myself to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is doubtless yours," said Claparon, holding himself very straight and looking at Birotteau; "hey! you are not a bungler. None of the roses you distil can be compared with her; and perhaps it is because you have ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... be true, the boast of the Atheist, that God is wasteful and a bungler, in that he wastefully scatters his sunlight, and sun-heat, in all directions into space, is set at naught. Nature has been misinterpreted. No sunlight nor sun-heat is disclosed, except in the direction of ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... do his share. Education must (3) also give the individual training in technique, or the skill required in his different activities; not to do this is at best but to leave him a well-informed and well-intentioned bungler, ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... know how to treat the idiot. Never one to suffer fools gladly, he grew irritable and would almost certainly have said something that would have put the garrulous young bungler in his place, had not the latter suddenly remembered something, just as he was on the point ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre |
