"Dumbness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suspension of judgment; his knowledge of nature brings him nearer to the unchanging and consoling element in the world. All the quite happy entertainment which he gets out of life comes to him from his contemplation of the peasant, as himself a rooted part of the earth, translating the dumbness of the fields into humour. His peasants have been compared with Shakespeare's; that is, because he has the Shakespearean sense of their placid vegetation by the side of hurrying animal life, to which they act the part of chorus, with an unconscious wisdom in their close, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Orlando threw himself, and on the ground he remained, his eyes fixed on heaven, his lips closed in dumbness; and thus he continued for the space of three days and three nights, till his frenzy had mounted to such a pitch that it turned against himself. He then arose in fury, and tore off mail and breastplate, and every particle of clothing from his body, till humanity was degraded in ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... you have been readers of Tolstoi, you will see that I passed into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... in the belief, which may be erroneous, that nobody is wronged in these trades. The taciturn storekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement as Critturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a language that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency; he drops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee idiom; he knows very well when they mean to buy and when they do not; and they equally wary and equally silent, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Barbara was all eagerness in her desire to know everything about the work; and the surveyor, in answering her questions, found himself drawn out of the dumbness that usually beset him in ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... advantage of the opportunity. It was his disciple St. Antony who preached to the fishes, and there is a delicious picture in Padua showing all the fishes perking their heads out of the water and listening in devout dumbness, the very oysters open to conviction. Poor dear fishes! What a delightful change to receive from the upper world something else than hooks! What a sweet simple cloister hath this lonely monastery—a ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... with me upon a silent hill, When the last flush of the dissolving day Fainted before the moonlight, and, as 'twere Unconscious of my listening, uttered there The comprehensions of a soul true poised With elemental beauty, giving tongue Unto the dumbness of the blissful air. So have I seen him, too, within his home, When, newspaper on knee, his earnest gaze Seemed scanning issues from the money list; But comments came not, till my curious eye Led out his meditation into words, Thought-winding ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... empty now,—lay narrow and bare down the hill; the moon had set, and the snow-clouds were graying heavily the pale light above. Only the sharp call of a discordant trumpet broke the solitude and dumbness of the hills. A lonesome, foreboding night. The old man rested his hand on the fence, choking down an uncertain groan now and then, digging into the snow with his foot, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... this new prisoner. Of course Ithuel understood all that was said in English, while the very idea of being catechized in French threw him into a cold sweat. In this strait the idea suddenly crossed his mind that his greatest security would be in feigning dumbness. ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... is what I want to find out. The mission I have for you, Dave, is to watch Mulgrum. In a word, I have my doubts in regard to his deafness and his dumbness." ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... becoming acquainted with, and above all, which it was quite unnatural for him to repeat in his present position. He says, "Five friends have been in poor Tom at once: of lust, as Obidient; Hobbididance, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder; Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing; who since ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... they are again domesticated. The case of the wild dogs on the island of Juan Fernandez having become dumb has often been quoted, and there is reason to believe (130. Roulin, in 'Mem. present. par divers Savans' tome 6 page 341.) that the dumbness ensued in the course of thirty-three years; on the other hand, dogs taken from this island by Ulloa slowly reacquired the habit of barking. The Mackenzie-river dogs, of the Canis latrans type, when brought to England, never learned ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... family, yet there has been no relationship between the parents. In addition to the born deaf, measles, bronchitis, typhus, scarletina, and other diseases are the causes of deafness, and consequently dumbness. ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... seemed to him that the trampling roar grew louder every second, drowning into dumbness the crashing and grinding of the ice; and the volleying mist-clouds seemed to race up-stream to meet him. Then, with a sickening jump and turn of his heart, a hope came and shook him out of his stoicism. He saw that his ice-cake was sailing straight for a little rocky islet just above ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the kind the multitudes impose upon us by their weight and pressure, but the expression of the individual soul turning itself into a pure fire and imposing its own pattern, its own music, upon the heaviness and the dumbness that is in others and in itself. When we have drunk the cold cup of the moon's intoxication, we thirst for something beyond ourselves, and the mind flows outward to a natural immensity; but if we have drunk from the hot cup of the ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... evidence. Letters. House. 21st.—To-day not for the first time felt a great want of courage to express feelings strongly awakened on hearing a speech of O'Connell. To have so strong an impulse and not obey it seems unnatural; it seems like an inflicted dumbness. 28th.—Spoke 30 to 35 minutes on University bill, with more ease than I had hoped, having been more mindful or less unmindful of Divine aid. Divided in 75 v. 164. [To his father next day.] You will see by your Post that I held forth last night on the Universities bill. The House I am glad ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and had been conveyed into a dumbness of mystery, that fell upon her turmoil of spirit like a blow. What struck her as especially strange and unnatural was the fact that the men with whom she was sitting in the dim court of this lonely house had not looked at her, did ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... bath had already relieved her so much, that she proposed taking part in the torchlight procession that same evening with the twenty-seven members of her family whom she had brought with her to Lourdes. Then there was a woman afflicted with nervous aphonia, who after months of absolute dumbness had just recovered her voice at the moment when the Blessed Sacrament went by at the head of the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... suspected me, that they more than half guessed the nature of my errand at Cocheforet, and that they were not minded to be bound by Mademoiselle's orders. In particular, I augured the worst from Clon's appearance. His lean malevolent face and sunken eyes, his very dumbness chilled me. ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... interrupted the silence; the sea did not break upon the shore; no bird or any living thing was visible; the midnight sun, by this time muffled in a transparent mist, shed an awful, mysterious lustre on glacier and mountain; no atom of vegetation gave token of the earth's vitality: an universal numbness and dumbness seemed to pervade the solitude. I suppose in scarcely any other part of the world is this appearance of deadness so strikingly exhibited. On the stillest summer day in England, there is always perceptible an under-tone of life thrilling through the atmosphere; and though no breeze ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... tones; "and thou would'st not create a pang in my heart? Then never seek to learn wherefore, when at the still tender age of fifteen, I resolved upon consummating so dreadful a sacrifice as to affect dumbness. The circumstances were, indeed, solemnly grave and strangely important, which demanded so awful a martyrdom. But well did I weigh all the misery and all the peril that such a self-devotion was sure to entail upon me. I knew that I must exercise the most stern—the most remorseless—the most inflexible ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... reigning conventionalities. The rigidity of behavior which at this time characterized the Bostonians seemed sometimes ludicrous and sometimes disagreeable to the foreign visitor. There was great gravity, together with a certain pomp and dumbness, and these things were supposed to be natural to the inhabitants and to give them joy. People are apt to forget that such masks are never worn with ease. They result from the application of an inflexible will, and always inflict discomfort. The Transcendentalists found themselves all ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Confederacy refolded the note and put it in his pocket. Presently he rose and left the church and Prescott followed him. An hour later Richmond was stricken into a momentary dumbness, soon followed by the chattering of many voices. The city, the capital, was to be given up. General Lee had written that the Southern army could no longer defend it, and advised the immediate departure of the Government, which was now packing up, ready to take flight ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... with astonishment. Common minds, always impressed by noisy demonstrations, that is to say, by cries and tears, are unable to understand a mute sorrow. Dumbness to them means indifference. She was therefore astonished at the calmness with which Amelie received the message she was charged to deliver. She did not see in the dimness of the twilight that Amelie's face from being pale grew livid. ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... silence of the innumerable, gray stones and monstrous rocks which try to speak to us like creatures once eloquent and possessing the knowledge of wondrous changes, and the key to problems that everlastingly distress the human mind, but on which the curse of dumbness has lain for ages! ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker |
