"Mindless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... certain, however, that the relations between Lincoln and Miss Todd were broken off for a time. He did go to Kentucky for a while, but this trip certainly was not due to insanity. Lincoln was never so mindless as some of his biographers would have us believe, and the breaking of the engagement was due to perfectly natural causes—the difference in temperament of the lovers, and Lincoln's inclination to procrastinate. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... which was sure to foster egotism. These were constitutional elements of that aloofness from men which characterised all his utterance. These disposing causes became inexorable fate, when, by the turn of the political wheel of fortune, he found himself alone amid the mindless dissipation and reckless materialism of the Restoration. He felt himself then at war with human society as constituted around him, and was thus driven to withdraw himself within a poetic world of his ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... subjects which interested him the most deeply, he had found May Webster a ready pupil; and when she differed from him she held her own with such merry defiance, that it gave her an added charm in his eyes. And now this mindless, fox-hunting squire was to carry her off, and life at Rudham would sink into one dead level of dulness. Thus it happened that he came ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... dazzling snow-mist shone. No church-bell lent its Christian tone To the savage air, no social smoke Curled over woods of snow-hung oak. A solitude made more intense By dreary-voiced elements, The shrieking of the mindless wind, The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind, And on the glass the unmeaning beat Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet. Beyond the circle of our hearth No welcome sound of toil or mirth Unbound the spell, and ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... drugging or bludgeoning, but it would be racial suicide to attempt it. In the split moment of realization he would kill every human being on Earth. There would be nobody left to operate on his brain, to make him a mindless, powerless idiot for the rest of time. For any period of time, he corrected himself. His brain would ...
— The Mightiest Man • Patrick Fahy
... as his strength increases. Give him interest in his future; light a star for him to fix his eyes on. So that, when he steps out of hospital, you shall not have to begin to train one who for months, perhaps years, has been living, mindless and will-less, the life ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... when she reaches New York. No emotional experience would leave a blur on her radiant youth, because love for her is a sensation, not a sentiment. By indirect and cumulative touches the novelist evokes for us her image. Truly a lovely apparition, almost mindless, with great sympathetic eyes and a sweet mouth. She exists, does Undine. She is not the barren fruit of a satirical pen. Foreigners, both men and women, puzzle over her freedom, chilliness, and ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... moderation, viz.—his continuance in power, and their own exclusion from it. Such a Minister must possess a large share of fortitude, careless of its exhibition, and often exposing him to the charge of insensibility, as he moves steadily on amongst disaffected supporters and desperate opponents, mindless equally of taunts, threats, reproaches, and misrepresentations. He must resolve to bide his time, while his well-matured measures are slowly developing themselves, relying on the conscious purity of his motives. Such a man as this the country will prize ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... felt it a relief when he ceased to be capable of watching the progress of it himself: his misery at least was over. Thereafter he slipped into perfect mindlessness, happy and harmless, but hopelessly mindless and vacant. Meantime, Lady Louisa Moor made a very brilliant marriage to a marquis, the eldest son of a duke, the account of which Mary Brunton read in the newspapers while watching her brother's face with its meaningless smile. How her heart swelled! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... characterises the conduct of modern institutes of education reduces us all to one mindless level, reproducing ad nauseam what is known as 'average citizens.' This nation is already crawling with them; art, religion, letters, government, business, human ideals remain embryonic because ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... teleology. This objection, it will be remembered, was, that it is as impossible to conceive of cosmic harmony as an effect of Mind [i.e. Mind being what we know it in experience to be], as it is to conceive of it as an effect of mindless evolution. The argument from inconceivability, therefore, admits of being turned with quite as terrible an effect on Theism, as it can possibly be made ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... some consolations," I replied, "since the mindless do not suffer. But if such is the case, how do you account for what you and poor Savage saw that night in the Town of the Child? It was not altogether a phantasy, for the dress you described was the same we saw her wearing at the Feast ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... will I care for the unshared sigh, If in my fear of lapse or fall, Close I have clung to Christ through all, Mindless how rough the road might lie, Sure He will smoothen ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... attention was riveted on an object up the street. Around a bend a few hundred yards away a huge wild devil of a thing swung unsteadily, recklessly, almost striking the curb and lamp-post; and then, righting itself, it came on with a rush—a mindless destroyer. Now on one side of the street, now in the middle, now on the other side; gliding along through the twilight, barely to be seen, creeping nearer and nearer through the shadows, now again on the wrong side of the street where it would not ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... you, then, she is practically mindless," remarked Shotwell, ironically. "You medically minded gentlemen are ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... He had never heard precisely that tone from her before. One word from Douglas and she had become a zombie—a mindless muscle preparation that existed only to obey. Anger filled him—anger that one he loved could be ordered by someone who wasn't worth a third of her—anger that she obeyed—anger at his own impotence and frustration. It wasn't a clean anger. It was ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... Hsueeh did not budge an inch or a step from their side. They sat round them, and did nothing but cry. Chia She and Chia Cheng too were a prey, at this juncture, to misgivings lest weeping should upset dowager lady Chia. Day and night oil was burnt and fires were, mindless of expense, kept alight. The bustle and confusion was such that no one, either master ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... love? Thy own warm blush within the water glows, With thee the coloured shadow comes and goes, Its empty being on thyself relies; 40 Step thou aside, and the frail charmer dies. Still o'er the fountain's watery gleam he stood, Mindless of sleep, and negligent of food; Still viewed his face, and languished as he viewed. At length he raised his head, and thus began To vent his griefs, and tell the woods his pain. 'You trees,' says he, 'and thou surrounding grove, Who oft have ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... to think. They were all but mindless. Whatever they might be able to do in reference to worldly matters, they were unable to think, to compare doctrine with doctrine, or to reason in any respect whatever on religious matters. One young man, a candidate for the ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... not, my little one. I shall be back sooner than the daisies close." Then he turned to me again. I noticed a pallid, desperate look in his face, as though he were strung to great effort; but it was the face of a mindless one still. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... they say. It doesn't. In reality it is a cut and dried subject easy to fit into a school curriculum. Its sacrosanctity saves educationalists an enormous amount of trouble, and its chief use is to enable mindless young men from the universities to make a dishonest living by teaching it to others, who in their turn may teach it to ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... then shall give her doom; And, sever'd wide, the tenants of the tomb Shall seek their portions with instinctive haste, Quick as the savage speeds along the waste. Then shall the golden hoard its trust betray, And they, that, mindless of that dreadful day, Boasted their wealth, its vanity shall know In the dread avenue of endless woe: While they whom moderation's wholesome rule Kept still unstain'd in Virtue's heavenly school, Who the calm sunshine of the ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... which all who look may now behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation. Science, whom erstwhile we thought a very Angel of God, pointing to that great barrier of Law, and proclaiming to the restless sea of changing doubt, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed,"—even Science has now herself thrown ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... three assumptions could be planted? Nature, according to his picturing, is base and cruel: what is the inference to be drawn regarding its Author? If Nature be 'red in tooth and claw,' who is responsible? On a Mindless nature Mr. Martineau pours the full torrent of his gorgeous invective; but could the 'assumption' of 'an Eternal Mind'—even of a Beneficent Eternal Mind—render the world objectively a whit less mean and ugly than it is? Not an iota. It is man's feelings, and not ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... we loved, And mindless at last we died; And deep in the rift of a Caradoc drift We slumbered side by side. The world turned on in the lathe of time, The hot sands heaved amain, Till we caught our breath from the womb of death, And ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... the mistake of projecting into the animal mind all our emotions and complicated trains of thought. Thus Schwammerdam apparently credits the snail with remorse for the commission of excesses. Others go to the other extreme and make animals hardly more than mindless automata. We are warned, therefore, by our very mode of study, to be cautious, not too absolutely sure of our results, nor indignant at others who may take a very different view. And yet by moving cautiously and accepting only ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... injury. But, Bruce, if that evil green moon blazes on for twenty-four hours more, the brain powers of Earth's millions will be forever shattered. So weakened will they be by then that recovery will be impossible even with the rays shut off, and the entire planet will be populated only by mindless imbeciles, readily available material for the myriads of monstrous hybrids that the invaders will create ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... unutterable folly of freedom, and control the breeding of human flesh as we control the output of beef and of mutton. Then the face of the world will alter. Millions of money is annually spent in order that mindless humanity, congenital lunatics and madmen, may be fed and housed and kept alive. Their existences are to themselves less pleasurable than that of the beasts, they are a source of agony to those who have borne them; but ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... command thee to obey me! it is for vengeance that I seek thee! This youth whom I would sweep from my path has crossed me, despite my spells:—this thing of purple and broidery, of smiles and glances, soulless and mindless, with no charm but that of beauty—accursed be it!—this insect—this Glaucus—I tell thee, by Orcus and by Nemesis, he ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... mist into the mirk The glimmering combers roll. Almost these mindless waters work As though they had a soul— Almost as though they leagued to whelm Our flag beneath their green Then welcome Fate's discourtesy Whereby it shall be ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... Stream Hasted unceasingly, Mindless of shade or gleam, Onward increasingly,— Widening, deepening Its rocky bed ever, That it might thus take in River by river;— And I said,—"Patient Stream, Hasting through shade and gleam, Careless of noontide beam, Loitering never, So ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining) |
