Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Stolidity   Listen
Stolidity

noun
1.
Apathy demonstrated by an absence of emotional reactions.  Synonyms: emotionlessness, impassiveness, impassivity, indifference, phlegm, unemotionality.
2.
An indifference to pleasure or pain.  Synonyms: stoicism, stolidness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Stolidity" Quotes from Famous Books



... relief—the conscious predominance in the Greek games of that element of poetry and art which is either not present at all in modern sport or at best is a happy accessory of chance. The modern man, and especially the Englishman, addicts himself to athletics, as to other avocations, with a certain stolidity of gaze on the immediate end which tends to confine him to the purely physical view of his pursuit. The Greek, an artist by nature, lifted his not less strenuous sports into an air of finer sentiment, touched them with the poetry of legend and the grace of art and song, and even to his most ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... stolidity and indifference of despair, however, he endured it all, sleeping in an attic at the roof of the house, eating what the cook gave him, accepting a few dollars a week, which he tried to save. His constitution was in no shape ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser

... he rebelled at the flourishes which embellished that form of handwriting. He seemed to divine somehow that such penmanship could not be useful or practicable for after life, and so, with that Dutch stolidity that, once fixed, knows no altering, he refused to copy his writing lessons. Of course trouble immediately ensued between Edward and his teacher. Finding herself against a literal blank wall—for Edward ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok

... in the school seemed flat and poor, except perhaps Johnny's, which steadily improved. Robert, whose father wished him to be pushed on so as to be fit for examination for Sandhurst, opposed, to all pressure, the passive resistance of stolidity. He was nearly sixteen, but seemed incapable of understanding that compulsory studies were for his good and not a cruel exercise of tyranny. He disdainfully rejected an offer from his aunt to help him in the French and ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... theory is one of the best that has ever been gotten up by the champions of nescience, and is worthy of a statement in the Journal as quite an improvement on the common expression of materialistic stolidity. He claims that he does not deny immortality, but he recognizes no immortality of man—no human soul. He recognizes only the immortality of the world, such as it is, which nobody denies. The future life of man he considers nothing but an illusion, though there is an immortality ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various

... stupidity. And it is a fact that the worst shocks of life are often received without outcries, without gestures, without a flow of tears and the convulsions of sobbing. The insatiable governess missed these signs exceedingly. This pitiful stolidity was only a fresh provocation. Yet the poor girl ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... injunction, when the habit of thinking before he spoke closed his half-opened lips. Immediately, his face assumed the obstinate, expressionless look which made those who searched no deeper than the surface pronounce him a dull boy. Rutford, for instance, interpreted this stolidity as unintelligence and lack of perception. John, meantime, was struggling with a thought which shaped itself slowly into a plan of action. He had just heard Lovell lie to save the Caterpillar. John knew well enough ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell

... domicile, composed of grass, twigs, and moss, but without mortar. The shy owner was nowhere to be seen, nor did she make any outcry, even though I stood for some minutes close to her nest. What stolidity the mountain birds display! You could actually rob the nests of some of them without wringing a chirp from them. On two later visits to the place I found Madame Thrush on her nest, where she sat until I came ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser

... and his father to entertain one another on the quarter-deck. The two children amused themselves very well talking to Alphonse, the steersman, and Adolphe, the engineer, thick-set, thick-witted men, who combined the picturesqueness of organ-grinders with the stolidity of agriculturalists; Nature had plainly intended them for the plough, and Circumstance had pitched ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... been German——a lady-in-waiting to one of the German princesses; and their father had met her and married her while he was secretary at the English Embassy in St. Petersburg. And Susie, who had heard of German philosophy and German stolidity, and despised them both with all her heart, concluded that the German strain was accountable for everything about Peter and Anna that was beyond her comprehension; and sometimes, when Peter was more than usually wise and unapproachable, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... Evreux (for a consideration), which Markham refused, an the two companions took to the road and soon passed out of sight, leaving the group of peasants staring after them, still mystified as to the whole occurrence and wondering with Norman stolidity whether Hermia was mad or just ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... second time what was her errand up there—whether she was following the man, or had suspected that he would be there—she shook her head vaguely and took refuge behind the stolidity ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... the dance. When he sat down the animal was still in him, but care again had clouded his brow. I think our early ancestors must have been much like Landers in this dance, strong, and merry for the time, seeking the woman in pleasures, fiery in movement for the nonce, and relapsing into stolidity. I can see why Landers, who takes what he will of womankind in these islands, still dominates in the trading, and bends most people his way. The animal way is the way here. The way of the city, of mere subtlety, of avoidance of issues, of intellectual control, is not the way ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... glasses, glasses with straws sticking in them, and glasses partially filled with bits of ice. Bar-keepers in spotless white linen prepared the famous American drinks, innumerable in variety, with a dexterity bordering on art and a stolidity out of which nothing ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... still not wholly satisfied. His complete stolidity frustrated every effort she made to penetrate ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... gracefulness of peasant life; even so, and perhaps more, Luigi Pulci must have had a deliberate intention of producing a ludicrous effect; in both cases the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the "Nencia da Barberino" from the genius of Lorenzo, in the "Morgante Maggiore" from the stolidity of Pulci. The "Morgante," of which parts were probably written as a mere sample to amuse a supper party, became interesting to Pulci, in the mere matter of inventing and stringing together new incidents; and despite its ludicrous passages, it must have been more ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... hours, without any loss whatever? For the soldiers of the North, in this disastrous series of blunders, fought with constancy and courage. Beaten day after day by unfailing troops in strong works, they ever came again straight at those impregnable positions, against which obstinate stolidity, or blind rage for blood, drove them to the slaughter. Hancock's men especially seemed to catch inspiration from their chivalric leader. Broken and beaten at the Wilderness—decimated at Spottsylvania, they still were ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... Hepsy with a business-like stolidity inexplicable to Carrie Goldthwaite's warm heart, "an' she's left two children, which Josh an' me'll hev to take, I reckon, seein' their parents is both dead now. We'd a letter to-day from the minister there—Mr. Penn ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan

... Thrusty Ellen accepted this information with much stolidity. The grandeur of having old silver made no impression on them. They saw that Grandma Padgett had one pair of horses hitched to her moving-wagon instead of three pairs, and they secretly rated her resources by ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... the great cross at the foot of which we were standing, and straightway bent the knee and crossed himself. Some few of the Indians likewise made the sign upon their breasts, though the greater part contained themselves with the same stolidity that had marked them ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock

... their soldiers. These outdid the best traditions of their race. At command they threw their lives away as a man throws away a trifle, and to meet new conditions they developed new qualities with which they have not previously been credited, qualities of stubborn scientific stolidity. They out-Germaned the Germans in the way their organization withstood the shock and wrack of battle. It was the German machine which broke down first. On that field a new France was born. Let no German ever again say that she is effete. It was purely a French victory. ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood

... having held high posts, some in the cabinet, for nearly a quarter of a century, he was too versed to acknowledge that he had not understood a single word that had been addressed to him for the last ten minutes. He looked on with the same grave, attentive stolidity, occasionally nodding his head, as he was wont of yore when he received a deputation on sugar duties or joint-stock banks, and when he made, as was his custom when particularly perplexed, an occasional note on ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought. Yet as she looked at him curiously he seemed quite commonplace and usual. He was a tall, dark workingman of the better class, with a sensitive face trained to stolidity and a poor man's clothes and hands. His face was soft and slow and his manner at once cold and nervous, like fires long banked, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... trial the prisoner had remained silent in his chair, with a stolidity that aroused no sympathy for him. Not once was he seen to lift his eyes to the judge; and but once, when Tess was being maligned by Dominie Graves, did the bible-back rise and fall as if the heart beneath were beating wildly. Skinner had not been allowed to testify in his own defense, ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... Merritt whom she had known, and in her place was a queen with a crown! She smiled at her reflection and nodded. For once she was swayed from her stillness and stolidity. She loaded her long hands with rings, and held them to her cheeks; then, struck by the contrast of her white linen sleeve, she rummaged in one of the big closets, and threw on the bed ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey

... thing?' inquired Ralph, with as much stolidity of face, as if he really were in utter ignorance of the ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... despite their apparent stolidity—in contradiction to the ideas of the closet naturalist and his theory of animal ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... care, and refer to their origin, associations and purposes, the historical and economical national facts are revealed with the utmost clearness and unity. The old Bastile represented, in its gloomy stolidity, the whole tragedy of the Revolution; and St. Genevieve combines the holy memories of the early church with that of the first French kings; the site of a fosse commune attests the valor of republican martyrs; the Champs Elysees are the popular earthly fields ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... as if he had suddenly caught sight of someone cutting the covenant 'for quiet possession' out of his legal documents; or of a monster lurking and stalking out in the future, casting its shadow before. Their want of stolidity, their want of reverence! It was like discovering that nine-tenths of the people of England were foreigners. And if that were so—then, anything ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... mortal anguish in the field, the cries of human sorrow in the city, the shrieks of mothers that lacked sons, the greetings of wives whose loves 'came coffined home.' And he does not mind aggravating the intense selfishness, and narrowness, and stolidity of these private passions and affections of the individual to a truly unnatural and diabolical intensity, by charging on poor Volumnia and Marcius his own reminiscences; as if they could have dared to heighten their joy at that moment by counting its cost—as if they could have ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... than that," said Mr. Murch with professional stolidity. "I happened to be on leave with the Missus at Halvey, which is only twelve mile or so along the coast. As soon as our people there heard of the murder they told me. I wired to the Chief, and was put in charge of the case at once. I bicycled over yesterday evening, and ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley

... have taken the burn from his skin, but with patient, bovine eyes looking out heavily from under half-closed lids. He breathed jerkily, but he neither cried out nor groaned. There was something almost brutal and inhuman in his absolute stolidity. He asked no sympathy, for his life had been without it. It was a broken tool ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the plates had been generally cleared, and the boys sat staring with the stolidity of repletion at one another across the tables, the junior house-master, Mr. Tinkler, made his appearance. He had lately left a small and little-known college at Cambridge, where he had contrived, contrary to expectation, to evade the uncoveted wooden spoon ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... something, though they were waiting for different things. Mr. Roy put his hands behind him, balanced himself on his toes, hoped that Captain Benyon had enjoyed his cruise,—though he should n't care much for the navy himself,—and evidently wondered at the stolidity of his wife's visitor. Benyon knew he was speaking, for he indulged in two or three more observations, after which he stopped. But his meaning was not present to our hero. This personage was conscious of only one thing, of his own momentary power,—of everything that hung on his lips; all the rest ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James

... had frequently turned my eyes toward the prime minister, and had been much impressed by his apparent stolidity. When he presented his arm to the lady mayoress, when he walked with her, and during all the time at table, he seemed much like a wooden image galvanized into temporary life. When he rose to speak, there ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... the shoulder as he spoke, and once more the Indian subsided into a state of stolidity, as if there were nothing the matter and he was ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn

... her dining-room windows commanded as comprehensive a view of the next house as did the front steps, and after a time her housewifely duty so far prevailed over her indignation at the man's unwholesome stolidity that she followed him down the hall to preside over the meal, not, however, to partake largely ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington

... it to be wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood in danger of being thawed in the sunshine of Lit-lit's eyes. She was pretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive face and temperamental stolidity of the average squaw. "Lit-lit," so called from her fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting about from place to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent and merry, and of laughing as lightly as she ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London

... contradictory types of people among the inhabitants of this land. On the one hand, a people of massive and solid build, a slow-moving people of firm, primitive nature, that for all their calm stolidity may give out a fiery ring if struck, and will fearlessly follow the lure of Adventure or of Right. On the other hand, a race of soft and flexible build, of shifting and elusive mind, alert to speak and slow to act, of rainbow temperament, fascinating and uncertain. Other types there may be, ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... trade goods after a successful season at the southern camps, they must wait until the shifting ice pack settles and the winter hunting begins. Such enforced inaction is irksome to the Eskimo, who does not partake of the stolidity of the Indian, but like a nervous child must be continually employed or amused. So this festival, which is of a purely social ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes

... were men of great strength but little alertness; the stray glimpses I had had of them, revealing a breadth of back that was truly formidable, if it had not been joined to a heaviness of motion that proclaimed a certain stolidity of mind that was ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green

... headache, noises and roaring sounds in the ears, the eyes may be blood-shot and watery, weak or painful, the patient imagines bright spots or flashes passing before them, and there may be partial blindness. There is increasing stolidity of expression, the eye is without sparkle, and the face becomes blotched and animal-like in its expression. The victim is careless of his personal appearance, not unscrupulously neat, and not unfrequently a rank odor exhales ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... the members of the Wild West company entered special coaches and were whirled toward London. Then even the stolidity of the Indians was not proof against sights so little resembling those to which they had been accustomed, and they showed their pleasure and appreciation by frequent repetition of ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore

... having reeled round with a thousand oaths, to the manifold amusement of the crowd, he suddenly began to smoke like a Prussian. Nothing could be more admirable than the look of complacent and pompous stolidity with which he accompanied each puff of his pipe. The applause was continued; and the one-eyed Bohemian serjeant, delighted at the ridicule which was heaped on his military rival, actually ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... purely agricultural, is the result of the industry and intellect of the men who till the soil. In Devonshire and Somersetshire we are charmed by the scenery, and amazed by the rich fertility of the soil, while we are amazed by the stolidity of the farmers and their labourers—nay, sometimes of the landlords—whose two ideas are comprised in doing what their forefathers did, and in hating every innovation. There fences, guano, pair-horse ploughs, threshing machines, and steam-engines, are almost as much ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... reckless, but she came in a very good second-best in most of the harum-scarum escapades. She could always be relied upon for support, could keep a secret, and had a peculiarly convenient knack of baffling awkward questions by putting on an attitude of utter stolidity. When her eyes were half-closed under their heavy lids, and her mouth wore what the girls called its "John Bull" expression, not even Miss Beasley herself could drag information out of Aveline. The Sphinx, as she was sometimes nicknamed, prided herself on her accomplishment, ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... air of indifference, as if hunting Whigs were much the same to him as cleaving firewood. He did his duty with a stupid unconcern which successfully imposed on the soldiers; and as soon as they allowed him to go, he fell to his wood-chopping with the same stolidity and rustic boorishness ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... spoke to the youth and the girl in her native tongue. They listened quietly; Oteo with an almost expressionless stolidity of face, but with his soft, dog-like eyes fixed upon his mistress; Eena with heaving breast and trembling limbs. When Lylda paused they both fell upon their knees before her. She put her hands upon their heads and smiling wistfully, ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... a bit clashy," said the man, with stolidity, stopping to spit into his hands a moment, before ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... intensified in each generation, by shaking our fists in the face of a little baby, to see whether it will wink or shrink or shriek? Some children may be more fearless than others, but whether that fearlessness arises from ignorance or from stolidity is again by no means easy to determine. A burnt child fears the fire, an unburnt child might boldly grasp a glowing coal, but all this would not help us to determine whether fear is an innate or an acquired tendency ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller

... observing the Indian. Peigan Charley's bovine stare changed swiftly as the white chief whom he regarded above all men gave his decision. Its stolidity had given way to incredulity, and Bill found in it a ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... Stareleigh—upon every occasion that we saw him, one of the Reader's most whimsical impersonations. The little judge—described in the book as "all face and waistcoat"—was presented to view upon the platform as evidently with no neck at all (to speak of), and as blinking with owl-like stolidity whenever he talked, which he always did under his voice, and with apparently a severe cold in the head. On the night more particularly referred to, Sam Weller, being at the moment in the witness-box, had just replied to the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... Mr. Bult observed, with his usual phlegmatic stolidity, "Your pianist does not think small beer ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... Her stolidity of manner and her logic, ponderous and irresistible, had their effect. His big, green eyes seemed to ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... bred reflection; one could put anything one liked into the picture with a certainty of its fitting the frame. We were putting a certain amount of regret into it; for though Villerville has seen us depart with civilized indifference or the stolidity of the barbarian—for they are one, we found our own attainments in the science of unfeelingness deficient: to look down upon the village from the next hill top was like ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... hold its own. Here are small, fierce, helpless nations overrun and outraged into a chronic state of secret ever-ready hatred. Here are innocent, small countries, defenceless through their position and size. Here is France rich, careless, super-modern and cynic. Here is England comfortable to stolidity, prosperous and secure to dullness in her own half belief in a world civilization, which no longer argues in terms of blood and steel. And here—in a well-entrenched position in the midst of it all—within ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... with any such feeling for their art, though at the same time they were not enthusiastic. A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... public did not exhibit the unbounded hilarity which marked that of their predecessors. The audience looked on quietly, and even with stolidity. There was nothing to excite laughter, and since the figures were slavish repetitions, it became monotonous. Some of the spectators withdrew to their houses, and those who remained belonged to the cliffs, whence they had come to witness the rite, as ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... supporters in the neighbourhood, where he completely broke down, and wept with a bitterness which evoked the active sympathy of those present. But this mood did not last. It was succeeded by a sullenness and stolidity such as had never before been observed in him. He knew that he had been beaten unfairly, and resolved to petition against the election. Meanwhile his rage against the party which had been concerned in his defeat was ungovernable, and must have vent. He ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... its elements were every place talking, in pairs or in little knots of people. As he came along, these fell silent at his passing. They stared at him, motionless, expressionless, with the characteristic Mexican stolidity that is the heritage of Indian blood. By his automobile he found Martinez posted, stroking his long black mustache and regarding Sorenson's office, which was still lighted though the curtain remained drawn over the ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd

... corner as if somebody had touched a spring. He seemed to be of the opinion that if you are a cyclone, it is never too soon to begin behaving like one. He danced round the Kid with an india-rubber agility. The Cosy Moments representative exhibited more stolidity. Except for the fact that he was in fighting attitude, with one gloved hand moving slowly in the neighbourhood of his stocky chest, and the other pawing the air on a line with his square jaw, one would have said that he did not realise the position ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... the image, and expected to see Mary Ann smile in response. He was disappointed when she did not; it was not only that her stolidity made his humour seem feeble—he half wanted to see how she looked when ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... be governed. Such absolute callousness to the feelings which govern the majority of mankind as we read of every now and then in the trial of some desperate criminal, is not infrequently associated with abnormally low intelligence, the sodden stolidity of the traditional criminal type. Where it appears, as it sometimes does, in criminals of high intelligence, it is regarded by psychiatrists as a specific abnormality, comparable to color-blindness ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... In consequence of their being some little way behind the others, Maggie did not at once know of the fact of Flower's disappearance with the baby. She was naturally a slow girl; ideas came to her at rare intervals; she even received startling and terrible news with a certain outward stolidity and calm. Still, Maggie was not an altogether purposeless and thoughtless maiden; thoughts occasionally drifted her way; ideas, when once born in her heart, were slow to die. When affection took root there it became a very sturdy plant. If there was any one in the world whom Maggie adored, ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade

... too stolid to weep for her husband. But even her stolidity was not proof against the fiery influence of jealousy, and, waking and sleeping, her visions were of veiled damsels of Orient assailing the too inflammable ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... presently engaged in a frightful duel. The white legs of the gunners scampered this way and that way, and the officers redoubled their shouts. The guns, with their demeanours of stolidity and courage, were typical of something infinitely self-possessed in this clamour of death ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... (Sends a glance to the Vaynor man, who tries vainly to combine a mouthful of ice pudding, a smirk of self-satisfaction, a glare of intense devotion, and the stolidity of a British ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling

... wrought with the kaleidoscopic transformations in Europe and America, China appears the most stationary of nations. She has moved less in centuries than western peoples have in decades. The restless Anglo-Saxon is alternately irritated and awed by this massive solidity, not to say stolidity. There is, after all, something impressive about it, the impressiveness of a mighty glacier which moves, indeed, but so slowly and majestically that the duration of an ordinary nation's life appears insignificant as compared with the ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... help admiring the calm stolidity with which the two men bore what must have been a painful operation, for neither flinched, but sat in turn gazing at his messmate, as much as to say, "That's the way to take it, ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn

... their work to make sure of their perquisites,—the poor robes which they stripped from His body. Thus gently Matthew hints at the ignominy of exposure attendant on crucifixion, and gives the measure of the hard stolidity of the guards. Gain had been their first thought, comfort was their second. They were a little tired with their march and their work, and they had to stop there on guard for an indefinite time, with nothing to do but two more prisoners to crucify: so they take a rest, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... fire dropped out of his eyes as he turned with his usual stolidity to where Li Tee was lying. Him he shook, saying briefly: "Boston boy come back!" But there was no reply, the dead body rolled over inertly under his hand; the head fell back, and the jaw dropped under the ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte

... court in Melbourne, that a Chinaman was summoned for being in possession of a tenement unfit for human habitation. The case was clearly proved, and he was fined L1. But in no way could John be made to understand that a fine had been inflicted. He sat there with unmoved stolidity, and all that the court could extract from him was: "My no savvy, no savvy." After saying this in a voice devoid of all hope, he sank again into silence. Here rose a well-known lawyer. "With your worship's permission, I think I can make the Chinaman understand," he said. He was ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison

... an indefinite tweed suit, carrying brown-paper parcels. That is what we met suddenly, at the bend of a muddy Dorsetshire lane, and the roan mare stared and obviously thought of a curtsey. The mare is road-shy, with intervals of stolidity, and there is no telling what she will pass and what she won't. We call her Redford. That was my first meeting with Judkin, and the next time the circumstances were the same; the same muddy lane, the same rather apologetic figure in the tweed suit, ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)

... the house were admitted. Mrs Obadiah Snedecker, the buxom wife of 'mine host,' was famous for the exquisite way in which she cooked veal cutlets. There were two niggers in the establishment, named Steve and Dick, who accompanied the gentlemen in their angling excursions, amusing them with their stolidity and the enormous quantity of gin they could imbibe without being ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... him; the train officials were civil and incurious, and went calmly about their business with all the traditional stolidity of ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... returned to the kitchen and turned on one of the taps. For perhaps three seconds a stream of the dimension of a darning-needle emerged, then with a sad gurgle the tap relapsed into a stolid inaction. There is no stolidity so utter as that of ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... he demanded in Ojibway. "Where you get your blankets? Where you get your grub? How you make the Long Trail? What you do when we go far and fast? What we do with you now?" Then meeting nothing but the stolidity with which the Indian always conceals pain, he flung her ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White

... with my sister; and I really do believe (to this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel), that if these hands could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise-cart, they would have done it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of mind, that he could not discuss my prospects without having me before him,—as it were, to operate upon,—and he would drag me up from my stool (usually by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and, putting me before the fire as if I were going to be cooked, would begin by ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... used by our Highlanders, light blue pantaloons fitting closely their thick short leg, and boots which rose above the ankle, and laced in front. The prevailing expression on their broad swarthy faces was not ferocity, but stolidity. Their eyes were dull, and contrasted strikingly with the dark fiery glances of the children of the land. They seemed men of appetites rather than passions; and, if guilty of cruel deeds, were likely to be so from the dull, cold, unreflecting ferocity of the bull-dog, rather than ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... makes fools look foolisher fifty-fold By putting in their place the wise like you, To take the full force of an argument Would buffet their stolidity in vain." ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... greatly affected by the thrilling account; but her phlegmatic husband listened to the recital with a stolidity which betrayed either a strange indifference or a wonderful control over his ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... apparently saw little such assurance in the thin pale cheeks, and feeble, recumbent form; for his face twitched all over, resumed the same sullen stolidity, and was bent ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... in time to learn that the very coach in which he rode brought the news to the authorities there that all intercourse between the two nations was indefinitely suspended. The characteristic taciturnity and formal stolidity of his fellow-travellers—all Englishmen, mutually unacquainted with each other, and occupying different positions in life—having prevented his sooner ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... often deceive themselves as to the character of other shrewd people. The difficulty was quite different. It was a peculiar sort of stolidity on the part of Mr. Shanks, for which she ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... mission throughout the book; he is an unconscious Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some unintentional ad absurdum, always bringing him back to the world of fact and commonplace by force of sheer stolidity. ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... limping, nursing their bruises, while Hansen, his stolidity momentarily vanished in the rush of the fight and not yet regained, exhibited an unusual vocabulary as he bossed them. Lund turned to the two hunters, ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn

... the spectator could follow. They ran, as it were, under her skin. There was no stolidity or phlegm. She was astoundingly alive and real. Unimportant, without sublimity of emotion or intellectual power, she was irresistibly real. The public understood all she told ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... The ice is quiet to-day. Does longing stupefy one, or does it wear itself out and turn at last into stolidity? Oh that burning longing night and day were happiness! But now its fire has turned to ice. Why does home seem so far away? It is one's all; life without it is so empty, so empty—nothing but dead emptiness. Is it the restlessness of spring that is beginning to come over one?—the desire for ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... she lived in the fortress of her splendidly garrisoned pride. Singing Arrow stood equally aloof, intrenched in her stoicism, but I think the root motives of the two were different, though the outside index was the same. Indeed, we all had different wellsprings for our composure. Pierre's stolidity was largely training. Starling's quiet might mean instinctive imitation, but I feared it was something more sinister. While mine—— But I had no composure. I swaggered and shrugged and played ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... extremely high. She was not fond of exerting her brains, and her exercises were generally full of "howlers". Miss Clark, her form mistress, was apt to wax eloquent over her mistakes, but she took the teacher's sarcasms with the same stolidity as the girls' teasings. It was a saying in the class that nothing could knock sparks out of Dona. Yet she possessed a certain reserve of shrewd common sense which was sometimes apt to astonish people. If she took the trouble to evolve a plan she generally ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... Force was now confronted with the bulk of the Boer commandoes, whose strength was vastly superior to its own, and whose courage was generally acknowledged to be splendid. The Dutch have ever a stoical stolidity which serves them in the hour of need as does the bulldog tenacity of the Briton, and therefore "those who knew" were not without apprehension in regard to the upshot of hostilities. It was plain to all who were in any way familiar with previous history and with local conditions that ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... droll humour and stolidity of Khalid, are shaken, aroused, by the ghoulish greed, the fell inhumanity of these sharpers. And Shakib from his cage of fancy lets loose upon them his hyenas of satire. In a squib describing the bats and the voyage he says: "The voyage to America is the Via Dolorosa of the emigrant; ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... upon the north by Fourteenth Street, upon the south by Delancy. Folk who dwell in it seldom stray farther west than the Bowery, rarely cross the river that flows sluggishly on its eastern border. They live their lives out, with something that might be termed a feverish stolidity, in the dim crowded flats, ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster

... was met just under Mark's window by the guard from the break at the end of the train, when a hurried conference took place, in which there was no stolidity on either side. 'Run back as quick as you can and set the detonators—there ain't a minute to lose, she may be down on us any time, and she'll never see the other signals this weather. I'd get 'em all out of the train if I was you, mate—they ain't safe where ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... supple-sinewed, unceasingly novel in his invention of new, unguessable attitudes; while above, below, and around him, a richly-dressed audience, painted in skilful perspective of stalls, boxes, dress-circle, and gallery, watched the thrilling performance with a stolidity which seemed to mark them out as made in Germany. Hardly versatile enough, perhaps, this Leotard; unsympathetic, not a companion for all hours; nor would you have chosen him to take to ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... necessary to tell the women that the preparations for the wedding must be stopped and that the invitations to the two big dinners that were to be given in honor of Colonel Ashley had been withdrawn she gathered from small signs—the feigned stolidity of some of them and the overacted astonishment of others—that they had probably been even better informed than Drusilla Fane. After that the food they brought her choked her and the maid's touch on her person was like fire, while she ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... least movement of hands or head during converse. This was exceedingly difficult of attainment to me, and took me an infinite deal of time and trouble; but I had for my model a middle-aged Englishman who was staying in the same hotel as myself, and whose starched stolidity never relaxed for a single instant. He was a human iceberg—perfectly respectable, with that air of decent gloom about him which is generally worn by all the sons of Britain while sojourning in a foreign clime. ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli

... The sight of the open door leading to freedom was too much for the youth's stolidity. Twisting suddenly, he drove his yellow teeth deep into the fleshy part of Standish's hand. And, profiting by the momentary slackening of Milo's grasp, he made one wildly scrambling dive across the hall, vaulting over the excited Bobby Burns (and losing a handful of his disreputable ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune

... had just fallen on her. I was assured of this by the sudden softening of his expression—the first real softening I had ever seen in it. It was but a momentary flash, but it was unmistakable in its character, as was his speedy return to his former stolidity. Whatever his thoughts were at sight of his little sweetheart, he meant to hide them even from his counsel—most of all from his counsel, I decided after further contemplation of them both. If Mr. Moffat still showed nervousness, it was for some other reason ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green

... apt to oppose any innovation upon the old abuses in which they have had centuries of vested right; and it was not until the studies of Mr. R. A. Goodenough that there were brought to bear veterinary knowledge, mechanical skill, and inventive faculty, to overcome the stolidity and interest which have been the lions in the way of ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell

... less agitating scenes, had our still Friend shrunk forcibly together; and shrouded-up his tremors and flutterings, of what sort soever, in a safe cover of Silence, and perhaps of seeming Stolidity. How was it, then, that here, when trembling to the core of his heart, he did not sink into swoons, but rose into strength, into fearlessness and clearness? It was his guiding Genius (Daemon) that inspired him; he must go forth and meet his Destiny. Show thyself now, whispered it, or ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... heard every day. Perhaps she was a little pale—but a healthy pallor had always been for him one of her chief attractions. Perhaps her face was rigidly set—but that marmoreal impassiveness, that magnificent stolidity, as of a wonderful statue by some great sculptor working under the curse of the gods; that imposing, unthinking stillness of her features, had till then mirrored for him the tranquil dignity of a ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad

... accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... on Miss Blomfield's countenance deepened visibly, and her crochet-needle trembled in her hand, whilst a despondent stolidity settled on Maria's face. ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... Valjean to pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, recognises the face of the detective; as when the lantern of the patrol flashes ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... world, or could be travelling either on business or pleasure. At last he had to give it up, and to turn to the black sailors. Going forward, he addressed one after the other; but as he spoke, their countenances also changed, and they stood before him with downcast looks, pictures of stolidity. Suddenly he at last bethought him of calling up Pango from the pinnace, to try if he could elicit any information from his sable countrymen. Pango, on being summoned, immediately sprang on board. No sooner had he done so than his eye fell on one of the blacks, from whom Adair was vainly ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston

... to strike or not, father," said Sadie, in a flippant manner. She raised a hand and adjusted a stray lock of hair as she spoke, then she straightened her ribbon stock. Her father said nothing, but his face assumed a stolidity ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... life, wandering wearisomely through the world in one long battle with Nature whereby to gain the wherewithal to live in that grim desert. There were no exceptions, it was the common lot. Each day and every day did these men and women, with a stolidity of long-continued destitution, and temporal and spiritual tribulation, gaze upon that bare, unyielding country, pregnant only with aggravation ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... faced him, I smiled. He was the same as he had been. A little stouter, perhaps, his pale hair and square-cut beard looking as though it had been carved from some pale honey-coloured wood, the thick stolidity of his long body and short legs, the squareness of his head, the coldness of his eyes and the violent red of his lips, all were just as they had been—the same man, save that now he was in civilian clothes, in a black suit with a black bow tie. There ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... overthrow my feeble virtue. But all this had been arranged by the small cunning of this really witless couple. I was left to find my way down stairs as I might; and just when I was about to leave the dwelling—vexed to the heart at the desperate stolidity of the miserable man, whom avarice and weakness were about to expose to a loss which might be averted in part, and an exposure to infamy which might wholly be avoided—I was encountered by the attenuated form and wan countenance of his ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... vileness of behaviour, boastful assertions of performance when there has been no performance, presumption of knowledge in ignorance, unfriendliness (or hostility), evilness of disposition, absence of faith, stupid reasoning, crookedness, incapacity for association, sinful action, senselessness, stolidity, lassitude, absence of self-control, degradation,—all these qualities are known as belonging to Darkness. Whatever other states of mind, connected with delusion, exist in the world, all appertain to Darkness. Frequent ill-speaking ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... I tell you that I'm one and that I'd see your 'Clarion' blazing in hell before I'd take another cent of your money." The fire died from her face, and in her former tone of dulled stolidity she repeated, "I want to see ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the gods according to the form consecrated by tradition. Even in the expression of the face the same process is to be traced. In early works we find sometimes no expression at all, or an apparent stolidity which is really the absence of expression; in the archaic smile we see an attempt to enliven the face, and possibly also, as we have noticed, to express and even to induce the benignity of the deity. But this attempt, made with inadequate artistic ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner

... easy subject for M'Adam to draw, but David was an easier. Insults directed at himself the boy bore with a stolidity born of long use. But a poisonous dart shot against his friends at Kenmuir never failed to achieve its object. And the little man evinced an amazing talent for the concoction of deft lies respecting ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant

... packed. The younger children, the boys with great frilled collars, the girls with ill-fitting shoes cramping their feet, leaned from the sides of buggy and carry-all, eating bananas and "macaroons," staring about with ox-like stolidity. Tied to the axles, the dogs followed the horses' hoofs with lolling ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... his path through the savages and the jungle, until at the door of a hut in a clearing, he saw a white man who could be none but him whom he sought, for in all that dark and gloomy forest there was none other of white skin. Then Anglo-Saxon stolidity asserted itself. Men of Latin race would have rushed into each others' arms with loud rejoicings. Not ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... amusing. A Chinese coolie, watching two prisoners handle a stack of cased goods, could not at last contain himself. He walked up to them, saying: "Hun no damn good," and proceeded to show them how it should be done. The stolidity of the Chinaman is generally proof against surprise, but some of those coming from the backwoods of Northern China were occasionally bewildered and overwhelmed when set down amid the amazing and ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... suspicion, resentment, and shame, with which Arthur looked on at all this, struck him dumb. Mr Flintwinch, who had spun backward some two or three yards under the impetus last given to him, brought himself up with a face completely unchanged in its stolidity except as it was affected by shortness of breath, and looked hard at Arthur. Not a whit less reticent and wooden was Mr Flintwinch outwardly, than in the usual course of things: the only perceptible difference in him being that the knot of cravat which was generally under his ear, had worked ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... but she made no friends either there or at the mill, and it would scarcely have been noticed had she disappeared altogether. Somehow she had floated into Sunday-school, and been placed in the class which afterward became Etta Mountjoy's, but here her apparent stolidity made her perhaps the least interesting of all the girls. Perhaps this was in part owing to the fact that one is not likely to be very ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow

... Plautinische Studien. He really succeeds in finding the crux of the situation in recognizing that these features are inherent in Plautus' style and are frequently employed solely for comic effect, though he is often overcome by a natural Teutonic stolidity. He aptly points out that Plautus in his selection of originals has in the main chosen plots with more vigorous action than Terence. We shall have occasion to quote him at intervals, but desire to ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke

... of warfare in the Great War—submarines and aircraft. The first free flight of an aeroplane, December 17, 1903. Attitude of the peoples; English stolidity. The navy and the air. The German menace hastens the making of our air service. The British air force at the outbreak of the war, and at its close. The achievement of the British air force. Uses of aircraft in war extended and multiplied—reconnaissance, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... pounds, sir.... Thank you, sir." With supreme stolidity Caw presented the salver as a waiter might do ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell

... Hilda could never get over her wonder at their stolidity, their endless patience, their matter-of-fact way of carrying on life under a cataclysm. They went on with their spading in the fields, while shrapnel was pinging. They trotted up and down a road that was pock-marked with shell-holes. ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason

... their sentiments. For, conscious, as these hankerers after the old "institutions" are, of being utterly ineligible for the furthering of modern progressive ideas, they revenge themselves for their supersession on everybody and everything, save and except their own arrogant stolidity. White individuals who have part and lot in the various Colonies, with their hearts and feelings swayed by affections natural to their birth and earliest associations; and Whites who have come to think the land of their adoption ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas

... together with all sorts of other monstrous powers, without shapes or faces, which inspired me with invincible terror. All the persecutions of my excellent instructors wore themselves out against a dead wall of stolidity. Successively disheartened, they left me to my dismal ignorance, prophesying a most dreary future for me, haunted with bitter regrets. I must say that, until now, I had scarcely experienced the effects of these gloomy predictions; ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck



Words linked to "Stolidity" :   apathy, stolidness, stolid



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com