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




Uninspired   Listen
adjective
Uninspired  adj.  See inspired.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Uninspired" Quotes from Famous Books



... narrowness and weakness of that dogma, so pertinaciously adhered to by persons of cold hearts and limited understandings, that Religion is not a fit theme for poetical genius, and that Sacred Poetry is beyond the powers of uninspired man. We do not know that the grounds on which that dogma stands have ever been formally stated by any writer but Samuel Johnson; and therefore with all respect, nay, veneration, for his memory, we shall now shortly examine his statement, which, though, as we think, altogether unsatisfactory ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... prayerful reading of the Word, gives not merely more knowledge, but increases the delight we have in reading it); and thus, like many believers, I practically preferred, for the first four years of my divine life, the works of uninspired men to the oracles of the living God. The consequence was, that I remained a babe, both in knowledge and grace. In knowledge I say; for all true knowledge must be derived, by the Spirit, from the Word. And as I neglected the Word, I was for nearly four years so ignorant, that I did not clearly ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller

... it that you can make your little German town fascinating, when I can only make this vast, stupefying India sound dull? It wouldn't sound dull if I were telling you about it by word of mouth. I could make you see it then; but what can a poor uninspired one do with a pen, some ink, and a sheet ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... original when at its lowest grade, that same regard compels me to say that in yet more instances it rises with the same [to a degree] which I believe it is scarcely possible for any individual with the limited powers of uninspired man to surpass. This soaring tendency is particularly observable in the version of the Book of Job, which is certainly the most beautiful, is believed by many to be the most ancient, and is confessedly one of the most important portions of the Old Testament. ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow

... that the writer of this book is inspired, and that nothing can be learned of the meaning of an inspired book by studying uninspired books. I reply that no inspired book can be understood at all without a careful study of uninspired books. The Greek grammar and the Greek lexicon are uninspired books, and no man can understand a single one of the books of the New Testament without carefully studying ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden

... America. As for his literary work, it requires no doubt a certain amount of good will to read it. It is voluminous, even in the original part not very original, and constantly marred by that loquacity which, especially in times of great inspiration, comes upon the uninspired or not very strongly inspired. The point about Sylvester, as about so many others of his time, is that, unlike the minor poets of our day and of some others, he has constant flashes—constant hardly separable, but quite perceivable, scraps, which show how genially heated ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... has so little of the peculiar interest belonging to that species of poetry, that it can hardly be called such. Nevertheless, it is perhaps the most sublime composition that ever came from the thoughts of uninspired man. It is meant to portray the heroic devotion, the undaunted courage of Prometheus—the friend of man, the assuager of his sufferings, the aider of his enterprises—who was chained to a rock, exposed to the burning heats ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... reason ab effectu; and if we had been asked what Nature had intended such men for, before she herself had by the event demonstrated her purpose, it is possible we might sometimes have been puzzled to declare; for it must be confessed that at first sight, and to a mind uninspired, a man of vast natural capacity and much acquired knowledge may seem by Nature designed for power and honour, rather than one remarkable only for the want of these, and indeed all other qualifications; whereas daily experience convinces us of the contrary, and drives ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... art; but I do not care whether a poem is written in conventional metre or in free verse, so long as it is unmistakably poetry. And no garments yet invented or the lack of them can conceal true poetry. Perhaps the Traditionalist might reply that uninspired verse gracefully written is better than uninspired verse abominably written. So it is; but why bother about either? He might once more insist that inspired poetry gracefully written is better than inspired poetry ungracefully written. And I should reply that it depended altogether on ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... implies a gross, harsh, and revengeful character in the executioner, that is eminently perplexing and incredible to those who expect to find an idea of justice in the government of the world, at least not materially below what is attained in the clumsy efforts of uninspired publicists. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... Christian baptism; but, had the New Testament required us to recline, and lean on one arm, and take the Lord's Supper with the other arm, insisting that this posture is essential to that sacrament, or had it specified the quantity of bread and wine, he thinks it would have been parallel to the uninspired requirement of a particular mode in ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams

... lose sight of the fact, that we have the Bible only in the form of a translation by uninspired men, from the original Hebrew and Greek, in which it was penned by the inspired writers. Hence it should not seem surprising that there are some inaccuracies connected with this translation; nor that certain words, allusion, ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin

... man contending against the world! Not a chieftain, at the head of an army, subduing kingdom after kingdom, but a priest, without a carnal weapon, resisting a continent combined at once to crush him, and finally vanquishing by his death. Uninspired by ambition, assailed by every earthly motive, God alone could have directed, and God only could have upheld him. The Emperor of Austria had sworn to depose him, the Italians promised to assist his antagonist. With scarce a footing in Germany or Italy, cooped up on a barren peak, he ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles

... Service at St. Paul's for the Queen's Jubilee. Went with Edy and Henry. Not at all adequate to the occasion was the ceremony. The Te Deum rather good, the sermon sensible, but the whole uninspired, unimpassioned and dull. The Prince ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... the artists of the time were too insincere, too intent upon pleasing shallow-brained and frivolous courtiers, to produce much that was worth while. Great numbers of plays were written, it is true, but they were hopelessly dull imitations of classic models. Imitative and uninspired likewise were statues and paintings and poems. One merit they possessed. If a French painter lacked force and originality, he could at least portray with elegance and charm a group of fine ladies angling in an artificial pool. Elegance, indeed, redeemed ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... Bordeaux in the three-thirties; and was thus (to link things up a little) a younger contemporary of the Indian Samudragupta. He was Ausonius: teacher of rhetoric, tutor to the prince Gratian, consul, country gentleman, large land-owner, and, in a studious uninspired reflective way, a goodish poet. Also a convert to Christianity, but unenthusiastic:—altogether, a dignified and polished figure; such as you might find in England now, in the country squire who has held important offices ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... power and spirit of the modern age is organization, and it cannot organize in its religion, there is little to be hoped for in religion. Modern education is a machine. If the principle of machinery is a wrong and inherently uninspired principle—if because a machine is a machine no great meaning can be expressed by it, and no great result accomplished by it—there is little to be hoped ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee

... a just God, and I know that I am entirely innocent" replied the noble old seaman in a firm voice. "But it is not for an uninspired man like me, to attempt to reconcile the mysteries of His providence. Far better men than I am, even prophets and apostles, have been brought before magistrates and judges, and their good names lied away, and they condemned to the prison and the scaffold ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson

... imposed design and authority and unity upon the letters of his country, and who so closed the epoch with which I have been dealing, was singularly suited to his task. Observant, something of a stoic, uninspired; courageous, witty, a soldier; lucid, critical of method only, he corresponded to the movement which, all around him, was ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's and de l'Orme's luxuriance into the conventions of the great colonnades and the ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... the form in which it finally appeared, it remains the noblest production of Washington's mind and heart; and has been pronounced by Alison, the eminent British historian, unequalled by any composition of uninspired wisdom. It is a political legacy which not only the countrymen of Washington, but the inhabitants of the civilized world ought to value as one of the most precious gifts ever bestowed by man upon his race. It is permeated with the immortal spirit of a true MAN, a true PATRIOT, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... rest of my meal untasted. The food choked me. I could have shed tears for the noble, patient life thus self-sacrificed. One hero the less in this world of unheroic, uninspired persons! I sat silent, lost in sorrowful thought. The landlord looked at ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli

... thing, I had been forgotten. Except from our mother and yourself, I had no welcome. But, apart from this immediate circle, and apart from the deep, comfortable glow experienced at the first sight of the "old country," I found England and the English dull, conventional, and uninspired. There was no poignancy. The habits and the outlook stood precisely where I had left them. The English had not moved. They played golf as of yore, they went to the races at the appointed time and in the appointed garb, they gave heavy dinner-parties, they wrote ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood

... hunted, and the voyageurs beside whom I camped, and had learned to distrust my own race; yet no sooner did I chance to stand again beside the sweeping current of the broad Mississippi, than I was gripped by the old irresistible yearning, and, although uninspired by either hope or purpose, drifted downward to ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, and Jeremy Taylor, besides hosts of others. The encomium passed upon it by Schaff is thus given in his own words: "This marvellous hymn is the acknowledged master-piece of Latin poetry and the most sublime of all uninspired hymns. The secret of its irresistible power lies in the awful grandeur of the theme, the intense earnestness and pathos of the poet, the simple majesty and solemn music of its language, the stately metre, the triple rhyme, and the vocal ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... conduct. Hosea writes that the Lord said unto him, "Yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu," but doubtless Knox would have argued that Hosea was temporarily uninspired, as he argued about St. Paul ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang

... their highest interpretation,—or, at least, from sustaining it, without sharp falsetto effort, throughout the entire passage of a play. In a few impersonations, where Kemble, with all his mannerisms and defective elocution, and Macready, notwithstanding his uninspired, didactic nature, were most at their ease and successful, this actor would be somewhat put to his mettle,—a fact of which he is probably ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... benevolence had willed it to be prolonged for the behoof of auditors unborn. I therefore came to the conclusion, that, in my individual case, it would be better and more reverent to let my eyes wander about the edifice than to fasten them and my thoughts on the evidently uninspired mortal who was venturing—and felt it no venture at all—to speak here above ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula. They originated that critical and rather hostile scrutiny of Semitic ideas and values in present civilization, which plays no small part in the dilettante naturalism of the moment. Thus the nature and place of man, under the influence of these "uninspired" literatures and cultures, became more and more important as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceased to be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendence of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance of his creatures, which inform both the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... Apostle Paul there is an admirable summing-up of the hero's character. After admitting Paul's ability, persistence, courage, and other virtues, he remarks—"But these are accompanied by what in an uninspired man would be called pride, jealousy, disdain, invective, sophistry, time-serving and intolerance." This is pretty strong; and "sophistry" and "time-serving" are only euphemisms for lying in ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... cultivating this ability to judge and produce the right touch, but the performer who is more concerned about the technical claims of a composition than its musical interpretation can only hope to give an uninteresting, uninspired, stilted performance that should rightly drive all intelligent hearers from his ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke

... We walked, too, in the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace where the mad king used to play. We visited the State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany that Queen Victoria would never have made the late war, and that Victorian England ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... was only laughing at me. The car was there and the tank was full of petrol, but neither the electric starter nor the crank that I found under the seat would produce anything but the most depressing and uninspired clanking from the mechanism that should have responded with the warm, encouraging thud of ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford

... nothing is left to hope for but discharge or death. I hit upon the idea of teaching him French; and accordingly, from Lichfield, I became the distracted master, and he the scholar—how shall I say? indefatigable, but uninspired. His interest never flagged. He would hear the same word twenty times with profound refreshment, mispronounce it in several different ways, and forget it again with magical celerity. Say it happened to be STIRRUP. 'No, I don't seem to remember that word, Mr. Anne,' he would say: 'it ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the great majority that denies because they are—dead!" he cried. "Smothered! Undivining! Living in that uninspired fragment which they deem the whole! Ah, my friend,"—and he came abruptly nearer—"the pathos, the comedy, the pert self-sufficiency of their dull pride, the crass stupidity and littleness of their denials, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... stands in the front rank of the second class. Shelley, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, far surpass him; and the sweet singer of Michigan, even in uninspired moments, never "threw ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... the last of the series of Buddhas[1], promulgated a religious system in India which has exercised a wider influence over the Eastern world than the doctrines of any other uninspired teacher in any age or country.[2] He was born B.C. 624 at Kapila-Vastu (a city which has no place in the geography of the Hindus, but which appears to have been on the borders of Nepaul); he attained his superior Buddha-hood B.C. 588, under a ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... Presbyterians, saying, 'I should not dare to introduce Christianity itself with such cruelties, how much less for a surplice, and the name of a bishop.' If there could be an intermediate space between inspired, and uninspired writings, that space would be occupied by Leighton. No show of learning, no appearance, or ostentatious display of eloquence; and yet both may be shown in him, conspicuously and holily. There is in him something that must be felt, even as the ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... course of healthy existence. In general Nature appears to have a prodigal delight in enclosing her costliest essences in the most frail and perishable vessels:—but Sheridan was a signal exception to this remark; for, with a spirit so "finely touched," he combined all the robustness of the most uninspired clay. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... importance indeed. Whether or not Howells then realized the "inspired knowledge of the multitude," and that most of the nation outside of the counties of Suffolk and Essex already recognized his claim, is not material. Very likely he did; but he also realized the mental dusk of the cultured uninspired and his prerogative to enlighten them. His Century article was a kind of manifesto, a declaration of independence, no longer confined to the obscurities of certain book notices, where of course one might be expected to stretch friendly favor a little for a popular Atlantic contributor. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... crowned this labor with the writing of the Epistle to the Ephesians, which is perhaps the profoundest and sublimest book in the world. The Church of Christ has derived many benefits from the imprisonment of the servants of God; the greatest book of uninspired religious genius, the Pilgrim's Progress, was written in a jail; but never did there come to the Church a greater mercy in the disguise of misfortune than when the arrest of Paul's bodily activities at Caesarea and Rome supplied him with the leisure needed to ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker

... laden with the traditions and rivalries of particular nations or places, have been guided in their decisions by the commanding genius of individuals, sometimes young and of inferior rank. Not that uninspired intellect overruled the super-human gift which was committed to the Council, which would be a self-contradictory assertion, but that in that process of inquiry and deliberation, which ended in an infallible enunciation, individual reason was paramount. Thus Malchion, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... 'Tameran,' the self-styled 'Island of Braves.' This, too, was the site of the Tahoro, or Tagoror, temple and senate-house of the ancients. The principal interest of these wild people is the mysterious foreknowledge of their fate that seems to have come to them by a manner of intuition, of uninspired prophecy. [Footnote: So in Candelaria of Tenerife the Virgin appeared in effigy to the shepherds of Chimisay in 1392, a century before the Norman Conquest, and dwelt fifty-four years amongst the Gentiles of Chinguaro. At least so say DD. Juan Nunez ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... their chances of success by selecting uninteresting and uninspired stories, which either describe some doleful historic incident or illustrate some Indian legend, in which no one of to-day is interested, and which is so far removed from actual life that it becomes at once artificial, academic and preposterous. Puccini spends years searching for suitable ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower

... a poem by Robert Browning is a sort of prize enigma, of which the solution is to be reached rather by wild and daring guessing than by any commonplace process of reasoning. Although to an ordinary and uninspired intellect it may appear perfectly obvious that a lyric means simply and clearly what it says, the true Browningite is better informed. He is deeply aware that if the poet seems to say one thing, this is proof indisputable that another is intended. ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... history of miracle is of inconstant power. St. Paul raises Eutychus from death, and his garments effect miraculous cure; yet he leaves Trophimus sick at Miletum, recognizes only the mercy of God in the recovery of Epaphroditus, and, like any uninspired physician, recommends Timothy wine for his infirmities. And in the second place, our own energies are inconstant almost in proportion to their nobleness. We breathe with regularity, and can calculate upon the strength necessary for common tasks. But the record ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... that you see at stations. You insert your penny. You set your prize subject. In the former case you hope for wax vestas, and you get butterscotch. In the latter, you hope for something at least readable, and you get the most complete, terrible, uninspired twaddle that was ever written on paper. The boy mind'—here the ash of his cigar fell off on to his waistcoat—'the merely boy ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse

... unimaginative men of letters who are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the control of the able little cousin he had married. I had known ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... extremely nice of you to want to be trained in—in enunciation by a stage-director. Perhaps I could help you. I'm a thoroughly sound and uninspired schoolma'am by instinct; ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... boundaries of the old Adamic garden. Let us mark how Mr. Granville Penn,—certainly one of the most extensively informed of his class,—deals with this difficulty.[41] There are, he argues, certain great corruptions of Scripture. What had been at first written as marginal notes by uninspired men, and were in some cases very erroneous and absurd, came in the course of transcription to be transferred, wholly by mistake, from the side of the page into the body of the text; and thus, in at least a few places, the Scriptures were ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... the image of love's infinite grace and the sense of the inexhaustible joy that lives in beauty. No! What he imparted to the Editor were no emotions, but mere facts conveyed in a deliberate voice and in uninspired words. ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... is conveyed to the soul from the body through certain bad temperaments or mixtures, or through the prevalence of some noxious spirit, and is harsh, difficult to cure, and baneful. Another kind of madness is not uninspired or from within, but an afflatus from without, a deviation from sober reason, originated and set in motion by some higher power, the ordinary characteristic of which is called enthusiasm. For, as one full of breath is called [Greek: empnoos], and as one full ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... results is uninspired work at best," he said once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years. "It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. It is playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. Far better, it would be, to examine the causes, and then the results ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various

... generation are dead—Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne. The great "makers" have passed away, and there remain to us but certain highly dexterous word-artificers and melodists, a varied chorus of dainty, musical, scholarly, but mostly uninspired, writers of verse. We have passed the crest of the poetical wave, and are sunk into its trough. It is not unnatural, therefore, that we should, at this particular juncture, feel some misgivings. Finding no immediate successor worthy to fill the place of those great departed, we cry out in our haste ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... something very dead about this country. I remember I picked apples from the grass by the roadside, and some were very sweet. But for the rest, there was mile after mile of dead, uninspired country—uninspired, so neutral and ordinary that ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... worships by proxy. Such belong to a different fellowship. This is the "song of the Lamb," which joined to the "song of Moses," constitutes the whole of the "high praises of the Lord," leaving no place for the vapid, empty, bombastic, amorous and heretical effusions, of uninspired men, whether of sound or "corrupt minds."—The burden of the song is the same as the "Song of Songs" and the forty-fifth Psalm,—"Christ crucified,"—Christ glorified, "the praises of him who hath called them from darkness into his marvellous light." The ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele

... better pleased to learn that the man in the moon is a poet. Possibly some uninspired groveller, who has never climbed Parnassus, nor drunk of the Castalian spring, may murmur that this is very likely, for that all poetry is "moonstruck madness." Alas if such an antediluvian barbarian be permitted to "revisit thus ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... a passage as this, however, those strong racy phrases which somehow find their way into the most uninspired of Tudor translations, are not wholly wanting. Thus when the careless nymph at last goes off to seek her desperate lover, Daphne in ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... been classified as, 1st, sacred knowledge and religion; 2d, philosophy; 3d, social rules and caste organization; 4th, criminal and civil laws; 5th, systems of penance; 6th, eschatology, or the doctrine of future rewards. No uninspired or non-Vedic production has equal authority in India. We can only judge of its date by its relative place among other books. It applies Vedic names to the gods, though it mentions Brahma and Vishnu, but it makes ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... all the more surprising that no good selection from Tennyson has yet appeared. His "complete works" contain so much that is ephemeral and uninspired as to be a mere book of reference on our shelves. When will some critic do for him what Matthew Arnold did for Wordsworth, and separate the gold from the dross—do it as well as Matthew Arnold did it for Wordsworth? ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... beyond what is discoverable from a careful study of the "Sections" and "Canons" themselves; added to what Eusebius has told us in that short Epistle of his "to Carpianus,"—which I suppose has been transcribed and reprinted more often than any other uninspired Epistle ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon

... play. He read three or four pages and then in irritation threw the play on to the floor, put out the candle, and drew the bedclothes over him; a little later, after thinking over it, he took the play up again and began to read it; then, getting angry with the uninspired tedious work, he again threw it on the floor and put out the candle. A little later he once more took up the play and read it, then he produced it and it was ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

... balanced and squared off to perfection, would be a very tolerable place to live in. Genius must take its chance, like all other qualities, and, on the whole, in a civilised country it gets on pretty well. Is it not something in itself to possess genius? and is it seemly, or a good example to the uninspired world, that its owner should deem it rather a misfortune than a blessing because he is not also surrounded by plush and shoulder-knots? If all geniuses had a prerogative right to rank and wealth, and all the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... seem to go far towards the substitution of the fathers for the written word of God, others in their abhorrence of that excess have run into the opposite, fancying, as it would seem, that they exalt the Divine oracles just in the same proportion as they disparage the uninspired writers of the Church. The great body of the Church of England adhere to a middle course, and adopt that golden mean, which ascribes to the written Word its paramount authority, from which is no appeal, and yet honours Catholic tradition ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler

... repetition this was especially noticeable. Kennedy, a small boy with glasses, who was always word-perfect, would nervously mumble through Henry V's speech (they always learnt Shakespeare) in an accurate but totally uninspired way. Mansell would stand at the back of the form and blunder out blank verse, much of which was his own, and little of which was Shakespeare, but which ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... not like German learning or German art, and consider the one pedantic and the other heavy and uninspired. A Frenchman wrote very feelingly the other day, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, about a return to the old French culture, an escape from what he described as the German habit of accumulating mere facts to something that, in addition to feeding the brain, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... that lodges in the bosoms of us males at the fateful spring and autumn seasons denominated house-cleaning. Who can say whither the awful gods, the prophetic fates, may drive our fair household divinities; what sins of ours may be brought to light; what indulgences and compliances, which uninspired woman has granted in her ordinary mortal hours, may be torn from us? He who has been allowed to keep a pair of pet slippers in a concealed corner, and by the fireside indulged with a chair which he might ad libitum fill with all sorts of pamphlets and miscellaneous literature, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... Edgar Caswall was, if not mad, close to the border-line. Madness in its first stage—monomania—is a lack of proportion. So long as this is general, it is not always noticeable, for the uninspired onlooker is without the necessary means of comparison. But in monomania the errant faculty protrudes itself in a way that may not be denied. It puts aside, obscures, or takes the place of something else—just ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker

... church spires, uninspired statuary, and weary, smoke-darkened trees shed their garments of commonplaceness and shimmered like the mosques and turrets ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... believer in his own star. For the matter of time he cared very little; considerations of odds did not weigh with him unduly; and he cherished a sovereign contempt for the cautious attitude of professional soldiers and other uninspired persons. Never did these qualities appear more vividly than ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... same meaning to all, though what human creature can fail to be spurred onwards by "Work while it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work." But I mean those beautiful thoughts—who can say that they are uninspired thoughts?—which may be gathered from a hundred authors to match a hundred uses. A fine thought in fine language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and ornament. To take the nearest example, there is ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... fight as I fought. I started as a sub-editor on three pounds a week, correcting the grammar in the copy of men who were getting five times that amount—but I can get you a start of sorts, right away. Come around now to the Record office, and I'll introduce you to Dodgson, the editor, a perfectly uninspired person, who ought to have been a grocer's assistant and have sung in a chapel choir. But he has the grace to realise his limitations, and take my advice. It will mean two guineas every now and then for a Page Four article—a thousand ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... late to back upstairs again and improvise upon my toilette, for they both looked up and saw me at that moment. So there I stood, like a stag at bay, with my nose unpowdered (Henry would say that a stag doesn't powder its nose, but you will know what I mean) wearing my dullest and most uninspired house-frock, and hurling silent anathemas at my ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick

... bowed before them, desolated to relate that the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so out all trooped into the starry midnight, filling the street with gay laughter, to be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed by the dull inhabitants of an uninspired world. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for a husband with a Rolls-Royce—is, by a curious twist of fate, one of the underlying causes of their precarious economic condition before marriage rescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress upon an uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers its highest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, they suffer the disadvantage of being less capable of it than men. Part of this disadvantage, as we have seen, is congenital; their ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... in the air. It was final, as far as he was concerned. He could do nothing—not even beg his dearest lady to plead for him. Besides, rumour had it that the Princess had cancelled her town engagements and gone to Morebury. So he walked in cold and darkness, uninspired, and though he worked with feverish energy, the heart and purpose of his ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... upon whose decision hung such momentous issues, the Council which met that evening at Westminster seemed alike unambitious in tone and uninspired in appearance. Some short time was spent in one of the anterooms, where Julian was introduced to many of the delegates. The disclosure of his identity, although it aroused immense interest, was scarcely an unmixed ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... her for it, she would give up all that for which she had sold her soul? He could not feel that he was a prophet sent by God from whose lips would fall such inspired words that the iron frost would thaw and the great depths of her nature be broken up. In fact, he felt singularly uninspired, and very much embarrassed. And when he had tried the impossible (he said to himself), and had given her the last chance of going back on this ugly fraud from nobler motives than that of fear, and had failed—he must then enter on the next stage and ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... in them nor purpose, no divine and eternal significance. This being conceded, what meaning would there be in designing works of art? If art has not its prototype in creation, if all that we see and do is chance, uninspired by a controlling and forming intelligence behind or within it, then to construct a work of art would be to make something arbitrary and grotesque, something unreal and fugitive, something out of accord with the general sense (or nonsense) of things, something with no further basis or warrant ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... speak of the peace to be found in faith in God and trust in an overruling Providence. Christ taught that our lives are precious in the sight of God, and poets have taken up the thought and woven it into immortal verse. No uninspired writer has exprest it more beautifully than William Cullen Bryant in his Ode to a Waterfowl. After following the wanderings of the bird of passage as it seeks first its southern and then ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... enthusiast, who is not responsible for his fervour, will assert that either the jest or the frankly cynical moral of Pietro of Abano compensates for the jolting in a springless waggon over a rough road and a long. We make the acquaintance of a magician who with knowledge uninspired by love has kicks and cuffs for his reward, and the acquaintance of an astute Greek, who, at least in his dream of life, imposed upon him by the art of magic, exploits the talents of his friend Pietro, and gains the prize of his ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... a universal inspiration, on which the special inspiration of the Old and New Testament rests. There are inspired men and uninspired men. There are inspired writings and uninspired writings. There is a general inspiration, out of which the particular inspiration of Bible writers grew. Universal inspiration is a genus, of which this is a species. We cannot understand the inspiration of the writers of ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... out of this?" the Judge demanded, coming upon Neil late one afternoon, poring over the uninspired pages of Mr. Thayer by the fading light. "What do ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton

... Charley's wise hands, emerged a wondrous cosmos of biscuits, light as the heart of a boy. And Frank, singing a French ditty, created wheat cakes. His method struck me as poetic. He scorned the ordinary uninspired cook's manner of turning the half-baked cake. One side being done, he waited until the ditty reached a certain lilting upward leap in the refrain, when, with a dexterous movement of the frying-pan, he tossed the cake into the ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... said. "I hate the way that the most uninspired ways of doing things turn out to be the best policy after all. I don't believe in stereotyped philanthropy, but I did think I had found a way around this problem of feeding up ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... of the great mass, nor of the queer periphery, nor of uninspired devilgrass. It was a green unknown in living plant before; a glassy, translucent green, the green of a cathedral window in the moonlight. By contrast, the widening circle about it seemed subdued and orderly. The fantastic shapes, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... plan. Many poems were produced (and even written out, which a number of his pieces never were), and were left in manuscript till they appeared in the Biography. Most of these are so little worthy of the author that the marvel is how he came to write them—in what uninspired hours. Unlike Wordsworth, he could weed the tares from his wheat. His studies were in Greek, German, Italian, history (a little), and chemistry, botany, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... Doederlein's views of inspiration were much more elevated than those held by many of his confreres; but he too speaks of poetical excitement, and draws a line of distinction between the inspired and uninspired parts of Scripture. But Ammon represents this subject better than Doederlein. It was his opinion that the idea of a mediate divine instruction is applicable to all human knowledge. He rejects the notion peculiar to revelation. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... Home Handicrafts, Use of Home Appliances, Beautician School, Charm School. He and Yetsko sampled the products of the Cooking School, intended for the cafeteria, and found them edible if uninspired. ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire

... space, and whose lifetime is an Eternal Now. Thus true Pantheism takes the Universe, as it is, in its infinity; regards it as without beginning or end; and worships it. Not that Pantheism denies the existence of evil or is unmoved by the struggle between evil and good, or is uninspired by faith in the reiterated triumph of good wherever the local conflict arises. But it insists that evil is relative to the finite parts of the Universe in their supposed isolation, and cannot possibly affect the Eternal All. It ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton

... admit, and above all else we should search for them, prize them, and use them. Study the Bible for the sake of its wonderful and sacred truth, catch the inspiration of its writers, and you will soon discriminate the inspired from the uninspired. With the statements of the true is necessarily more or less error; the Truth we want, the falsity we leave behind. Whatever is good and pure and ennobling is of God; whatever is evil, erroneous, degrading, is from ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson

... are so like pictures of other growths. I felt that this scene was a worthy one for the kind but never familiar man who walked and reflected there. We enjoyed a constant outdoor life. But in those uninspired hours when there was no father in sight, and my mother was resting in seclusion, I played at grocer's shop on the sands with a little girl called Hannah, whom I then despised for her name, her homely neat clothes, her sweetness and silence, and in retrospect ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... the intimate confidence, the mutual encouragement and self-sacrifice, never a note of despair, but always the exultation of the Great Fight, and the promise of a great victory. This is a finer company than a mere casual alliance; yet it makes the uninspired pause, wondering and questioning. These men are earnest men of different creeds; still they are as intimately bound to one another as if they knelt at the one altar. In the narrow view the creeds ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... Peter Heffelbower laid before me a temptation that swept me off my feet. In his sensible, uninspired way he showed me his books, and explained that his profits and his business were increasing rapidly. He had thought of taking in a partner with some cash. He would rather have me than any one he knew. When ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry

... much fonder of Tom Brangwen, and more at their ease with him, yet if their lives had been robbed of the vicar, and of Lord William, the leading shoot would have been cut away from them, they would have been heavy and uninspired and inclined to hate. So long as the wonder of the beyond was before them, they could get along, whatever their lot. And Mrs. Hardy, and the vicar, and Lord William, these moved in the wonder of the beyond, and were visible to the eyes of Cossethay ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... as if it had been the last draught at a cheerful banquet, and quietly laid himself down and died. "Thus perished," says DR. SMITH, "the greatest and most original of Grecian philosophers, whose uninspired wisdom made the nearest approach to the divine morality of the Gospel." As observed by PROFESSOR TYLER of Amherst College, "The consciousness of a divine mission was the leading trait in his character and the main secret of his power. This directed his ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... God I stand and so proclaim mine innocence. Though ye sinless hosts of heaven had foretold ye coming of this most desolating breath, proclaiming it a work of uninspired man, its quaking thunders, its firmament-clogging rottenness his own achievement in due course of nature, yet had not I believed it; but had said the pit itself hath furnished forth the stink, and heaven's artillery hath shook the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... vowels form the initials of a sentence in Latin and German, signifying, 'The house of Austria is to govern the whole world.'"[26] Notwithstanding the archidiaconal sneer, Frederick III.'s anagram came quite as near the truth as any uninspired prophecy that can be mentioned. In little more than sixty years after the Emperor's death, the house of Austria ruled over Germany, the Netherlands, Naples, Sicily, the Milanese, Hungary, Bohemia, the Spains, England and Ireland ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various

... unless we greatly err, they will find them peculiarly subservient to correction and instruction in righteousness. Many writers have done more for the details of Christian conduct; but for purposes of heart-discipline and for the nurture of devout affections, there is little uninspired authorship equal to the more practical publications of Owen. In the Life of that noble-hearted Christian philosopher, the late Dr. Welsh, it is mentioned that in his latter days, besides the Bible, he read ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... they lack creative energy. They wear ready-made clothing, for example, without taking the trouble to improve upon it. The same goes for their homes. Mere uninspired adornment won't do, let me add. That's simply the mark of the nouveau upper middle class. One doesn't receive such persons in ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley

... Stolid and uninspired as he seemed to the whites, the Indian of the Sound was not without his touch of poetry. He had that imaginative curiosity which marked the native {p.028} American everywhere. He was ever peering into ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams

... Still uninspired by any definite design, I tried the gate and found that it was unlocked. Like some wandering soul, as it has since seemed to me, I descended. There was a lamp over the archway, but the glass was broken, and the rain apparently had extinguished the light; as I passed ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... that even pace which they maintain in all their dramatic compositions, is a proof that they are not capable of sublime conceptions; that they never rise to any degree of elevation, and are in truth uninspired by the muses:—Judgment they may have to plan and conduct their designs; but few French poets have ever found the way of writing to the heart. Have they attained the sublime height of Shakespear, the tenderness of Otway, or the pomp of Rowe? and yet these are names which ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber

... barbarism satisfactory to the heart and brain of this century. They have also found that a falsehood in Hebrew in no more credible than in plain English. People at last are beginning to be satisfied that cruel laws were never good laws, no matter whether inspired or uninspired. The Christian religion, like every other religion depending upon inspired writings, is wrecked upon the facts of nature. So long as inspired writers confined themselves to the supernatural world; so long as they talked about angels and Gods and heavens and hells; so long as they described only ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... of the Baconian faith. The tasks which the greatest of our poets set himself when near the age of thirty, and to which he presumably brought all the powers of which he was then conscious, were the uninspired and pitilessly prolix poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and THE RAPE OF LUCRECE, the first consisting of some 1,200 lines and the second of more than 1,800; one a calculated picture of female concupiscence ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... whole intellectual constitution, that, irradiated at once by all the lights of religion and philosophy, and with clearer glimpses of the land of vision and the glories behind the veil than perhaps uninspired mortality ever partook of before, he seems to have reached as near to the full standard of perfection as it is possible for frail and feeble humanity to attain. Dr. Outram said that he looked upon Dr. More as the holiest person upon ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts

... from whose lips distil a lofty eloquence and a remarkable wisdom upon any or all subjects proposed, with a flow of extemporaneous poetry or of heavenly music which has never been equaled under such circumstances by uninspired mortals. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... fell. Foreign invaders occupied the land and were expelled again. Customs, costumes, beliefs, institutions, underwent changes. Of course, then, art did not remain stationary. On the contrary, it had marked vicissitudes, now displaying great freshness and vigor, now uninspired and monotonous, now seemingly dead, and now reviving to new activity. In Babylonia we deal with perhaps even remoter periods of time, but the artistic remains at present known from that quarter ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... anywhere from home, and constantly when at Peterhead. He spoke with enthusiasm of the beauty, simplicity, and energy of the English Liturgy, especially of the Litany, which he declared to be the finest piece of uninspired composition in any language." Life of Dr. Beattie, by Sir W. Forbes, Bart., ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various

... The Bible is the Word of God. It was written by holy men whom God inspired. [II Pet. 1:21] It contains knowledge which no man could have discovered by his own power. It foretells events which no uninspired man could have foreseen. It contains teachings so exalted and holy that they could not have originated in the heart of man. It possesses a power such as no merely human book ever did ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump

... would have liked to maintain, in Henry the Seventh's Chapel, that it was impossible to find, in many hundreds of pages dictated by the Holy Spirit, fifty or sixty chapters more edifying than any thing which could be extracted from the works of the most respectable uninspired moralist or historian. The leaders of the majority therefore determined to shun a debate in which they must have been reduced to a disagreeable dilemma. Their plan was, not to reject the recommendations of the Commissioners, but to prevent those recommendations from ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... infinite labour, a list of the High Priests of Amon; but unless he has encouraged them to put such life into those figures that each one seems to step from the page to confront his recorder, unless the name of each calls to mind the very scenes amidst which he worshipped, then is the work uninspired and as deadening to the student as it is useful to the professor. A catalogue of ancient scarabs is required, let us suppose, and students are set to work upon it. They examine hundreds of specimens, they record the variations in design, they note the differences in the glaze ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... therefore no one can define God's will who is not of the ministry. Had the possibility of direct revelation been admitted this reasoning must have fallen; for then, obviously, the word of an inspired peasant would have outweighed the sermon of an uninspired divine; it follows, necessarily, that ecclesiastics so situated would have been jealous of lay preaching, and absolutely intolerant ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... to distinguish between the inspired and the uninspired parts of the Bible; for this ability ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... which she had been toying, she turned on me one of those rare smiles to which the King could refuse nothing; and wherein wit, tenderness, and gaiety were so happily blended that no conceivable beauty of feature, uninspired by sensibility, could vie with them. "Good friend, I have sinned," she said. "But I am a woman, and I love. Pardon me. As for your PROTEGEE, from this moment she is mine also. I will speak to the King this evening; and if he does not at once," Madame continued, with a gleam of archness that showed ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman

... of the world for reading the uninspired is truly astonishing, and the hundred worst books may be found in every bookseller's window. Would that it were of books that Occam had written: "Non sunt multiplicandi praeter necessitatem"! The men who produce these unnecessary books perform a ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... degree in which every Christian receives, or refuses, the several gifts expressed by that general benediction, he enters or is cast out from the inheritance of the saints,—in the exact degree in which he denies the Christ, angers the Father, and grieves the Holy Spirit, he becomes uninspired or unholy,—and in the measure in which he trusts Christ, obeys the Father, and consents with the Spirit, he becomes inspired in feeling, act, word, and reception of word, according to the capacities of his nature. He is not ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... will make, if the reader will allow, a supposition analogous to some which the author of "Supernatural Religion" has made in pages 360 and following of his first volume. We will suppose that all the ecclesiastical literature, inspired and uninspired, previous to the Council of Nice, had been blotted out utterly, and the Four Gospels alone preserved. And we will suppose some critic taking upon himself to argue that the Gospel of St. John was written after the Nicene ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler

... long-stretching winds. As it was, to look from her window only meant to find repeated the trivialities of life, more picturesque indeed, but still trivialities. It was the estimable and domestic qualities of Nature that presented themselves: Nature in her most maternal and uninspired mood—Mother earth submissive to the dictatorship of man, permitting herself to be torn, and wounded, and furrowed, and harrowed at his pleasure, yielding her substance and her life to sustain the produce of his choosing, her ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... unknown. Long afterwards a wooden tablet was fixed by a churchwarden on the wall of the south aisle of the chancel. A metal plate framed, and painted blue with gilt letters, was substituted. In 1845 that was replaced by one of brass, at the expense of several admirers of Ralegh's genius. It bears the uninspired words: 'Within the chancel of this church was interred the body of the great Sir Walter Ralegh, on the day he was beheaded in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, October 29, 1618. Reader, should you reflect on ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... justly, "and we become a race of independent beings, claiming as a debt the reward of our good works; a sort of contracting party with the Almighty, contributing nought to his glory, but anxious to maintain our own independence, and our own rights." The lips of uninspired man never spake more truth in one sentence. Let the aspiring moralist consider it in its nature and consequences. If he obtain humility by the meditation, he will feel the blessedness ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... names in the history of Science which recall so imposing a combination of these several gifts, that, comparing the men who bore them with the civilization of their time, we can hardly conceive that uninspired intellect should come nearer the imaginary standard. Such a man was Aristotle. The slender and close-shaven fop, with the showy mantle on his ungraceful person and the costly rings on his fingers, who hung on the lips of Plato for twenty years, and trained ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... Church, accept the theory of Jeanne herself; her saints were true saints from Paradise. On the other hand it is manifest that visions of a bright light and 'auditions' of voices are common enough phenomena in madness, and in the experiences of very uninspired sane men and women. From the sensations of these people Jeanne's phenomena are only differentiated by their number, by their persistence through seven years of an almost abnormally healthy life, by their importance, orderliness, and veracity, ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang

... developed, with a healthy sensibility of feeling and culture of imagination, we can get all the influence and enjoyment of art from the works of thoroughly educated and creative artists, and we shall do so with more relish, without the weary remembrance of mechanical practicing uninspired ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... man ought to have been free from persecution it was George Whitefield, bringing great masses of the people into the kingdom of God, wearing himself out for Christ's sake: and yet the learned Dr. Johnson called him a mountebank. Robert Hall preached about the glories of heaven as no uninspired man ever preached about them, and it was said when he preached about heaven his face shone like an angel's, and yet good Christian John Foster writes of Robert Hall, saying: "Robert Hall is a mere actor, and when he talks about heaven the smile on his face ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... me from distinguishing the features of the personage who was receiving me with this solemn welcome. I had always, however, understood that Lady Hester Stanhope wore the male attire, and I began to utter in English the common civilities that seemed to be proper on the commencement of a visit by an uninspired mortal to a renowned prophetess; but the figure which I addressed only bowed so much the more, prostrating itself almost to the ground, but speaking to me never a word. I feebly strived not to be outdone in gestures of respect; but presently my bowing opponent saw the error under which I was acting, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake

... lukewarm; careless, mindless, regardless; inattentive &c 458; neglectful &c 460; disregarding. unconcerned, nonchalant, pococurante^, insouciant, sans souci [Fr.]; unambitious &c 866. unaffected, unruffled, unimpressed, uninspired, unexcited, unmoved, unstirred, untouched, unshocked^, unstruck^; unblushing &c (shameless) 885; unanimated; vegetative. callous, thick-skinned, hard-nosed, pachydermatous, impervious; hardened; inured, casehardened; steeled against, proof against; imperturbable &c (inexcitable) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... The scanty and suspicious materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the church. The great law of impartiality too often obliges us to reveal the imperfections of the uninspired teachers and believers of the gospel; and, to a careless observer, their faults may seem to cast a shade on the faith which they professed. But the scandal of the pious Christian, and the fallacious triumph of the Infidel, should cease as soon as they recollect not only by whom, but likewise ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... well from home as from love, and it mattered to him very little, in the morbid excitement of his present mind, whether he fell by the hand of his rival, or lived to pine out a wearisome existence, lonely and uninspired, a gloomy exile in the bitter world. He waited, it may be said, with some impatience for the fire of his antagonist. Once he saw the pistol of Stevens uplifted. He had one in each hand. His own hung ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... remembrest to have read of such a king, dost thou not? SOL-O-MON, I learned, in my infant state [my mother was a good woman] to answer, when asked, Who was the wisest man?—But my indulgent questioner never asked me how he came by the uninspired part of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... girlish body of the child-soldier there lived a courage as daring as Danton's, a patriotism as pure as Vergniaud's, a soul as aspiring as Napoleon's. Untaught, untutored, uninspired by poet's words or patriot's bidding, spontaneous as the rising and the blossoming of some wind-sown, sun-fed flower, there was, in this child of the battle, the spirit of genius, the desire to live and to die greatly. To be forever a beloved tradition ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... as uninspired in comparison with Hegel in his treatment of the antithesis of good and evil. "One thinks he is saying something great," Hegel remarks "if one says that mankind is by nature good, but it is forgotten that one says something far ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels

... other, whatever be the consequence in the way of offending well-to-do supporters whose dream it has been that son of theirs shall "wag his head in a pu'pit," whatever be the disappointment caused to the uninspired ambitions of callow youth or the conceit of later years. The pulpit is not for sale! The honour of standing there is not to be dispensed as a reward or allowed as a compliment. Wealth has no rights and poverty no disabilities as to the occupancy of ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson

... go another step—let us compare the ideas of this God with the ideas of uninspired men. I am making this long preface because I want to get it out of your minds that the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... was obliged at all costs to finish it within a limited time, I do not mind including this in the list of my uninspired compositions. But I was not displeased with it when it was done, more especially when it was played at the rehearsals given by the Dresden choral societies under my personal supervision. When, therefore, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... openly reproved thus before her friend, lifted her uninspired hands from the keys and spake. When she ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber

... or profit. She was, even then, most interested in religious things. But her chief sources of spiritual strength were in such writings as those of Baxter, Payson and Robert Phillips. It was her custom to read the Bible from duty, and then turn to these uninspired volumes for the kindling of a higher devotion. For a good while this satisfied her; but, at length, she came to feel grieved about it. She thought it a dishonor to God's word that any book should ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various

... extraordinary theory as to the manifold documents which have supplied the materials for the work, has thrown to a much earlier period the authorship of the main portion; and the views of later critics are gradually tending in the same direction. Both study the Pentateuch as uninspired literature; but De Wette absurdly regarded it as an epic created by the priests, in the same manner as the Homeric epic by the rhapsodes: Ewald on the contrary considers it ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... far above all human efforts, his poems fail in these representations. God is a spirit; he is here presented as a body, and that by an uninspired pen. The poet has not been able to carry us up to those infinite heights, and so his attempt only ends in a humanitarian philosophy: he has been obliged to lower the whole heavenly hierarchy to bring it within the scope of our objective comprehension. He ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... object of pity. She was happy. The absence of intolerable tension was enough to make her so. As for the society she was thrown with, after the wear of incessant subtleties and uncertainties there was something positively soothing in straightforward uninspired vulgarity. These people knew their own minds, if their minds were not worth knowing; and that was something. It seemed to her that her own mind was growing healthier every day; till, by the time Edith visited her, there was no need ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... that Byron, uninspired by Pallas, turned to the 'Epics of the Ton' for "copy," but whether he left a blank on purpose because "Vansittart" (to whom Perceval did turn) would not scan, or, misled by old newspapers, would have written "Horner," must remain ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... ascribes inexhaustibility to the trackless savannahs of history. These vast hunting-grounds for the imaginative understanding are in fact but charts and surveyors' outlines meagre and arid for the timid or uninspired student. To a grander intellect these historical delineations are not maps but pictures: they compose a forest wilderness, veined and threaded by sylvan lawns, 'dark with horrid shades,' like Milton's haunted desert in the 'Paradise Regained,' at many a point looking back to the towers of vanishing ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... reject all idea of chance on the fortune of war, and believe firmly that every result is the decision of a Superior Power.[252] Although this elevated conception of the One God[253] is deeply impressed upon the Indian's mind, it is tainted with some of the alloy which ever must characterize the uninspired faith. Those who have inquired into the religious opinions of the uneducated and laborious classes of men, even in the most enlightened and civilized communities, find that their system of belief ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... literary style almost at his worst; and in some cases incoherent (e.g. p. 185, middle). The chapters on the Anatomy and Physiology, on the Source, on the Order and Dates of Appearance and Disappearance, and on the Value and Use of Original Tendencies seem to the reviewer inconclusive and uninspired. There are shrewd and interesting remarks here and there, particularly those of a destructive intent, which the older reader will appreciate; while on the whole he will wonder whether the author has, in these last four chapters, any other than the whimsical aim of producing ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... will. If we contradict the record we call in question the veracity of the spirit which controlled the writer, whether the statement relates to God, man or demons. But this statement does not apply to mistranslations, for it is one thing to contradict an uninspired translator, and another altogether to contradict the statement of one controlled by the spirit of God. We fearlessly assert that the Bible is just the book that common-sense and reason demands that it should be in order to contain a ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various

... and it were perhaps well that she should keep the fact steadily before her, by laying them down as such on their chart. Not from the gross and earthy fires of political movement in the present day, or from the cold grey ashes of movement semi-political in some uninspired age of the past, must that pillar of flame now ascend which is to marshal her on her pilgrimage through the wilderness, at once reviving her by its heat and guiding her by its effulgence. The light borrowed from the one ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... girlish body of the child-soldier there lived a courage as daring as Danton's, a patriotism as pure as Vergniaud's, a soul as aspiring as Napoleon's. Untaught, untutored, uninspired by poet's words or patriot's bidding, spontaneous as the rising and the blossoming of some wind-sown, sun-fed flower, there was, in this child of the battle, the spirit of genius, the desire to live and to die greatly. To be forever a beloved tradition in the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... you will deliberate, and you will discuss, and that is fine. But my friends the people cannot wait. They need help now. And there's a mood among us. People are worried. There has been talk of decline. Someone even said our workers are lazy and uninspired. And I thought, "Really? Go tell Neil Armstrong standing on the moon. Tell the American farmer who feeds his country and the world. Tell the men and women of Desert Storm." Moods come and go, but greatness ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... all is barren. There is a fearful destitution of the picturesque elements. It is true that our local historians commonly avoid all romance as if it were of the Enemy; but if we compare their labors with "The Beauties of England and Wales," for example, the work certainly of uninspired men, we shall be convinced that the American Dryasdust suffers from poverty of material. There is no need to remind us of Hawthorne; but he is such a genius as is rare everywhere, and could conjure poetry ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... the Deity, as in Scripture (though Milton does, and not very wisely either); but have adopted his angel as sent to Cain instead, on purpose to avoid shocking any feelings on the subject, by falling short of what all uninspired men must fall short in, viz. giving an adequate notion of the effect of the presence of Jehovah. The Old Mysteries introduced him liberally enough, and this is avoided in the New."—Letter to Murray, February 8, 1822, Letters, 1901, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron



Words linked to "Uninspired" :   uncreative, unimaginative



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com