"Jejune" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... continuity with the past should be maintained. John Bunyan wrote sterling prose, knowing no language but his own. But how much could he read? What judgments could he form? We want also to keep classics and especially Greek as the bountiful source of material and of colour, decoration for the jejune lives of common men. If classics cease to be generally taught and become the appanage of a few scholars, the gulf between the literary and the scientific will be made still wider. Milton will need more explanatory notes than O. Henry. Who will trouble about us scientific students ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the preposterous Euphuism of the moment; the style is founded on Lyly, the manner is the manner of Greene, and Whetstone in his moral "Mirrors" and "Heptamerons" has supplied the matter. The "absurdity" satirized in this jejune and tedious tract is extravagant living of all kinds. The author attacks women with great vehemence, but only in that temper which permitted the young Juvenals of the hour to preach against wine ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... rank generally accorded to him. He is, of course, far from being faultless. In his longer sentences (though long sentences are by no means the rule with him) he often falls into that abuse of the classical style which the comparatively jejune writers who had preceded him avoided, but which constantly manifested itself in the richer manner of his own contemporaries—the abuse of treating the uninflected English language as if it were an inflected language, in which variations and distinctions of case and gender and ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... with jasper light Greet jejune souls within this shoal, Where witches lure each helot's eye, Each gyving hoodlum, seer and sage. In blazing tankards gleams a sight As o'er their heads giant rocks roll, Of skinless nudes that gasp and die As poisoned lizards vent their rage. Then, vile squats blast the ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... very angry when he heard how miserably the ceremony had been performed. I have been this evening to hear Peel move the address of condolence to the King, which Canning would have done if he had been here; and it is a pity he was not, for Peel did it very ill: it was poor and jejune, and undistinguished by eloquence or the appearance of deep feeling. I was greatly disappointed, for I expected to hear a worthier tribute to his merits. Canning was very anxious to have been here to have performed ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Mail, indirectly confirmed his own impressions. It was true that the PREMIER did not physically resemble an Arab sheikh, and his knowledge of medicine, science or philosophy, to say nothing of geography, was decidedly jejune, but the sad case of President WILSON made it all too clear that he was capable of exerting a hypnotic influence on his colleagues. Mr. KEYNES did not think Mr. LLOYD GEORGE was an Aristotelian; he preferred to consider him an unconscious Pragmatist. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... of the geographers of a period not remote to grapple somewhat jejune facts to the infant mind by means of fanciful comparison: thus, Italy was likened to a boot, France to a coffee-pot, and the European domain of the Sultan to a ruffling turkey. In this pleasant scheme the state of New York was made to figure as a couchant lion, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... spite of the jejune nature of the communication, read it very carefully and indeed even went so far as to examine the ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... shown about in favored circles, supplied the place of newspapers. The lowest ebb of indifference seems to be reached in a letter by Daniel Webster, written from Richmond, and devoted to some very commonplace and jejune praises of morning and early rising. Except as an instance of our epistolary degeneracy, we could hardly wish it to have a place in Mr. Holcombe's collection, which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... abstract subjects. When compared with such philosophic writing as Hume's, Diderot's, Berkeley's, then Comte's manner is heavy, laboured, monotonous, without relief and without light. There is now and then an energetic phrase, but as a whole the vocabulary is jejune; the sentences are overloaded; the pitch is flat. A scrupulous insistence on making his meaning clear led to an iteration of certain adjectives and adverbs, which at length deaden the effect beyond the endurance of all but the most resolute students. Only the profound and stimulating ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... question will frequently arise, How far the detail should be extended? There is a danger, on the one hand, of being carried to an undue length, and of enlarging, more than is needful, on facts which may be thought already sufficiently known; and, on the other hand, of giving such a jejune account, and such a slight enumeration of important events, as shall disappoint the wishes and expectations of the reader. Of the two extremes, the last seems to be that which should most be avoided; for, unless what Captain Cook performed, and what he encountered, be related somewhat ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... or rather a reformation so arid, jejune and material that it promised little more than the "Law of Moses," before this was vivified and racially baptised by Mesopotamian and Persic influences. But human nature was stronger than the Prophet and, thus outraged, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton |
