Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Unthinking   /ənθˈɪŋkɪŋ/   Listen
Unthinking

adjective
1.
Not exhibiting or characterized by careful thought.  Synonyms: unreflective, unthoughtful.
2.
Without care or thought for others.  Synonyms: thoughtless, uncaring.
3.
Mentally sluggish.  Synonyms: lumpen, lumpish.






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 |





"Unthinking" Quotes from Famous Books



... Mr. Cotton Mather was there, Mr. Sims, Hale, Noyes, Cheever, etc. All of them said they were innocent, Carrier and all. Mr. Mather says they all died by a righteous sentence. Mr. Burrough, by his Speech, Prayer, protestation of his innocence, did much move unthinking persons, which occasioned the speaking hardly concerning his ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... unfavorable to our cause and to his intellect, would never have been published had not English reviewers thoroughly ventilated his opinions on the American war. Their insertion, consequently, in no way exposes Landor to severer comment than that to which the rashly unthinking have already subjected him, but, on the contrary, increases our regard for him, denoting, as they do, that, however erroneous his conclusions, the subject was one to which he devoted all the thought left him by old age. The record ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... have spoken with the eloquence of this empty space! The men exchanged no words; the solitude of the cabin, instead of drawing them together, seemed to isolate each one in selfish distrust of the others. Even the unthinking garrulity of Union Mills and the Judge was checked. A moment later, when the Left Bower entered the cabin, his presence ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... based on the "Iron Law of Wages," of which a refutation has been given in Chapter IV.,[853] may sound plausible to the unthinking workman. They may infuriate him and therefore serve the ends of the Socialist agitator, but they are utterly false and dishonest, as all Socialist leaders know. Wages depend partly on the supply and demand for labour, partly on the productiveness of labour. In machineless ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... and retort the frown of others; to wrestle with the anxiety of the heart, and to depend on the caprice of the excited nerves. It is something to feel one part of the drama of disgrace is over, and that I may wait unmolested in my den until, for one time only, I am again the butt of the unthinking and the monster of the crowd. My lord, I have now done! To you, whom the law deems the prisoner's counsel,—to you, gentlemen of the jury, to whom it has delegated his fate,—I leave the chances ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... science of medicine, is the one who appreciates least that it is due to the skill and intelligence of the medical men of to-day that he owes his comfort, his health, and his freedom from pestilence, plague and disease. Unthinking people laud and praise some upstart whose ability lies in his faculty to fool the gullible, or they will rush to seek the false aid of some nondescript science, because it is popular and well advertised, while they pass by ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague

... matter, my son.' 'Nay,' rejoined Master Ciappelletto, 'call it not a light matter, for that the Lord's Day is greatly to be honoured, seeing that on such a day our Lord rose from the dead.' Then said the friar, 'Well, hast thou done aught else?' 'Ay, sir,' answered Master Ciappelletto; 'once, unthinking what I did, I spat in the church of God.' Thereupon the friar fell a-smiling, and said, 'My son, that is no thing to be recked of; we who are of the clergy, we spit there all day long.' 'And you do very ill,' rejoined Master Ciappelletto; 'for that there is nought which it so straitly ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... as soon as we looked at her. Already the grey shadows were deepening on the face of the wanderer as we gathered around her, speaking in whispers. Suddenly the loud clamour of the ship's bell, struck by an unthinking sailor, made the ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke

... distinctly to be perceived; but it is always present as a factor, as a force dignifying and relieving from all touch, all taint of the commonness that is so often inseparably associated with art whose absorption in nature is listlessly unthinking instead of enthusiastic and alert. In Rousseau, too, in a word, we have the classic strain, as at least a psychological element, and note as one source of his power his reserve and restraint, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... though your friends had forsaken you. Go to Gethsemane; see there that Master who but a short time before, with the twelve surrounding the table, had told them of the approaching trials and dangers: urged to rashness, the unthinking Peter had declared that, although all others might forsake him, he would not. He goes into that lonely garden, separating himself from his disciples; but he takes Peter, with two others, and asks them to watch here a while, while he goes yonder and prays. And then that traitor ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy

... bigger than a man's hand amidst a broad expanse of blue ether? The faint, scarce perceptible menace of that one little cloud is lost in the wide brightness of a summer sky. The traveller jogs on contented and unthinking, till the hoarse roar of stormy winds, or the first big drops of the thunder-shower, startle him with a sudden consciousness of the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... years before, and Lightfoot, with unconscious force, had taken her mother's place. There was none other with woman's ways to help the men in the rock-guarded home on the windy hill. Hilltop had not been altogether unthinking all this time. He had often looked upon his daughter's friend, the jolly, swart and well-fed Moonface, and had much approved of her, but, today, as he listened to her story, he did not pay such attention ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... all had gone their several ways, leaving Baji Lal and his wife, Bimjee and myself, alone beneath the pipul tree. A first look into each other's eyes showed that we were all of the same mind. In their excitement of the moment the unthinking throng had approved; but for us there was nothing ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell

... men won't have art, and poor men can't, there is, nevertheless, some unthinking craving for it, some restless feeling in men's minds of something lacking somewhere, which has made many benevolent people seek for the possibility of ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris

... mind these unthinking judgments about our great college do harm, and I determined, therefore, that anything that I said about Oxford should be the result of the actual observation and real study based upon a bona fide residence in ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock

... little, he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled himself again in a recumbent posture. It was beyond his strength to follow that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast with what his ears took in. He sighed and lay back, and surrendered his senses to the mere unthinking charm of ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... of babes and sucklings the heedless and unthinking are condemned; would God I could bring the little creatures back, for your sake. And mine, yes, and mine; for I have been unjust. There, there, don't cry—nobody could be sorrier than your poor ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain

... heart than that he should have induced the enemy of other days to pay this highest of all tributes to his honesty and worth. He had convinced his enemy of his rectitude, and what greater deed than this! I confess it made my ears tingle with shame when I used to hear unthinking scoundrels, egged on by others who should have known better, shout "Barrymore!" at Mr O'Brien in their attempts to hold him up to public odium for an act which might easily have been made the most benign in his life, as it certainly was one of ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan

... The gay coquette Has long forgot the flames she lighted, And you and I unthinking by Alike are thrown, alike are slighted. The darkness gathers fast without, A raindrop on my window plashes; My cigarette and heart are out, And naught is left ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various

... in free style is the last movement of Cesar Franck's Prelude, Choral and Fugue in B minor for Pianoforte. This movement alone would refute all charges of dullness or dryness brought against the fugue by the unthinking or the unenlightened. A good fugue, in fact, is so full of vitality and demands such active comprehension[39] on the part of the listener that it is not difficult to imagine where the dullness and dryness ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... were sounded to the very depths, this intimate closely hidden wretchedness, following upon her unthinking, girlish first love, had roused in her an abhorrence of passion; possibly she had no conception of its rapture, nor of the forbidden but frenzied bliss for which some women will renounce all the laws of prudence and the principles of conduct upon which society ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac

... and welcome in her eyes, and it gave him a peculiar thrill, a thrill at first of absolute and unthinking joy, followed at once by a little catch. Before him rose the square and massive vision of "King" Plummer, and he had an ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... rarity of his wine-parties, and his never having other wines produced than port or sherry, he himself explained to me—"Men would say, it was easy for me to sport claret and champagne, when I could get them for nothing." But if an unthinking freshman broke out in praise of the said excellent port or sherry, (as indeed they might well be pardoned for doing, considering the quality of what they commonly imbibed,) he would say at once—"Yes, I believe it is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... that simple weakness may come to be the parent of great sin. In a world like this, where there are always more voices soliciting to wrong than to right, to be weak is in the long run to be wicked. Fatal facility of disposition ruins hundreds of unthinking men. Nothing is more needful than that young people should learn to say 'No,' and should cultivate a wholesome obstinacy which is afraid of nothing but of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... stock on his farm may be the meanest trash in existence, and it creates no remark. On the contrary, one who at any extra cost has supplied himself with stock of the choicer kinds, let their superiority be ever so apparent, has often been the subject of ribaldry, by his unthinking associates. And such, we are sorry to say, is still the case in too many sections of our country. But, on the whole, both our public spirit, and our intelligence, is increasing, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen

... fact that yet another remarkable peculiarity of Hinduism is mainly due—namely, that in no other System of the world is the chasm more vast which separates the religion of the higher, cultured, and thoughtful Classes, from that of the lower, uncultured, and unthinking Masses." ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... are always to be mine. I was born to be of the minority. Please don't give another thought to me or my play. Go your own way. Get back to the plays that please people. Be happy. You have the right to be happy, and I am a selfish, unthinking criminal whom you would better forget. Don't waste another dollar or another moment on my play—it is madness. I am overwhelmed with my debt to you, but I shall ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... self, the life that is more his own life than the beating of his heart, which a bullet may still for ever. And if the exaltation of noble patriotism can 'abolish death, and bring life and immortality to light' for almost any unthinking lad from our factories and hedgerows, should not religion be able to do as much for us all? And may it not be that some touch of heroic self-abnegation is necessary before we can have a soul which death cannot touch? When Christ said that those ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... in the great adventurer's career, he was lucky. The unthinking have always admitted his luck, but never seen that he forced it—forced it by doing the unexpected—attacking when he was attacked. He was doing that now. The three coolie-guards in his way must have known who he was, so their alarm at ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore

... the causes for congratulation to-night is the confidence we have that the enfranchised people will prove worthy of American citizenship. No true patriot wishes to see them exhibit a blind and unthinking attachment to mere party; but all good men wish to see them cultivate habits of industry and thrift, and to exhibit intelligence and virtue, and at every election to be earnestly solicitous to array themselves ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard

... exceptions have been much animadverted upon by unthinking persons. I have shown that according to the code of morality, that is in vogue among people whose Christianity and civilisation are unquestionable, a lie may sometimes be honourable. However casuists may argue, the world is agreed that a lie for saving life ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... things in the way you have done," exclaimed Terence, from the fulness of his heart. "Had it not been for you, shipmate, I should not have seen the finger of God in the various ways in which He has been pleased to preserve me, and I should have died the ungrateful, unthinking wretch ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston

... tightened into two small clenched fists—and then tumult died in her ringing ears, the brightness of the eyes was quenched, her hands relaxed, her head sank low, lower, never again to look on this man undismayed, heart free, unafraid—never again to look into this man's eyes with the unthinking, unbelieving tranquillity born of the most harmless ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers

... individual happiness had been caught away from her in a whirlwind of calamity, and when the whole world was reeling under the red storm of war, Sara could always remember the utter, satisfying peace of those golden days of early July—an innocent, unthinking peace that neither she nor the world would ever quite regain. Afterwards, memory would always have her scarred and bitter place at the ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... her lineaments, her figure, were all distinct from theirs, and, evidently, the type of another race—of a race less gifted with fullness of flesh and plenitude of blood; less jocund, material, unthinking. When I first cast my eyes on her, she sat looking fixedly down, her chin resting on her hand, and she did not change her attitude till I commenced the lesson. None of the Belgian girls would have retained one ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

... the tying together of broken strings; so that while the savage has his faculties sharpened by various occupations, and by exposure to various perils, the civilized man treads a monotonous, stupefying round of unthinking toil. This cannot, must not, always be. Variety of action, corresponding to the variety of human powers, and fitted to develop all, is the most important element of human civilization. It should be the aim of philanthropists. In proportion as Christianity shall spread the spirit of brotherhood, there ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... which lightly comes tripping from the lips of unthinking men, and even women." So writes a famous war-correspondent, a man in the midst of war and telling of war as it really is. Now hear a woman war-correspondent, writing about this same war: "I was so ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... this billet catches you in bed, you are a lazy, sleepy little slut, and I am a giddy, foolish, unthinking fellow, for keeping you so late up—but this Sabbath is a day of rest, at the same time that it is a day of sorrow; for I shall not see my dear creature to-day, unless you meet me at Taylor's half an hour after twelve; but in this do as you like. I have ordered Matthew to turn thief, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... our country! These, we are told by the Minister, are only vulgar topics fitted for the meridian of the mob, but unworthy to be mentioned in such an enlightened assembly as this; they are trinkets and gew-gaws fit to catch the fancy of childish and unthinking people like you, sir, or like your predecessor in that chair, but utterly unworthy of the consideration of this House, or of the matured understanding of the noble lord who condescends to instruct it! Gracious God! We see a Perry re-ascending from the tomb and raising his awful ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... have been sharpened by migration. To carry a pack and peddle is better than to work for a Ph. D., save for the social usufruct and the eclat of the unthinking. We learn by indirection and not when we say: "Go to! Now watch us take a college course and enlarge our phrenological organs." Our knobs come from knocks, and not from the gentle massage of hired tutors. Selling subscription-books, maps, sewing-machines or Mason and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... the prosecution was not carried on by the lessees, but by the magistrates of the borough, who were determined to put a stop, by all means in their power, to a recurrence of such disgraceful proceedings, and attempts on the part of an unthinking public to force gentlemen to do what they did not consider right or equitable. The verdict returned was "guilty of riot, but ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian

... about her ears And filled her with a thousand fears, Lest the rude blast should snap the bough, And spread her golden hopes below. But just at eve the blowing weather Changed, and her fears were hushed together: "And now," quoth poor unthinking Ralph,[1] "'Tis over, and the brood is safe." (For Ravens, though, as birds of omen, They teach both conjurers and old women To tell us what is to befall, Can't prophesy themselves at all.) The morning came, when Neighbour Hodge, Who long had marked her airy lodge, And ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various

... together!—till the Watch would look down the skylight upon us, grinning, and chuckle hoarsely that old Belzey, as they called their commander (being a diminutive for Beelzebub), and his young Imp were having a tussle. Thus it came about that among these unthinking Seamen I grew to be called Pug (who, I have heard, is the Lesser Fiend), or Little Brimstone, or young Pitchladle. And then I, in my Impish way, would offer to fight them too, resenting their scurril nicknames, and telling them that I had but one name, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... well-known seminary. When they had entered this walk, it had been empty. Now it held for one of them—and possibly for the other, too—a world of joy and promise;—the world of seventeen. Innocent and unthinking, neither of them had known her own heart, much less that of her fellow. But when in face of that approach, eye met eye with an askance look of eager question, revelation came, crimsoning the cheeks of both, and marking an epoch in ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green

... with the Head, who was father-confessor and agent-general to them all; for what they shouted in their unthinking youth, they proved in their thoughtless manhood—to wit, that the Prooshan Bates was "a downy bird." Young blood who had stumbled into an entanglement with a pastry-cook's daughter at Plymouth; experience who had come into a small legacy but mistrusted ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling

... something for his lord, to entertain him till the happy hour. The rustic pleas'd me with the concern he had for my Philander; oh my charming brother, you have an art to tame even savages, a tongue that would charm and engage wildness itself, to softness and gentleness, and give the rough unthinking, love; 'tis a tedious time to-night, how shall ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... about the same as people once believed in original sin; we still receive ready-made opinions from above, the Academy of Sciences occupying in many respects the place of the ancient councils. Except with a few special savants, belief and obedience will always be unthinking, while Reason would wrongfully resent the leadership of prejudice in human affairs, since, to lead, it must itself ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... in themselves, the majority has no right to impose upon the minority, is a doctrine that was, I think I may say, universally understood among thinking Americans of all former generations. It was often forgotten by the unthinking; but those who felt themselves called upon to be serious instructors of public opinion were always to be counted on to assert it, in the face of any popular clamor or aberration. The most deplorable feature, to my mind, of the whole story of ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin

... mined, as were those of the early eighteenth century in France by the Encyclopaedists, by a select class of destructive critics, in whose wake the whole public irregularly follows. The ordinary unthinking man accepts the change with exhilaration, since in this country the majority have always enjoyed seeing noses knocked off statues. But if we are to rejoice in liberation from the bondage of the Victorian Age we ought to know what those ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... the deeper they are, the more surely are we drawn into them. On foot, of course, there is no danger whatever, and, with ordinary precautions, but little on animals. In comfortable tourist faith, unthinking, unfearing, down go men, women, and children on whatever is offered, horse, mule, or burro, as if saying with Jean Paul, "fear nothing but fear"—not without reason, for these canyon trails down the stairways of the gods ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... repudiated in fact, though not expressly even by its own author. This circumstance, which is simply undeniable, might dispense us from any further consideration of the hypothesis itself. But the "conspiracy of silence," which has accompanied the repudiation tends to lead the unthinking many to suppose that the same importance still attaches to it as at first. On this account it may be well to ask the question, what, after all, is ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... found the cits, their daughters, sons, and spouses, Spending the live-long night in fierce carouses: Alas, unthinking of the danger near! One or two sentinels the ramparts guarded, The rest were sharing in the general feast: "God wot, our tipsy town is poorly warded; Sweet Saint Sophia ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray

... red-letter day with me when Peter said his prayers for the first time; and I was better pleased when he put his little paws up and lifted his eyes up to the ceiling than with any other of his accomplishments, though they were more appreciated by unthinking friends. It was all very well to place a mouse at my feet and thus play to the gallery, but I felt that Peter's thirst for ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... to give Mother Beckett a faint hint of hope. But I dared not run the risk. If Paul Herter proved to be mistaken, it would be for her like losing her son a second time, and the dear one's strength might not be equal to the strain. After thinking and unthinking all night, I decided to keep silent until our two men returned from the British front. Then, perhaps, I might tell Brian of the message from Doctor Paul, and ask his opinion about speaking to Father Beckett. As for myself, I resolved not to make any confession, unless it were certain that Jim ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... have been the unthinking verdict passed upon suffragists and their activities prior to the World War, it was thereafter widely acknowledged that in the national crisis they played a leading role in the support and defense of the nation. While it is a matter for regret that their ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... he would be strange there; he knows naught of the ways of the colonists. He would be poor, despised, while here he has been like the first, the best. His pride could never stoop to a life like a slave's; his pride would break his heart. Let me undo the mischief I have wrought; let me unsay the unthinking, foolish words ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... Autumn arrived. The stated changes of the seasons serve as monitors to remind us of the flight of time; and upon such occasions the most unthinking can hardly avoid pausing to reflect upon the past, the present, and the probable future. Autumn has been properly styled the "Sabbath of the year." Its scenes are adapted to awaken sober and profitable reflection; and the voice with which ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell

... we may decry the Gotha raids over the English coast and on London, there is no doubt that the men who undertook these raids were not deficient in the form of bravery that is of more value than the unthinking valour of a minute which, observed from the right ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... and to secure a steady and irresistible progress. Its truest devotees will remain in principle what they are, losing gradually the external characteristics of the school as it is now known,—while the great mass of its disciples, unthinking, impulsive, will sink back into the ranks of the old school, carrying with them the strength they have acquired by the severe training of the system, so that the whole of English Art will be the better for Pre-Raphaelitism. But with Ruskin's influence ceases the Commonwealth of Art; for Ruskin ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... hundred and ninety-five are five more—as we allow—who have so little of perception, who are so stolid, so dull of wit and apprehension that they go into battle unmoved, unshaken, unthinking. This leaves nine hundred and ninety who are afraid—sorely and terribly afraid. They are afraid of being killed, afraid of being crippled, afraid of venturing out where killings and cripplings are carried on as branches ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... whipt, and otherwise punished on this occasion: But, from the end of June 1553, to the end of November of the same year, the court sat daily, and every day four, five, or six were tried and condemned, who were all punished according to their sentences next day. The unthinking people styled Alvarado a Nero, who could thus condemn so many of a day, yet amused himself afterwards with the attorney-general in vain and light discourses, as if those whom he condemned had been so many capons or turkies to be served up at his table. In the month of October, Basco Godinez ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr

... disseminated throughout the land in publications under various titles. He aimed to reach not only the young theologians and all who were likely to wield a great public influence, but to so popularize his system that the unthinking masses might become his followers. He succeeded. Even Roman Catholics embraced his tenets, and he was accustomed to say, with evident satisfaction, that his text-books were used at Ingolstadt, Vienna, and Rome. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... queen, "will be to say to yourself, 'Am I so poor a maid that I cannot by the very beauty of my dancing keep the eyes of the watchers lifted clear above my shoes? For shoes, what are shoes? Leather and wood. Inanimate, unthinking stuff! They are not worth one heart pang, one moment of misery to me or mine. But I, I am alive. I can see and think and understand. I can go so joyously through the mazes of the dance that the watchers ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake

... have some comfort in the shortness of their views; in their unapprehensiveness; and that they penetrate not beyond the present moment: in short that they are unthinking!—But, for a person of my thoughtful disposition, who has been accustomed to look forward, as well to the possible, as to the probable, what comfort can I ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... wisdom cried to stay their maddened feet, When with dissuading words Theano spake: "Wherefore, ah wherefore for the toil and strain Of battle's fearful tumult do ye yearn, Infatuate ones? Never your limbs have toiled In conflict yet. In utter ignorance Panting for labour unendurable, Ye rush on all-unthinking; for your strength Can never be as that of Danaan men, Men trained in daily battle. Amazons Have joyed in ruthless fight, in charging steeds, From the beginning: all the toil of men Do they endure; and therefore ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... experience, very often turn out very able men. The number of great generals and statesmen, as well as excellent authors, that France has produced, is an undeniable proof, that it is not that frivolous, unthinking, empty nation that northern prejudices suppose it. Seem to like and approve of everything at first, and I promise you that you will like and approve of many ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... on, blind with weariness, but upheld by that desperate, unthinking courage that animates a bayonet charge. It seemed that every moment must see the beginning of that slow work of demolition which would send them all scurrying to safety; but hour after hour the piling continued to hold and the fingers of steel ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... unexperienced audience please: No single character had e'er been shown, But the whole herd of fops was all their own; Rich in originals, they set to view, In every piece, a coxcomb that was new. But now our British theatre can boast Drolls of all kinds, a vast, unthinking host! 10 Fruitful of folly and of vice, it shows Cuckolds, and cits, and bawds, and pimps, and beaux; Rough country knights are found of every shire; Of every fashion gentle fops appear; And punks of different ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... best of our present Translations at used; and thus the Tune, and the Sense, and their Devotion is interrupted at once, because they dare not sing without understanding, and almost against their Consciences. Whereas the more unthinking Multitude go on singing in chearful Ignorance wheresoever the Clerk guides them, a-cross the River Jordan, thro' the Land of Gebal, Ammon and Amalek; He leads 'em into the strong City, he brings them into Edom; Anon they ...
— A Short Essay Toward the Improvement of Psalmody • Isaac Watts

... I was afraid he'd force you against your will. Once I was eager to take you even so, but I hope you won't judge me for that. I was an unthinking boy then." ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... social worker, or from the doctor, surgeon, or sexologist, there has been a "vox clamantis in deserto." Usually these voices have fallen on unheeding ears; but again and again some delver in books, some student of men, some inspired, self-effacing, or altruistic one has taken up the cry; and at last unthinking, unheeding, superficial, self-satisfied humanity has turned ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long

... head taller than the others. There was a little black hole in the middle of his forehead. And thereupon Silvere fired straight before him, without taking aim, reloaded and fired again like a madman or an unthinking wild beast, in haste only to kill. He could not even distinguish the soldiers now; smoke, resembling strips of grey muslin, was floating under the elms. The leaves still rained upon the insurgents, for the troops ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... not so reckless of our true interest, so blind to utter helplessness—not to say so devoid of humanity, as to entertain the hostile designs, or to cherish the fiendish passions, which it seems have been, by the unthinking, so unjustly attributed ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... premise it's my honest conviction, That my breast is the chaos of all contradiction, Religious—deistic—now loyal and warm, Then a dagger-drawn democrat hot for reform; * * * * * Now moody and sad, now unthinking and gay, To all points of the compass I veer ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White

... you first came here I was ugly and poor and deformed. I was jeered at and scorned by the unthinking. I ate grass; a bunch of leaves was my sole garment, and I had nothing to hide my ugliness. But now, O Tusitala, now I am beautiful; my body is sound and handsome; I bear a great name; I am rich and powerful and unashamed, ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... to myself. The thing was sickeningly clear to me. Jim Starr had nothing to do with it. I was the man for whom that bullet from the rim had been intended. I was the unthinking, shortsighted fool who had done Jim Starr to his death. It had never occurred to me that my midnight reconnoitring would leave tracks, that Old Man Hooper's suspicious vigilance would even look for tracks. But given that vigilance, the rest followed plainly enough. A ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... still a young man; he is young in soul and body. Like Peter Pan he does not grow up, yet he is a famous man; he has written great books, he has written fine poems, he has written brilliant essays, but he has never written a book with an appeal to an unthinking public that reads to kill thought. I wonder whether Chesterton would write a 'Philosophy for the Unthinking Man'? I think he is the one man of the day who could do it, and I think it might ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... that he could not openly voice his suspicions until the other was ready to show his hand, Blake kept a close mouth, and thus the two played at cross-purposes. Maruffi—if he were indeed the author of those letters—had not shrunk from betraying the unthinking instruments of the Mafia. Would he ever bring himself to implicate the man, or men, higher up? Blake doubted it. A certain instinctive distrust of the Sicilian was beginning to master him when a letter came which put a wholly different face ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... has been obtained from a careless and unthinking legislature, which makes all healing a crime, when not performed by graduated, licensed and registered practitioners, but the law is so odious that it is not enforced against those who are not administering ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various

... the cause of art, as to assert that the greater portion of Bill's utensils are useless; and that by much puttering he loses time without improving his work. These persons we are inclined to class among those zealous but unthinking lovers of simplicity, whose misdirected reformatory efforts in other departments of life are so well known. As might be expected, Bill treats these sacrilegious innovators with the contempt they so justly merit. Were an officious stranger to try to convince ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... But you have made it needful. You have put forth notions radically false and practically mischievous on fundamental questions; and you have done it in the way most calculated to impose on the minds of the ignorant and unthinking—by quietly assuming their truth. One wonders to see you apparently so unconscious of the utter contradiction between that which you take for granted and that which, in the general consent of respectable writers and thinkers, is held ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... but almost the whole Continent. In short, in your friend's letter, I am condemned for the very thing for which I ought to have been praised, viz., that I have not written down to the level of superficial observers and unthinking minds. Every great poet is a teacher: I wish either to be considered as a teacher, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... fish. To the officers who resided there this proved a great convenience, and they encouraged the natives to visit them as often as they could bring them fish. There were, however, among the convicts some who were so unthinking, or so depraved, as wantonly to destroy a canoe belonging to a fine young man, a native, who had left it at some little distance from the settlement, and as he hoped out of the way of observation, while he went with some fish to the huts. His rage at finding ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... years back the unthinking and officious School Directors voted to have that fence demolished, simply because it seemed to be out of keeping with the grand new building that had been erected, a storm of angry protest arose from students and parents; while letters arrived ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson

... the Supreme Council in Paris sufficient proof that saving democracy was just another shibboleth? Is not a ghastly war to be followed by a ghastly peace? The press-agents and orators popularized the war with the unthinking and the hesitant, which is proof enough to me that we lack national unity and a definite national policy. We're a lot of sublimated jackasses, sacrificing our country to ideals that are worn at elbow and down at heel. 'Other times, other customs.' But ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... ugly duckling, and I saw my swan's plumage reflected in the placid faces of the boys around me, as in the vacant waters of a pool. As yet I did not dream of a moulting season, still less that a day would come when I should envy the ducks their domestic ease and the unthinking tranquillity of their lives. A little boy may be excused for not realising that Hans Andersen's story is only the prelude to a sadder story that he had ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... exclaims the Englishman, "we have no Bastile! Thank God, with us no man can be punished without a crime!" Unthinking wretch! Is that a country of liberty, where thousands languish in dungeons and fetters? Go, go, ignorant fool! and visit the scenes of our prisons! witness their unwholesomeness, their filth, the tyranny of their governors, ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... help, I was—I know I was, for I have often, often, thought about it since—the most inclined to yield to what he showed me. Oh! if he had relented but a little more; if he had thrown himself in my way for but one other quarter of an hour; if he had extended his compassion for a vain, unthinking, miserable girl, in but the least degree; he might, and I believe he would, have saved her! Tell him that I don't blame him, but am grateful for the effort that he made; but ask him for the love of God, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... comforts, she assigned me the best place in her power—the corner of a shelf on which she kept her books, slate, needlework, and inkstand. And there I lived, sitting on my trunk, and observing human life from a new point of view. And though my dignity might appear lowered in the eyes of the unthinking, I felt that the respectability of my character was really in no way diminished; for I was able to fulfil the great object of my existence as well as ever, by giving innocent pleasure, and being useful ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown

... supremacy, as of one who was monarch of all he surveyed in the county of Surrey. But Elma could see, for all that, that he was absent-minded and self-contained; he answered all questions in a distant, unthinking way; some inner trouble was undoubtedly consuming him. His eyes were all for the two Warings. They glanced nervously right and left every minute in haste, but returned after each excursion straight ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... on MANNERS are not out of print, An honest tongue may drop a harmless hint. Stop not, unthinking, every friend you meet, To spin your wordy fabric in the street; While you are emptying your colloquial pack, The fiend Lumbago jumps upon his back. Nor cloud his features with the unwelcome tale Of how he ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... thus the Exhalations bred From her own Bowels, to obscure her Head. And Absolom already had subdu'd Whole Crowds of the unthinking Multitude. But through these Wiles too weak to catch the Wise, Thin as their Ephod-Lawn, a Cobweb Net for Flyes, The searching Sanedrim saw; and to dispel Th'ingendring Mists that threatned Israel, They still resolv'd their Plotting ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.

... pleasure of conversing with Lady Madeleine Trevor; more changed than she will perhaps believe; more changed than he can sometimes himself believe. I hope that he will not be less acceptable to Lady Madeleine Trevor because he is no longer rash, passionate, and unthinking; because he has learnt to live more for others and less ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... in certain influential quarters for which I have a high respect, and desire to have a higher. I am afraid that by dint of constantly being reiterated, and reiterated without protest, this assumption— which I take leave altogether to deny—may be accepted by the more unthinking part of the public as unquestionably true; just as caricaturists and painters, professedly making a portrait of some public man, which was not in the least like him to begin with, have gone on repeating and repeating it until the public ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... therefore, by the bitter experiences at Wilbraham, Russell determined to go to Yale. This meant a stern fight indeed, one that would call out all his reserves of determination, perseverance and indifference to the jeers and jibes of unthinking and unfeeling classmates. But he did not flinch at the prospect. His brother Charles went with him, and in the fall of '60 they entered Yale College. If poverty was bitter at Wilbraham, it was bitterer here. They were utter strangers among hundreds of boys from ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr

... theory is to some modern scientists. The tsgya live in the earth, in the water, in the air, in the foliage of trees, in decaying wood, or wherever else insects lodge, and as they are constantly being crushed, burned or otherwise destroyed through the unthinking carelessness of the human race, they are continually actuated by a spirit of revenge. To accomplish their vengeance, according to the doctors, they "establish towns" under the skin of their victims, thus ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... endure it as we endure to traverse the ward for epileptics in an hospital for the insane. It is appalling, it fills you with horror, it haunts you for days and nights, it leaves a kind of stain on the memory. It is a possibility of character of which the healthy, the pure, the unthinking have never dreamed. Such a portrait is not art, that is true; but it is science, and that delivers the critic from the necessity of searching his vocabulary for the cheap superlatives of moral censure. Whether ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... They serve to purge scientific literature of the awkward and careless statements too often made by writers not sufficiently instructed or cautious, which in the absence of hostile criticism might get accepted by the unthinking reader along with the truths which they accompany. Most scientific and philosophical works have their defects; and it is fortunate that there is such a thing as dogmatic ardour in the world, ever sharpening its wits to the utmost, that it may spy each lurking inaccuracy ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... should perpetually cherish in his thoughts, will banish from us all that secret heaviness of heart which unthinking men are subject to when they lie under no real affliction, all that anguish which we may feel from any evil that actually oppresses us, to which I may likewise add those little cracklings of mirth ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... centuries, the centuries of its greatest achievements and noblest martyrdoms, Christianity had not defined its God. And even to-day it has to be noted that a large majority of those who possess and repeat the Christian creeds have come into the practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood, that only in the slightest way do they realise the nature of the statements to which they subscribe. They will speak and think of both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... long for an unthinking lad; and they seemed endless, those never-changing rows of tree-trunks, those uncounted yellow, blinking cornfields ... and never a creature on the road. It was something very much out of the way when a pigeon flew through the azure sky; ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels

... and though through weakness of character an unwise master, yet not an unthinking statesman; and I still want a satisfactory solution of the ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... (2)The apparently unthinking and apathetic class, who prefer to relegate all initiative to leaders whom they will loyally follow. This class is the most numerous ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... sacrifice was my darling capable were her life's purpose wrecked. Something there was in the portrait of the sweet singleness, the noble scorn of self, the devotion unthinking, uncalculating, which I knew lay hidden in ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell

... and influence. As we read now its words of tenderness for the woman who loved him, and who brought almost the only ray of sunlight into his life, we can only wonder and be silent. Entirely different are his Drapier's Letters, a model of political harangue and of popular argument, which roused an unthinking English public and did much benefit to Ireland by preventing the politicians' plan of debasing the Irish coinage. Swift's poems, though vigorous and original (like Defoe's, of the same period), are generally satirical, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... vigorously that THEY would not consent to be photographed with him—a statement which would not be true in any instance. There are hundreds of people in America who would frankly say to you that they would not be proud to be photographed in a group with the Prince, if invited; and some of these unthinking people would believe it when they said it; yet in no instance would it be true. We have a large population, but we have not a large enough one, by several millions, to furnish that man. He has not yet been begotten, and in fact ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain

... for him through the lives and struggles of the countless beings who are in the line of his long descent; his mind is equally an accumulated inheritance of the mental growth of the myriads of thinking men and unthinking animals that went before him. In the forms of his humbler forebears he has himself lived and died myriads of times to make ready the soil that nurses and sustains him to-day. He is a debtor to Cambrian and Silurian times, to ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... which some one was holding his finger without reading it. No wonder that the public felt sure that she could just as well discover secrets which no one knows and be aware of far-distant happenings. It is only one step from this to the belief in a prophetic foresight of what is to come. For most unthinking people, mind-reading leads in this fashion over to the whole world of mysticism. In sharp contrast to such vagaries, the critical observers like the judge and the minister insisted that there was no trace ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... boasted charms, The angry infant flew to arms; He slung his quiver's golden frame, He took his bow; his shafts of flame, And proudly summoned me to yield, Or meet him on the martial field. And what did I unthinking do? I took to arms, undaunted, too; Assumed the corslet, shield, and spear, And, like ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... walls so high above him, His eyes waiting hang, Waiting, though she would not love him, For her lattice-clang— Waiting till the loved should send her Glance into the vale, And, unthinking, toward ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald

... building the society of nations upon a basis of genuinely representative government. Behind this reasonable process of constructive thinking, carried on in every country by politically convinced individuals and groups, will be the powerful support of the unthinking, suffering masses, motived by no clear conception of causes or remedies, but by that collective instinct of self-preservation which impels the herd to avoid destruction and to follow leaders who point the way ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... year of abuse, I felt no ill effects whatsoever, although I realized, in an unthinking way, that I was doing wrong. But sexuality had assumed the proportion of a regular feature of our school life. It was difficult for me to place a "universal" view in its true perspective. I used to smile at the glazed, dull ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... stood up in the full blaze of the fire-light. "I confess to nothing," he said. "My strong point hasn't been my piety, I own to that. I'm not much of a hot gospeller. I can't call to mind any works of unusual virtue perpetrated by me in unthinking moments. I'll go even so far as this: I'll acknowledge there are times when, if I let myself off the chain, I'd astonish all Timber Town; for there lurks somewhere inside my anatomy a demon which, let loose, would turn the town into a little hell, but, gentlemen, ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace

... in his moods is no mere trick of fancy carried into execution. It is a part of the character of a strong nation, and has a wider bearing on national life than perhaps unthinking people are aware. Mr. Froude, in his survey of early England, gives it a special place; and I venture to quote his words, for they carry with them, not only their own lesson, but the authority of a great name ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving

... They were seldom provided with more food than was sufficient for the day; and in their treacherous visitations at night, for the purposes of revenge, the European might be easily mistaken for, or confounded with, the savage. But thus it was, to the great evil of the community to which these unthinking wretches belonged. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... foremost, Him by the cast of his eye oblique, I knew as the firebrand Whom the unthinking populace held for their idol and hero, Lord of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... meditate that hopeless project—the offspring, poor angel, of her artless, unthinking generosity? Does she still fancy that it is in her power to assert my innocence before the world? Oh, mother (if she do), use your utmost influence to make her give up the idea! Spare her the humiliation, the disappointment, the insult, ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins

... heart, "When you can find me a job where I can earn as much as I do right here, I'll take it, but until then, I must live, and I must help to support my family." Meanwhile these street merchants are creating an erroneous impression in the minds of the unthinking, but ever sympathetic public, leading it to believe that begging is all that the blind can do; and so, when asked to employ a blind person, even in the smallest capacity, people mention the blind of the street, and say they will gladly contribute to the support of the sightless either ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley

... himself up to melancholy reflections. Mingled with grief for his disappointment was mortification at having been the dupe of what now appeared to him a very shallow artifice, which nothing but his own passionate and unthinking precipitation could have rendered plausible. Nor was he without some twinges of conscience for the sarcasms which he had often uttered against women, and for which his present sufferings were no more than a just retribution. Then came meditations of revenge upon the beautiful author of all this ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... salvation, imputed righteousness, saving faith, &c. When I came to look for those doctrines in the Bible, I could not find one of them from the beginning of the Book to the end. I was in consequence led to regard them as the imaginations of unthinking, trifling, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... had its instantaneous effect amongst the younger and more unthinking loiterers. Those who at once would have disbelieved the imputed guilt of Antagoras upon motives merely political, inclined to a suggestion that ascribed it to the jealousy of a lover. And his character, ardent and fiery, rendered the suspicion ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... fury. Then a strange thing happened. The assailant turned and fled, not to the ready egress of the front door, but down the dark stairway to the basement. The judge thundered after, in maddened, unthinking pursuit. Average Jones ran fleetly and easily. And his running was not for the purpose of flight alone, for as he sped through the basement rooms, he kept casting swift glances from side to side, and up and down the walls. The heavyweight ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the unthinking city, the Cathedral kept watch alone, beseeching pardon for the inappetency for suffering, for the inertia of faith that her sons displayed, uplifting her towers to the sky like two arms, while the spires mimicked the shape of joined hands, the ten fingers ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans



Words linked to "Unthinking" :   stupid, inconsiderate, thoughtfully



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org