Stupidity

“ Your poets and your philosophers have no resource against the stupidity that opposes them. “Even the gods,” they complain, “fight unvictorious against stupidity.” But your divines and your preachers have hope beside the dullest and the stupidest and even the most imbruted. They point themselves and their slowest and dullest-witted hearers to Old Honest, this rare old saint; and they set up their pulpit with hope and boldness on the very causeway of the town of Stupidity itself. ”

“ Why are people stupid and wearisome, and yet make themselves important with their stupidity? And wherefore am I myself such a melancholy personage, worse than anybody else, and should have withal such a pair of quick eyes, as if only on purpose to see the infirmities and perversions of the world? ”

“ Frivolity, Envy, Dissipation, Covetousness, all these darling vices of fallen man,—these are at the bottom of what we name Stupidity. This is true enough, but it is not so much to the point as the saying of a highly judicious aphorist of my own acquaintance, that "Excessive anger against human stupidity is itself one of the most provoking of all forms of stupidity." ”

“ It is not so, unless we say that stupidity is nothing but the want of that sense which acts on our social intercourse much as the thyroid gland does on the bodily system, or, to take another image, like that subtle ingredient of a salad which animates the whole. ”

“ But imagine in the case before us the intervals as well—the stupidity, the vacant gaze, the hanging lip, the pale flaccid countenance and bloodshot eyes, idiocy alternated with madness—no voice of human speech, only the animal babble of the uneducated dumb—the misery of his falling down anywhere, now in the fire, now in the water, and the divine shines out as nowhere else—for the father loves his only child even to agony. ”

“ Never will I resign myself to wickedness, and stupidity is wickedness, not even a decent, honest wickedness, but a crazy, sap-headed sort of wickedness, same as influenza isn’t a disease but just an ailment that kills you all the same. ”

“ I am very far from placing them in the same class with those men whom we call stupid, for the latter are stupid only from deficient education, and I rather like them. I have met with some of them—very honest fellows, who, with all their stupidity, had a kind of intelligence and an upright good sense, which cannot be the characteristics of fools. ”

“ The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward. ”

“ The best that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity—which is still the average mark of our culture. ”

“ In warring against stupidity, the most just and gentle of men at last become brutal. They are thereby, perhaps, taking the proper course for defence; for the most appropriate argument for a stupid brain is the clenched fist. ”

“ Vexed as he was at his wife’s words, our hero replied in the affirmative to conceal his own stupidity.
Thus, some there are in this world, who, though they may not willingly give away anything, pretend to have done so when, by accident, or stupidity, they happen to lose it. ”

“ Oh, my friends, I feel there is an immense fund of Human Stupidity circulating among us, and much clogging our affairs for some time past! A certain man has called us, ‘of all peoples the wisest in action;’ but he added, ‘the stupidest in speech:’—and it is a sore thing, in these constitutional times, times mainly of universal Parliamentary and other Eloquence, that the ‘speakers’ have all first to emit, in such tumultuous volumes, their human stupor, as the indispensable preliminary, and everywhere we must first see that and its results out, before beginning any business! ”

“ I have designedly placed, after an example of superstition, facts which prove the stupidity, or charlatanism of the profession, it appearing to me instructive to preserve the progressive ascendency; the march from the little to the great, in ridicule, as in everything else, is absurd. ”

“ He drew breath to give his friend the benefit of this illustration, but another connection quickly caught him up. "How can you pretend to suggest that you're in these parts the faintest approach to an insignificant person? How can you pretend that you're not as clever as you can stick together, and with the cleverness of the right kind? For there are odious kinds, I know—the kind that redresses other people's stupidity instead of sitting upon it." ”

“ To give a still greater effect to all these various charms, a peculiar look of stupidity is spread over the whole face, and is more especially to be attributed to the way in which their mouths are always kept opened. ”

“ When they see it anew, how many people will be astounded at having formerly scoffed at the work and offended the master, struck dumb and secretly humiliated at having thus contributed to the writing of the hundred thousandth chapter of that endless book, the book of human stupidity. ”

“ I think I have said enough to show that, though not a fool, I have frequently passed for one, even among people capable of judging; this was the more vexatious, as my physiognomy and eyes promised otherwise, and expectation being frustrated, my stupidity appeared the more shocking. ”

“ And we of the present time are convicted of exceeding stupidity, if we think it not worth while to go a number of ages back to contemplate the mass of mankind, the wide world of beings such as ourselves, sunk in darkness and wretchedness, and to consider what it is that is taught by so melancholy an exhibition. ”

“ With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our stupidity,—which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short of crime,—would he forthwith, by the merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as daylight. ”

“ She discovered that a great deal of the suffering in this world is due, not so much to original sin, but to a kind of original stupidity, an unimaginative, stubborn stupidity. ”

“ but to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable—else, indeed, what would become of social bonds? ”

“ He writes, 'My stupidity in accepting theories and statements of others, concerning spirits, which I could have tested personally, is a source of deep sorrow, and I do not know but it could be called criminal. ”

“ Most of this world’s misery is the fruit not as priests tell us of wickedness, but of stupidity.” And we know that of all stupidities he considered anger the most deplorable. ”

“ The pun is the dung of the mind which soars. The jest falls, no matter where; and the mind after producing a piece of stupidity plunges into the azure depths. ”

“ Personally, I have a great admiration for stupidity. ”

“ They have reached the stage when they are the victims of human pity—a lamentable condition. But those dense persons inhabiting the thickly populated region bordering on foolishness—those self-satisfied, uncomprehending egotists occupying the half-way house between wisdom and folly, known as stupidity—against such my wrath burns fiercely. ”

“ There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity. ”

“ Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents. ”

“ How ungenerous, and even cruel, it is to reproach or ridicule a child for stupidity, is evident when we reflect that any supposed inferiority in his mental organization can not, by any possibility, be his fault. ”

“ You're an intelligent and determined girl, and suddenly, on one point, your stupidity is simply astonishing—goose-like, silly! It goes straight to your soul, does it? From that point of view you might as well marry an ex-convict, if pity or stupidity are reasons. You ought to raise a bit of a row with your father for once! ”

“ There is however a Russian proverb which says that Misfortune is next door to Stupidity; and it will often be found that men who are constantly lamenting their luck, are in some way or other reaping the consequences of their own neglect, mismanagement, improvidence, or want of application. ”

“ While perhaps one or two, of better disposition, imperfectly descrying at moments something true and important in what was said, and convinced of the friendly intention of the speaker, might feel a transient regret for what they would with honest shame call the stupidity of their own minds, accompanied with some resentment against those to whose neglect it was greatly attributable. ”

“ "They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy." ”

“ Deficiency in judgement is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy. ”

“ Under certain circumstances, virtue is merely a venerable form of stupidity: who could blame you for it? And this form of virtue has not been outlived even today. ”

“ But leaving this subdivision of the stupid entirely out of consideration, and remarking, by-the-way, that the word stupidity is misapplied when used to denote the mere absence of brilliant talent, we would call attention to the large class of persons who are dull and obtuse, not by reason of any probable congenital deficiency, nor by an unfair comparison with great wits or geniuses, but by comparison with what the individuals themselves clearly ought to be—with what they would have been had their faculties been developed in the right way. ”

“ Let them continue to dupe fools: that is an affair between their consciences and human stupidity. For myself, I have always found them very agreeable: they have often proved serviceable in lending me money. ”

“ As if there were safety in stupidity alone. ”

“ I was, of course, myself the chief sufferer, because I was fully conscious of the disgusting meanness of my spiteful stupidity, and yet at the same time I could not restrain myself. ”

“ We can only burst out laughing: a reply to such a statement is impossible! The lawyer’s habit of thought is at its apogee, and (as Heine says) ‘Gegen die Dummheit kämpfen wir Götter selbst vergebens.’—Against stupidity the very gods themselves struggle in vain. ”

“ I too wanted to do good to men and would have done hundreds, thousands of good deeds to make up for that one piece of stupidity, not stupidity even, simply clumsiness, for the idea was by no means so stupid as it seems now that it has failed.... ”