C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Stupidity

Stupidity,—unconscious ignorance.

H. W. Shaw.

Stupidity has no friends, and wants none.

Horace Greeley.

Against stupidity the very gods fight unvictorious.

Schiller.

The fault rests with the gods, who have made her so stupid.

Gresset.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that a wrong one.

Dr. Johnson.

Heaven should be kind to stupid people, for no one else can be consistently.

Balzac.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head.

Pope.

He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others.

Samuel Johnson.

The fool of nature stood with stupid eyes
And gaping mouth, that testified surprise.

Dryden.

With various readings stored his empty skull,
Learn’d without sense, and venerably dull.

Churchill.

A pity about the people! they are brave enough comrades, but they have heads like a soapboiler’s.

Schiller.

There is in it a placid inexhaustibility, a calm, vicious infinitude, which will baffle even the gods.

Carlyle.

In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,—he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.

Carlyle.

Stupidity has its sublime as well as genius, and he who carries that quality to absurdity has reached it; which is always a source of amusement to sensible people.

Wieland.

For blocks are better cleft with wedges,
Than tools of sharp or subtle edges,
And dullest nonsense has been found
By some to be the most profound.

Butler.

Peter was dull; he was at first
Dull,—Oh, so dull—so very dull!
Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed—
Still with this dullness was he cursed—
Dull—beyond all conception—dull.

Shelley.

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