What is "unpromising"

Usage examples of "unpromising".

The violence of personal or superstitious animosity might sometimes prevail over the most natural apprehensions of disgrace and danger but it cannot surely be imagined, that accusations of so unpromising an appearance were either lightly or frequently undertaken by the Pagan subjects of the Roman empire.

At that moment the bucket appeared slightly above the brace at the shaft, and was taken by the topman, Joe Bulder, who, lifting it to one side, unhooked it and placed on the hook an empty bucket of the same construction, ready for the unpromising descent.

These unpromising boats, as well as the ladder floats, are, during favorable weather, often run to Pittsburg with entire safety.

It was difficult to imagine a more unpromising land in which to find civilization and he wondered if it would be wise to change course.

In spite of the unpromising appearance of the house, the hostess produced a very tempting-looking supper for hungry people.

Looking back at the old town, with its one steep street climbing the white face of the chalk hill, I remembered what wonderful exotic women Thomas Hardy had found eating their hearts out behind the windows of dull country high streets, through which hung waving no banners of romance, outwardly as unpromising of adventure as the windows of the town I had left.

I have worked on the most unpromising material, persuading the dumb to speak and trying, from that, to arrive at general principles about the malleability of the infant mind.

A slow ride of eight miles placed us in a safe gorge draining a dull-looking, unpromising block.

I am speaking on literary criticism, and in the world in which we are actually living that is almost as unpromising as speaking about peace.

Good bad poetry, however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right atmosphere has been worked up before hand.

Baxter turns his hand to another Big Scientific Topic with this look at human evolution, from the unpromising Mesozoic start of the hominid line to its last gasp in the failing days of Earth.

And he had been such unpromising material to start with: a lazy, spottily brilliant young instructor, dangerously contemptuous of academic life, taking a sophomoric pleasure in shocking his staid colleagues, with a suicidal tendency to make major issues out of minor disputes with deans and presidents.

Up in the woods of Canada last summer I found a chemist trying to do with the wood waste what Remsen and Perkin and others have done with coal waste, and I cannot resist the suggestion of my metaphor that there in the forest valleys beyond the Alleghanies the elements and conditions were found to convert this Atlantic by-product, unpromising outwardly, into the substance of a new and precious civilization.

But hydraulic thinking centred not on the fatty and unpromising tissue of which the brain was composed but instead on its fluid-filled core, the ventricles, lovingly drawn by early anatomists, none more strikingly than Leonardo.

In the unpromising surfaces of bare rock, she had found a bright wheel of capricious emotions, while in cloud puffs that surely must have been burping with innate whimsy, she found such a bleakness as would chill the heart of a commissioner.