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More "Frivolous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I mention purely to obviate the prepossession of the art being so frivolous, so unworthy of the attention of the manly and grave, as it is vulgarly, or on a superficial view, imagined. It is not high notions of it that I am so weak as to aim at impressing; all that I wish is to give just ones: it being perhaps as little eligible, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... neighbouring towns, for it is almost as quick as going by rail, and much cheaper; and half-an-hour later we rumbled out of the Porta San Lorenzo, and I had entered upon the strange journey to find Hedwig von Lira, concerning which frivolous people have laughed so unkindly. And you may call me a foolish old man if you like. I did it ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... lunch?" demanded Anstey, who was now disrobed and in his right mind—that is to say, in his usual whimsical, pseudo-frivolous character. ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... Heaven. This life is often full of discords, the life to come is perfectly in tune. Here on earth our lives are very like musical instruments. One plays nothing but dirges of sorrow and discontent. Another life is made up of frivolous dance music; another is hideous with the discord of "sweet bells jangled, out of tune, and harsh." The life to come is one of perfect harmony, for each servant will be in complete accord with the Master's will and pleasure. And I think the vision of those who ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... vain, farcical, without one redeeming feature. The naked truth was brutal, but it cut clean to wholesome consciousness. Such so-called social life as she had plunged into deliberately to forget her unhappiness had failed her utterly. If she had been shallow and frivolous it might have done otherwise. Stripped of all guise, her actions must have been construed by a penetrating and impartial judge as a mere parading of her decorated person before a number of males with the purpose of ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... previous chapter I have dwelt on some of the lighter conditions of our life at this time; I must now turn to it in a less frivolous aspect. As my tenth year advanced, the development of my character gave my Father, I will not say anxiety, but matter for serious reflection. My intelligence was now perceived to be taking a sudden start; visitors drew my Father's attention to the fact that ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... the good qualities of drunkenness, let us now answer some frivolous objections that may be made against what we have here advanced. For example, people will not be wanting immediately to object, that drunkenness has been ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... party with his friends, George sent to a certain silversmith's for a certain chalice, intrusted to the shopkeeper from a certain church to be repaired in a certain manner. This being brought, Master George—then, be it remembered, not at the delicate and frivolous age of most Oxford boys, but at the mature one of six-and-twenty—filled it with wine, and handing it round, used the sacred words, 'Drink this in remembrance of me.' This was a blasphemous parody of the most sacred rite of the Church. All Selwyn could say for himself was, that he ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... fallen into the shameful times, when women bear rule over men; and make the toilet a tribunal before which the most gigantic minds must plead. Hence the stunted spirit of our poets; hence the dwarf products of their imagination; hence the frivolous witticism, the heartless sentiment, crippled and ricketed by soups, ragouts and sweetmeats, which you find in ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... grief to a mother that her girls become giddy, frivolous, and unsteady, and perhaps cause her shame? Do you want them to be quiet, to stay at home, and be neat, modest, unselfish girls? then do not be giddy and a gadabout yourself. "Lead thou the way, mother, and ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... "'Tis a frivolous way of passing the time," he said, "but it would be well for one of serious mind to be present in order that he might impose a proper dignity upon those ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sat in the undignified position imposed on us by circumstances, we exchanged various frivolous remarks, not because we felt particularly gay, but because we had to do something to keep ourselves interested and to keep our courage up. Bulle resented this, and raised his head to look at me reproachfully over the barricade, and say: "Don't ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... being dull, and full of humour without being frivolous; stating in the most popular form the main results of modern research.... We have said enough to take our readers to the book itself, where they will learn more of Ancient Egypt than in any other popular work ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare
... elsewhere, but your ear had mechanically received and retained the sounds, and your busy fancy, stirred by Grizel's legend I presume, had introduced this scrap of German into your dream. As for the waking wisdom which seized on so frivolous a circumstance as an apology for persevering in some course which it could find no better reason to justify, it is exactly one of those juggling tricks which the sagest of us play off now and then, to gratify our inclination at the expense ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... transported to a city called Washington, although for characteristic flavor it might as well be any other place, and we enter upon the events attending a young lady's entrance into society. This might all be very pretty and pleasant, except for the deadly seriousness of the author. It is entirely frivolous and unimportant, but frivolity may be made charming and full of suggestion. Points of etiquette and behavior engage the minds, hearts, and passions of the personages of the story. It is a sort of animated illustration of the little book called "Don't." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... not base and frivolous things amongst grave and learned men, nor very difficult questions or subjects among the ignorant, nor things ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... professed creeds, can leave no doubt that they must roast in the fires of hell in an anguish unutterably fiercer, and for eternity, and yet they go about as smilingly, engage in the battle for money, in the race for fame, in all the vain shows and frivolous pleasures of life, as eagerly and as gayly as others. How often do we see the literal truth of this exemplified! It is clear they do not believe in the dogma to whose technical terms they ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... George Sand's grandfather was Maurice de Saxe. He may have been an adventurer and a condottiere, but France owes to him Fontenoy, that brilliant page of her history. All this takes us back to the eighteenth century with its brilliant, gallant, frivolous, artistic and profligate episodes. Maurice de Saxe adored the theatre, either for itself or for the sake of the women connected with it. On his campaign, he took with him a theatrical company which gave a representation the evening before a battle. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... is true that we ourselves are to be the judges in the case. But then we are judges under the same stern laws of conscience toward God, which compel us to violate the law of the empire, though death in its most terrific form be the penalty. And is it likely therefore that we shall, for frivolous causes, or imaginary ones, or none at all, hold it to be our duty to rebel against the law of the land? To think so were to rate us low indeed. They may surely be trusted to make this decision, whose fidelity to conscience in other emergences ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... of Greeks, not Semites, as being originally savages. But I pointed out {124} that he considered it safer to 'hedge' by making an exception of the Israelites. There is really nothing in Genesis against the contention that the naked, tool-less, mean, and frivolous Adam was ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... a little frivolous tune Which he felt to be pulsing with ecstasy, For he thought that success always followed desire, Such a very superlative fool ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... time the publication of the sentence against Henry, and in November he went to his interview with Francis I. at Marseilles.[894] While he was there, Bonner intimated to him Henry's appeal to a General Council. Clement angrily rejected the appeal as frivolous, and Francis regarded this defiance of the Pope as an affront to himself in the person of his guest, and as the ruin of his attempts to reconcile the two parties. "Ye have clearly marred all," he said to Gardiner; "as fast as I study to win the Pope, you study to lose him,"[895] and he declared ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... other, will not always allow an uniformity of feelings and disposition. The case of Seneca (to which we have alluded,) and that of Sir Matthew Hale, are exceptions. Youth is generally gay, thoughtless, and frivolous; but life, in more advanced periods, is sober, thoughtful, and dignified. A husband should not be deemed a teacher or guardian for the wife so much as a companion; and the wife should not be considered as guardian for the husband: there ought to be a mutual sympathy, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... have been more indebted for entertainment than ever I was in prouder theatres. Your charms as a woman would insure applause to the most indifferent actress, and your theatrical talents would insure admiration to the plainest figure. This, Madam, is not the unmeaning or insidious compliment of the frivolous or interested; I pay it from the same honest impulse that the sublime of nature excites my admiration, or ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... conventional etiquette, at the worst, of taste, of aesthetics. In thus bringing down his repugnance to nakedness to so low a plane he had indeed rendered it generally acceptable, but at the same time he had deprived it of high sanction. His profound horror of nakedness was out of relation to the frivolous grounds on ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... relapse, and that she died a lingering and a painful death. Mr. Welwyn (who, in after years, had a habit of vaingloriously describing his marriage as "a love-match on both sides") was really fond of his wife in his own frivolous, feeble way, and suffered as acutely as such a man could suffer, during the latter days of her illness, and at the terrible time when the doctors, one and all, confessed that her life was a thing to be despaired ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... man like you always is prepared, and I suspect that the weather, together with the fatigue you have gone through, and your state of health, have something to do with your forebodings. If you won't think me frivolous, let me ask you what you had for ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... of listening for hours to the repetition of past gaieties, or the anticipation of future ones, to the commonplace remarks or stupid conversation of persons whose whole thoughts are engrossed by the frivolous amusements of Paris, which are all ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... child the use of his natural liberty, which, for a time at least, secures him from the vices of the slave. Bring me those harsh masters, and those fathers who are the slaves of their children, bring them both with their frivolous objections, and before they boast of their own methods let them for once learn the method ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... beyond the gloom for the unhoused, startled, shivering soul,—ah! this indeed is terrible. The "confusions of a wasted youth" strew thick confusions of a dreary age. Where youth garners up only such power as beauty or strength may bestow, where youth is but the revel of physical or frivolous delight, where youth aspires only with paltry and ignoble ambitions, where youth presses the wine of life into the cup of variety, there indeed Age comes, a thrice unwelcome guest. Put him off. Thrust him back. Weep for the early days: you have found no happiness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... strength of principle would be liable to be put to the severest test. They keep company in which it is nearly impossible that their moral feelings should not be defiled. They allow themselves to assort with the idle, the frivolous, with those who are given to foolish talking and jesting; they indulge idle thoughts, repeat amusing stories, read hooks and papers that do not gender to piety, etc. But he who is willing to go as far toward evil as he can with safety, has lost one of the greatest safe-guards of ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... founded. But the biting tongue of the frivolous mixed races dwelling in this city is well known. They have tried it on me; and if, in this instance, any one is to blame, it is not I, the imprisoned prefect, but the chief and captain of the night-watch, whose business it is to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... or where the mother is unmarried, nevertheless abortion must be recognized as an evil, a necessary evil now and then, but an evil, nevertheless. It is never to be undertaken lightly, or to be considered in a frivolous spirit; and it is the duty of all serious-minded and humanitarian men and women to do everything in their power to remove those conditions which make abortion necessary ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... criticising all the public expenditures, and even reducing the gross sum in cases of extravagance. But the same contumacious spirit, which several times expelled Mr. Christie, member for Gaspe, on purely vexatious and frivolous charges, and constantly impeached judges without the least legal justification, simply to satisfy personal spite or political malice, would probably have been exhibited towards all officials had the majority in the assembly ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... he was not alone, if some other survivor of the shipwreck had managed, like him, to reach the shore, and even in default of the captain or the mate, this proved to be Professor Tartlet, how little he could depend on that frivolous being, and how slightly improved the chances of the future appeared! At this point, however, he still had hope. If he had found no trace among the breakers, would he meet with ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... a good deal of superficial instruction, and exceedingly vain of his personal advantages. I am quite sure that, having allowed him to be a fine-looking man, he would forgive me for saying that his character is frivolous, and that his principles, both moral and political, are governed entirely by that which best suits ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... of her name on the lips of a gossiping and frivolous girl, the barriers had given away. In eagerness and self-contempt he surrendered to the vision. Go to an afternoon tea to see and speak with her again? He would, in that awakened mood, have walked across the continent, only to be in her presence, to feel himself ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... can push in or draw out at pleasure. If the geologists find that more time was necessary they will stretch them out. Should it turn out that the world is not quite as old as some think, they will push them up. The "six days" can now be made to suit any period of time. Nothing can be more childish, frivolous or contradictory. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of having found a greater cruelty in the sorrows which light natures undergo, as unfit and disproportionate for them. Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit lot of serious natures; when it befell the frivolous it was more than they ought to have been made to bear; it was not of their quality. Then by the mental zigzagging which all thinking is I thought of myself and whether I was of this make or that. If it was more creditable to be of serious stuff than frivolous, though I had ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... were frivolous, but like most other lads in the army, they had grown into the habit of teasing one another, which was often a relief to teaser ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... toward England has always been masculine and real, has no longer to anticipate at our hands the frivolous and offensive criticisms which were once in vogue among us. But neither nation prefers (and it would be an ill sign if either did prefer) the institutions of the other; and we certainly do not contemplate the great Republic in the spirit of mere optimism. We see that it has a marvellous and unexampled ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... never regret,' said Mr. Pickwick in a low voice, 'I shall never regret having devoted the greater part of two years to mixing with different varieties and shades of human character, frivolous as my pursuit of novelty may have appeared to many. Nearly the whole of my previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of wealth, numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have dawned upon ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... gone, at first there was silence, a very heavy silence, since even the frivolous Abati felt that the hour was big with fate. Of a sudden, however, the members of the Council began to chatter like so many monkeys, each talking without listening to what his neighbour said, till at length a gorgeously dressed person, I understood that he was a priest, ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... infamy: we imagine him a gloomy and bloodthirsty tyrant; a morose tiger enthroned; a gross sensualist;—well, I shall show you portraits of him, to see whether you can accept him for that. The truth is that aristocratic Rome, degenerate and frivolous, parrot-cried out against the supposed deneracy of the imperial, and for the glories of the old republican, regime; for the days when Romans were Romans, and 'virtuous.' One came to them in whom the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... whether I was not sorry I never married. "No," I replied, "for, although I often envy my friends the happiness they find in their children, I have never envied them their husbands." I think we must have been in a frivolous mood; for a lady visitor, who was present, capped my remark with the statement that she was quite sure Miss Spence was thankful that when she died she would not be described as the "relic" of any man. It was the same lady who on another occasion, when one of the juvenile members of the party asked ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... and triumphant (that's what he had meant to be one day), exactly like the strange young man who looked at Elsbeth with his frivolous smile. He also wore patent-leather boots and a fashionable colored necktie, and his suit was made of the finest ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... broken reed. frapper, to strike. fraude, f., deception. frayeur, f., fear. frmir, to shudder, tremble. frmissement, m., thrill, shudder. frre, m., brother, dear friend. frissonner, to shudder. frivole, frivolous. front, m., forehead, brow. frontire, f., frontier. fugiti-f, -ve, fleeing, fleeting. fuir, to fly from, shun. fuite, f., flight. funbre, funereal, black, dark. funeste, baneful. fureur, f., fury; en —, furious, raging. ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... public, and be tired to death with receiving frivolous complaints and petitions, and will not even have the satisfaction of doing justice; for, whether a cause be just or not, his ministers will take care that the decision shall be according to their ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... go into the house of the Lord." I was anxious for my time to come to tell how good Jesus was to me. When I met my neighbors I would be heavy- hearted, because they talked of servants, house cleaning, the new fashions, and these seemed so vain, so frivolous. I liked to direct their minds to speak of the Scriptures, and of the ways of doing work for God. I soon found out I was not welcome, I was looked upon as an intruder, was often avoided, I could see the frowns and glances of impatience at my presence. These ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... educated at the Ursuline Convent in Montreal. It was my mother's dearest wish that I should take the vows of that order, but I fear I am far too frivolous for so serious a life. I love happy things too well, and the beautiful outside world of men and women. I ran away from the Sisters, and then my father and I voyaged to this country, where we might lead a ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... year. In youth we live but for ourselves—self predominates in every thing. In mature age, if we have fulfilled the conditions of our tenure, we feel that we must live for our children. Fortunately, increase of years weans us from those selfish and frivolous expenses which youth requires, and we feel it little or no sacrifice to devote to our children the means which, before, we considered so important to the gratification of our pride and our ambition. Not that we have lost either our pride or our ambition, but ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... her little foot passionately on the carpet. "How dare you speak of a fraud so black, of treason so detestable! I am his sister, sir, and have something of his courage, frivolous as people think me. Persecute her or provoke me too far and I will tell ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... those who differ most widely from ourselves, provided we have sufficient evidence that their scruples result from conscientious feelings. While, therefore, in our differences from others, we are careful not to be actuated by mere frivolous pretences, we must be equally solicitous not to be deterred from showing a firm consistence of conduct, lest we should incur the charge of an ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... them." "Espouse Corinne!" interrupted the Count, bursting out laughing, "truly that idea never occurred to me! Take my advice, my dear Nelville, if you wish to do foolish things let them be such as will admit of reparation; but as for marriage, you must always consider propriety. I appear frivolous in your eyes, nevertheless I wager that in the conduct of life I shall be more reasonable than you." "I believe so too," answered Lord Nelville, and said not ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... vain and frivolous is the might of an earthly king compared with that Great Power who rules the elements and says unto the ocean, 'Thus far shalt thou ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... one's head. After two days I discovered a remedy for this undesired dizziness. I turned the menu upside down, and ordered a meal in the reverse order. The Supper itself was a success; but the waitress (who, in the winter, teaches school in Texas) disapproved of what she deemed my frivolous proceeding. Her eyes took on an inward look beneath the pedagogical eye-glasses; and there was a distinct furrowing of her forehead. Thereafter I did not dare to overturn the menu, but ate my way heroically backward. After all, our prandial prejudices are merely the result of custom. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... sensitive, intuitive, had a quick, shocked sense of having blundered egregiously; and worse, he had a further sense of Mrs. Oldham's words being fraught with some ugly and hidden meaning. In her voice there had been manifest an unsuspected quality which had revealed her for the moment as not all frivolous fool or spoiled and empty-headed doll; but a tyrant and oppressor, crueller and more menacing because infinitely ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... and Wilson bless the thought which led them to take Darwin's Origin of Species on their first Southern Journey. Such is the object of your sledging book, but you often want the book which you read for half an hour before you go to sleep at Winter Quarters to take you into the frivolous fripperies of modern social life which you may not know and may never wish to know, but which it is often pleasant to read about, and never so much so as when its charms are so remote as to ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... of the highway and beyond the thinly sown wheat a stretch of pine woodland was darkly limned against the western horizon, standing a gloomy advance guard of the shadows of the night. At its foot the newer green of the late spring foliage took a frivolous aspect, presenting the effect of deep-tinted foam breaking against the impenetrable ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... and ought not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion and words heedlessly scattered; that our faith, whatever it may be, is the most sacred of our possessions, organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing; that our passage across the world, if very short, is yet too serious to be wasted in frivolous disrespect for ourselves, and angry disrespect for others. All this was actually his mind. And hence the little difficulty he had in keeping his retort to the archbishop, as to his other antagonists, on a ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... his sister-in-law to be a wordly-minded, frivolous woman, with many trivial ambitions; but in this instance he had misgivings that she might be right. What did he, John Merrick, know of select society? A poor man, of humble origin, he had wandered into the infantile, embryo West years ago and there amassed a fortune. When he retired and returned ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... blood from the soul itself. Husband and wife powerfully tend to a common level and likeness. The higher must redeem and lift the unequal mate, or live in strife and misery. If the lower takes pattern after the superior one, the petty, frivolous, false, and fretful becoming magnanimous, dedicated, truthful, and serene, it is a divine triumph of grace, and the result will be full of blessedness. But otherwise a wearing unhappiness is inevitable, however carefully it be hidden, however bravely it be borne. ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... In the revelation that his own directors had availed themselves of that father's methods, and the ignoble character of his present mission, he felt a stirring of self-reproach. What would become of her? Of course, frivolous as she was, she would not feel the keenness of this misfortune like another, nor yet rise superior to it. She would succumb for the present, to revive another season in a dimmer glory elsewhere. His critical, cynical observation of her had determined that any filial affection she ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... gink, and all frivolous cracks are lost on him completely. He's a patient waiter, too. He sticks around for over two hours without gettin' restless, until finally Mr. Robert blows in from the club. First chance I gets, I springs ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... with a very short, and, I hope, a very simple and intelligible account of the powers and operations of the human mind. By this plain statement of facts, it will not be difficult to decide many celebrated, though frivolous, and merely verbal controversies, which have long amused the leisure of the schools, and which owe both their fame and their existence to the ambiguous obscurity of scholastic language. It will, for example, only require an appeal to every man's experience, ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... estate as think to drive you out of it into the wide world of common sense and argument. Every man's house is his castle; and every man's common-place is his stronghold, from which he looks out and smiles at the dust and heat of controversy, raised by a number of frivolous and vexatious questions—'Rings the world with the vain stir!' A cure for this and every other evil would be a Parliamentary Reform; and so we return in a perpetual circle to the point from which we set out. Is not this a species of sober madness more provoking than the real? Has not the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... lesson for dramatists to see a man suppressing all frivolous trifling and empty episodes in order to concentrate his subject entirely on the inner life of two living souls. In that Wagner is our master, a better, stronger, and more profitable master to follow, in spite of his mistakes, than all the other literary and dramatic ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... fact, so many tribes were of a gay and frolicsome disposition, so much given to joking, to playing on words, and to noticing the humorous aspect of occurrences, that they have not unfrequently been charged by the whites best acquainted with them, the missionaries, with levity and a frivolous temperament. ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... won't get women to search history for results that wouldn't please them; and to expect a certain kind of frivolous, selfish woman to look beyond her own pleasure is to expect the great miracle that will never come. You ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... back as obscurely as possible into a dark corner where she might muse on the charms of Nolan, the beauties of the new Buddy Gillian, the martial dignity of Captain Hardin, and the appeals of all the rest, to her frivolous ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... as did rise above the medley of catcalls and gibes of a dark nature which passed in playful badinage between the sister services were of a nature exclusively frivolous; and the conversation of such officers as were not consuming the midday cocktail consisted entirely of a great thankfulness that they had seen the last of an abominable island, and a fervent prayer that they would ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... small, a contrast to Dame Harrison in her mild and somewhat fussy manner; her plain petticoat, too, was embellished with paniers, and in spite of the heat of the day she wore a tippet edged with fur: both of which frivolous adornments had obviously stirred up the wrath of ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... I am among the Philistines, spending my mornings so pleasantly, as books, only books, can make them, and sitting at evening the silent spectator of card playing and dancing. The English here unite the spirit of commerce, with the frivolous amusements of high life. One of them who plays every night (Sundays are not excepted here) will tell you how closely he attends to profit. 'I never pay a porter for bringing a burthen till the next day,' says he, 'for while the fellow feels his back ache with the weight, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... improvement, especially delighted him. He was amused as well as instructed by the well-applied admixture of diverting expedients to keep the children alive and alert. It was 'seria mixta jocis,' but there was practical sense in the seemingly most frivolous part of the plan. He trusted that the time was not far distant when there should be many such institutions. He called on all present to join him in returning cordial thanks to ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... otherwise in fashionable circles. Isabelle is a very good pretext for you; she is young, beautiful, clever, modest, and virtuous. In fact many an actress who takes like her the role of the ingenuous young girl is in reality all that she personates, though a frivolous and frequently licentious public will not credit ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... whenever Thorold was my partner; other people's talk was very tiresome. They went over the platitudes of the day; or they started subjects of interest that were not interesting to me. Bits of gossip—discussions of fashionable amusements with which I could have nothing to do; frivolous badinage, which was of all things most distasteful to me. Yet, amid it, I believe there was a subtle incense of admiration which by degrees and insensibly found its way to my senses. But I had two dances with Thorold, and at those times ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... God! what blind bats men are! With all their high capabilities and immortal destinies, with all the world before them to conquer, they can sink unnerved and beaten down to impotent weakness before the slighting word or insolent gesture of a frivolous feminine creature, whose best devotions are paid to the mirror that reflects her in the most becoming light! How easy would be my vengeance, I mused, as I watched Ferrari. I touched him on the shoulder; he started from his uncomfortable ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... present there. This stately robe invested the venerable lady's noble figure with such majesty as could not fail to inspire respect, even in the mob of idle loungers who were wont to collect in anterooms, laughing and jesting in frivolous and irreverent fashion. They all shyly made way for her; and when she entered the salon the king himself in his astonishment rose and came to meet her. As his eyes fell upon the glitter of the costly diamonds in the necklace and ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... could have wished to adore you alone upon my bended knees in some far hidden retreat, away from the frivolous world that ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... and really alarmed at the indefinite prospect of delay in passing his all-important measures which now began to open, could not conceal his vexation in the remarks which he offered, and speaking of the amendment as one 'of a frivolous character,' indignant cries of 'No, no,' from his usual admirers, obliged him to withdraw the expression. His feelings were not soothed when, later in the evening, even Mr. Cobden rose to deplore the conduct of that minister ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... position of the then youthful humanism with regard to the age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to poesia, as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously combats—the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of these frivolous negotiations had meanwhile covered her head with the blanket, from the folds of which issued shrill giggles. Sun Dog, who had been listening intently with hand scooped to ear (he was somewhat deaf), now precipitated himself into the discussion. Violently thrusting his ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... God and the immortality of the soul—was duly elected professor of Christian dogmatics and ethics in the University of Zurich, by the party then in power, which consisted mostly of demagogues and frivolous infidels." ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... was raised in the family of the minister of Salem, and some black servants were charged with the supposed crime. Once started, the alarm spread rapidly, and in a very short time a great number of people fell under suspicion, and many were thrown into prison on very frivolous grounds, supported, as such charges usually were, by very unworthy witnesses. The new governor of the colony, Sir William Phipps, arrived from England in the middle of May, and he seems to have been carried away by the excitement, and authorized judicial prosecutions. ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... own?" she asked with an air of assumed innocent interest, and he did not see the frivolous gleam in her eyes, or notice the touch of aloes ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... coalition presently," he boomed, looking from his wife to me and puffing out his enormous chest. Then, suddenly altering his tone, "Excuse this frivolous family badinage, Mr. Malone. I called you back for some more serious purpose than to mix you up with our little domestic pleasantries. Run away, little woman, and don't fret." He placed a huge hand upon each of her shoulders. "All that you say ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... there were all these miserable quarrels and heartburnings going on in it. I suppose they go on everywhere, but one can't help feeling as if there was something specially hard in those which come under one's own eyes, and touch one's self. And then they are so frivolous, and everything might go on so comfortably if people would only be reasonable. I ought to have been a man, I am sure, and then I might, perhaps, be able to do more, and should have more influence. If poor papa were ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... till delirious, he scarcely ever mentioned her name. But now I believe she played with his heart—the noblest that ever beat—and then threw it away, as if it were a toy instead of the richest offering ever made to a woman. Proud fool that she was; she has done more mischief than a thousand such frivolous lives as hers can atone for. I can write no more; my heart is breaking with ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... thou frivolous god! twofold thy measure of time? "Slowly run from the one, the hours of lovers ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... tap-room, with Mr. Pickwick and his faithful Sancho Weller. I am sure that a man who, a hundred years hence should sit down to write the history of our time, would do wrong to put that great contemporary history of "Pickwick" aside as a frivolous work. It contains true character under false names; and, like "Roderick Random," an inferior work, and "Tom Jones" (one that is immeasurably superior), gives us a better idea of the state and ways of the people than one could gather from any more ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... undeteriorated by their slight admixture of Catalonian blood. The magnificent monuments of the Roman city, the theatre and the arena, show the rank it held in ancient Gaul. In the present day it is a well-to-do, gay, careless town, with a lively and frivolous population, fond of pleasure, and indulging freely in it. Night overtook me during my walk, and under the splendid moonlight I could have fancied myself in some Arab town; I was in a labyrinth of lanes, where the heat of day still hung. The women sat before ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... school year. There are others who think of their summers as something to be endured until they can go back to the more or less selfish freedom of the school. Neither is the right way. The summer ought not to be an entirely frivolous season, neither ought it to be too workaday. If a girl has work to do, everything should be so arranged as not to deprive the vacation of its recreative side. On the other hand the summer should ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... Earl was light-hearted and frivolous by nature, yet even he had his graver moments; and upon this subject of the old Maulevrier scandal he was peculiarly sensitive, perhaps all the more so because his grandmother had never allowed him to speak to her about it, had never ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... his mind anywhere—any angle of it. She's given him carte blanche, she says, to manage the publicity for her. Do you realize what that means? He's licensed to try to make the public believe anything that he thinks would heighten their interest in her. That she dresses indecently; that she's a frivolous extravagant fool; that she has lovers. You know ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... use, "his obstinacy, difficult to explain, nearly compromised both Davoust and the success of the battle;" See also Thiers (tome vii. p. 172), who attributes Bernadotte's conduct to a profound aversion for Davoust conceived on the most frivolous grounds. Bernadotte had frequently given cause of complaint to Napoleon in the two campaigns of 1806 and 1806. In the movement on Vienna Napoleon considered he showed want of activity and of zeal. These complaints seem to have been made in good faith, for in a letter ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... enjoy its revenues. He had extorted exhorbitant sums from the barons. He had violated the charters of London and other cities. He had compelled merchants to pay large sums for the privilege of carrying on their business unmolested. He had imprisoned men on false or frivolous charges, and refused to bring them to trial. He had unjustly claimed heavy sums from villeins, or farm laborers (S113), and other poor men; and when they could not pay, had seized their carts and tools, thus depriving them of their means ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Willow-herb, the flags, and the grasses, Reeds, rushes, and sedges, Flower and fringe and feather my edges. To be beautiful is not amiss, But to be loved is more than this; And who more sought than I, By all that run or swim or crawl or fly? Sober shell-fish and frivolous gnats, Tawny-eyed water-rats; The poet with rippling rhymes so fluent, Boys with boats playing truant, Cattle wading knee-deep for water; And the flower-plucking parson's daughter. Down in my depths dwell creeping things Who rise from my bosom on rainbow wings, For—too swift for ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... frivolous occupation! catching each other!—nay, only trying to catch each other! Poor fools and blind! let us cease, I say—' But he had no one to say it to, for the whole audience had gone off in different directions, and the preacher had only his little brother of five ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... sin); from such occurrences it is common to snatch occasion and matter of calumny. Those who are disposed this way are ready peremptorily to charge them upon whomsoever they dislike or dissent from, although without any apparent cause, or upon most frivolous and senseless pretenses; yea, often when reason showeth quite the contrary, and they who are so charged are in just esteem of all men the least obnoxious to such accusations. So, usually, the best friends of mankind, those who most ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... technical equipment, a civet cat in a jackal hunt, or, coming out from England to assume official duties, you must take a larger view of your dignities than the clubs are accustomed to admit. For the sex that does not hunt jackals it is easier—you have only to be a little frivolous and Calcutta will invent for you the most side-shaking nickname, as in the case of three ladies known in a viceroyalty of happy legend as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I should be sorry to give the impression ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... as in a bad sense. With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French critic, M. Sainte-Beuve,[390] and a very inadequate estimate it in my judgment was. And its inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in our English way ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Eugenie used often to say with a laugh that she was the only true royalist at the imperial court of France. That was well enough for her in her days of flightiness and frivolity. No one, however, accused Queen Victoria of being frivolous, and she was not supposed to have a strong sense of humor. None the less, after listening to the skirling of the bagpipes and to the romantic ballads which were sung in Scotland she is said to have remarked with a ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... show her those polite attentions which my betrothed would reasonably expect from my nephew. And at times I even insisted that he should represent me at certain gatherings of Phyllis's friends, who were too young and frivolous to claim my serious attention. When he protested, and pleaded headache, business, or other sign of disinclination, I rallied him good-humoredly on his lack ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... wealth are two very solemn realities, which the frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff about. Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse. What business has a man who knows nothing about the beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in the midst of the mob. They were dressed in the nattiest costumes of our youngest and prettiest white women, and in dancing raised their skirts so as to show their lean, shrivelled legs and yellow thighs. Nothing queerer could be imagined than all these charming fashions and finery of the frivolous century of Louis XV., these Watteau shepherdess costumes, furbelows, plumes and laces, upon these black, ugly-faced, flat-nosed, woolly-headed, frightful people. Thus decked out they were no longer even negroes and negresses; ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... of this paper is rapidly extending itself throughout the country. As a late instance, we note that PUNCHINELLO has given in its adhesion to the only true and pure republican agricultural party, which it appropriately names the "Right Party." PUNCHINELLO was once a frivolous, good-for-nothing sheet, devoted to low jokes and witticisms. The conversion of its editor to the temperance cause is the reason of the recent change in its tenets. We ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... Believe me, the whole course and character of your lovers' lives is in your hands; what you would have them be, they shall be, if you not only desire to have them so, but deserve to have them so; for they are but mirrors in which you will see yourselves imaged. If you are frivolous, they will be so also; if you have no understanding of the scope of their duty, they also will forget it; they will listen,—they can listen,—to no other interpretation of it than that uttered from your lips. Bid them be brave;—they will be brave for you; bid ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... using dull coloured carpets and hangings, have your modern reproductions antiqued. If you prefer gay, cheering tones, let the painted furniture be bright. These schemes are equally interesting in different ways. It is stupid to decry new things, since every grey antique had its frivolous, vivid youth. ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... ask for an injunction and that the court had no authority to go behind the action of the Legislatures in voting for ratification. The case was taken to the District Court of Appeals. On October 4 this court denied the injunction and dismissed the case as "frivolous and brought for delay." It was then carried to the Supreme Court ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... I confess I would rather have you as you are, than among those frivolous and heartless courtiers who beset our sovereign. Their fate must be miserable. They are bringing reproach and ruin upon our country; and albeit, though I wish to die as I have lived, a member of the Church of England, yet I am well-content ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... to look downwards, and her spine seemed flaccid. Ethel was beautiful, or about to be beautiful; Millicent was pretty; Rose plain. Rose was deficient in style. She despised style, and regarded her sisters as frivolous ninnies and gadabouts. She was the serious member of the family, and for two years had been studying for the ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... against it. The Government of General Herrera, there is good reason to believe, was sincerely desirous to receive our minister; but it yielded to the storm raised by its enemies, and on the 21st of December refused to accredit Mr. Slidell upon the most frivolous pretexts. These are so fully and ably exposed in the note of Mr. Slidell of the 24th of December last to the Mexican minister of foreign relations, herewith transmitted, that I deem it unnecessary to enter into further detail on this portion ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... "I might have enjoyed that experience, but I was feeling depressed at the time; a lot of the depression went under the influence of frivolous talk, military music, and champagne. Yet, all the same, do these things really count for much? I felt ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... me all about it. He feels very badly. It was very frivolous of you, Milly. I should not have thought ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... probably, the most pertinent and poetical simile ever devised. Keeping in view the career of man on earth, "the river," says Pliny, "springs from the earth, but its origin is in heaven. Its beginnings are insignificant, and its infancy frivolous; it plays among the flowers of a meadow; it waters a garden, or turns a little mill. Gathering strength in its youth, it sometimes becomes wild and impetuous. Impatient of the restraints it meets with in the hollows among the ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... wont to trudge back to his hermitage and draw his mantle of solitude about him once more. He had never walked with any lass. Whether from shyness or surliness, he had held consistently aloof from such frivolous pastimes. If a girl ever cast a saucy look his way the brooding blue eyes never seemed aware of it. In speech with womenkind he was always slow and half-reluctant. That his great bull-like physique could by any means be an object of admiration was ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... with his countenance the offending building was quickly razed to the ground. In his report of this business Claverhouse writes:—"My Lord, since I have seen the Act of Council, the scruple I had about undertaking anything without the bounds of these two shires is indeed frivolous, but was not so before. For if there had been no such act, it had not been safe for me to have done anything but what my order warranted; and since I knew it not, it was to me the same thing as if it had not been. And for my ignorance ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... perilous, hairbreadth ridi' was our word for it; and in the conflict that rages over women's dress it has the misfortune to please neither side, the prudish condemning it as insufficient, the more frivolous finding it unlovely in itself. Yet if a pretty Gilbertine would look her best, that must be her costume. In that and naked otherwise, she moves with an incomparable liberty and grace and life, that marks the poetry of Micronesia. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spirit of this new world into which David's leap out of the baggage car had plunged him. He was picturesquely of the wild; his face was darkly bearded; his ivory-white teeth shining as he smiled a welcome; his tricoloured, Hudson's Bay coat of wool, with its frivolous red fringes, thrown open at the throat; the bushy tail of his fisher-skin cap hanging over a shoulder—and with these things his voice rattling forth, in French and half Indian, his joy that Father Roland was not dead but had arrived at ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... tavern table that evening ran on merrily among the young people. Albeit, the Sabbath hour was not too frivolous, for we were pretty stanch in our Presbyterianism there. I think our love for Dr. Hemingway in itself would have kept the Sabbath sacred. He never found fault with our Sunday visiting. All days were holy to him, and his evening sermons taught us that frivolity, and idle gossip, ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... to endure beyond the life of most such affairs. She professed an infatuation equal to his own, and regretted that an immediate marriage, which he timidly advocated in the course of their first interview, was not practicable. That she was frivolous, light-minded, and would never settle down to be a good worker, was a village verdict he scorned. Who would have her otherwise? Not he, nor the adoring Boo'ful, it is certain. He determined to go to live at her house, and, strangely enough—for ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... Throughout this frivolous talk (I only venture to report it because it shows that I bore no malice on my side) Miss Melbury was looking at us like the basilisk of the ancients. She owned to being on the wrong side of thirty; and she had a little money—but these were surely no reasons why she ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... if even we, Even for a moment, can yet free Our hearts and have our lips unchained; For that which seals them hath been deep ordained. Fate which foresaw How frivolous a baby man would be, By what distractions he would be possessed, How he would pour himself in every strife, And well-nigh change his own identity, That it might keep from his capricious play His genuine self, and force him to obey, ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... intensely calm, at early morning and when the evening approached. At a certain hour, with a curious regularity, the breeze came, generally from Ischia, and turned it to vivacity. A temper that was almost frivolous then possessed it, and it broke into gayeties like a child's. The waves were small, but they were impertinently lively. They made a turmoil such as urchins make at play. Heedless of reverence, but not consciously impious, they flung themselves at the feet of San Francesco, casting up a ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Sometimes, too, by listening long at the key-hole, you could hear a faint sound, like a human groan; but it was probably merely the sigh of the draught through the aperture. This story so horrified me and froze my young blood that the fancies of Mrs. Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe seemed like frivolous ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... chided her, though gravely, for he was not pleased, not happy in the course to which he had committed himself. "You, too," he chided. "Oh, you brazen huzzy! There's nothing like it—nothing in all the world like ready cash to make a female frivolous!" ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... nowhere, and if when I was down town after the groceries I'd 'a' stepped into the drug store and bought me a lemonade—and they didn't have no nut sundaes then—they'd of had me up before the church for frivolous conduct. ...
— Maw's Vacation - The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone • Emerson Hough
... MAR. Ah! frivolous Musetta! thee can I ne'er forget! My grief affords her pleasure, And yet my weak heart is fain To call her to my fond ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... thereby benefit others to their salvation. Just as Christ on the Cross prayed not for Himself alone, but rather for us, when He said, "Father, forgive them, fort they know not what they do," so we also must pray for one another. From which every man may know that the slanderers, frivolous judges and despisers of other people are a perverted, evil race, who do nothing else than heap abuse on those for whom they ought to pray; in which vice no one is sunk so deep as those very men who do many good works of their own, and seem to men to be something extraordinary, and ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... manners and graciousness on unreality, Englishmen of the fourteenth century were no severe critics of a crowned king. It was only when in his later years Edward laid aside the soldier's life, and abandoned himself to the frivolous distractions and degrading amours[2] which provoked the censure even of his admirers, that the self-indulgent traits inherited from his ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Algernon's disappointment. Lord Beverdale contented himself with rallying his fair guest on the becomingness of "good works." But he continued, "You're offering a dreadful example to these ladies, Miss Desborough, and I know I shall never hereafter be able to content them with any frivolous morning amusement at the Priory. For myself, when I am grown gouty and hideous, I know I shall bloom again as ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... place, and then burn them, to the sorrow of many, as well as of the Protestants as of the other party. This was by them styled 'the funeral of Scotus the Scotists.' So that at this time and all this king's reign was seldom seen anything in the universities but books of poetry, grammar, idle songs, and frivolous stuff."—Ibid., Wood is referring to the reign ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... Fletcher, when writing in combination, really had a freedom and breadth of manner which excels the comedy of Shakspeare. As to the altered Shakspeare as taking precedency of the genuine Shakspeare, no argument can be so frivolous. The public were never allowed a choice; the great majority of an audience even now cannot be expected to carry the real Shakspeare in their mind, so as to pursue a comparison between that and the alteration. Their comparisons must be exclusively amongst what ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... but once it's fixed in his mind, you needn't think he's going to change,—it's there for the rest of his natural life. He could no more change his opinion about things as I do than he could fly. Perhaps he thinks I'm frivolous and "uncouth,"—as Nora sometimes says I am. Well, let him; who cares? I think he is a regular old poke, though he is better than I thought at first; but you'll hear all about it. Of course Hilliard was polite, and all that, when he came to our ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... that animals understand, feel, and reason just like people, so he painted them as happy, sad, gay, dignified, frivolous, rich, poor, and in all ways just like human beings. This appealed to the people, and he became ...
— Stories Pictures Tell - Book Four • Flora L. Carpenter
... before I make an End, just to observe, in Regard to the Controversy, between Mr. J—s and Mr. Taylor, on the Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin; that Mr. J—s, as well as Dr. W—s, lays great Stress on that frivolous Distinction, mentioned a few Pages back, of moral and natural Necessity, to that Degree, that Mr. Taylor is treated somewhat rudely, for not perceiving the Force of it; when I dare aver, none but misguided Zealots, could ever see any Reason or Argument in it: Nor ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... bold by temperament, and, normally, I fear ladies. Therefore it surprised me to hear myself begin a frivolous causerie, replying to her pretty epigrams with epigrams of my own, advancing to the borderland of badinage, fearlessly conducting her and myself over that delicate frontier to meet upon the ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... of all the rest, is certainly in these pictures. I comprehend "Field-People Reposing," "the Diggers," and "the Angelus" in this opinion. Some folks always think of the French as a small race, five or five and a half feet high, and ever frivolous and smirking. Nothing of the sort. The bulk of the personnel of France, before the revolution, was large-sized, serious, industrious as now, and simple. The revolution and Napoleon's wars dwarf'd the standard of human ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... coming out better than I had expected, Melanie; but at the same time, you will observe that they have no choice in the matter. The Mobiles are called out, and have to go. All who can raise the most frivolous pretext for exemption do so. There is a perfect rush of young men to the Prefecture, to obtain places in the clothing, medical, arming, and equipping departments; in any sort of service, in fact, which will exempt its holder ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... and that she died a lingering and a painful death. Mr. Welwyn (who, in after years, had a habit of vaingloriously describing his marriage as "a love-match on both sides") was really fond of his wife in his own frivolous, feeble way, and suffered as acutely as such a man could suffer, during the latter days of her illness, and at the terrible time when the doctors, one and all, confessed that her life was a thing to be despaired of. He ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... sir. I will see that a copy is sent to your Majesty at once. It is, of course, work of a very light and frivolous kind—but it is popular and it does no harm." Then, as by an after-thought, the official countenance grew grave. "Was her Majesty also intending to be present?" ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... fantastic and fascinating a character now as he was 300 years ago, Lysistrata and her girls as freshly bodied as any girl kissed to-day. Therefore the serious part of the play is that which deals with them, the frivolous part that in which Rogers detects gravity ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... be found to have written a book too shallow for the learned, too deep for the frivolous, too technical for the general public, and too diffuse for ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... eye a long series of men and women, each marked by some strong peculiar feature. There were avarice and prodigality, the pride of blood and the pride of money, morbid restlessness and morbid apathy, frivolous garrulity, supercilious silence, a Democritus to laugh at everything and a Heraclitus to lament over everything. The work proceeded fast, and in twelve months ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... Vicky Van's habit. All that the woman said corroborated my idea of the little butterfly's frivolous life. So, why should she keep permanent servants if she was at home only half the time? I knew the troubles Aunt Lucy had with her menials, and I approved ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... 'er daughter. 'I am afraid, on thinking it over,' she says, 'that you won't suit, after all. You don't look serious enough. I feel sure, from the way you do your 'air,' says my lady, 'there's a frivolous ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... religion or a love of dress, shows most plainly its influence on this diary. On the whole, I think that youthful vanity, albeit of a very natural and innocent sort, is more pervasive of the pages. And it is fortunate that this is the case; for, from the frankly frivolous though far from self-conscious entries we gain a very exact notion, a very valuable picture, of the dress of a young girl at that day. We know all the details of her toilet, from the "pompedore" shoes and the shifts ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... More frivolous are very diminutive bridesmaid's hats, and at the wedding of a bride who is going to travel far away there may be small boats, either real or of cardboard, with a flying flag of ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... known, Though sad, has yet its charms. And if, at times, The truth discussing, my opinions should Unwelcome be, or not be understood, I shall not grieve, indeed, because in me The love of fame will be extinguished quite; Of fame, that idol frivolous and blind; More blind by far than ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... it was for yourself you would give it up directly. How amusing for me to see you work at that!" Lucy rose and brought her the new novel. Mrs. Bazalgette took it and sat down to it, but she could not fix her attention long on it. Ladies whose hearts are in dress have no taste for books, however frivolous; can't sit them for above a second or two. Mrs. Bazalgette fidgeted and fidgeted, and at last rose and left the room, book in hand. "How unkind I am!" said ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... grey hat jammed down anyhow, she wore this morning the most bewitching and frivolous of boudoir caps upon her bright head, and a shimmery, lacy empire something, that clung caressingly about her, and fell back becomingly from her round white arms. Miles and miles away from the Candy Wagon was Margaret Elizabeth, who had so recently ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... the inmost recesses of their souls and they had nothing to do it with but two or three elementary words. How pretty they were, the fair one dressed in red and the other, who was dark, all in white, with camellias in the dusk of her hair. They were not at all afraid of being frivolous and would linger now and then to examine the filmy muslins and laces ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... are frivolous incidents, scarce worth committing to paper; but they may serve to introduce observations of more consequence; and in the mean time I know nothing will be indifferent to you, that concerns—Your ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... beard with an air of the deepest gravity. Had you only seen his face at that moment you would have supposed that all the care of a mighty empire weighed upon his shoulders. The countenance of a grand vizier, engaged in considering an ultimatum of Lord Salisbury, were frivolous in comparison. There is little doubt that if Lord —— had applied to the serious business of life as much earnest deliberation as he gave to the movement of a pawn, he would have made a very different figure in Society. But having been born without any effort of his ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... Under the opposite treatment, the character loses its freshness, and we regard the early happiness as an illusion. The old emotions dry up at their source. Grief produces fretfulness, misanthropy, or effeminacy. Power is wasted on petty ends and frivolous excitement, and knowledge becomes barren and pedantic. In this way the postulate justifies itself by producing the noblest type of character. When the 'moral being' is thus built up, its instincts become its convictions, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... ministering to the peasantry, but in the course of their travels it had become painfully apparent that the clergy themselves were in urgent need of some awakening force. Those of good family led, for the most part, worldly and frivolous lives, while the humbler sort were as ignorant as the peasants among whom they lived. The religious wars had led to laxity and carelessness; drunkenness ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... character exactly, as I do not know him; but I should not like to have such a man for my friend. He may love study, and wish not to be interrupted by his friends; Amici fures temporis. He may be a frivolous man, and be so much occupied with petty pursuits, that he may not want friends. Or he may have a notion that there is a dignity in appearing indifferent, while he in fact may not be more indifferent ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... sometimes purely conventional and sometimes inherently real. Fashions, fads, affectations, poses, ideals, manias, popular delusions, follies, and vices must be included in the mores. They have characteral qualities and characteral effect. However frivolous or foolish they may appear to people of another age, they have the form of attempts to live well, to satisfy some interest, or to win some good. The ways of advertisers who exaggerate, use tricks to win attention, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... good-natured pity, akin to the feeling which the gods of Epicurus might be supposed to experience when they looked down upon foolish mortals,—and when we shut the book, go out into our own world to fret, fume, and wrangle over things equally transitory and frivolous. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... and laments the frivolity of women. He is left with one daughter (who is a blue) to admire the proportions of the Madeleine, to pass a rapturous hour in the square room of the Louvre, and to examine St. Germain l'Auxerrois, while the frivolous part of his household goes stoutly away, light-hearted and gay as humming-birds, to have their first look ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... wonderful afternoons when she deigned to be good! Sometimes, wearied with walks about the open country, and bored, as might have been expected of a frivolous, fickle character like hers, with the monotony of the landscape of orange-trees and palms, she would take refuge in her parlor, and sit down at the piano! With the hushed awe of a pious worshipper, Rafael would take a chair in a corner, and gluing his eyes upon those two majestic shoulders over ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... recommended to her in Paris," put in Caroline, more languidly. Her interest was only half engaged by this frivolous topic. ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... countryfolk, on a market day, would wait a quarter of an hour for the young man and think nothing of it; and I imagine Bofield found his account in the elevator, though he did complain sometimes that such persons went up and down on frivolous pretexts or to amuse the baby. As a matter of fact, Elgin had begun as the centre of "trading" for the farmers of Fox County, and had soon over-supplied that limit in demand; so that when other interests added themselves ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... be frivolous if I wanted to down here. Kobe would have proven fatal, for there are many foreigners there, and the temptation to have a good time would have been too much for me. I am rapidly developing into a hymn-singing sister, and the world and ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... way, Mr. Lagrange," said Mrs. Taine, quite casually,—when, under the influence of the mildly stimulating beverage, the talk had assumed a more frivolous vein,—"Who is your talented neighbor that so charms Mr. King with the music ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... wreckers of the lives of men. The evil that they do rises from absolute selfishness, rather than from deliberate sensuality. Not one of them could have been saved by any environment, or by any husband. Varvara is frivolous, Irina is cold-hearted, and Maria is a super-woman; she makes a bet with her husband that she can seduce any man he brings to the house. To each of her lovers she gives an iron ring, symbol of their slavery; and like Circe, she transforms men into swine. After ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... of the guard to fetch you to the orderly room, by and by," said Robert, "for 'preferring frivolous complaints.'" And he departed to the farmyard to look at ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... shook her head. "I should wish to guard myself against speaking unjustly of any one," she said; "but when you talk of 'a sweet woman,' you imply (as it seems to me) the domestic virtues. Mrs. Eyrecourt is essentially a frivolous person." ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... up because he was angry that other people were in so frivolous a mood at a time when he felt so exalted. For that reason he had no intention ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... but she saw a refusal would displease her cousin; and she was not accustomed to consult her own inclination in such frivolous matters. She therefore seated herself at the harp, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... effects which I hope for from the telling of stories in the schools, I, personally, place first the dramatic joy we bring to the children and to ourselves. But there are many who would consider this result as fantastic, if not frivolous, and not to be classed among the educational values connected with the introduction of stories into the school curriculum. I, therefore, propose to speak of other effects of story-telling which may seem of more ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... to be victor in some Field of Achievement, but each is jealous of the other's Field. Hattie thought Rosalie frivolous, and Rosalie scribbled notes under the nose of Hattie's brilliant recitations. Miss MacLauren, on the neutral ground of a non-combatant, was expected by each to furnish the ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... wholesome rule, we are bidden to think of the Passion of Jesus Christ our Lord. To think of that, however happy and comfortable, however busy and eager, however covetous and ambitious, however giddy and frivolous, however free, or at least desirous to be free, from suffering of any kind, we are ourselves. To think of the sufferings of Christ, and learn how grand it is to suffer ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... little jokes and reading his great folios, neither wrangling with nor accepting the opinions of the friends he loved to see around him. To a contemporary stranger it might well have appeared as if his life were a frivolous and useless one as compared with those of these philosophers and thinkers. They discussed their great schemes and affected to prove deep mysteries, and were constantly asking, "What is truth?" He sipped his glass, shuffled his cards, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a showy, handsome man, with a good deal of superficial instruction, and exceedingly vain of his personal advantages. I am quite sure that, having allowed him to be a fine-looking man, he would forgive me for saying that his character is frivolous, and that his principles, both moral and political, are governed entirely by that which ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Shining o'er all; and fell upon his knees, Restored to faith in one wise, loving God. Day followed day, and still he bode in Rome, Waiting his audience with the Cardinal, And from the gates, on pretext frivolous, Passed daily forth,—his Eminency slept,— Again, his Eminency was fatigued By tedious sessions of the Papal court, And thus the patient pilgrim was referred Unto a later hour. At last the page Bore him a missive with Filippo's seal, That in his name commended Tannhauser Unto the Pope. The ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... the states of the Union the laws are uniform on the proposition that experts may testify as to comparisons made and the results based on such comparisons, except that the paper admitted to be genuine shall not contain matter of a frivolous nature, etc. ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... state of dependence, that their characters have become dwarfed. The thirst for excitement that drives them restless from one amusement to another, and which finds relief in the extravagances of dress,—this passionate devotion to the frivolous and the absurd,—spring from the want of a reasonable employment for mind and body. My great principle is to exchange their passive condition for an active one. I would establish schools, where girls may receive a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Louis XIV. in the nineteenth century cannot wear ignoble pinchbeck buttons. These are little innocent toys, which make me considered a millionaire. I have created the sect of the 'Cannophiles' in the world of fashion, and every one thinks me utterly frivolous. This amuses me!" Certainly Balzac was not wrong when he told his correspondent that there was much of ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... anger which she expected to see break forth, the marquis answered coldly that what she was saying was incredible, that he had always found the young man very well behaved, and that, no doubt, having taken up some frivolous ground of resentment against him, she was employing this means to get rid of him; but, he added, whatever might be his love for her, and his desire to do everything that was agreeable to her, he begged her not to require this of him, the young man being ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of character; the extent to which the senses could be indulged within the bounds of morality; he sought to rid himself of all that troubled him by writing song or epigram about it, which made him seem frivolous and prompted one friend to seek to subdue him by means of church forms, which he had severed on coming to Leipzig. By degrees he felt an epoch approaching when all respect for authority was to vanish, and he became suspicious and even despairing with regard to the best individuals ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... The influence of FOLLY is more dangerous, as the station it possesses is more exalted; and as the means of doing good are more enlarged among the Rich and Great, that time is the more to be lamented which they consume in frivolous pursuits and ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... the Plays written by that ingenious Gentleman are so chast and inoffensive, as he declares them to be. The rather, because the Success he mentions overthrows that frivolous Pretence, of the Poets lying under a Necessity of writing lewdly in order to please the Town. And if this Gentleman do yet retain the same tenderness of doing nothing for Gain or Glory, which does not strictly ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... intoxicating wine at the Lord's table, and would not this be awful? Moreover, it forbade a farmer to manufacture hard cider from his own orchard, and would not this be a hard and tyrannical law? This was vexatious, for we were fighting the saloon, and were not seeking to palter with such frivolous and intermeddling legislation. Nevertheless, in spite of these crafty attempts to excite popular odium against the amendment, it was adopted by a majority of more than eight thousand, and it became the duty of the next Legislature to enact a law enforcing the amendment. Then some of us waited ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... misled by his exclusive references to poesia, as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously combats—the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the day before which must influence her during all the remainder of her days. It seemed to shake all her little artificial affected nature off and to reveal the real Nora, who was frightened and weak and silly, and yet who had somewhere beneath her frivolous exterior a real little heart of gold. If there was one person whom Nora really adored, and in whose presence she was ever her truest and best, it was her mother. She looked at her mother now as she re-entered ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... regretted that it had not fallen to the lot of civilized men. I was wrong no doubt: it is just that those should be most favored by their common mother, who are least disposed to pervert her gifts, or to give the preference to advantages which are factitious, and often very frivolous. We quitted with regret this charming spot, and soon came to another large village, which our guide informed us was called Kathlapootle, and was situated at the confluence of a small stream, that seemed to flow down from the mountain covered with snow, which we had seen the day before: ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... bodily development, the Romans exercised for usefulness in war. Cicero exclaims, with reference to Greek gymnasial training: "What an absurd system of training youth is exhibited in their gymnasia! What a frivolous preparation for the ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... "How frivolous American women will appear to you, Madame! Few of us ever read the constitution of our country. I confess I only know the first line:—'When in the course of human events it becomes necessary,' but what they thought necessary to do is very ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... food-stuffs unknown to the purveyor of a lumber camp's commissary, but in demand by the housewife; its one glass case shone temptingly with fancy stationery, dollar watches, and even cheap jewelry. There was candy for the children, gum for the bashful maiden, soda pop for the frivolous young. In short, there sprang to being in an astonishingly brief space of time a very creditable specimen of the country store. It was a business in itself, requiring all the services of a competent man for the buying, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... Justice, not only throughout his own country, but through the various nations of the world. How low, how little, are the grandest enterprizes of Heroic Ambition, when compared with this magnanimous pursuit! How frivolous and vain are the highest aims of Fancy and Science, when contrasted with a purpose so beneficently great! But, marvellous as the magnitude of HOWARD'S enterprise appears, on the slightest view that magnitude becomes doubly striking, when we contemplate at the same ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... Bill is never real gay, But built on a sour-face plan; Bill wouldn't laugh, whatever you'd say; Looks like a love-poisoned man. "Grin, ye hyenas," he'll say as he smokes; "I ain't a frivolous guy—" "Thinkin' of all of the pain you caused folks While learnin' ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... idle spectators, and as a part of the splendid spectacle, till the ordinary round of twenty-four races [51] was completely finished. On solemn festivals, Julian, who felt and professed an unfashionable dislike to these frivolous amusements, condescended to appear in the Circus; and after bestowing a careless glance at five or six of the races, he hastily withdrew with the impatience of a philosopher, who considered every moment as lost that was not devoted to the advantage of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... base and frivolous things amongst grave and learned men, nor very difficult questions or subjects among the ignorant, ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... to make the most, in no mean or vulgar sense, of the few years of life; few, indeed, for the attainment of anything like general perfection! With the brevity of that sum of years his mind is exceptionally impressed; and this purpose makes him no frivolous dilettante, but graver than other men: his scheme is not that of a trifler, but rather of one who gives a meaning of his own, yet a very real one, to those old words—Let us work while it is day! He has a strong apprehension, also, of the beauty of the visible things around him; their fading, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... West. Yet she smiled them firmly away, to the wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favor? But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at times, the self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough to sit on the sidewalk with a half-dozen children round her blowing bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the-ring; yet this only made her more popular. Jansen's admiration was at ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... "shitting Chian." On account of their notoriously pederastic habits, the inhabitants of this island were known throughout Greece as 'loose-arsed' Chians, and therefore always on the point of voiding their faeces. There is a further joke, of course, in connection with the hundred and one frivolous pretexts which the Athenians invented for exacting contributions from the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels, and immense glazed book-cases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture of her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the Second Empire. It was her habit to sit in a window of her sitting-room on the ground floor, as if watching calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors. She seemed in no hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her confidence. She was sure ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... knowledge, which gave flavour to the otherwise rather insipid conversation. Margaret saw glimpses in him of a slight contempt for his brother and sister-in-law, and for their mode of life, which he seemed to consider as frivolous and purposeless. He once or twice spoke to his brother, in Margaret's presence, in a pretty sharp tone of enquiry, as to whether he meant entirely to relinquish his profession; and on Captain Lennox's reply, that he had quite enough to live upon, she had seen Mr. Lennox's curl ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Henry III. and the chessboard of Louis XIII. are merely ridiculous. We must excuse well-intentioned monarchs when they only indulge themselves with frivolous and childish trifles. It is something to be thankful for if we have not to apply to them the adage—Quic-quid delirant reges plectuntur Achivi—'When kings go mad ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... delirious, he scarcely ever mentioned her name. But now I believe she played with his heart—the noblest that ever beat—and then threw it away, as if it were a toy instead of the richest offering ever made to a woman. Proud fool that she was; she has done more mischief than a thousand such frivolous lives as hers can atone for. I can write no more; my heart is breaking with grief ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... XVI, when Marie Antoinette was in the flower of her inconsiderate elegance, the note of the day was for art to be small, but perfect; the worth of a work of art was determined by its size—in inverse ratio. It was a time lively and intellectual and frivolous, and its art was the reflection of ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... of the Squire of Ashe; thin and small, a contrast to Dame Harrison in her mild and somewhat fussy manner; her plain petticoat, too, was embellished with paniers, and in spite of the heat of the day she wore a tippet edged with fur: both of which frivolous adornments had obviously stirred up the wrath of her ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... reward. Believe me, the whole course and character of your lovers' lives is in your hands; what you would have them be, they shall be, if you not only desire to have them so, but deserve to have them so; for they are but mirrors in which you will see yourselves imaged. If you are frivolous, they will be so also; if you have no understanding of the scope of their duty, they also will forget it; they will listen,—they can listen,—to no other interpretation of it than that uttered from your lips. Bid them be brave;—they ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... seeing him. "My treasure—the darlingest love of a dress I have ever ordered—was brought in exactly two seconds before a brace of honorables— lumbering machines that they are! knocked at the door. So, lest they should brand me as a frivolous doll (as if anybody with a soul, and an infinitesimal degree of love for the beautiful, COULD help admiring the divine thing!), I pushed the poor box under the sofa, and there it has lain in ignominious neglect, like a pearl of purest ray serene smothered in an oyster, all the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the beauties of ancient and innocent days moved radiant and luminous in the azure of her mind. But time crept on and a woman's penetrating comprehension came to her, and the dreams of youth shifted off into the realities of maturity, and she saw that many who came to pray were careless, frivolous people, and that the vergers did their work without more reverence than did the stablemen who cared for her father's horses. And once when twilight was veiling the choir, and all the worshipers had departed, she saw a curate strike a match on the cloister-wall, to light his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... is ever growing more reckless. He even dares to attack the virtue of Donna Anna, one of the first ladies of a city in Spain, of which her father, an old Spanish Grandee, as noble and as strict in virtue as Don Juan is oversatiated and frivolous, is governor. The old father coming forward to help his beloved daughter, with drawn dagger attacks Don Juan, who compelled to defend himself, has the misfortune to stab ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... this desired ease is a lightness of phrasing which is at once a matter of thought and of rhetorical construction. Try to avoid heaviness and austerity of thought as much as you would similar qualities in writing. Get at the lighter, brighter, perhaps more frivolous side of things; do not take your work too seriously, you are seldom writing tragedies; permit yourself to be humorous, witty, a little ironical; do not plunge too deeply into dark abysses of metaphysics or theology. I do not mean that you should not treat of serious things, ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... "You are frivolous, Mr. Lennox," he said, "and this is not a time for light talk. I don't know what you mean, but it seems to me you don't appreciate the dire nature of your peril. I liked you and your comrades when I met you in Quebec ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... RACHAEL (still half frivolous under the sudden wrench from tragic despair). And, after that terrible experience, you still have love and romance in you! I should want a warm bed, and then—to-morrow—to-morrow—we will sit on the terrace and watch the calm old sun go down into the calm old sea, with not a thought ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... much less a Queen Faery; and he stayed in the Hill and walked through all the passages to see that every thing was in order. The Butterfly, poor thing! was dead, and the Black Ant of course was too busy burying him to attend to such frivolous matters. The Grasshopper, however, came the whole length of the Garden, and each skip was precisely as long as the last. It took just one hundred and sixty-seven skips to reach the Lilac Bush. His uniform looked finely, and ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... such things as social distinctions; and we conceive that a man and a 'contributor' (an ancient contributor to Blackwood), must in the herald's college be allowed a permanent precedency before all bridges whatsoever, without regard to number of arches, width of span, or any other frivolous pretences. We acknowledge therefore with gratitude Coleridge's loyalty to his own species in not listening to any compromise with mere things, that never were nor will be raised to the peerage of personality, and sternly refusing them the verbal honours which are sacred ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Firenze, 1834. There is great need of a careful, critical edition of the Canzoniere of Dante, in which poems falsely ascribed to him should no longer hold place among the genuine. But there is little hope for this from Italy; for the race of Italian commentators on Dante is, as a whole, more frivolous, more impertinent, and duller, than that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... almost for nothing; for that the things which nature requires are easily obtained." As to the second kind of desires, his opinion is that any one may easily either enjoy or go without them. And with regard to the third, since they are utterly frivolous, being neither allied to necessity nor nature, he thinks that they should be entirely rooted out. On this topic a great many arguments are adduced by the Epicureans; and those pleasures which they do not despise in a body, they disparage one ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... boy, the example of his elders teaches him to look upon frivolous distinction as a great end and aim of life, whilst that of his comrades leads him to neglect all study as dry, to despise all application as "slow." At home he hears some good-looking, grown-up cousin, or agreeable military ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... liberal arts, to the degree that most of your countrymen do when they travel in Italy. If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you, but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light, brings him into a great deal of bad company, and takes up a great deal of time which ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... own works by our inventions, that we have almost smothered her; yet in other places, where she shines in her own purity and proper lustre, she marvellously baffles and disgraces all our vain and frivolous attempts: ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... with tortoise-shell, and seemingly the one thing that had reconciled Rachel the downright to the possession of a hand-mirror was the fact that the tortoise-shell was real tortoise-shell. She had "made out" that a hand-mirror was too frivolous an object for the dressing-table of a serious Five Towns woman. She had always referred to it as "the" hand-mirror—as though disdaining special ownership. She had derided it once by using it in front of Louis with the mimic ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the pampered daughter of a frivolous mother. Her dislike for the rugged life of Girl Scouts is eventually changed to appreciation, when the rescue of little Lucia, a woodland waif, becomes a problem for the ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... here is uncertain. Li Ch'uan indicates "a treaty confirmed by oaths and hostages." Wang Hsi and Chang Yu, on the other hand, simply say "without reason," "on a frivolous pretext."] ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... the warm bosom of Earth and make them mingle. You would lift up Earth to Heaven! Ah, that is difficult! Even Christ came down! It is the chief thing I admire in Him, that He 'descended from Heaven and was made Man'. TRES CHER Felix, I shall bewilder you to death with my specious and frivolous reasoning,—and after all, I had much better come to the main fact of what I intended to tell you,—a sort of confession out of church. You know I have already told you I am going to die soon, and that I am a ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... reproachfully. "Thy trust in me should be greater, for I have done thee full many a kindly office; or, now I do bethink me, thou art assorted on the booke! Unhappy brother, can it be that thou dost covet this vain toy, this frivolous bauble, that thou wouldst seek the devil's companionship anon to compound with Beelzelub? I charge thee, Brother Gonsol, open thine eyes and see in what a slippery place ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... imperious Constance of Aquitaine, her successor, proved a penitential infliction second only in severity to the anathemas of the Church. Troops of vain and frivolous troubadours from her southern home, in all kinds of foreign and fantastic costumes, invaded the court at Paris and shocked the austere piety of the king. He perceived the corrupting influence on the simple manners of the Franks of their licentious songs, lascivious music and dissolute ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... humble study, but how many others are there which so often compensate the trouble they give by affording us opportunity to cry Eureka."[113] Julien Havet, when he was "already known to the learned men of Europe," used to divert himself "by apparently frivolous amusements, such as guessing square words or deciphering cryptograms."[114] Profound instincts, and, for all the childish or ridiculous perversions which they may exhibit in certain individuals, ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... woman, strength to 60:18 man, and a centre for the affections. This, however, in a majority of cases, is not its present tendency, and why? Because the education of 60:21 the higher nature is neglected, and other considerations, - passion, frivolous amusements, personal adornment, display, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... only in her very merry moods. As a rule, she is too much occupied with weeping to have time for frivolous reflections. ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... wing, and gave a little appearance of shelter, and a few Lombardy poplars and light-leaved young birches made a thin and interrupted screen to the east; but the house stood clear of these light and frivolous young attendants in a nakedness which made the spectator shiver. The wood in the long avenue had been thinned in almost the same ruthless way, but here and there were shady corners, where old trees, not worth much in the market, but ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... deepening into Puritanism. He had come to view his own preaching as frivolous, Sadducean, pagan." He decided to preach one sermon which would show what changes had come, and the announcement of his intention brought together the usual throng of under-graduates, fellows and professors who looked for the usual entertainment. ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... without regard to justice." For this reason they were suspended for a time in Louisiana and Georgia by General Steedman and General Fullerton, and cases were then sent before military courts. Men of the highest character were dragged before the Bureau tribunals upon frivolous complaints, were lectured, abused, ridiculed, and arbitrarily fined or otherwise punished. The jurisdiction of the Bureau courts weakened the civil courts and their frequent interference in trivial matters was not conducive to a ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... chide; To feel the west-wind cool refreshment yield, That comes soft creeping o'er the flowery field, And shadow'd waters; in whose bushy side The Mountain-Bees their fragrant treasure hide Murmuring; and sings the lonely Thrush conceal'd!— Then, Ceremony, in thy gilded halls, Where forc'd and frivolous the themes arise, With bow and smile unmeaning, O! how palls At thee, and thine, my sense!—how oft it sighs For leisure, wood-lanes, dells, and water-falls; And feels th' untemper'd heat ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... supposed head of it. But this was neither owing to affectation nor inadvertence. I have carefully avoided the introduction of personal reflections of any kind. Much the greater part of the topics which have been used to blacken this nobleman are either unjust or frivolous. At best, they have a tendency to give the resentment of this bitter calamity a wrong direction, and to turn a public grievance into a mean personal, or a dangerous national, quarrel. Where there is a regular scheme of operations carried on, it is the ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... a bandbox and a case supposed to contain the family jewels. Alice, who played the part this time of a frivolous young woman, was to ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... since the trite and frivolous question following was debated in a very polite and learned company, viz., Who was the greatest man, ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... her own. The mongrel and modern nations of the South, with a mingled arrogance and ignorance, confounded the worships of all climes and ages. And the profound mysteries of the Nile were degraded by a hundred meretricious and frivolous admixtures from the creeds of Cephisus and of Tibur. The temple of Isis in Pompeii was served by Roman and Greek priests, ignorant alike of the language and the customs of her ancient votaries; and the descendant of the ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... upon as frivolous and unsuited to the gravity of a Vestal, Brinnaria introduced Terentia to the organ. This instrument the child had heard, but had not learned to play, as organs were expensive in those days, whereas ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... sighed when I mentioned it, 'when a certain domesticated little Mary's lamb I could name was some instructed himself in the line of pernicious sprightliness. I never expected, Perry, to see you reduced down from a full-grown pestilence to such a frivolous fraction of a man. Why,' says I, 'you've got a necktie on; and you speak a senseless kind of indoor drivel that reminds me of a storekeeper or a lady. You look to me like you might tote an umbrella and wear suspenders, and ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... corrupt and petty society and give him free scope, and he at once lets fall the film of shams from off him like a cast garment, and comes out as a reality. Shut the same Englishman up in an artificial, frivolous, unreal society, and he at once becomes afraid of himself; he fears to exhibit enthusiasm about anything, and he hides his genuine nature behind a cloud of slang. He belittles everything he touches, he is afraid to utter ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... I think you are to be congratulated. I consider that you ran a tremendous risk in asking a young woman, of whom you knew nothing, to come out to you; still it has turned out well. If she had been a frivolous, giggling thing, like most of them, I had made up my mind to do you a good turn by helping to get her engaged on the voyage, and should have seen her married offhand at Calcutta, and have come up and told you that you were well out of the scrape. As, ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... above his forehead seemed to burn more brilliantly than ever as if to shame the frivolous occidental jewels that ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... matters," "frivolous affairs"; but for the full import of the phrase {paidikois pragmasi} ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... to grow frivolous and forgetful when the world goes well with them and the desire of their hearts is accomplished; others are filled with a passion of gratitude and thanksgiving, and Darsie Garnett belonged to the latter category. Prosperity made her more humble, more kindly, more overflowing with love to God and ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... always the same? Shall I increase his admiration for the beautiful creature, by telling him that she best loved to sit by the quiet hearth of her parents, leaving it to lighter and less amiable maidens to rove on idle errands and frivolous pursuits through the village. For, let my brother learn, she was that wonder, a woman, contented and happy in her own house, with none but her own father to listen or reply. During the long evenings of the period when the sun is away from the earth for so great a portion of the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... the existence of a personal God and the immortality of the soul—was duly elected professor of Christian dogmatics and ethics in the University of Zurich, by the party then in power, which consisted mostly of demagogues and frivolous infidels." ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... way," he admitted, "this is disappointing. You are right. I have never felt the call of those other things. When I was a young man, I was frivolous simply when I felt inclined to turn from the big things of life for purposes of relaxation. When an alliance was suggested to me, I was content to accept it, but thank heavens I have been Oriental enough to keep women in my life where they belong. I am disappointed ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... upon those special and admirable reasons for which our Saviour made use of so many parables. Only thus much is needful to be said, namely, that they are very much mistaken, that, from hence, think themselves tolerated to turn all the world into frivolous and ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... blameless existence one leads. I think I would soon grow very good, for there is no temptation to be anything else. One can't be very frivolous when there is no one to be frivolous with; nor can one backbite and be unkind, for there is no provocation. As for being vain and fond of the putting on of apparel, what is the good when one is the Best People if one wears ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... it's necessary," said Kenton, haughtily, "There's only one thing that could give him the right to know it, and we'll wait for that first. I thought you said that he was frivolous." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... intended to make all the temples centers of moral instruction (Allard, Julien l'Apostat, II, 186 ff.), and this great idea of his reign was partially realized after his death. His homilies were little appreciated by the bantering {286} and frivolous Greeks of Antioch or Alexandria, but they appealed much more to Roman gravity. At Rome the rigorous mysteries of Mithra had paved the way for reform. St. Augustine, Epist., 91 [202] (Migne, P. L., XXXIII, col. 315), c. 408 A. D., ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... basis of a series of fictions by Nash half a century after his death. He cannot have been more than thirty when, in the Reign of Terror towards the close of Henry VIII.'s life, he was arrested on frivolous charges, the gravest being the assumption of the royal arms, found guilty of treason, and beheaded on Tower Hill on 19th January 1547. Thus it will be seen that Wyatt was at Cambridge before Surrey was born, and died five years before him; to which it need only be added that ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... so important an article as the Umbrella would be without its lighter as well as its more serious history? Umbrellas are still, we regret to say, regarded rather in a comic than a serious light; so, if any of the following anecdotes seem to treat of Umbrellas in too mocking or frivolous a vein, it is the fault of the bad taste of the British public, not ours, who have merely compiled. However, we may commence with a very neat ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... calumny, all the echoes of the party of the Importants took it up, and Madame de Montbazon herself found pleasure in repeating it during several following days, so that the incident became the entertainment of the Court. A frivolous curiosity has very faithfully preserved the text of the two letters thus found at the ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... trying hard to be intent on its destination. You may see it falter, struggling with its sense of duty, and then break weakly into a mild figure eight. The ragged rooks of Faery at once hurry into the air to show their laborious imitator how this should be done. The spirit of frivolous competition enters into the aeroplane, its duty is flung to the winds. It flaunts itself up and down once or twice, as if to say: "Now look, everybody, I'm going to be clever." Then it goes mad. It leaps upon imaginary Boches, it stands upon its ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... acknowledge the courtesy of authors and publishers in granting permission to reprint the verses contained in this book. To Mr. Guy Wetmore Carryl, whose "Fables for the Frivolous" are published by Messrs. Harper & Brothers; to Mr. Charles E. Carryl, whose verses appeared originally in St. Nicholas; to Mr. Oliver Herford, whose "Child's Primer of Natural History" is published by Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons; to the same author for the selection from "Alphabet ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various
... such a trifling and frivolous old age is to lay up in our way to it such stores of knowledge and observation as may make us useful and agreeable in our declining years. The mind of man in a long life will become a magazine of wisdom or folly, and will consequently ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... or promoted were seen no more in Massachusetts. The era for gayeties had not yet come in the new world. Endicott would not be satisfied with crushing out evil; he would also nip in the bud all such lightsome and frivolous conduct as might lead those who indulged in it to forget the dangers and difficulties attending the planting of the reformed faith ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... over every other daughter in the universe; but the power to understand her or to sympathise with her had not been given to that narrow mind. The only way in which Mrs. Sheldon's affection showed itself was unquestioning indulgence and the bestowal of frivolous gifts, chosen with no special regard to Charlotte's requirements, but rather because they happened to catch Mrs. Sheldon's eye as they glittered or sparkled in ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
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