|
|
|
More "Insignificant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of that reiterated visage seemed suddenly to explain everything to me. I felt at once the stupidity of any appeal, and the instant necessity for every kind of appeal. I felt the negation, the sudden slipping into insignificant unimportance of the whole of the Western world—and, at the same time, the dismissal of the East. "No longer my masters" a voice seemed to cry from the very heart of that multitude. "No longer will we halt at your command, no longer will your words be wisdom to us, no longer ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... able to fashion themselves to a No, now murmured expostulation and refusal. "I could not"—these are his own words—"abase myself to such a point as to serve the First Consul merely in the capacity of a journalist, while so many insignificant, low, and servile people, such as the Treilhards, the Roederers, the Lebruns, the Marets, and others whom it is superfluous to name, held the first place in this government ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... little more than a century ago, when the Corsican terrorized Europe. But our rumour-mongers are too far out of date for this age. It is unfortunate that the advocates of militarism should receive parliamentary support of any kind. The Opposition is weakly and insignificant enough in all conscience, without courting further unpopularity by floating British public feeling in this way, and encouraging the cranks among its following to bring ridicule upon ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... her, you wouldn't think it worth while to raise all this breeze over her, or any thing she could do. She is a little, insignificant looking woman, anyhow; and yet I think she is ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... painter was sober and temperate in his life, very industrious, and devoted to his widowed mother. About 1536 he married the daughter of a Venetian citizen, and had a son, who became one of the many insignificant painters of the end of the sixteenth century. Most of his days were divided between his little Villa of Lovadina in the district of Belluno, and his modest home in the Corte dell' Cavallo near the Misericordia. "He lives comfortably in his quiet house," writes Vasari, who certainly knew Bordone ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... all things: the Fountain of Mercy, who had so loved the world as to give His only-begotten Son for its salvation: the Father who, having loved her before the world was, cared for everything, however insignificant, which concerned her welfare. Christ was the Friend who sticketh closer than a brother—the Lamb who had been slain for her, the High Priest who was touched with every feeling of human infirmity. Heaven was the ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... existence; the actual sensation and the interest belonging to it are both fled; but it has had a real existence, and we can still call up a vivid recollection of it as having once been; and therefore, by parity of reasoning, it is not a thing perfectly insignificant in itself, nor wholly indifferent to the mind whether it ever was or not. Oh no! Far from it! Let us not rashly quit our hold upon the past, when perhaps there may be little else left to bind us to existence. Is it ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... lest our claims to attention are not fully recognized, less our worth be not observed, our proper station accorded to us. How we press our paltry little claims upon others, how we glorify our own insignificant deeds; how large loom up our small and puny acts. The whole universe centers in us; our ego is a most important thing; our work of the highest value and significance; ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... that the measurement could not be absolutely accurate, because it is made from the surface of the earth, and not from the earth's centre, but the size of the earth is so insignificant in comparison with the distance of the sun that this slight discrepancy could ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... like amount of similar animal products derived from higher organisms, and when we consider the prodigious numbers of these worms found on a single square yard of some soils, we may easily see that they furnish no insignificant contribution to the nutritive material required for the growth of plants. [Footnote: I believe there is no foundation for the supposition that earthworms attack the tuber of the potato. Some of them, especially one or two species ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... tobacco between that port and Glasgow, but of late years it has become chiefly noted for its iron ships and steamers, which are unsurpassed; and it is now, I believe, the second city in the United Kingdom in point of wealth and population. The Clyde, naturally an insignificant stream, has been deepened by art until it is now ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... the present section, occupying 251 lines in {Pi}, there is only one reading of the Parisinus—a false reading, it happens—that seems to Budaeus worth recording. Compared with what Aldus gleaned from {Pi}, Budaeus's extracts are insignificant. It is remarkable, for instance, that on a passage (65, 11) which, as the appended obelus shows, he must have read with attention, he has not added the very different reading of the Parisinus. Either, then, Budaeus did not consult the Parisinus with care, or he did not think ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... "The most insignificant and unpolished workman is dearer to him than his own child," said she, proudly, drying her tears. "He is now, perhaps, watching in the cabins of his laborers, and does not care if his own house is burned to the ground; but even if he were told that ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... dramatic presentation of history, there are very great possibilities for the short story introduced into the portrait of some great personage, insignificant in itself, but which throws a sudden sidelight on his character, showing the mind behind the actual deeds; this is what I mean ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... to reconcile them to his own chastening, but not unfriendly, hand. The grandeur of a united Fatherland flashed upon minds hitherto impenetrable by any national ideal when it became known that Napoleon was bargaining for Oppenheim and Kaiserslautern. Not only were the insignificant questions as to the war-indemnities to be paid to Prussia and the frontier villages to be exchanged promptly settled, but by a series of secret Treaties all the South German States entered into an offensive and ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Latin prose, and as an orator, he was second to Cicero alone in the age that is called the Ciceronian; and no third is to be named with these two. Yet among his contemporaries his literary power was an insignificant title to fame, compared with his overwhelming military and political genius. Here he stood alone, unrivaled, the most successful conqueror and civilizer of all history, the founder of the most majestic political fabric the world has ever seen. There have been ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... and experience has furnished the debtors with ways and means to evade the force of this statute, and to secure their estate against the reach of it, which renders it often insignificant, and consequently, the knave against whom the law was particularly bent gets off, while he only who fails of mere necessity, and whose honest principle will not permit him to practise those methods, is exposed to the fury of this act. And as things are now ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... cried Cleopatra, "I often turn hot and cold, and the tears even spring to my eyes, when the shouting is loudest. A great mass of men all uniting in a common emotion always has a great effect. A drop, a grain of sand, a block of stone are insignificant objects, but millions of them together, forming the sea, the desert or the pyramids, constitute a sublime whole. One man alone, shouting for joy, is like a madman escaped from an asylum, but when ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... extent of the territory occupied. For there were Hindu kingdoms in Java and Camboja and settlements in Sumatra[2] and even in Borneo, an island about as far from India as is Persia from Rome. But such military or commercial invasions are insignificant compared with the spread of Indian thought. The south-eastern region of Asia—both mainland and archipelago—owed its civilization almost entirely to India. In Ceylon, Burma, Siam, Camboja, Champa and Java, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... civilization. In commerce, art, and literature, Italy was the queen of Europe. In military force, extent of possessions, and unbounded wealth, Spain was the leading power of the world. The Portuguese mariners had ransacked every sea, and discovered new continents and islands in every zone. How insignificant, in comparison with these great nations, were England, Holland, and Germany! But England, Holland, and Germany became Protestant; Italy, Spain, and Portugal remained Catholic; while France and Austria adopted ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... quietly. "My ideas are pretty well-known; but I am too insignificant a fellow for what I say to be noticed. Now ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... himself what could have taken the Hooper party to the Christ Church barge? Ewen Hooper was a Llandaff man, and Llandaff, a small and insignificant college, shared a barge with another small college some ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Raeburn, taking up a Marechal Niel rose from the table and studying it abstractedly. "I've had a sentence of Auerbach's in my head all day, 'The martyrdom of the modern world consists of a long array of thousands of trifling annoyances.' These things are in themselves insignificant, but multiplication makes them a great power. You have been feeling this heat, I'm afraid. I will relieve guard, Erica. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... endeavour; her own personality was prepossessing; she had sufficient tact never to seek to ingratiate herself; her solecisms were few and insignificant, and the introduction of Abigail ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... been crawling about outside the camp during the fatal tragedy of that morning, may seem strange. More strange still, that not one of that party should have thought of going back to seek her. But the female infant occupies an insignificant place among those uncivilized people: the birth of one of them is greeted with but a small fraction of the honours with which a ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas
... There were four somewhat insignificant-looking engines in all. Of these, one drove the stern propeller, one the side propellers, and two the fan-wheels on the masts. He learnt as soon as the voyage began, that, by a very simple switch arrangement, the power of the whole four engines could ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... was leading. Then there came other rumours—of his successes in the service. By then he had taken to cutting me in the street, and I suspected that he was afraid of compromising himself by greeting a personage as insignificant as me. I saw him once in the theatre, in the third tier of boxes. By then he was wearing shoulder-straps. He was twisting and twirling about, ingratiating himself with the daughters of an ancient General. In three years he had gone off considerably, though he ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... standing at the window of a small house in an insignificant street on the southern side of the Seine. He was remarkably calm—quite the calmest man within the radius of a mile; for the insignificant little street was in an uproar. There was a barricade at each end of it. Such a barricade ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... point, condescend to borrow a lesson from an illustrious, though oft despised, neighbour, who, it appears by the evidence of all travellers, has taken care that the roads and hedges of France should be covered with productive fruit trees. If such also were the condition of Britain, how insignificant would become the anxious questions about a Corn Bill, or the price of any single article of food. We should then partake of the ample stores provided, and perhaps contemplated, by our forefathers, when they rendered ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... discovered that Greek and Latin are of no more practical use than Choctaw—which is perfectly true, if the useless money-bag be our summum bonum. With the indisputable authority of a man who keeps a large balance at his bank, he once dismissed the wars of the Greeks as "petty and insignificant skirmishes between savages." Poor Greeks! They did not pay their bills in dollars or buy their steel at Pittsburg. The chief article in his political creed is that monarchy is a crime. In his opinion, it is a degradation to kiss the King's hand. "The first man who feels as he ought to feel," ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... have been very fully annotated, and nothing that seemed to offer any real difficulty has been passed over. All proper names have been explained, with the exception of a few too well known or too insignificant to justify comment. The notes are further reenforced by an Idiomatic Commentary, to be studied in connection with the text. By frequent reviews and by oral drill in translating the idioms from either language to ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... eelman were active fishermen, as their father had been before them; and although they were all married they lived together. The swarm of children was not insignificant; young and old formed one family, in which the old grandmother ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... nothing is known, but that he built, or repaired, a temple at Nineveh. His reign probably occupied the interval between B.. 1090 and 1070. He would thus seem to have been contemporary with Smendes in Egypt and with Samuel or Saul in Israel. So apparently insignificant an event as the establishment of a kingdom in Palestine was not likely to disturb the thoughts, even if it came to the knowledge, of an Assyrian monarch. Shamas-Vul would no doubt have regarded with utter contempt the petty sovereign of so small a territory as Palestine, and would have ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... disgust at what they were doing; for one of the commanders of a company, who was asked for troops for the restoration of order, to reply that soldiers ought not to be butchers—and thanks to these and a few other seemingly insignificant influences brought to bear on these hypnotized men, the affair took a completely different turn, and the troops, when they reached the place, did not inflict any punishment, but contented themselves with cutting down the forest and giving ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... difficulties, and her ability to rise above her environment, however discouraging their conditions, prevented her from being unhappy or depressed by the small annoyances met daily. She never failed to find joy and pleasure in the faithful performance of daily tasks, however small or insignificant. Aunt Sarah attributed her remarkably fine, clear complexion, seldom equalled in a woman of her years, to good digestion and excellent health; her love of fresh air, fruit and clear spring water. She usually drank from four to five tumblerfuls ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... larger power than themselves! With the triumph and subsequent absorption of Buddhism into Brahmanism the latter abandoned its sacrifices and accepted the Buddhistic emphasis upon Karma, and doomed every soul to the tread-mill of its own destiny. To every human word, deed or thought, however insignificant, there is fruit which must ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... paper said: "There were a good many men in the audience and they did not look much as they do in the comic papers. The suffragists' husbands in caricature are consumptive, cadaverous, insignificant mortals, trailing around in the wake of rambunctious and overwhelming wives; but most of the men who mixed themselves up with this convention looked as if they could not very easily have been dragged there if they had not wanted to come. Some of them were six ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... appearances, and in deference to their vain, arrogant prejudices. The man whom I upbraided in my heart for shaking as it were in triumph those horrible keys, to make me more keenly sensible of his power, whom I set down as an insignificant tyrant, inured to practices of cruelty, was then revolving thoughts of compassion, and assuredly had spoken in that harsh tone only to conceal his real feelings. Perhaps he was afraid to trust himself, or that I should prove unworthy gentler treatment; doubtful whether I might not be yet ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... presence of the Omnipotent how insignificant is the proudest and the noblest of men! Even Washington, who alone of his kind could fill that comprehensive epitome of General Henry Lee, so often on our lips, "First in war, first in peace, and ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... Evelyn Darrah. No one ever saw its contents save the girl to whom it was addressed, but there came nothing to be forwarded to the Archers at Camp Almy. From that night among the cedars Lilian never again saw Harold Willett. It was a pitifully insignificant little packet of letters the young officer found on his desk the morning of his return from the Hassayampa road. It contained only the pages he had penned to his Lily of the Desert. The earlier ones were fond, endearing, ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... guides the investigator to the discovery of new facts which, when ascertained, it seems also able to co-ordinate.[6] Nay, "Natural Selection" seems capable of application not only to the building up of the smallest and most insignificant organisms, but even of extension beyond the biological domain altogether, so as possibly to have relation to the stable equilibrium of the solar system{10} itself, and even of the whole sidereal universe. Thus, whether ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... room under it! For me! What a contemptibly little-minded and insignificant person she must think me. The words with which I strove to tell her that I wished to live here as lord, with her as my queen, would not come. She looked at me for a moment as I stood on the brink of saying something but not saying it, and then she ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... to ascertain what had occurred.... It was also at Konopi[vs]t[ve] that Francis Ferdinand, who was threatened with hereditary madness, had shot a gamekeeper dead. Knowing that the Archduke was as good a shot as he was insignificant in horsemanship, this had excited great attention in the highest circles, coming as it did after other scenes of violence.... In contrast with all these semi-mysteries it is clear that Serbia had nothing whatever to gain by the Archduke's disappearance, and although ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... appellation, which to Pierre seemed terrible, they were now leading him somewhere with unhesitating assurance on their faces that he and all the other prisoners were exactly the ones they wanted and that they were being taken to the proper place. Pierre felt himself to be an insignificant chip fallen among the wheels of a machine whose action he did not understand but which ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... along the face of the cliff. Landless looked and saw a very narrow ledge, a mere projection here and there of jagged and broken rock, a pathway perilous and difficult as might well be imagined. So narrow and insignificant it looked, such a mere seam along the vast wall, that a white man passing through the ravine might never ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... visited the modern town of Nauplia; where I observed that many respectable houses have been recently erected, several good shops opened, and the streets are much cleaner than might be expected. Its old palace was an insignificant building, but they are adding considerably to it. The Greeks being forbidden to carry arms, their costume is less picturesque than formerly; but, on some of the noble-looking figures I saw, it still appeared handsome and becoming. None of Graecia's beauteous daughters were visible to-day, all the ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... while we play. For the mind may be trained to meditate on great themes instead of giving itself up to idle reverie; when it is released from work it may concern itself with the highest things as readily as with those which are insignificant and paltry. Whoever can command his meditations in the streets, along the country roads, on the train, in the hours of relaxation, can enrich himself for all time without effort or fatigue; for it is as easy and restful to think about great things as ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... confirmation about applications to the Admiralty, and applications to the War Office, and applications to the Colonial Office, by Sir Alexander Cochrane for De Berenger; and after they had called witness after witness to give this confirmation upon this insignificant and trifling point, they leave him without confirmation upon that important, that vital part of this case to my Lord Cochrane, videlicet: the dress which Mr. De Berenger wore at the time he came to that house, and had with him that interview. Lord Cochrane puts him on a grey military ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... arrive at a sort of harmony of life, to have definite things that they want to do, definite regions in which they desire to advance. The people whom it is hard to fit into any scheme of benevolent creation are the vague, insignificant, drifting people, whose only rooted tendency is to do whatever is suggested to them. One who like myself has been a schoolmaster knows that the danger of school life is not that the wicked are numerous, but the weak; ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this desperate band, and the fact of their being shielded by strong bolts massive walls, rendered them no insignificant enemies. Ladders were placed against the windows, but the true aim of the keen-eyed brigands made four successive shots tell with appalling effect, since each of them laid low one of their assailants. ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... way the case would never have come into my hands. It was at Quarles's instigation that I asked to be employed upon it, and since small and insignificant affairs are sometimes ramifications of big mysteries, no surprise ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... "you were the only person before whom it seemed to me, from the first, that I could think and speak freely. All those who come about women like me have an interest in calculating their slightest words, in thinking of the consequences of their most insignificant actions. Naturally we have no friends. We have selfish lovers who spend their fortunes, riot on us, as they say, but on their own vanity. For these people we have to be merry when they are merry, well when they want to sup, sceptics like themselves. We are not allowed to have hearts, under penalty ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... permitted to narrate a personal incident which occurred before I left Montgomery. One evening about sunset, while I was waiting in the office of the Secretary of War, for the comparatively insignificant sum of money to be provided for my expenses to England, Mr. Davis greeted me as Major. I replied: "I might ask, Mr. President, in what regiment," having in mind the well known anecdote of the subaltern who, on handing the Emperor Napoleon his chapeau ...
— The Supplies for the Confederate Army - How they were obtained in Europe and how paid for. • Caleb Huse
... my own voice mention that insignificant sum; for, when one considered Hynds House, the little we had was beggarly; so I wrote it down, and pushed the paper across to her. Instead of looking scared, Alicia ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... been the cause of so much delay in mobilization, and which Ministers had to contend against. It must be added, however, that most of the meetings mentioned took place in Transvaal. At the Cape the discontent was almost insignificant, whilst as much of it as had existed promptly ranged itself on the side of the Government when the "Free" State and Transvaal hoisted the standard ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... of the City's history has rarely been touched by writers, and yet its geographical position combined with the innate courage and enterprise of its citizens served to give it no small political power and no insignificant place in the history of the Kingdom. This being the case, the Corporation resolved to fill the void, and in view of the year 1889 being the 700th Anniversary of the Mayoralty of London—according to popular tradition—instructed the Library Committee to prepare a work showing ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... Roman Empire kept up its name and forms. Besides smaller sovereignties, as Saxony and Bavaria, there were two hundred and fifty petty principalities, fifty imperial cities, and several hundred knights, each with an insignificant domain subject to him. The empire was one body only in theory. National feeling had died out. The Diet had little to do, and no efficiency. Austria, which held the imperial office, and included in its extensive dominions Milan and Southern Netherlands, had sunk into ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... a judge on that point, Mr. Titmouse?" inquired Mr. Gammon, with a smile; "pray let us, my dear sir, at once proceed to your rooms—time is very short and valuable. I should vastly like to look at these same insignificant ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Macdonald Kinnier observes on these floating batteries, "As the elevation of place is considerably above the level of the country in its immediate vicinity, and the Mygdonius is a very insignificant stream, it is difficult to imagine how this work could have been accomplished, even with the wonderful resources which the king must have had at his disposal" ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... moment than that suggested by Ambrose Campany—Barthorpe. Ambrose Campany, bookworm though he was, was a shrewd, sharp fellow, said Bryce—a man of ideas. There was certainly much in his suggestion that a man wasn't likely to buy an old book about a little insignificant town like Barthorpe unless he had some interest in it—Barthorpe, if Campany's theory were true, was probably the place ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... outward telegraphic instrument? Should not we adapt our thoughts to that tremendous fact? Instead of thinking "I have a soul," should we not rather think "I am a soul"? Instead of thinking, that beautiful girl has an ugly soul, that insignificant looking man has a noble soul, should we not rather think, that ugly soul has a beautiful girl body, that splendid soul is in a mean looking body? Would not some such manner of thinking help to bring home the reality, that "I" am the invisible immortal ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... revolutionary Government invaded what is now Belgium, and as a first act of hostility to Holland declared the navigation of the Scheldt to be open. Our interest in that matter then, as now, was relatively small and insignificant, but what ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... several varieties abound, and also other animals, the flesh of which furnishes nutritious food. But all supplies of food thus obtained are insignificant in comparison with the fish, which the Indians are able to obtain except in the ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... it was quite natural that he should not know well what to say to me. I am only a young lady. I acquit him of all peculiar rudeness to me, for I am sure Mr. Churchill really could not talk for only one insignificant hearer, could not bring out his good things, unless he felt secure of possessing the attention of the whole dinner-table, so I ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... disingenuous; obscure, ignoble, plebeian, inglorious, undistinguished, vulgar; penurious, illiberal, sordid, miserly, stingy, mercenary parsimonious, ungenerous; midway, average, moderate, middle, medium, mediocre; intermediate, mediate, intervening; insignificant, paltry, inconsequential, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... quickness or delicacy of a manner. Would she begin to regret presently, I wondered, the lack in the man she loved of those smaller virtues which in the first rosy glow of romance had seemed to her insignificant and ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... the question was, In what direction should we fly? The desert was terminable on the east by the Nile; on the north, by the barbarous empire of Morocco, or by Algiers, Tripoli, or Tunis; while to the south were hordes of savages of whom we knew nothing, with only one insignificant French settlement where we might expect a kind reception: and we should undoubtedly have many hundred miles of an almost barren region to traverse, either to the east or to the north or south, with but a bare possibility of escaping on ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... scarcely know of at all, in their domestic state, and among these are two small plants called chick-weed and groundsel, which grow abundantly along the hedges and in the fields on the outskirts of the smoky city. Both chick-weed and groundsel are insignificant little things, but the epicurean lark, canary, or goldfinch finds in it a most agreeable and beneficial article of diet, quite as much superior to other green stuff as—in the minds of some boys and girls—ice-cream and sponge-cake are superior to roast-beef ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... consider for a moment the geographical situation of this great southland, which is separated from us only by a comparatively insignificant stream of water. ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... Madge Hampton, an amateur of some small private means, and he thought no more about her. Rehearsal in an insignificant part displayed her as capable ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... had already been working at it for three days, and my head was in a perfect whirl. That morning one of our call boys had turned up missing and that fact also irritated me. It would seem that a call boy was a pretty insignificant chap in a big railroad, but such is not the case. In a perfect system every employee is like a cog in a big wheel, and as soon as one cog is broken there is a jar in the otherwise smooth symmetrical movement of the machine. The call boy is quite an important personage, because, upon ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... Scotch gentlemen, who have neither talents nor ambition, to be educated in England, where they may be perhaps distinguished only by a nick-name, lavish their fortune in giving expensive entertainments to those who laugh at them, and saunter about as mere idle insignificant hangers on even upon the foolish great; when if they had been judiciously brought up at home, they might have been comfortable and creditable ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... raven, in a hoarse voice, "am I to wait all day while you introduce those miserable little insignificant grub-eaters?" ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... the first man of leadership in the West who was of Cavalier ancestry; for though so much is said of the Cavalier type in the southern States it was everywhere insignificant in numbers, and comparatively few of the southern men of mark have belonged to it. Blount was really of Cavalier blood. He was descended from a Royalist baronet, who was roughly handled by the Cromwellians, and whose three sons came to America. One of them settled in North Carolina, near Albemarle ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... vast number of animal forms, great and small, and are still, that had no relation to man, that were not in his line of descent, and played no part in his evolution. During that carnival of monstrous and gigantic forms in Mesozoic time the ancestor of man was probably some small and insignificant creature whose life was constantly imperiled by the huge beasts about it. That it survived at all in the clash of forces, bestial and elemental, during those early ages, is one of the wonders of time. The drama or tragedy of evolution has had many actors, some of them fearful and terrible ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... under their load, and almost to perspire, when in reality they are void of sensation, and do not contribute to the stony stability, so these men would wish to look like Atlases, when they are no better than statues of stone, insignificant scrubs, funguses, dolts, little different from stone. Meanwhile really learned men, endowed with all that can adorn a holy life, men who have endured the heat of mid-day, by some unjust lot obey these, dizzards, content probably with ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... symmetry, of the whole scheme are gone, and the infinite quantity,—that is, immortality under the curse of estrangement from God,—is rendered a mere supplement tacked on to the finite, and comparatively insignificant, if not doubtful, evil, namely, the dissolution of the organic body. See what a poor hand Asgill makes ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... at her; Summerling and Jarrold were mystified. She looked so little like laughter! And, as both had cause to regard the situation, there was so little call for laughter. But they could have no clue to Gloria's thoughts. Her wedding! With that insignificant little grey man in his cheap wrinkled clothes to officiate; with that unshaven, leering, dirty man to witness! Holy matrimony! Gloria Gaynor's wedding! She was near madness with the hideous, ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... who does an injustice in a small matter, departs but slightly from the mean. Now this seems to be insignificant and should be accounted among the least of evils, as the Philosopher declares (Ethic. ii, 9). Therefore not everyone that ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... a soft word. Ah! how few of us, when the will is strong with its purpose, can believe in the power of agencies so apparently insignificant! And yet all great influences effect their ends silently, unobtrusively, and with a force that seems at first glance to be altogether inadequate. Is there not a lesson for ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... tactics, impaled themselves upon the bayonets of the French squares. Fifteen thousand men of all arms fell upon the field. The battle had cost the French scarcely a hundred killed and wounded; for, if defeat is terrible for broken squares, the loss is insignificant for victorious squares. The Mamluks had lost their best horsemen by fire or water: their forces were dispersed, and the possession of Cairo secured. The capital was in extraordinary agitation. It contained more than three ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... has been so long neglected, it will require some time to develop in this field the necessary standard to secure a distinction between the significant and insignificant and between truth and fiction. On account of the emphasis which has been recently given to this study, many novices lacking especially the historical point of view have entered this field because it is so productive that it is ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... this person, desiring to make it known That he was in all ways moving up to the date, Introduced into his insignificant shop A machine-that-counts, Called a National Cash Register, Which announces to refined and intelligent customers The amounts ...
— Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse • Thomas Burke
... and put into the hands of Pompey with unlimited command. The Tribunes of the people, however, sided with Caesar, and refused confirmation of the Senatorial decrees. Caesar then no longer hesitated, but with his army crossed the Rubicon, which was an insignificant stream, but was the Rome-ward boundary of his province. This was the declaration of civil war. It was now "'either anvil or hammer." The admirers of Caesar claim that his act was a necessity, at least a public benefit, on the ground of the misrule of the aristocracy. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... the noblest actions of his career. For his defence of Harriet Westbrook is something more than a work, it is an act—an act of high courage and nobility. With words icily cold in their logic, Mark Twain tabulated the six pitifully insignificant charges against Harriet, such as her love for dress and her waning interest in Latin lessons, and set over against them the six times repeated name of Cornelia Turner, that fascinating young married woman who read Petrarch with Shelley and sat up all hours of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... pine-tree, in ghastly parallel with all the motions of the traveller's staff? Such are the spirits of the air haunting this howling wilderness, where the pale sheeted phantom of the burial vault or the deserted cloister would lose all his terrors and feel himself utterly insignificant. Sometimes the phantom's head is large and his body small, then he receives the name of Fahin. James Hogg has asserted, not only poetically, but in sober prose, that, he was acquainted with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... business-man, and soon after his marriage to a Northern lady he had purchased a plantation in Alabama, where both of his children had been born, and where he was a man of high standing, with wealth enough to maintain his position in luxury, though his fortune was insignificant compared ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... effort, is bound to keep on a level with its neighbors, and in which no one will be stronger in the end when the whole world shall be subjugated. Their ten thousand regulars suffice, and they have their militia for extraordinary occasions. Lastly, their Federal debt is insignificant; and, if the private debts of a few States reach a high figure, they are nowhere of a nature to impose on the tax-payers a large surplus ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... understood distinctly that this case is given only as an illustration of a principle which is applicable to all cases. The act of opening and shutting a door in a noisy manner is altogether too insignificant a fault to deserve this long discussion of the method of curing it, were it not that methods founded on the same principles, and conducted in the same spirit, are applicable universally in all that pertains to the domestic management of children. And it is a method, too, directly the opposite ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... supplicating terror, as perfectly overcame me. I immediately restored it to life and liberty. The agonies of a prisoner at the stake, while the fire and instruments of torture are preparing, could not be more severe than the sufferings of that poor mouse; and, insignificant as the object was, I felt at that moment the sweet sensation that mercy leaves in the mind when she ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... another page. Here you see the gipsy men and women, sitting and standing around a fire, over which is a pot, evidently containing the material for their meal. If you notice the picture carefully, you will observe, also, a little, insignificant looking dog, who is apparently asleep, and, for aught I know, dreaming about the exploits of the day. You will no doubt smile, and wonder what exploits such a cur is able to perform; but I assure you that if he ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... Losing his temper he seized it with his paw and was about to kill it. The Mouse, terrified, piteously entreated him to spare its life. "Please let me go," it cried, "and one day I will repay you for your kindness." The idea of so insignificant a creature ever being able to do anything for him amused the Lion so much that he laughed aloud, and good-humouredly let it go. But the Mouse's chance came, after all. One day the Lion got entangled in a net which ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... he'll have you off in forty winks, and the orchestra of the spheres whispers through its million strings and sings your soul to rest. For I tell you here and now, Matilda Anne, I, poor, puny, good-for-nothing, insignificant I, have heard that music of the spheres as clearly as you ever heard Funiculi-Funicula on that little Naples steamer that used to take you to Capri. And when I'd crawl out from under that old wagon-box, like a gopher out of his ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... dainty green leaves and waxen white berries, nestling for protection under the strong arm of a great oak, that the goddess passed it by. Assuredly no scathe could come to Baldur the Beautiful from a creature so insignificant, and Freya returned to Asgard well pleased with ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... have done a great deal of mischief by inciting the people in the recent outbreak, they are very insignificant when compared with the bitter feeling aroused by the greedy grabbing of Chinese territory by the different Powers. All praise to the United States, for she is the only nation that does not covet Chinese territory. The other Powers are all eager and are doing their utmost ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 4, October, 1900 • Various
... stripling when he ascended the throne; he already had a grown-up son at his side. Nor was he of insignificant descent, the family to which he belonged being a widespread one, and his heritage considerable. His establishment at Gibeah was throughout his entire reign the nucleus of his kingdom. The men on whom he could always ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... rose from a low chair near the fire. She was a little, insignificant woman, rather unfashionably attired, with neat grey hair and an entirely undistinguished face, but as she stood there, motionless, waiting for Magda to come up to her, she was quite unconsciously impressive—transformed by that tragic dignity ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... hospital, I sought profitable employment, and obtained it. In the course of a few months I had earned a sum—dearer, more valuable to me than all I have since acquired. It was insignificant in itself, but it purchased for my Sebastian his long wished-for treasure—the horse and water-cart. I took it to him; and when I approached him, I had not a word to say, for my grateful heart was in my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... south continued until 980. Before it was ended, the Sung tried to extend their influence in the south beyond the Chinese border, and secured a sort of protectorate over parts of Annam (973). This sphere of influence was politically insignificant and not directly of any economic importance; but it fulfilled for the Sung the same functions which colonial territories fulfilled for Europeans, serving as a field of operation for the commercial class, ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... he admitted he somewhat lessened the pleasure of the novice; since an American, fresh from the fresher fields of the western continent, might very well find delight in memorials of the past, more especially in England, which pall on his taste, and appear insignificant, after he has become familiar with the Temple of Neptune, the Parthenon, or what is left of it, and the Coliseum. I make no doubt that I lost a great deal of passing happiness in this way, by beginning at the beginning, or by beginning in Italy, and ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... but we do not think we {223} are wrong in saying that they leave a great many minds singularly ill at ease, in a condition of vague but unmistakeable discomfort, oppressed by the vastness of the universe as revealed by science, feeling lost and utterly insignificant in this illimitable expanse of worlds on circling worlds, and aeons upon exhaustless aeons. It was possible, when the universe was regarded as a comparatively small affair, with our earth as its veritable centre, to think oneself of sufficient value ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the American people upon their path of progress, we must follow the pilgrims back to and into their English homes. What, then, does the history of the American people teach us? A simple lesson, still more impressively told by the history of Japan: that time may become an insignificant element in the making of a powerful nation. What it took England ten centuries to accomplish, the United States has done in two hundred, and Japan in thirty years. What mighty leavening agency has been employed, what secret learned from nature's workshop, ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... Vigo,' sudden swoop-down upon Town and shipping in those Gallician, north-west regions. Which was perfectly successful,—Lord Cobham leading;—and made much noise among mankind. Filled all Gazettes at that time;—but now, again, is all fallen silent for us,—except this one thrice-insignificant point, That there was in it, 'in Handyside's Regiment,' a Lieutenant of Foot, by name STERNE, who had left, with his poor Wife at Plymouth, a very remarkable Boy called Lorry, or LAWRENCE; known since that ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... systems as large as itself, rolls ever silently through space in the direction of the constellation of Hercules. The great spheres of which it is composed spin and spin through the eternal void ceaselessly and noiselessly. Of these one of the smallest and most insignificant is that conglomeration of solid and of liquid particles which we have named the earth. It whirls onwards now as it has done before my birth, and will do after my death—a revolving mystery, coming none know whence, and going none know whither. Upon the outer crust of this moving mass crawl ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Lord Mayor, like any other Englishman, probably fancied that War was on the western gale, and was glad to lay hold of even so insignificant an American as myself, who might be made to harp on the rusty old strings of national sympathies, identity of blood and interest, and community of language and literature, and whisper peace where there was no peace, in however weak an utterance. And possibly his Lordship thought, in his wisdom, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... passed "that every settler who deserted a town for fear of the Indians should forfeit all his rights therein." But now, at any rate, as I have frequently observed, a man may desert the fertile frontier territories of truth and justice, which are the State's best lands, for fear of far more insignificant foes, without forfeiting any of his civil rights therein. Nay, townships are granted to deserters, and the General Court, as I am sometimes inclined to regard it, is ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... let us consider the example of an opposite character, afforded by another and a comparatively insignificant Oriental people, the Jews. They, too, had an absolute monarchy and a hierarchy, and their organized institutions were as obviously of sacerdotal origin as those of the Hindoos. These did for them what was done for other Oriental races by their institutions, ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... the author's part of such an unsuspected (by the reader) and seemingly insignificant agent for the working of Nemesis, I think shows great skill. I say seemingly insignificant because a little dog seems such a small and unlikely thing to act the leading part in a criminal's judgment and suggested ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... of the church and look down from the balcony which surrounds the lantern. The height is so great that even the great dimensions of the biggest palace in the world are dwarfed in the deep perspective, and the wide gardens look small and almost insignificant. But the relative proportions of the buildings and grounds appear correctly, and measure each other, as it were. Moreover, it is now so hard to obtain access to the gardens at all that the usual way of seeing them is from ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... yet that sum which she so eagerly relinquished was, in truth, more than a twentieth part of what she had to live on. And when the whole income does not nearly amount to a hundred pounds, to give up a twentieth of it will necessitate many careful economies and many pieces of self-denial—small and insignificant in the world's account, but bearing a different value in another account book that I have ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... forbade it. My next lodging was at a German hotel, where I slept in a little cupboard which hung over a black, sluggish canal, and was without stove or fire-place. The cost of this chamber was five marks a month, or scarcely one shilling and sixpence a week. These expenses will appear paltry and insignificant, till compared with the amount of wages received, when it will be apparent that boarding and lodging in an English hotel at eleven shillings and odd pence a week, was a monstrous extravagance; and that even an apartment in ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... for it does not often fall to the lot of mortal man to find in one little, insignificant figure, dwarfish alike in soul and body, such a compound of selfishness, duplicity, meanness, and vulgarity, as was centered in the object of ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... illustrate history. This illustration then leads to the third task, which is the discovery and exposition of the motives which impel individual historical personages to the performance of great historical acts, and from outwardly, apparently insignificant events in their lives to deduce their inmost thoughts and natures, and ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... he accomplish it? How small and insignificant he felt, and how utterly worthless! How he seemed to dwindle into nothing beside the great work that he was called to do! And yet how anxious he was to do it well! How he longed to be like his father David, a true shepherd to his people! How his heart yearned over his subjects; ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... this shape upon familiar subjects, and which, perhaps, were never intended to be published, and it is this which makes them so valuable, for I must confess, for my own part, that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally intended for the press, are generally the most insignificant, and very little worth any person's reading' (2 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the prophesying for the Cyclopes till he grew old; he told me that all this would happen to me some day, and said I should lose my sight by the hand of Ulysses. I have been all along expecting some one of imposing presence and superhuman strength, whereas he turns out to be a little insignificant weakling, who has managed to blind my eye by taking advantage of me in my drink; come here, then, Ulysses, that I may make you presents to show my hospitality, and urge Neptune to help you forward on your journey—for Neptune ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... can only appear insignificant to him beside the great catastrophe which he wishes to avert; and his conscience alone dictates his duty to him. Is ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... found a finer and more complete Norman church. Arches, windows, mouldings, more elaborate and more grand may no doubt be found elsewhere; but where else can we find, as here, choir, transepts, and nave, with all the original Norman, from ground to roof, with two insignificant exceptions, remaining unaltered? It is natural to compare the three great East Anglian Cathedrals, as all have superb work of the Norman period. But at Norwich the lower arches in the choir have been rebuilt ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... the several names of the Horseshoe, Crescent, and British Fall, from its semi-circular form and contiguity to the Canadian shore. The smaller is named the American Fall. A portion of this fall is divided by a rock from Goat Island, and though here insignificant in appearance, would ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... long, long while at my embarrassed countenance, and deliberately putting out my tongue, I shook my head with a bitter smile. The scales fell from my eyes: I saw clearly, more clearly than I saw my face in the glass, what a shallow, insignificant, worthless, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... sometimes invests and obliterates the great pillars which support the masses of foliage. Conspicuous at all seasons of the year,—in spring when its brown buds are swollen to bursting, or when the myriads of flowers, insignificant singly, give in the sunlight an atmosphere of purplish-brown; when clothed with light, airy masses of deep green in summer or pale yellow in autumn, or in winter when the great trunk and mighty sweep of the arching branches distinguish it from all other trees. The roots lie near the surface ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... hostile critics overlook various vital considerations. The destruction of Germany's sea-striking power at this juncture was worth literally anything that Britain could give; not perhaps in England's immediate interest, but in the interests of the Empire, without which England would occupy but a very insignificant place among the ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... too insignificant to merit capture. He is beneath the wrath of the emperor. He is yet in your power. I come, ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... of the people deliberates and it thunders, it is because Jupiter does not wish that anything shall be decided on that day and the assembly must dissolve. The most insignificant fact may be interpreted as a sign—a flash of lightning, a word overheard, a rat crossing the road, a diviner met on the way. And so when Marcellus had determined on an enterprise, he had himself carried in a closed litter that he might be sure of ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... horse had improved in numbers and discipline; several cavalry officers of rank and skill had joined it, and assisted in its organization; and although deprived of its gallant leader, Don Carlos O'Donnel, who had fallen victim to his own imprudent daring in an insignificant skirmish beneath the walls of Pampeluna, Eraso, and the other Carlist generals, had now sufficient confidence in its efficiency to risk a battle in a comparatively level country. Numerically, the Carlists were superior to their opponents, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... merits, but as to the very appearance of the light, Some few thousand people had gone out to Menlo Park, and had there seen the lamps in operation at the laboratory or on the hillsides, but they were an insignificant proportion of the inhabitants of the United States. Of course, a great many accounts were written and read, but while genuine interest was aroused it was necessarily apathetic. A newspaper description or a magazine article may be ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... high lords in the land of Zenith—Dr. Dilling the surgeon, Charles McKelvey the contractor, and, most dismaying of all, the white-bearded Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of the Advocate-Times. In their whelming presence Babbitt felt small and insignificant. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... heaven. The silence of the deep woods is pregnant with mighty growths. Says Maurice de Guerin, true poet and lover of Nature: "An innumerable generation actually hangs on the branches of all the trees, on the fibres of the most insignificant grasses, like babes on the mother's breast. All these germs, incalculable in their number and variety, are there suspended in their cradle between heaven and earth, and given over to the winds, whose charge it is to rock these beings. Unseen amid the living forests ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... displeasure of his ungrateful master, from whom he had never been separated during seventeen difficult years, had proved the vanity of the little things of life. He looked at men from a distance that obscures what is insignificant, and shows ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... commerce with beautiful things and beautiful thoughts does not exist only, or even chiefly, at the moment of seeing, or hearing, or reading; nay, if the beautiful touched us only at such separate and special moments, the beautiful would play but an insignificant part ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Caroline's devotion to her insignificant little lord and master, and the eagerness with which she hastened on foot to meet him, running across the Gardens, on his return from the Continent, have been made the subject of satire. She was generally accompanied by her five daughters, ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... Rest, or St. Est, whichever name rightly belonged to it, was in itself so insignificant as a 'benefice,' that its present rector, vicar, priest and patron had bought it for himself, through the good offices of a friend, in the days when such purchases were possible, and for some ten years had been supreme Dictator ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... annihilation of the wicked (based probably on a misunderstanding of certain Biblical passages[104]), it may be said that the role of the theory of extinction of the soul in the general development of religion has been an insignificant one. Beginning among the lowest tribes as an expression of belief in the universality of mortality, it assumed a punitive character in the higher savage creed, and was gradually abandoned by the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... of the house being open, Clare could hear across the yard each trivial sound of the retiring household. The dairy-house, so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the landscape; what was it now? The aged and lichened brick gables breathed forth "Stay!" The windows smiled, the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... to Wellington, it should be said that his complaints were due to false reports that exaggerated a couple of insignificant ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... heavens with her silvery light that only a few stars of the first magnitude were visible. There was very little wind, and a heavy dew was falling; but that, after the hardship of exposure in an open boat, was a trifle so insignificant that it ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... up her lead, whether she wished it or not. "A good third of our lives here is passed in sleep. I'm not always sure that we are right in treating the mental—for certainly they are mental—experiences of that time as altogether trivial, or insignificant." ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... which probably represented public opinion much better than the former. On the whole, the conclusion is inevitably forced on the student of this first national movement against the slave-trade, that its influence on the trade was but temporary and insignificant, and that at the end of the experiment the outlook for the final suppression of the trade was little brighter than before. The whole movement served as a sort of social test of the power and importance of the slave-trade, which proved to be far more powerful than the platitudes ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... well would have exerted all their influence against it. Nor in doing so would they have acted unwisely or unjustly. Had not Rome been the residence of their Chief Pastor, that great historic city would have ceased long ago to exist, or would be known only as an insignificant village, scarcely perceptible on the map of Europe. How often has not the celebrated city been rescued from destruction by the direct agency of the Popes? How long have they not governed it with wisdom and blessed it with prosperity? ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... a little later voices were heard, and two horsemen came out of the shadows of the wood, and followed the horses upward along the bank of the river to where a little stream of fresh water tumbled down to the Kootenai. There a little camp was located, an insignificant gathering of tents, but one that meant a promising event to the country, for it was to be the connecting point of the boats that would one day float from the States on the river, and the railroad that would erelong lead ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... century as a transition period: during that time the education of the child under eight has changed much more than the education of older children, at least in the elementary school; and there have been certain marked phases that, though apparently insignificant in themselves, have marked stages ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... it guides the investigator to the discovery of new facts which, when ascertained, it seems also able to co-ordinate.[6] Nay, "Natural Selection" seems capable of application not only to the building up of the smallest and most insignificant organisms, but even of extension beyond the biological domain altogether, so as possibly to have relation to the stable equilibrium of the solar system{10} itself, and even of the whole sidereal universe. Thus, whether ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... all under the feudal system of government, the chieftainship is hereditary, and although the chief is usually the greatest ass, and the most insignificant of the tribe in appearance, the people pay a deference to him which is truly astonishing.... I feel the benefit often of your instructions, and of those I got through your kindness. Here I have an immense practice. I have patients now under treatment who have walked ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... useless. He was now beginning to understand that sheep and cows were also hollow as far as good meat was concerned; the flesh they had was only a mouthful in comparison with what they ought to have considering their apparent bulk: insignificant, mere skin and bone covering a cavern. What right had they, or anything else, to assert themselves as so big, and prove so empty? And now this discovery of woman's falsehood was quite too much for him. The world ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. The most insignificant of Strickland's works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; it is this which has excited so curious an interest ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... the private sanctum of James Glieve, he saw a stout red-faced man, with a suspicion of side whiskers and a slight appearance of ferocity, seated at a desk. On his right, and insignificant by comparison, was a small grey-haired ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... of the plainest of men, shy, awkward, insignificant looking, with a long-featured, pleasant face, and red hair. Warren had told his wife at various times that George was "a prince," and physically, at least, Rachael found him disappointing, especially beside her own handsome husband. She knew ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... couple than the cartwright Molnar and his wife can seldom be seen. When, on Sunday, the pair went to church through the main street of Kisfalu, an insignificant village in the Pesth county, every one looked after them, though every child, nay, every cur in the hamlet, knew them and, during the five years since their marriage, might have become accustomed to the spectacle. But it seemed ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... they have been materially assisted. It is a great and an unanswerable argument in favour of a Providence that we constantly perceive that the most beneficial results are brought about by the least worthy and most insignificant agents. The purest religions would never have been established had they not been supported by sinners who felt the burthen of the old faith; and the most free and enlightened governments are often generated by the discontented, the disappointed, and the dissolute. ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... right, girl," said her father. "We can thank Captain Meagher. The frustration and the exposure of that plot has increased our reputation an hundredfold. Heretofore, the Catholic population had been regarded as an insignificant element, but when the ambitions of the enemy to secure their cooperation were discovered, the value of the Catholics to the country ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... one's-self up to reverie. How terrible, we thought, must have been the scene on the mountain slopes when the enormous craters of the Teng'ger range were belching forth their death-dealing streams of lava, their showers of ashes and stones and choking sulphurous fumes! How insignificant was man before the powerful agencies of Nature! How bright were the occasional stars one saw wherever there was a break in the trees that lined our path! How wonderful that each of those stars, those planets, might be peopled by beings ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... be doing some good. I know I am of use in various ways. No doubt there is a danger of a woman's head being turned, when she reflects that a powerful Minister governing a kingdom has not considered her too insignificant to advise him; and I am sensible of it. I am, I assure you, dearest, on my guard against it. That would not attach me to him, as his homely friendliness does. He is the most amiable, cheerful, benignant of men; he has no feeling of an enemy, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a vast family of nations all of which had sprung from one stock, and of which the Babylonians and Assyrians were the most powerful representatives. The Israelites were, politically speaking, a comparatively insignificant folk surrounded by mighty empires which had attained a high degree of civilisation. The excavations which are now proceeding in oriental lands, especially the territories occupied by ancient Assyria, ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... hastily explored in 1820. These mounds have long formed the subject of animated controversies; but it was not before the year 1842 that any serious attempt was made to penetrate beneath the grass that covered them. In this year M. Botta, the French consul at Mosul, made some insignificant opening, but without discovering any remarkable remains; and rumours having reached him from Khorsabad, a few miles off, of some remains there, he caused some vigorous excavations to be made there, and, aided ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... "oil of St. John," which, like the mistletoe, heals all wounds, and is, perhaps, the mistletoe itself in its glorified aspect. Thus it is easy to understand how a title like the Golden Bough, so little descriptive of its usual appearance on the tree, should have been applied to the seemingly insignificant parasite. Further, we can perhaps see why in antiquity mistletoe was believed to possess the remarkable property of extinguishing fire, and why in Sweden it is still kept in houses as a safeguard against conflagration. Its fiery nature marks it out, on homoeopathic ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... him, and curiosity urged him to do something other than to stand staring at the saloon front. He recalled his plan to sojourn in San Andreas a few days, and incidently to ride over to the Lawrence ranch—frankly, to have another visit with Dorothy. He shrugged his shoulders. That idea now seemed insignificant, compared with ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... says Mr. Barham, that for libel on the Queen among the rest; but the grand attempt on the part of the Whigs to crush the paper was not made till the 6th of May, 1821. A short and insignificant paragraph, containing some observations upon the Hon. Henry Grey Bennett, a brother of Lord Tankerville's, was selected for attack, as involving a breach of privilege; in consequence of which the printer, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the disastrous diseases of brain and spinal cord, is surely the gravest material danger which exists. How small compared with that the thousands of deaths from crime and accidents and wrecks! how insignificant the harvest of human life which any war may reap! And all this can ultimately be avoided, not only by abstinence, but by strict hygiene and rigorous social reorganization. At this moment we have only to ask how much ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... and misty generality which consoled Cigarette for an abandonment of her sworn revenge which she felt was a weakness utterly unworthy of her, and too much like that inconsequent weathercock, that useless, insignificant part of creation, those objects of her supreme derision and contempt, those frivolous trifles which she wondered the good God had ever troubled himself to make—namely, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... harm—except perhaps when I stole the game—I fear not for the future. I shall wait patiently until my Saviour chooses to take me to himself. I can well imagine that there is not much space in heaven; but I believe that there is a small place for one so insignificant as me, where I can wait the coming of Magde, Nanna, Father, Ragnar, and all the little ones, that is if they do not hold ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... their victim, until at length the slight wound becomes a sore of great magnitude, and never heals. Mortification at length ensues, and the death of the snake is then certain. You can see that if the insects are weak and insignificant, nature teaches them a method of avenging their wrongs, and they are not slow to ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... she formed was nothing else than the assassination of Peter. She saw no other way by which she could save herself from the dangers which surrounded her, and make sure of retaining her power. Her brother, the Czar John, was growing weaker and more insignificant every day; while Peter and his party, who looked upon her, she knew, with very unfriendly feelings, were growing stronger and stronger. If Peter continued to live, her speedy downfall, she was convinced, was sure. She accordingly determined that ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... pressing the call for ministers, that the large and flourishing church of Orleans, in a letter written the last day of February, proclaimed their expectation of establishing a theological school to supply their own wants and those of the adjacent regions; and it is no insignificant mark of the power with which the reformatory movement still coursed on, that the canons of the great church of Sainte Croix had given notice of their intention to attend the lectures that were to be delivered![27] In such an encouraging strain ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... have done with myself, or rather with my own insignificant present history, and come to that of the Hare. It impressed me a good deal at the time, which is not long ago, so much indeed that I communicated the facts to Jorsen. He ordered me to publish them, and what Jorsen ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... it has remained the most barbaric and least progressive of all states. Its roads and means of communication remained up till the last quarter of the nineteenth century much as they had been in the days of Osman; except along an insignificant strip of sea-coast railways were non-existent; it was bankrupt in finance and in morals, and did not contain a single seed that might ripen into progress or civilisation. Mesopotamia was once the most fertile of all lands, ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... sinewy, and muscles grown flabby from lack of active exercise, for me to lift a virgin sheet of stone from the ground to the surface of my writing-desk without a derrick, but these are, after all, minor difficulties, and I shall let no such insignificant obstacles stand between me and the great purpose I have in mind. I shall persist in the face of all in the writing of this Autobiography if for no worthier object than to provide occupation for my leisure hours which, in these patriarchal days to which I have ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... beautiful buildings in an ancient city were always the temples, colonnades, and other public structures. The houses of private individuals, for the most part, had few pretensions to beauty. They were insignificant in appearance and were often built with only one story. From a distance, however, their whitewashed walls and red-tiled roofs, shining brightly under the warm sun, must have made an ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... dingy lodging-house sitting-room to see the doctor, wondering much that any one could be interested in such an insignificant matter as her health, now that her treasure was safe. She went reluctantly, murmuring that she was well enough—quite well now; and had hardly tottered into the room, when she sank down upon the ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... mated with. Was it the tall youth with the commonplace good looks opposite to her? Linforth detected now a certain flashiness in his well grooming which he had not noticed before. Or was it the fat insignificant young man three seats ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... parents or preachers, eminent lawyers or business men, great politicians or writers of books. Arrogant and sweeping, sparing nothing sacred—young. Ignorant, confused and groping, almost wistful—new. They are becoming no insignificant part in ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... thoughts was interrupted by a cautious knocking at her door. She rose suddenly, startled by any sound in the stillness of her room. She rose, and threw herself into a low chair near the fire. She flung her beautiful head back upon the soft cushions, and took a book from the table near her. Insignificant as this action was, it spoke very plainly. It spoke very plainly of ever-recurring fears—of fatal necessities for concealment—of a mind that in its silent agonies was ever alive to the importance of outward effect. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... suddenly my letter closed, just at the very smilax of that awful adventure. But really, Clytie, so many things have happened since, and every minute is so full of pleasures or catastrophes, that, as I look back, that one seems almost insignificant. ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... said Heriot, "for your father's son I would do much; and yet truly, if I know myself, I would do as much and risk as much, for the sake of justice, in the case of a much more insignificant person, as I have ventured for yours. But as we shall not meet for some time, I must commit to your own wisdom the farther ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... not been in any way wiser or better for their existence. They were born to eat as long as they could eat, and when they could eat no longer they died. Not that in this respect they were a whit less insignificant than the generality of their fellow-creatures. Most of us now present," continued the youthful orator, "are only born in order to die; and the chief consolation of our wounded pride in admitting this ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... so blindly believed in her; the possibility of deception, of treason, had never presented itself to his mind. He could not understand. This young Frenchman, almost the most insignificant of all his wife's acquaintances! The fear was borne in upon him that perhaps she had never been worthy of the trust he had reposed in her. To complete it all, he had been hoping in a few months to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... us it is not so much great sorrows, disease, or death, but rather the little "daily dyings" which cloud over the sunshine of life. Many of our troubles are insignificant in themselves, and might easily ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... they know them all. There are times when their eyes take in a rival from head to foot; they can guess the slightest movement of a foot beneath a gown, the almost imperceptible motion of the waist; they know the significance of things which, to a man, seem insignificant. Two women observing each other play one of the choicest scenes of comedy that ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Military Service Bill, establishing compulsion for all men married or single, Colonel CRAIG made a vain appeal to Mr. REDMOND to get the measure extended to Ireland. Nothing would do more to show the world that the recent rebellion was only the work of an insignificant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... the aid of my faithful ally, the servant. After delays which half maddened me with impatience, insignificant though they were, she contrived to fulfil my wishes. One afternoon, while Mr. Sherwin was away at business, and while his wife had gone out, I succeeded in gaining admission to the garden at the back of the house, where Margaret was then occupied ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... property was sold at auction, the whole amounting to about $12. Among the assets was a lot of old music valued at ten florins. It is uncertain whether this included the unpublished manuscript or not. In personal appearance Schubert was somewhat insignificant. He was about five feet one inch high, his figure stout and clumsy, with a round back and shoulders, perhaps due to incessant writing, fleshy arms, thick, short fingers. His cheeks were full, his eyebrows bushy and his nose insignificant. His hair was black, and remarkably thick ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... and still spinning, shook out her hair, and flung herself backwards, till it streamed and eddied with the whirlwind of her dance. In her fantastic dress (she wore her colours, the red and black) her very womanhood had vanished, she was a mere insignificant morsel of flesh and blood, inspired by the dizzy, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... a very helpless and insignificant object, whatever may have been the terror which he inspired while he was alive. As long as Henry continued to breathe, the attendants around him paid him great deference, and observed every possible form of obsequious respect, for they did not know but ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... little compositions lately. They are insignificant, but it is impossible to find a technical error in them. Such precision was remarkable for a child who had no idea of the science of harmony. About that time some one had the notion that I should hear an orchestra. So they took me to a symphony concert and my mother held me in her arms near the ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... heard: the last, as imagination pictured her lover's certain physical suffering. But of all agonies, none could approximate to that induced by Death. When that rumour reached her, she realized that hope had given her some measure of support, and how insignificant all other trouble is beside that awful blank, that mystery, whose single revelation is the houseless soul's unreturning flight from the only world we are sure of. When the contradicting rumour came, she clutched at hope and clung ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... coalition changed its base, and attacked M. Rouvier, the prime minister. He was outvoted in the Chamber on some insignificant question; and having no parliamentary majority, he was forced to resign. By no efforts could M. Grevy get anyone to take his place. Once he thought he had persuaded M. Clemenceau, a Radical leader, to form a ministry; but his party gave him ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... Ninon," said Bel, "soon became sadly bewildered, for there were so many people all talking at once, and they pushed against and jostled her as if she were very small and insignificant indeed, and she began to think that her mother was right, and that she was only a child; and she grew frightened and wished herself at home again. But she kept fast hold of the hand of her brother whom the saints loved, and felt that as long as he was with her she was safe. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... reflected bitterly that Annalise might quite well have been left at home. Quite well? A thousand times better. What had she done but whine during her passive period? And now that she was active, a volcano in full activity hurling forth hot streams of treachery on two most harmless heads, she, the insignificant, the base-born, the empty-brained, was actually going to be able to ruin the plans of the ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... is smoothed up, her hat on straight and her belt all right behind, the other cares and responsibilities of this life sink at once and forever into insignificant nothingness. ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... emphatically, for her, a Beatific Vision. It is vain for us to endeavor to fathom the exquisite happiness which this vision of God's love produces in the soul. For, if the mere smile of a king has the power of infusing joy into the heart of a poor and insignificant person, what shall we say of the smile of God, who is the King of kings? What shall we say of this affectionate, paternal embrace? What shall we say of the joy, the happiness that flow into the soul, ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... the very technical nature of the conversation; and Sir Philip exchanged a congratulatory smile with Margaret over her friend's success. For the delight of finding a congenial spirit had brought the crimson into Janetta's olive cheeks and the brilliance to her dark eyes: she had looked insignificant when she went in to dinner; she was splendidly handsome at dessert. Mr. Adair noticed her flashing, transitory beauty, and said to himself that Margaret's taste was unimpeachable; it was just like his own; he ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... married, but to a girl who, though respectable, was poor; and in consequence he was thoroughly frightened at the thought of losing his means of support. But though menaced with arrest, he was sufficiently insignificant to ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... entirely for myself and neglected my correspondence to such a point that folks ceased to write to me. As a matter of fact I was a very sick man, under the iron rule of doctors and nurses and such like oppressors; but, except to explain why I had lost touch with everybody, that is a matter of insignificant importance. The one or two letters I did receive from Lady Auriol did not stimulate my interest in The Romance. I gathered that she was in continuous relations with General Lackaday, who, it appeared, was in the best of health. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... debate was in progress the advocates of the beaver spoke of the territory as the beaver territory, but it never reached a point of universal adoption. It was well known that the gopher abounded, and his name was introduced as a competitor with the beaver; but being a rather insignificant animal, and his nature being destructive, and in no way useful, he was objected to by many, as too useless and undignified to become an emblem of the coming great state,—for we all had, at that early day, full confidence that Minnesota was destined to be a great and prominent state. Nothing ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... play. There are only two parts in it—the bride and bridegroom. The best man is only a walking gentleman. With the exception of a crying father and a snivelling mother, the rest are SUPERS who have to dress well and have to PAY for their insignificant parts in the shape of costly presents." I did not care for the theatrical slang, but ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... brittleness of the feathers, length and size of the claws, and the scales of the legs and feet assuming a ragged and corny appearance. Your cock and hens should be as near two years old as possible. Hens will lay at a year old, but the eggs are always insignificant in size, and the layers giddy and unsteady sitters. The hen-bird is in her prime for breeding at three years old, and will continue so, under favourable circumstances, for two years longer; after which she will decline. Crowing ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... inspect a snapshot that Ferdy produces from his pocketbook; and, while it looks about as insignificant as most of 'em, I pumps up some gushy remarks which seem to make a ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... induction coil. When the discharge is sent through the tube, there proceeds from the anode—that is, the wire which is connected with the positive pole of the battery—certain bands of light, varying in colour with the colour of the glass. But these are insignificant in comparison with the brilliant glow which shoots from the cathode, or negative wire. This glow excites brilliant phosphorescence in glass and many substances, and these "cathode rays," as they are called, were observed and studied by Hertz; and more ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... enchantment. Little by little that too faded, until at last, far away, through a rift in the ranks of the giants, but one remained gilded by the glory of a dream that continued with it after the others. Heretofore it had seemed to us an insignificant peak, apparently overtopped by many, but by this token we knew it to be the ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... peaceful little town, cut in two in its entire length by a broad, paved street. Its modest inhabitants cannot possibly look any more stupid or insignificant than ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... the hypocotyl which was left free was rather old, and therefore not highly heliotropic. A filament had been fixed to the midrib of one of the cotyledons, and the movement of the whole seedling was traced during two days. The circumnutation of the hypocotyl is quite insignificant compared with that of the cotyledons. These rise up vertically at night and come into close contact; so that they may be said to sleep. This seedling was so old that a very small true leaf had been developed, which at night was completely hidden by the closed cotyledons. On Sept. 24th, ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... insignificant individual, I was put into a waterman's boat with my chest and bed, and was sent on board. On reporting myself, I was told by the commanding officer not to bother him, but to go to my mess, where I should be taken care of. On descending a ladder to the lower deck, I looked about for ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... because a battle won or lost might entirely break off a negociation of peace, which in all probability was near being concluded. He added, that two years before, the confederates might have taken Arras and Cambray, instead of amusing themselves with the insignificant conquests of Aire, Bethune, and St. Venant. The duke of Devonshire said he was, by proximity of blood, more concerned than any other in the reputation of the duke of Ormond; and therefore could not help expressing his surprise, that any one would dare ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... ever dreamed such an insignificant fellow as the rice-pounder could surpass the venerable scholar in a religious insight, but the Fifth Patriarch saw at once an Enlightened Soul expressed in those lines; therefore he made up his mind to give the Kachaya to the writer, in whom he ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... intrinsic and comparative value. Still, in great things and small, (though each in its own weight and measure,) the truth is ever dear for its own sake, and should be for its own sake pursued. And it must never be forgotten, that one truth, in itself perhaps too minute and insignificant for its worth to be felt in the calculation, when probabilities are being estimated, may be a guiding star to other truths of great value, which, without its leading, might have remained neglected and unknown. In itself, a false statement, though generally acquiesced in, ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... named curtly a sum which was in itself so insignificant that any other person than Heyst would have exclaimed at it. And even Heyst could hardly keep incredulity out of his politely modulated voice as he asked if it was a fact that Morrison had not ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... own? Three or four hours lost in a storm—what may they not mean to more than one human heart on this train? The Supreme Arbiter plays His hand, if you wish to call it that, with reason and intent. To someone, somewhere, the most insignificant occurrence may mean life or death. And ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... dots, the little company trailed a slow way across this ocean of green. Nothing on its face was more insignificant than they. The birds in the trees and the bees in the flowers had a more important place in its economy. One afternoon David riding in the rear crested a ridge and saw them a mile in advance, the road stretching before and behind them in a curving thread. The tops of the wagons ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... their consciences, in the enjoyment of robust health, which she knew Miss Pecksniff would be glad to hear. That she had received Miss Pecksniff's note with unalloyed delight, because she never had attached the least importance to the paltry and insignificant jealousies with which herself and circle had been assailed; otherwise than as she had found them, in the contemplation, a harmless source of innocent mirth. That she would joyfully attend Miss Pecksniff's bridal; and that ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... command. The complaints made by the officers and soldiers stationed at Damietta compelled General Lanusse, the commander, to remonstrate against the alteration of a bulletin, by which an engagement with a body of Arabs was represented as an insignificant affair, and the loss trifling, though the General had stated the action to be one of importance, and the loss considerable. The misstatement, in consequence of his spirited ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... matter?' she said, finally, with her grand air; 'I have only to marry my granddaughters creditably, and prevent my grandson going to the dogs, and then my mission on this insignificant planet will be accomplished. What new form that particular modification of molecules which you call Lady Maulevrier may take afterwards is hidden in the great mystery ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... of such labor and sacrifices made its appearance in the world, which was on January 1, 1831, it was, in point of size, insignificant enough. It did not look as if its voice would ever reach beyond the small dark chamber where it saw the light. Picture, oh! reader, a wee sheet with four columns to the page, measuring fourteen inches one way and nine and a quarter the other, ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... her, for my father and hers did not get on very well together. The Marquis de Laurebourg looked on us as too insignificant to—" ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... she had run away: there was no evading that. An insignificant boy thousands of miles away had sent out a cry for help, and she, the proud and blessed, who had always considered herself quite as spunky as another person, had bolted in a panic. And she had bolted too fast, it seemed, to consider even that, with that cry, there had come a new element ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... I, a lonely and insignificant person, may say or do. What is my protest against the common current, the race to which I belong is taking and (what grieves me more), which the missionary societies seem to follow? Even if a respectable number protested it would not be of any use. Yet ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... the war; and the treaty of peace with the United States was a prelude to treaties of peace with the Bourbon powers. Their actual gains were insignificant. France indeed won nothing in the treaties with which the war ended; Spain gained only Florida and Minorca. Nor could they feel even in this hour of their triumph that the end at which they aimed had been ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... Next to friendly, insignificant little Miss Murray was Miss Cottle, a large, dark, morose girl, with untidy hair, and untidy clothes, and a bad complexion. Miss Cottle was unapproachable and insolent in her manner, from a sense of superiority. She was connected, ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... top of the ridge" (most insignificant "ridge," made by hand; Wilhelmina satirically says), Tourist Zollner can discern with pleasure "a considerable Brook,"—visible, not audible, smooth Stream, or chain of meres and lakelets, flowing languidly northward towards ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... is forthwith engaged, and the aforesaid young ladies, from mere charity, exhibit themselves for three days, from twelve to four, for the small charge of one shilling per head! With the exception of these classes of society, however, and a few weak and insignificant persons, we do not think the attempt at imitation to which we have alluded, prevails in any great degree. The different character of the recreations of different classes, has often afforded us amusement; and we have chosen it for ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Till now she had always thought that she loved mountains. The desert suddenly made them insignificant, almost mean to her. She turned her eyes towards the flat spaces. It was in them that majesty lay, mystery, power, and all deep and significant things. In the midst of the river bed, and quite near, rose a round ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... instinctive cares of reproduction and nourishment. But let the eye draw near, and endeavour to see; and at once the least phenomenon of all becomes overpoweringly complex; we are confronted by the enigma of intellect, of destiny, will, aim, means, causes; the incomprehensible organisation of the most insignificant act of life. ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... inconsiderable in number, not amounting to more than about six species. The freshwater kinds, including those inhabiting ditches, ponds, &c., are more numerous; but, except the unio, all are small and insignificant. Some species occur abundantly in situations which are perfectly dry for at least six months of the year, and seem, like many snails, to have the power of sustaining life for a long period in a ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... their railway journey successfully, and Farquharson managed to explain their destination to a porter privately, and asked him to get a cab for them. The man was either stupid or was disappointed at receiving an insignificant tip, since Farquharson was not one to waste money unnecessarily; for he gave the direction "Asylum" to the driver in a voice that McConnachie must have been deaf not to have heard distinctly. Farquharson glanced at ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... over a small summer house and converting a cheap affair into one of some pretensions, remember that one of the most telling points is the character of your porch railing. So at once remove the cheap one with its small, upright slats and the insignificant and frail top rail, and have a solid porch railing (or porch fence) built with broad, top rail. Then place all around porch, resting on iron brackets, rail-flower boxes, the tops of these level with the top of the rail, and paint the boxes the colour of the house ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... ones we are to deal with now appeal to the moral imagination. The facts that these depend on, and which are practically new discoveries for the modern world, are the insignificance of the earth, when compared with the universe, of which it is visibly and demonstrably an integral but insignificant fragment; the enormous period of his existence for which man has had no religious history, and has been, so far as we can tell, not a religious being at all; and the vast majority of the race that are still ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... Union of our confederated States—that Union which binds us together as one people, and which for sixty years has been our shield and protection against every danger. In the eyes of the world and of posterity how trivial and insignificant will be all our internal divisions and struggles compared with the preservation of this Union of the States in all its vigor and with all its countless blessings! No patriot would foment and excite geographical and sectional divisions. No lover of his country would ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... him there to go back to my room the steward was finishing dusting. I sent for the mate and engaged him in some insignificant conversation. It was, as it were, trifling with the terrific character of his whiskers; but my object was to give him an opportunity for a good look at my cabin. And then I could at last shut, with a clear conscience, the door of my stateroom and get my double back into the recessed part. ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... their stings. But my hopes are disappointed: the duties of maternity speak in too imperious a voice for them to risk their lives and wipe out the insult in a mortal duel. The whole thing is confined to hostile demonstrations and a few insignificant cuffs. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... themselves upon the action of the disturbing agencies,—effects of the irregular winds upon the distribution of heat and rain, and upon the action of lands and seas, mountains and plains. Though such disturbances are comparatively insignificant in the motions of the planets, yet in the weather they are often more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... and Pompeius had thus at least a tacit understanding as early as the beginning of 702, the alliance might be held as formally concluded, when at the consular elections for 703 there was elected not Cato himself indeed, but—along with an insignificant man belonging to the majority of the senate—one of the most decided adherents of Cato, Marcus Claudius Marcellus. Marcellus was no furious zealot and still less a genius, but a steadfast and strict aristocrat, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an act which they had not the generous courage, when they found and felt their error, honorably and fairly to disclaim. By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble counsels, so paltry a sum as Threepence in the eyes of a financier, so insignificant an article as Tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Maryland went on—'an essay on the monotony of piety. Poor man! he did not know what he was talking about. The glorious liberty of the children of God!—that was something beyond his experience;—and the joy of their service. It is what redeems everything else from monotony. It glorifies what is insignificant, and dignifies what is mean, and lifts what is low, and turns the poor little business steps of every day into rounds of Heaven's golden ladder. I verily think I could have hanged myself long ago, for the very monotony of all things else, if it had not been for the life ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... sky, a broad flat sheet of gold, and on its height the monument, perched against the quivering air, was a purple shaft, its gesture proud, haughty, exultant. Suddenly he saw in front of him, moving with quick, excited steps, Mrs. Brandon, an absurdly insignificant figure against ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... Revenue Laws have in their operation been grievous to all the Colonies & this in a particular Manner. Our own property has been extorted from us, and applied to the purpose of rendering our provincial & only Legislature an insignificant Body; and by providing for the Executive & judiciary Powers in the Province independent of the People, to place them under the absolute Power & Controul of a Minister of State. Our righteous and stedfast opposition to this System of Slavery, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... pebbles, but absolute identity. It affirms that if we put one pebble to two pebbles, those very pebbles are three. The objects, therefore, being the very same, and the mere assertion that "objects are themselves" being insignificant, it seems but natural to consider the proposition, Two and one is equal to three, as asserting mere identity of signification ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... was, "What is the use of a child? It may become a man!" When Galvani discovered that a frog's leg twitched when placed in contact with different metals, it could scarcely have been imagined that so apparently insignificant a fact could have led to important results. Yet therein lay the germ of the electric telegraph, which binds the intelligence of continents together, and, probably before many years have elapsed will "put a girdle round ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... ribbon of the Thames bound bridge to bridge running thematically through a symphony of grey and green and gold. A consciousness of power leapt high within Paul. Only the sun was above him, the sun and the suave immensity of space. How insignificant an episode was a human life, how futile and inept; a tiny note in a monstrous score. Below in the teeming streets moved a million such points, each one but a single note in this vast orchestration, a bird note, faint, inaudible 'mid the music of the spheres. Yet ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... have seen, upwards of 1400 miles along the shores of the Mediterranean, there should be no river of any magnitude or importance for commerce: the Bagrada and the Catada alone are noticed by ancient historians, and both of these were insignificant streams. ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... thousand ways, as if by a malicious agency, we mortals are woefully put out and tormented; and that, too, by things in themselves so exceedingly trivial, that it would seem almost impiety to ascribe them to the august gods. No; there must exist some greatly inferior spirits; so insignificant, comparatively, as to be overlooked by the supernal powers; and through them it must be, that we are thus grievously annoyed. At any rate; such a theory would supply a hiatus in ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... comparison between her and my son, than between anything in the world; however, if it is so, it is so, and I mean to say no more about it, and to be sure he's as contented to think so as if he was as mere an insignificant animal ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... these are made into brute animals, lions, tigers, cats, dogs, monkeys, etc. This is what the ancients called Metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls; a doctrine which is still held by the natives of India, who scruple to destroy the life even of the most insignificant animal, not knowing but it may be one of their relations in an ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... of the Socialist Revolutionary party in the Revolution of 1905, when it was a powerful peasant movement, demanding the immediate application of the maximum Socialist programme. Now an insignificant ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... destroyed by destiny, by your own understanding, and by Kesava. Vasava's dart is lost, having effected the slaughter of Ghatotkacha who was as insignificant as straw. Karna, and my sons, as all the other kings, through his highly impolitic act, have already entered the abode of Yama. Tell me now how the battle once more raged between the Kurus and the Pandavas after the fall of Hidimva's ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... scene was, Colonel Lockwood's simplicity and courage were much more serviceable to his colleagues than their own inept coup de theatre would have been if he had not spoiled it. It was plain to every one that he had acted in entire good faith, without a thought as to these apparently insignificant little books being of any importance or having caused me or anybody else any trouble, and that he was wounded in his most sensitive spot by the construction my Times letter had put on his action. And in Colonel Lockwood's case one saw the case of his party ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... he despises them. Let it at once be noted that in this first kind of morality the antithesis "good" and "bad" means practically the same as "noble" and "despicable",—the antithesis "good" and "EVIL" is of a different origin. The cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, and those thinking merely of narrow utility are despised; moreover, also, the distrustful, with their constrained glances, the self-abasing, the dog-like kind of men who let themselves be abused, the mendicant flatterers, and above all the liars:—it is a fundamental belief of all aristocrats ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and dust of the manoeuvring will be over, I heartily wish that our losses in the retreat may prove innocent and as insignificant as they are reported ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... the rhymed tragedies of the next generation. Massinger diverges in the opposite direction. The metre is felt enough and only just enough to give a more stately step to rather florid prose. It is one of his marks that a line frequently ends by some insignificant 'of' or 'from,' so as to exclude the briefest possible pause in reading. Thus, to take an example pretty much at random, the following instance might be easily read without observing that it was blank ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... of demarcation between allied species have grown more and more distinct, and it is usually only by going back to fossil ages that we can supply the missing links of continuity. In the desperate struggle for existence no peculiarity, physical or psychical, however slight, has been too insignificant for natural selection to seize and enhance; and the myriad fantastic forms and hues of animal and vegetal life illustrate the seeming capriciousness of its workings. Psychical variations have never been unimportant since the appearance of the first faint pigment-spot ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... not the Consul return without an answer? Did not Mr. Rosenthal say that the English Government had laughed at his letter?" Altogether; there were some seven or eight questions, but the others were insignificant, and I do not remember them. A few days before a Greek priest had arrived from the coast with a letter for his Majesty: Whether these statements were contained in the missive; or were merely a pretext invented by Theodore himself, to give a reason for the ill treatment he intended to ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... "pride and prejudice establish an awful gulf between man and man!" We may rest assured that, with Marat, a veterinary surgeon in the Comte d'Artois's stables, with Robespierre, a protege of the bishop of Arras, with Danton, an insignificant lawyer in Mery-sur-Seine, and with many others beside, self-esteem, in frequent encounters, bled in the same fashion. The concentrated bitterness with which Madame Roland's memoirs are imbued has no other cause. "She could not forgive society[4338] for the inferior position she had so ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Mayhew, was. A woman is an "inspiration" or a "millstone according to what she is," this stranger, this disturber of her peace, from whom it seemed she could not escape, had not only asserted but proved by showing her a lady she would have passed as plain and insignificant, but who nevertheless possessed some sweet potency that won and cheered all hearts, and who, she was compelled to admit, was positively beautiful as she sat at the piano, radiant with her purpose to cause gladness in others. Miss Burton had created sunshine enough to enliven ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... lamented that a question so insignificant when viewed in its practical effects on the people of Kansas, whether decided one way or the other, should have kindled such a flame of excitement throughout the country. This reflection may prove to be a lesson of wisdom and of warning for our future guidance. Practically considered, the question ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... by this particular train were returning from abroad; but the third-class carriages were the best filled, chiefly with insignificant persons of various occupations and degrees, picked up at the different stations nearer town. All of them seemed weary, and most of them had sleepy eyes and a shivering expression, while their complexions ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... at all in such a situation. But we get accustomed, in an incredibly short time, to the most violent changes; and calamities that seem insupportable, when looked at from a distance, lose half their power if met and resisted with fortitude. The last may, indeed, be too insignificant a word to be applied to all of the party on the wreck, on the occasion of which we are writing, though no one of them all betrayed fears that were troublesome. Of Mulford it is unnecessary to speak. His deportment had been quiet, thoughtful, and ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... their parishioners, were a new world to me, whilst they, the clergy, men of piety and learning, considered themselves as out of the world altogether. The population was thin and scattered, the mode of living primitive in the extreme, and the visit of a stranger, so insignificant as myself, quite enough to make a great sensation in these secluded parts. I found the ministers ingenuous, free from all puritanism, and generally well informed.... The examination of the parish books was also a labour of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... British Minister to the Chilian Republic, by whose joint exertions the Government was induced to admit—that national honour was involved in fulfilling national obligations; though an infinitesimal view of either the one or the other was certainly taken when awarding me the insignificant sum ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
